Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
History
Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Irish question
the correct federal model the Austro-Hungarian Constitution contains,
how improbable it is that so enormous a structure can endure, and how,
after all, the Hungarians have not got rid of the Emperor, who commands
the army and represents the brute force of the old _régime_, I do not
think he need feel greatly concerned. This may be all true, and yet the
Austro-Hungarian federalism is a valuable thing. It has proved that the
federal remedy is good for more than one disease, that it can cure both
too much unity and too little. The truth is that there are only two
essentials of a federal government. One is an agreement between the
various communities who are to live under it as to the manner in which
the power is to be divided between the general and local governments;
the other is an honest desire on the part of all concerned to make it
succeed. As a general rule, whatever the parties agree on and desire to
make work is likely to work, just as a Unitarian government is sure to
succeed if the people who live under it determine that it shall succeed.
If a federal plan be settled in the only right way, by amicable and
mutually respectful discussion between representative men, all the more
serious obstacles are certain to be revealed and removed. Those which
are not brought to light by such discussions are pretty sure to be
comparatively trifling, and to disappear before the general success of
arrangement. But by a "mutually respectful discussion" I mean discussion
in which good faith and intelligence of all concerned are acknowledged
on both sides.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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