the rights of the Imperial Government.  A weak Ministry depending on Irish votes rules, or rather is ruled, at Downing Street.  Every one knows how, under the supposed conditions, the affair will end.  There will be a transaction of some sort, and we may be certain that such a transaction will be to the advantage of the Irish Government, and will weaken or discredit Imperial or English authority.  We come round here to the root of the whole matter.  Were the Restrictions on the power of the Irish Parliament real and easily enforceable, were the obligations imposed upon or undertaken by the Irish people obligations of which an English Ministry could at once compel the fulfilment, Restrictions and obligations alike would be rendered futile and unreal by the presence of the Irish members at Westminster.  Every Home Rule scheme which can be proposed is impolitic and is as dangerous as Separation; but the most impolitic of all possible forms of Home Rule is the scheme embodied in the Bill of 1893.  Its special and irremediable flaw is the retention of the Irish members at Westminster.  This governs and vitiates all the leading provisions of the new constitution.  Under its influence every conceivable safeguard, the supreme authority of Parliament, the veto, the legal restrictions on the competence of the Irish legislature melt away into nothing.

They are some of them capable of doing harm, they are none of them capable of doing good.

Cast a glance back at the leading features of the new constitution.

The Imperial Parliament remains in form unchanged, and retains the attribute of nominal sovereignty.  But in Ireland the Imperial Parliament surrenders all, or nearly all, the characteristics of true and effective power; it retains in fact in Ireland nothing more than the right to effect under the semblance of a legal proceeding a revolution which after all must be carried out by force.  For practical purposes it has no more power at Dublin than it has at Melbourne, i.e. it retains at Dublin scarcely any real power whatever.

For the sake of this nominal and shadowy authority the Imperial Parliament is itself transformed into a strange cross between a British Parliament and the Congress of an Anglo-Irish Federation.

The Irish Executive and the Irish Parliament become under the new constitution the true and real Government of Ireland.  But the Irish Government and the Irish people are fettered by Restrictions which would not be borne by the Government or the people of a self-governing colony.  These Restrictions are ineffective to bind, but they are certain to gall, and if taken together with onerous financial obligations to Great Britain, which whether just or not must have an air of hardness, and with the habitual presence in Ireland of a British army under the direction of the British Executive, lay an ample foundation for the most irritating of conflicts.