forth should become simply State Parliaments,
whilst the whole British Empire was ruled by some Imperial Congress
sitting, say, either in London or in Victoria. Nor need we in this
matter have recourse to theory. The present Parliament of the United
Kingdom is itself a monument of the historical fact that sovereign
Parliaments can divest themselves of sovereignty. For the Parliament of
the United Kingdom is itself the result of the abdication of supreme
power by sovereign Parliaments. The Union with Scotland was not, as
Englishmen often, I suspect, fancy, the absorption of the Parliament of
Scotland in the Parliament of England. The transaction bears, when
carefully looked at, a quite different character. Up to the year 1707
there existed an English Parliament sovereign in England, and there
existed a Scotch Parliament sovereign in Scotland. These two sovereign
bodies in negotiating the Treaty of Union acted with scrupulous, and on
the Scotch side with punctilious, independence. Neither sovereign body
would consent to be absorbed in the other. What they did agree to was to
constitute a new State, namely, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and
each to surrender their separate sovereignty in favour of a new
sovereign, namely, the sovereign Parliament of the United Kingdom. The
English Parliament no more became supreme in Scotland than the Scotch
Parliament became supreme in England. The old Parliament of each country
abdicated and lost its identity in the New Parliament of Great Britain.
In theory the Treaty of Union between Great Britain and Ireland bore
exactly the same character as the Treaty of Union between England and
Scotland. But on this point I do not care strongly to insist, because at
the present moment every part of Irish history excites controversy.
When, however, the excitement of the day has passed by, no one will
dispute that 22 Geo. III. c. 53 and 23 Geo. III. c. 28 constituted the
renunciation by the British Parliament of sovereignty over Ireland. The
difference between the limitation of sovereignty and the surrender of
sovereignty has been pressed far enough for my present purpose; no
principle of jurisprudence is more certain than that sovereignty
implies the power of abdication, and no fact of history is more certain
than that a sovereign Parliament has more than once abdicated or shared
its powers. To argue or imply that because sovereignty is not limitable
(which is true), it cannot be surrendered