[70] I do not, of course, deny for a moment that an Act could be so drawn as to give Ireland an Irish Parliament, to remove the Irish members from the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and at the same time to reserve to the residue of the United Parliament, or Rump, the full sovereignty now possessed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. What I do insist upon is, that it is open to question whether the Government of Ireland Bill was so drawn as to achieve these results. Nor is the question unimportant. The fundamental ambiguity of the Bill obviously arose from the fact that its authors, whilst wishing to promise in appearance to Ireland that the new Irish constitution should not be changed by a body in which Ireland had no representatives, also wished to soothe the apprehensions of England by tacitly reserving to the British Parliament the power of altering or repealing the Irish constitution without recalling the representatives of Ireland. The consequence is that the Bill proclaims in so many words that its provisions shall be altered in one way only, but by implication, as its authors suppose, provides that its provisions may be altered in another and quite different way. If this is the intended effect of the Bill it ought to have been made patent on its face. In constitutional matters, as indeed in all the serious concerns of life, ambiguity and uncertainty of expression is the source both of misunderstanding and of danger. The question of the sovereignty of the British Parliament might, it should be noted, arise in another and more perplexing form, which received, unless I am mistaken, no attention during the debates on the Irish Government Bill. Admit for the sake of argument that the British Parliament can legislate for Ireland; is it equally certain that the Imperial Parliament (i.e. the British Parliament with the addition of Irish representatives) cannot claim to legislate for England or for the whole British Empire? No doubt the Gladstonian Constitution proposes that the Imperial Parliament should be convened only for a limited definite purpose; but is it certain that the Imperial Parliament, which would in its constituent parts be in effect the reunited Parliament of the United Kingdom, might not when convened claim to reassume sovereign power? The addition of a hundred Irish members might turn a minority in the British Parliament into a majority in the Imperial Parliament; can we feel sure that the English minority in the British Parliament would resist the temptation to exalt the authority of a body in which they would be supreme? The enquiry sounds to Englishmen a strange one; but the annals of foreign constitutions suggest that an assembly which, though convoked for a particular purpose, is able from any point of view to consider itself sovereign is with difficulty restrained from asserting supreme power. From this side the Gladstonian Constitution might prove a menace to the supremacy of the British Parliament.