[16] See Bill, clauses 10-19, and note especially clause 12, sub-clause (I).

[17] Ibid, clauses 14-16.

[18] Ibid, clause 12, sub-clause (3).

[19] I am aware that to this statement moderate Gladstonians may take exception.  What may be the effect of the preamble which reserves the supreme authority of Parliament or of Bill, clause 33, which recognises the right of the Imperial Parliament to legislate for Ireland will be most conveniently considered in the next chapter.  In this chapter, be it noted, I am concerned only with the constitution as it is intended to work, and most Gladstonians will admit that as long as the Government of Ireland, including in that expression both the Cabinet and the Parliament, keeps within the terms of the Act, it is not intended that the British Cabinet or Parliament shall, except in certain excepted cases, intervene in Irish affairs.

[20] All the provisions which under clause 9 of the Home Rule Bill, 1893, in its earliest form, were intended to restrain Irish Peers, or members representing Irish constituencies, from deliberating or voting on any Bill or motion the operation of which should be confined to Great Britain, were swept away by the Gladstonian majority before the Home Rule Bill was sent up to the House of Lords.  The unfairness of giving to Ireland a Parliament intended to legislate on all, or nearly all, Irish affairs, and at the same time retaining eighty Irish members at Westminster with full power to legislate on all English and Scottish affairs, secured in 1895 the enthusiastic approval by the British electorate of the rejection of the Home Rule Bill of 1893 by the House of Lords.

[21] See Bill, clause 5 (1).

[22] Bill, clauses 22, 23.

[23] ’The Imperial Parliament was supreme, but he held the passing of the Home Rule Bill, reserving certain subjects to the Imperial Parliament and committing others to the Parliament of Ireland, as amounting to a compact which would be observed by men of common sense that there would be no capricious or vexatious interference by this Parliament with an action within the appointed sphere of the Parliament of Ireland.  If such interference were attempted, the presence in this Parliament of eighty Irish members—­a number which had been found to be sufficient to initiate an Irish constitution—­would be found sufficient to protect an Irish constitution when it was given.’—­Mr. Sexton, Feb. 13, 1893, Times Parliamentary Debates, p. 318.

[24] For evidence that the power of the Imperial Parliament is intended under the new constitution to be subjected to at any rate a moral limit, the reader should note particularly the terms of the Home Rule Bill, clause 12, sub-clause (3).

CHAPTER II

THE NEW CONSTITUTION

A critic of the new constitution, intent on ascertaining how it affects the relation of Great Britain and Ireland, will do well to divert his attention from the numerous details of the Home Rule Bill, important as many of them are,[25] and fix his mind almost exclusively upon the four leading features of the measure.