In the next place, it is to be noted that the checks proposed affect legislation only and not administration.  If the Bill of 1893 or any similar Bill should become law, the whole executive power in Ireland will be in an Irish Ministry responsible to an Irish Assembly; and it is obvious that many of the wrongs against which the restrictive clauses of the Bill were directed may be inflicted by administrative act or omission as effectively as by legislation.  To quote a work of authority[33]—­

“An independent Irish Executive will possess immense power.  It will be able by mere administrative action or inaction, without passing a single law which infringes any restriction to be imposed by the Irish Government Act, 1893, to effect a revolution.  Let us consider for a moment a few of the things which the Irish Cabinet might do if it chose.  It might confine all political, administrative, or judicial appointments to Nationalists, and thus exclude Loyalists from all positions of public trust.  It might place the bench, the magistracy, the police, wholly in the hands of Catholics; it might, by encouragement of athletic clubs where the Catholic population were trained to the use of arms, combined with the rigorous suppression of every Protestant association suspected, rightly or not, of preparing resistance to the Parliament at Dublin, bring about the arming of Catholic, and the disarming of Protestant, Ireland, and, at the same time, raise a force as formidable to England as an openly enrolled Irish army.  But the mere inaction of the executive might in many spheres produce greater results than active unfairness.  The refusal of the police for the enforcement of evictions would abolish rent throughout the country.  And the same result might be attained by a more moderate course.  Irish Ministers might in practice draw a distinction between ‘good’ landlords and ‘bad’ landlords, and might grant the aid of the police for the collection of ‘reasonable,’ though refusing it for the collection of ‘excessive,’ rents.”

Irish Ministers might even refuse actively to oppose the “moral claim” of the Irish Catholics to the use of the cathedrals and of the accumulated capital of the Irish Church.[34]

To contemplate the possibility of action or calculated inaction of the character above described is not to attribute to Irishmen any special measure of original sin.  In every case where the executive power is divorced from the ultimate legislative authority such divergencies are likely to recur; and more than one instance may be found in our own recent history.  In 1859 the Canadian Government warned the Home Government that any attempt to interfere with the customs policy of the Dominion was inadmissible, unless the home authorities were prepared to undertake the responsibility of administering the whole government of Canada.  The Home Government gave way.[35] In 1878 the Governor of Cape Colony proposed to place the colonial forces