too weak to withstand the pressure exercised by eighty-six obstructives, and that Ireland, no less, as we are now at last frankly told, than Scotland and Wales, desires to relax the bonds of national unity. We are advised to dissolve the United Kingdom into a confederacy because Germany, through a clumsy form of confederacy, is growing into a united empire. This counsel confuses the stages of imperfect development with the stage of incipient decay; it ascribes to the childishness of approaching senility the hopes which are proper to the childishness of early youth. The point is worth pressing. The considerations which govern a confederacy as it is developing into a nation are very different from the considerations applicable to a full grown nation when threatened with dismemberment into a confederacy. Deak's statesmanship undoubtedly found at any rate a temporary solution of the questions which kept Austria and Hungary at variance in a compromise which bears some analogy to the arrangement by which Home Rulers propose at once to loosen and to maintain the connection between England and Ireland. In the case of Austria-Hungary, the union which exists is not, on the face of it at least, a step towards unity, but rather the surrender of the endeavour to mould the two parts of the monarchy into a united empire. The Dual system is therefore the instance of the blessings attending Home Rule which is most sedulously thrust upon English attention. Let us see, then, what in outline this system is, and what are the causes which favour its existence.[4] German jurisprudence has taxed hard its boundless stores of ingenuity and obscurity in the endeavour to find a proper scientific definition of the nature of the anomalous union which binds together the monarchy of Austria-Hungary. With the inquiry, however, what may be the precise class of constitutions under which we ought to bring a political arrangement which is "singular" in the strictest sense of that word, English inquirers need not concern themselves. The broad outlines of the Dual system, invented by the ingenuity of Deak, and accepted under the stress of necessity by the sagacity of the Emperor, may, for our present purpose, be roughly sketched in short, and it is hoped in not unintelligible terms. The Dual system is a permanent alliance rather than a union between the kingdom of Hungary and the countries now represented in the Austrian Imperial Parliament, or (to use convenient though not quite accurate terms) between Austria and Hungary. The essential features of this alliance or compromise, which is in its nature a treaty far more than an act of legislation, may be thus summed up.