One of the most important elements in the problem of Home Rule must be the relation between the spheres of legislation to be retained by the existing Parliament, and those to be allocated to the subordinate Irish Legislature. Such demarcation will be applied later to the other local Parliaments which may be created for England, Scotland and Wales. The creation of subordinate legislatures, together with the retention of a central Parliament, must necessarily lead to the study of federal systems already in existence in the Empire, and of the mutual relations of similar bodies within such federations. It is true that a certain influential school of political thought is rather disposed to compare the position of the future Irish Parliament to that of the Dominion Parliaments in their relations with the Parliament at Westminster. The effort, however, to draw an analogy between Ireland in her relations with Great Britain, and the relations existing between the three Dominions and the United Kingdom is most misleading. The difference between those dominions and Ireland is indeed far more striking than the similarity, whether they are compared either from the point of view of area, of present and future population, or of geographical position. The narrowness of the strip of sea that separates Ireland from Great Britain places it from a military and naval standpoint in a very different position to that of Canada, Australia, or South Africa. Whereas the great distance at which these Dominions are situated imposes upon them the necessity of creating their own defensive forces, a separate Irish Navy or Army would have no _raison d’etre_. Again, not only the distance but the different environment and climate of these Dominions, and, particularly in the cases of Canada and South Africa, their greater non-British population, naturally promote the development of a sense of national entity and therefore of a desire for a greater measure of national independence than is felt or demanded by Ireland, in spite of her strong national sentiment. Supposing for argument’s sake, that the whole of the Canadian, Australian, and South African Dominions formed geographically with Great Britain one continuous territory such as the United States of America, it is clear that there would have been no call for granting the various Dominions the almost sovereign powers which they now enjoy. What would most probably arise in such a hypothetical case would be a single federal complex, comprising a central authority or parliament and a large number of state legislatures.