by an English Ministry will veto Bills passed by an Irish Parliament and approved by the Irish people.  An English court will annul Irish Acts; English revenue officers will collect Irish customs, and every penny of the Irish customs will pass into the English Exchequer.  An English army commanded by English officers, acting under the orders of English ministers, will be quartered up and down Ireland, and, in the last resort, English soldiers will be employed to wring money from the Irish Exchequer for the rigorous payment of debts due from Ireland to England.  Will any Irishman of spirit bear this?  Will not Irishmen of all creeds and parties come to hate the constitution which subjects Ireland to English rule when England shall have in truth been turned into an alien power?

The new constitution does not in any case satisfy England.

That England is opposed to Home Rule is admitted on all hands; that England has good reason to oppose the new form of Home Rule with very special bitterness is apparent to every Unionist, and must soon become apparent to any candid man, whether Gladstonian or Unionist, who carefully studies the provisions of the new constitution, and meditates on the effect of retaining Irish representatives in the Parliament at Westminster.  For my present purpose there is no need to establish that English discontent is reasonable; enough to note its existence.

A consideration must be here noticed which as the controversy over Home Rule goes on will come into more and more prominence.  We are engaged in rearranging new terms of union between England and Ireland; this is the real effect of the Home Rule Bill; but for such a rearrangement Great Britain and Ireland must in fairness, no less than in logic, be treated as independent parties.  Whether you make a Union or remodel a Union between two countries the satisfaction of both parties to the treaty is essential.  Till England is satisfied the new constitution lacks moral sanction.  That the Act of Union could not have been carried without, at any rate, the technical assent both of Great Britain and Ireland is admitted, and yet the moral validity of the Treaty of Union is, whether rightly or not, after the lapse of ninety-three years assailed, on the ground that the assent of Ireland was obtained by fraud and undue influence.  But if the separate assent of both parties was required for the making of the treaty, so the free assent of both must be required for its revision, and the politicians who force on Great Britain the terms of a political partnership which Great Britain rejects, repeat in 1893 and in an aggravated form the error or crime of 1800.[102]

Secondly.  The new constitution rests on an unsound foundation.

It is a topsy-turvy constitution, it aims at giving weakness supremacy over strength.