which has been tried in similar cases, and always with success? One only policy has never been tried in Ireland--honest Home Rule. Certainly, if Home Rule is to be refused till all the prophets of evil are refuted, Ireland must go without Home Rule for ever. "If the sky fall, we shall catch larks." But he would be a foolish bird-catcher who waited for that contingency. And not less foolish is the statesman who sits still till every conceivable objection to his policy has been mathematically refuted in advance, and every wild prediction falsified by the event; for that would ensure his never moving at all. _Sedet æternumque sedebit_. A proper enough attitude, perhaps, on the part of an eristic philosopher speculating on politics in the silent shade of academic groves, but hardly suitable for a practical politician who has to take action on one of the most burning questions of our time. Human affairs are not governed by mathematical reasoning. You cannot demonstrate the precise results of any legislative measure beforehand as you can demonstrate the course of a planet in the solar system. "Probability," as Bishop Butler says, "is the guide of life;" and an older philosopher than Butler has warned us that to demand demonstrative proof in the sphere of contingent matter is the same kind of absurdity as to demand probable reasoning in mathematics. You cannot confute a prophet before the event; you can only disbelieve him. The advocates of Home Rule believe that their policy would in general have an exactly contrary effect to that predicted by their opponents. In truth, every act of legislation is, before experience, amenable to such destructive criticism as these critics urge against Home Rule. I have not a doubt that they could have made out an unanswerable "case" against the Great Charter at Runnymede; and they would find it easy to prove on _à priori_ grounds that the British Constitution is one of the most absurd, mischievous, and unworkable instruments that ever issued from human brains or from the evolution of events. By their method of reasoning the Great Charter and other fundamental portions of the Constitution ought to have brought the Government of the British Empire to a deadlock long ago. Every suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, every Act of Attainder, every statute for summary trial and conviction before justices of the peace, is a violation of the fundamental article of the Constitution, which requires that no man shall be imprisoned or otherwise punished except after lawful trial by his peers.[20] Consider also the magazines of explosive materials which lie hidden in the constitutional prerogatives of the Crown, if they could only be ignited by the match of an ingenious theorist. The Crown, as Lord Sherbrooke once somewhat irreverently expressed it, "can turn every cobbler in the land into a peer," and could thus put an end, as the Duke of Wellington declared, to