be in effect the reunited Parliament of
the United Kingdom, might not when convened claim to reassume sovereign
power? The addition of a hundred Irish members might turn a minority in
the British Parliament into a majority in the Imperial Parliament; can
we feel sure that the English minority in the British Parliament would
resist the temptation to exalt the authority of a body in which they
would be supreme? The enquiry sounds to Englishmen a strange one; but
the annals of foreign constitutions suggest that an assembly which,
though convoked for a particular purpose, is able from any point of view
to consider itself sovereign is with difficulty restrained from
asserting supreme power. From this side the Gladstonian Constitution
might prove a menace to the supremacy of the British Parliament.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONCLUSION.

[Sidenote: Survey of argument.]

Let us here review and summarise our argument. The demand for Home Rule
is a demand for a change in the Constitution so fundamental as to amount
to a legal and pacific revolution; such a demand requires for its
support cogent, we may almost say conclusive, reasons.

The positive arguments in favour of Home Rule are not easy to grasp.
Their strength lies in their correspondence with the prevailing opinions
of the day. But though public opinion under any form of government, and
especially under the system of what is called popular government,
deserves great consideration, still the value of a prevailing belief or
conviction cannot be determined without examining the elements which
have gone to its production. The state of opinion which favours Home
Rule is found to result from various and even self-contradictory
feelings, some of which belong to the highest and some to the lowest
parts of human nature; humanity and a sense of justice are in this
instance curiously combined with indolence and impatience. The
arguments again for Home Rule rest upon one dubious assumption and one
undoubted fact. The dubious assumption is that the root of Irish
discontent is the outraged feeling of nationality. The undoubted fact is
that in Ireland, on all matters either directly or even remotely
connected with the tenure of land, the law of the Courts is opposed to
the customs, to the moral sentiment, we may say to the law of the
people; hence the Queen's tribunals are weak because they are not
supported by that popular assent whence judges derive half their
authority; the tribu