It is necessary perhaps to add that non-representation at Westminster does not in the smallest degree affect the complete legal supremacy of the Imperial Parliament over the subordinate Irish Legislature.  This Legislature will in legal language be a “local and territorial” body, like those of the Colonies.  It will be the creature of Parliament, and could be amended or even extinguished by it in a subsequent Act.  The Bill of 1886 (perhaps because it never reached the Committee stage) said nothing explicit about the supremacy, though the Bill of 1893, while providing for representation at Westminster, repeatedly (and sometimes quite superfluously) affirmed it—­in the Preamble, for example, and in a rider to Clause 2.  The King’s authority, through the Lord-Lieutenant, will be supreme in Ireland, as, through the Governors, it is supreme in the Colonies.  Every Irish Bill, like every Colonial Bill, will require the Royal Assent, given through the Lord-Lieutenant, who will correspond to the Colonial Governors.  The Lord-Lieutenant, like his colonial counterpart, will have to exercise both his Executive and Legislative functions in a double capacity:  in the first instance by the advice of his Irish Cabinet, but subject to a veto by the British Cabinet.  This dual capacity has belonged to all Colonial Governors ever since the principle of responsible government was established.  As I showed in earlier chapters, it was regarded even by Lord John Russell as impossible and absurd as late as 1840; but it ought by now to be understood by every educated man, and we may hope to be spared the philosophical disquisitions and hair-splitting criticisms which it evoked from men who should have known better in the Home Rule debates of 1893.

Laws framed at Westminster will be applicable to Ireland, as they are frequently made applicable to the Colonies.[89] Conversely, only through the express legislative authority of Westminster will an Irish, like a Colonial Act,[90] be held to operate outside the borders of Ireland.

Apart from the strict legal omnipotence of Imperial sovereignty, it is, of course, impossible to say now what the exact constitutional position of Ireland will be under any form of Home Rule.  No Bill can state it fully in set terms.  Time, custom, and judicial decisions will build up a body of doctrine.  It is so with the Colonies, whose exact constitutional relations with the Mother Country are still a matter of juristic debate, and are only to be deduced from the study of an immense number of judicial decisions and of Imperial Acts passed subsequently to the grant of the original Constitutions.  Some of these Acts I have already illustrated.  The one Act of general application, namely, the Colonial Laws Validity Act, cannot be read without the rest, though in form it appears to contain a complete set of rules.  While giving general power to a self-governing Colony “to make laws for the peace, welfare, and good government