The question of the sovereignty of the British Parliament might, it should be noted, arise in another and more perplexing form, which received, unless I am mistaken, no attention during the debates on the Irish Government Bill.  Admit for the sake of argument that the British Parliament can legislate for Ireland; is it equally certain that the Imperial Parliament (i.e. the British Parliament with the addition of Irish representatives) cannot claim to legislate for England or for the whole British Empire?  No doubt the Gladstonian Constitution proposes that the Imperial Parliament should be convened only for a limited definite purpose; but is it certain that the Imperial Parliament, which would in its constituent parts be in effect the reunited Parliament of the United Kingdom, might not when convened claim to reassume sovereign power?  The addition of a hundred Irish members might turn a minority in the British Parliament into a majority in the Imperial Parliament; can we feel sure that the English minority in the British Parliament would resist the temptation to exalt the authority of a body in which they would be supreme?  The enquiry sounds to Englishmen a strange one; but the annals of foreign constitutions suggest that an assembly which, though convoked for a particular purpose, is able from any point of view to consider itself sovereign is with difficulty restrained from asserting supreme power.  From this side the Gladstonian Constitution might prove a menace to the supremacy of the British Parliament.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONCLUSION.

[Sidenote:  Survey of argument.]

Let us here review and summarise our argument.  The demand for Home Rule is a demand for a change in the Constitution so fundamental as to amount to a legal and pacific revolution; such a demand requires for its support cogent, we may almost say conclusive, reasons.

The positive arguments in favour of Home Rule are not easy to grasp.  Their strength lies in their correspondence with the prevailing opinions of the day.  But though public opinion under any form of government, and especially under the system of what is called popular government, deserves great consideration, still the value of a prevailing belief or conviction cannot be determined without examining the elements which have gone to its production.  The state of opinion which favours Home Rule is found to result from various and even self-contradictory feelings, some of which belong to the highest and some to the lowest parts of human nature; humanity and a sense of justice are in this instance curiously combined with indolence and impatience.  The arguments again for Home Rule rest upon one dubious assumption and one undoubted fact.  The dubious assumption is that the root of Irish discontent is the outraged feeling of nationality.  The undoubted fact is that in Ireland, on all matters either directly or even remotely connected with the tenure of land, the