er name it be called, which
consists of the representatives of England and Scotland only, and does
not include representatives of Ireland.

[68] As to the sovereignty of Parliament, see Dicey, 'Law of the
Constitution,' pp. 35-79.

[69] Government of Ireland Bill, clause 39.

[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