An autocrat, such as the Russian Czar, can undoubtedly abdicate; but sovereignty, whether it be the sovereignty of the Czar or of Parliament, is always one and the same quality.  If the Czar can abdicate, so can Parliament.  The Czar again could, instead of abdicating in the ordinary sense of the term, constitute a new sovereign body for the government of Russia, of which he might himself be a part.  Thus he may undoubtedly give Russia a constitution like that of England, under which the Czar and two Houses of Parliament might together become the sovereign of the Russian State, and no constitutionalist would dream of maintaining that the new power thus constituted was the less supreme owing to the fact that one of its members, namely the Czar, had at one time been himself the real sovereign of Russia.  Here again what is true of the Czar is true of Parliament.  The Parliament of the United Kingdom certainly might become a part of another sovereign body, or might join in constituting a sovereign power supreme throughout the British Empire of which Parliament itself did not form a part.  There is nothing in the theory of sovereignty to prevent the Parliament of the United Kingdom from forming a constitution for the whole British Empire under which the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the Victorian Parliament, the Parliament of the Canadian Dominion and so forth should become simply State Parliaments, whilst the whole British Empire was ruled by some Imperial Congress sitting, say, either in London or in Victoria.  Nor need we in this matter have recourse to theory.  The present Parliament of the United Kingdom is itself a monument of the historical fact that sovereign Parliaments can divest themselves of sovereignty.  For the Parliament of the United Kingdom is itself the result of the abdication of supreme power by sovereign Parliaments.  The Union with Scotland was not, as Englishmen often, I suspect, fancy, the absorption of the Parliament of Scotland in the Parliament of England.  The transaction bears, when carefully looked at, a quite different character.  Up to the year 1707 there existed an English Parliament sovereign in England, and there existed a Scotch Parliament sovereign in Scotland.  These two sovereign bodies in negotiating the Treaty of Union acted with scrupulous, and on the Scotch side with punctilious, independence.  Neither sovereign body would consent to be absorbed in the other.  What they did agree to was to constitute a new State, namely, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and each to surrender their separate sovereignty in favour of a new sovereign, namely, the sovereign Parliament of the United Kingdom.  The English Parliament no more became supreme in Scotland than the Scotch Parliament became supreme in England.  The old Parliament of each country abdicated and lost its identity in the New Parliament of Great Britain.  In theory the Treaty of Union between Great Britain and Ireland bore exactly the same character as the