All who look coolly into the matter apart from faction and its necessities have pronounced that the choice lies between separation and legislative union. Two Parliaments, two nations; so all wisdom says and so experience before the Union proved. The forces which under Grattan's constitution held the two Parliaments together in strained and precarious fellowship, the nomination boroughs, the pension list, the sinecures, the peerages, the bishoprics, would no longer exist. What is even more important, there would no longer be an oligarchical and exclusionist Parliament in Ireland dependent on British support for its ascendency, perhaps even for the security of its lands. Antagonism would almost inevitably ensue; the more surely as the partners would set out with the embitterment of a divorce. Nothing apparently could avert collision; the result of which would be repression, making the latter end worse than the first. The proposal of federation is surely preposterous. It would be necessary first to cut the United Kingdom in two and create an Irish government in order that negotiations for a federal union might be set on foot. But how could there be a federation of two states, one of them enormously superior in power to the other? What sort of deliberative assembly would the federal council be? Another plan is to form a federation of the four nationalities, as they are assumed to be, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; wrenching apart the members of a great nation which have long been united and cancelling the highest work of British statesmanship. Here again federation could not work. England being so much the predominant partner, the result would almost certainly be a perpetual league of the three minor powers against her domination. The federal system is applicable only to a group of tolerably equal States. The restoration of the Heptarchy with the addition of Scotland, divided into Highland and Lowland, and the four provinces of Ireland erected into States, would be a comparatively practicable system. The present condition of the Federal system in the United States does not encourage experiments of that kind.