Our Judge would find the question more difficult to answer than is readily admitted by English lawyers not versed in any constitution except their own.  He would have to consider the language and effect of the Irish Government Act in the light of certain propositions which are now, and at the supposed passing of that Act must have been, true of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

These propositions may be thus stated, roughly indeed, but with sufficient accuracy for our purpose:—­

The Parliament of the United Kingdom is admittedly the sovereign of the whole British Empire.

The Parliament of the United Kingdom because it is a sovereign body can make laws for every part of the British Empire, and can legally make or unmake any law, and establish, alter, or abolish any institution (including in that term the Constitution of the Canadian Dominion or of Victoria) existing within the limits of any country subject to the British Crown.

The Parliament of the United Kingdom just because it is a sovereign body cannot, whilst retaining its position as sovereign of the British Empire, be itself bound by any Act of Parliament whatever.

To recur to an instance which is pre-eminently instructive, Parliament conferred in 1867 upon the Dominion of Canada as large a measure of independence as is compatible with a colony’s maintaining its position as part of the British Empire.  Yet the Parliament of the United Kingdom retains now, as ever, the indisputable legal power to change or abolish the Constitution of the Dominion.

The Parliament of the United Kingdom, just because it is a sovereign body, though it cannot remain a sovereign and place a legal limit on its own powers, can, like any other sovereign, e.g. the Czar of Russia, abdicate its sovereignty in reference to the whole, or it may be to part of the Crown’s dominions; and the Parliament of the United Kingdom can, just because it is a sovereign body, do what is at bottom the same thing as abdicate, namely, merge its own powers in those of another sovereign body, or, in other words, form, or aid in forming, a new sovereign for the British Empire.

This proposition has during the Home Rule controversy been occasionally, in words at least, disputed or questioned by the supporters of Mr. Gladstone’s policy, and language has been used which seems to imply that a sovereign power such as the Parliament of the United Kingdom can never by its own act divest itself of sovereignty.  I can hardly think that the able controversialists who seem to maintain this doctrine really meant to contend for more than the admitted principle that a sovereign cannot while remaining a sovereign limit his sovereign powers.  If, however, it be seriously suggested that the Parliament of the United Kingdom cannot divest itself of sovereignty, the suggestion is as a matter of argument untenable, and this for more than one reason.