[35] It may, I am quite aware, be argued that the presence of Irish representatives is not requisite for the maintenance of parliamentary supremacy.  In theory it is not.  An arrangement might quite conceivably be made (which if Home Rule were to be conceded might be the least objectionable method of carrying out a radically vicious policy) under which it should be distinctly agreed that Ireland should occupy the position of a self-governing colony with all the immunities and disadvantages thereof, and should cease to be represented at Westminster, whilst the British Parliament retained the right to abolish, or modify, the Irish constitution.  Such an arrangement would, however, make it perfectly plain that the sovereignty of the British Parliament meant in Ireland what the sovereignty of the Imperial Parliament now means in New Zealand.  But ’the retention of the Irish members is a matter of great public importance’ (at any rate in the opinion of Mr. Gladstone) ‘because it visibly exhibits that supremacy’ (i.e. the supremacy of Parliament) ’in a manner intelligible to the people.’—­Mr. Gladstone, Feb. 13, 1893, Times Parliamentary Debates, p. 306.  See as to Home Rule in the character of colonial independence, England’s Case against Home Rule (3rd ed.), pp. 197-218.

[36] i.e. at the moment when these pages are written.  What parts of the Government of Ireland Bill may or may not be officially deemed essential by the time these pages appear in print, no sensible man will undertake to predict.  Mr. Gladstone’s own language is most extraordinary.  On the retention of the Irish members, which in the eyes of any ordinary man affects the whole character of the new constitution, and essentially distinguishes the Home Rule policy of 1886 from the Home Rule policy of 1893, he uses (inter alia) these words:  ’On the important subject of the retention of the Irish members I do not regard it, and I never have regarded it, as touching what may be called the principles of the Bill.  It is not included in one of them.  But whether it be a principle of the Bill or not, there is no question that it is a very weighty and, if I may say so, an organic detail which cuts rather deep in some respects into the composition of the Bill.’—­Mr. Gladstone, Feb. 13, 1893, Times Parliamentary Debates, pp. 305, 306.  This statement, with the whole passage of which it forms part, is as astounding as would have been a statement by Lord John Russell on introducing the great Reform Bill, that he could not say whether the disfranchisement of rotten boroughs did or did not form a principle of the measure.

[37] Compare Report of Special Commission, pp. 18, 19.

[38] Under the Home Rule Bill of 1893 as sent up to the House of Lords, it would have been the ‘constant presence.’

[39] The division of parties in an American State is governed not by questions concerning the internal affairs of the State, but by the questions which divide parties at Washington.  State politics depend upon federal politics.  ’The national parties have engulfed the State parties.  The latter have disappeared absolutely as independent bodies, and survive merely as branches of the national parties, working each in its own State for the tenets and purposes which a national party professes and seeks to attain.’  See Bryce, American Commonwealth, ii. p. 194.