On the contrary, I hope that the opponents as well as the supporters of Home Rule would agree that, since Home Rule involves a division of legislative powers between the Parliament of the United Kingdom and the Irish Parliament, it is not only pertinent, but necessary, that we should make ourselves acquainted with the lines upon which Parliament has, in practice, divided up its legislative business. For, while the point should not be pressed too far, I would suggest that the separate Irish laws, and, for that matter, the separate English and Scottish laws, constitute a kind of internal devolution, which is all the more significant because Parliament has not been actuated by any preconceived purpose; and that the subjects which are now dealt with by “State” laws are, for that very reason, those of which Parliament should naturally be relieved under any scheme of Home Rule. Similarly, it might be claimed that Parliament should retain those powers which it is now able to exercise in common for the whole of the United Kingdom; but the position is not the same in the two cases. In its anxiety to economise time, Parliament does not hesitate to render its measures applicable to the whole of the United Kingdom by appending to them clauses which regulate separately the application of the provisions to Scotland and Ireland; and where these “application clauses,” as they are called, are long and complicated, it is probable that separate measures for the different parts of the United Kingdom could be adjusted more closely to the local requirements. On the other hand, we may be sure that Parliament would not have passed, for instance, separate Local Government Acts for England, Scotland and Ireland, each of which took up much of its time, unless it had been obliged to do so; and we may assume, whenever such separate Acts are passed, that Parliament had some strong reason for its action, though, of course, I do not imply that Parliament has legislated also for England and Scotland on every subject on which it has passed an Act that related exclusively to Ireland.