The new Bill is remarkable for the explicitness with which it invests Ireland with control over the Executive. For the first time in the written constitutions of the Empire we have a statutory Executive, and not only is it a statutory Executive, but it is to be a Parliamentary Executive defined by statute. In the earlier Bills nothing was more remarkable than the brevity and allusiveness with which this question of the Government of Ireland was treated. “The Executive power in Ireland shall continue vested in Her Majesty the Queen” was the language employed in the Bill of 1893. Under that Bill the Government of Ireland would have continued, even after its passage into law, to be in the hands of the English Cabinet and it would have rested with that Cabinet to determine how large or how small a part of the prerogatives of the Crown should be delegated to the Lord-Lieutenant. Paradoxical as it may seem, it would have been quite possible for a Unionist Government, coming into power immediately after the Home Rule Bill had passed into law and an Irish Parliament had met at Dublin, to retain in their own hands the Executive authority in Ireland without any breach of statutory obligations. The Bills of 1886 and 1893 left it in the discretion of the Crown to decide what the powers of the Lord-Lieutenant should be. Following Colonial precedents, the Constitution would have had to be supplemented(47) by prerogative legislation in the shape of Letters Patent defining those powers. Moreover, these powers were to have been vested not in the Lord-Lieutenant in Council, but in the Lord-Lieutenant alone. Something was indeed, said about an “Executive Committee” of the Irish Privy Council to aid and advise in the Government of Ireland—this was the only hint of responsible Government that the Bill contained—but nothing was said of the powers or constitution of the Committee nor of the extent to which the Lord-Lieutenant was bound to act on its advice. Its constitution was left to the discretion of Her Majesty. Its powers would, of course, as in the case of the Colonies, have been decided by the tacit adoption of the unwritten conventions of the English Constitution that the advisers of the Governor must command the confidence of the Legislature which votes supplies.