The Irish Constitution / Explained by Darrell Figgis

THE CONSTITUTION COMMITTEE IN SESSION.
From left to right :—R. J. P. Mortished ( Secretary ), John O’Byrne, B.L.; C. J. France, Darrell Figgis ( Acting Chairman ), E. M. Stephens, B.L. ( Secretary ); P. A. O’Toole, B.L. ( Secretary ); James MacNeill, Hugh Kennedy, K.C.; James Murnahan, B.L.; James Douglas. (Prof. Alfred O’Rahilly and Kevin O’Shiel, B.L. were absent from the Session).
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I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK TO MY FRIEND ARTHUR GRIFFITH

The articles that are now gathered together in this little book were first published in the Irish Independent at the invitation of its Editor. They were not written for publication in book-form; and they naturally suffer, in their present form, from the conditions that were first imposed on them, conditions proper to their original setting. With the exception of two of them, they were written rather in a spirit of exposition than in a spirit of analysis and criticism; and this intention was only departed from because it seemed that the two matters so dealt with departed, with differing degrees of flagrancy, from the original purpose of the Constitution, which was to make the mechanism of Government malleable at every stage to the will of the people of Ireland.
Whether one believes ardently in the faith that the will of a people should under all circumstances prevail, and that the forms of Government should at all times be submissive to that will, is indifferent. That is a question for the individual, with which I do not presume to interfere. One need only believe with l’Abbé Coignard that “a people is not susceptible to more than one form of government at the same period,” to believe, further, that if one asserts the derivation of all power and authority from the popular will, if that will be once fairly and honestly ascertained, it then follows that the will of the people is sufficient to itself, and that all forms of government must be made malleable to it. On that supposition, all frustrations and obstructions of, and impediments to, the constant exercise of that will must of necessity be cogs in the machinery of government; and for that reason in two articles I turned from exposition to criticism.