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 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.
The new constitution, lastly, places in the hands of the Irish people ample means for constitutional or extra-constitutional resistance to Imperial, or in fact to English, power, and almost ensures the success of Ireland in any constitutional conflict. The presence of the Irish members at Westminster saves, or proclaims, the nominal sovereignty of the Imperial Parliament; but their presence in truth makes this sovereignty unexercisable, and therefore worthless, and while increasing the apparent power ensures the real weakness of England.