Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government
limitations of the kind in the Australian Commonwealth Act of 1900.
Australia, no doubt, correctly represents the tendency of modern thought
on this matter. Some of the American safeguards have produced great
inconvenience. Nor can it be denied that the most elaborately contrived
legal safeguards are of less value than the moral safeguard afforded by
the sense of honour, justice, and prudence in the community. The
existence of these qualities in Ireland, as in other white countries, is
the true foundation of Home Rule. Some day Irishmen will ask, as a
united country, for the repeal of these statutory safeguards.
That brings me to the penultimate point of importance, which may be held
to affect the inclusion or exclusion of Irish Members at Westminster--I
mean the question of future constitutional amendment. Here the colonial
analogies are a little complicated. Since the Australian Colonies Act of
1850, in the new grant of a Constitution to a self-governing Colony,
power has invariably been given to amend its own Constitution, without,
of course, detracting from any powers specified in it for preserving the
sovereignty of the Mother Country. Canada, when federating in 1867, took
the somewhat singular course of making no provision in her Federal
Constitution for its subsequent amendment, though, by Section 92 of the
British North America Act, she gave her Provinces the exclusive right to
amend their own Constitutions, a right which three of them have used to
abolish their Upper Chambers. The Dominion Constitution, then, cannot be
amended otherwise than by an Imperial Act. Such amending Acts are
promoted by the Dominion Government without any specially devised
machinery for ascertaining the public opinion of Canadians. Australia,
on the other hand, when federating in 1900, made elaborate arrangements,
which have been put several times into operation, for the amendment of
the Federal Constitution by the Australian people itself, without an
Imperial Act. Now, it will follow as a matter of course that Ireland
will be given powers, as in both the previous Bills,[93] to amend her
own Constitution within certain defined limits, after a certain lapse of
time, and without encroaching upon Imperial authority. For my part I
would strongly urge that the powers now to be conferred should be much
wider; for I believe that Ireland alone can make a really perfect
Constitution for herself. But, that point apart, the question arises of
the further amendment, outside such permissive powers, of the Home Rule
Act itself, which will, of course, contain within its four corners the
whole of the Irish Constitution, so far as it can be written down. No
special arrangements were made for such a contingency in the Bill of
1893, presumably because Ireland was to be represented at Westminster
and would have a share in the making of any amending act. In the Bill of
1886, which excluded the Irish Members, Mr. Gladstone proposed (in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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