The Irish Parliament cannot legally repeal a single provision of the constitution, but an Irish Parliament might render much of the constitution a nullity.  The Parliament might pass Acts which trenched upon the Restrictions limiting its authority.  Till treated as void such statutes would be the law of the land.  Such voidable Acts, and even parliamentary resolutions,[91] would go like a watchword through the country and encourage throughout Ireland popular resistance to Imperial law.  A profound observer has remarked that people do not reckon highly enough the importance at a revolutionary crisis of any show or appearance of legality.[92] Revolution acquires new force when masked under the form of law.  This is a point which Englishmen constantly overlook.  They know the moral influence of leagues and combinations; they do not reflect that a Parliament or House of Commons in sympathy with resistance to Imperial demands would possess tenfold the moral authority of any National League.  Note too that the Irish Ministry and the Irish Parliament would play into one another’s hands, and would further be strengthened by their Irish allies at Westminster, as also by the Irish electoral vote in England.

For the true stronghold of the Irish Government lies, under the new constitution, at Westminster.[93]

There they would command at least eighty votes:  the Irish members could still, as now, and far more effectively than now, coerce under ordinary circumstances any Ministry disposed to enforce the rights of the Imperial Government, or, in other words, of England.

Take a concrete case to which I have already referred.[94] Irish farmers who have purchased under the Ashbourne Act grow weary of paying instalments which are equivalent to rent.  The Irish Cabinet refuses to collect the rent; it urges its absolute inability to pay the sums due to the Imperial Exchequer and asks for remission.  Meanwhile the Irish House of Commons passes a resolution supporting the conduct of the Irish Government.  The British Ministers are stern, and reject the request of the Irish Cabinet.  The Cabinet at Dublin retire from office.  No successors can be appointed who command the support of the Irish Parliament.  The Lord Lieutenant advises the Government at home that things have come to a deadlock and that a dissolution will change nothing.  Thereupon the Irish members at Westminster begin to move; they threaten general hostility to the British Ministry.

They proffer their support to the Opposition.  It may of course happen that the British Ministry can, like the Unionist Government of 1886, defy the Opposition and the Irish members combined.  If so the English Cabinet can risk a constitutional conflict in Ireland, though it is a conflict likely to end in disturbance or civil war.  But judging the future by the past the eighty members will hold the balance of power.  If so their course is clear.  They expel from office the Ministers who have protected