If the general drift of my argument does not sufficiently answer this objection, two special replies lie near at hand. In the case both of Switzerland and of America, a Federal Constitution supplied the means by which States, conscious of a common national feeling, have approached to political unity. It were a rash inference from this fact, that when two parts of one nation are found (as must be asserted by any Home Ruler) not to be animated by a common feeling of nationality, a Federal Constitution is the proper means by which to keep them in union. The more natural deduction from the general history of Federalism is, that a confederation is an imperfect political union, transitory in its nature, and tending either to pass into one really united State, or to break up into the different States which compose the Federation. If, again, the example either of America or of Switzerland is to teach us anything worth knowing, the history of those countries must be read as a whole. It will then be seen that the two most successful confederacies in the world have been kept together only by the decisive triumph through force of arms of the central power over real or alleged State rights. General Dufour in Switzerland, General Grant and General Sherman in America, were the true interpreters and preservers of the constitutional pact. This undoubted fact hardly suits the theories of Irish Federalists. Nor ought we to stop at this point. Citizens of the Union filled with justifiable pride at the success of the American Constitution assume that a Federal Government is in itself absolutely the best form of government, that in any country where it can be adopted it must be an improvement on the existing institutions of the land, and that as compared with the constitutional monarchy of England federalism exhibits no special faults from which English constitutionalism is free. This assumption is perfectly natural; it resembles that absolute faith in the virtues of the British Constitution which reached its culminating point when Burke's intimate friend and pupil, Gilbert Elliott, himself no mean statesman, went to Corsica to establish a miniature copy of English Parliamentary institutions. But in each case a faith which is natural will also be pronounced by any candid judge to be unfounded. Federalism has in its very essence, and even as it exists in America, at least two special faults. It distracts the allegiance of citizens, and what is even more to the present point, it does not provide sufficient protection for the legal rights of unpopular minorities. There is not, and never was, a word in the Articles of the Constitution forbidding American citizens to criticise the institutions of the State. An American Abolitionist had as much right to denounce slavery at Boston, or for that matter at Charlestown, as an English Abolitionist had to denounce slavery in London or Liverpool. It were ridiculous to maintain