The notion that Ireland or any one part of the United Kingdom ought, or has a claim, to have the same institutions as every other part rests on a confusion of ideas, and is a false deduction from democratic principles. It is founded on the feeling which has caused half the errors of democracy, that a fraction of a nation has a right to speak with the authority of the whole, and that the right of each portion of the people to make its wishes heard involves the right to have them granted. This delusion has once and again made Paris the ruler of France, and the Parisian mob the master of Paris. The sound principle of democratic government--and England must, under the present state of things, be ruled on democratic principles--is, that all parts of the country must be governed in the way which the whole of the State as represented by the majority thereof deems expedient for each part, and that while every part should be allowed a voice to make known its wants, the decision how these wants are to be met must be given by the whole State, that is (in the particular instance) by the majority of the electors of Great Britain and Ireland. From this principle it does not follow either that every part of the kingdom should have those institutions which that part prefers, (though in so far as this end can be attained its attainment is desirable,) or, still less, that every part of the kingdom should have the same institutions as every other part. That this is so everybody in a general way admits. No one supposes that because the people of Leicester abominate vaccination the Vaccination Acts are not to be extended to that borough, or that the wish of the people of Birmingham in favour of free schools is decisive in favour of making education in Birmingham gratuitous. The will of a locality is admitted not to be the expression of the will of the nation. No one, again, fancies that the legal institutions of England ought of necessity to be extended to Scotland, or the law of Scotland to England. In Ireland recent legislation has, and with general approval, established institutions which no one alleges must, because they exist in Ireland, be applied of necessity or as a matter of justice to England. English tenants might in many cases, it is likely enough, think the provisions of the Irish Land Acts a boon, but no one would listen to the argument that simply because under the special circumstances of Ireland special privileges are given to Irish tenants, similar privileges ought to be conferred upon every English tenant farmer. The idea therefore that because English boroughs or counties receive an increased measure of self-government the same measure ought to be extended to Ireland, though it sounds plausible, is neither conformable to democratic principle nor to our habitual practice, grounded as that practice is on considerations of common sense and expediency. The true watchwords which should guide English democrats in their dealings with