I am far from implying that restrictions are bad things in themselves.  All Constitutions, whether the sole work of the men who are to live under them, like that of the United States, or the gift of a Sovereign State to a dependency, or the joint work of a Sovereign and a dependent State, contain restrictions designed for the common good.  The criterion of their value is the measure of consent they meet with from those who have to live under and work the Constitution, and it is that circumstance which makes it urgent that Irish opinion should be evoked upon their future Constitution, and that the Irish Nationalist party should think out its own scheme of Home Rule.  The Constitution of the United States contains many self-imposed restrictions upon the powers both of the Central and the State Governments, in the interest of minorities; and nobody accuses the Americans of having insulted themselves.

It will be no slur on Ireland, for example, if the most elaborate safeguards against the oppression of the Protestant minority are inserted in the Bill, provided that Nationalist Ireland, recognizing the fears of the minority, spontaneously recommends, or, at any rate, freely consents to their insertion—­a consent which could not, of course, be expected if their tendency was to derange the functions of Government or cripple the Legislature.

On the other hand, it would be a slur on Ireland which she would justly resent, besides being a highly impolitic step, to deny to the Irish Executive an important power, such, for example, as the control of its own police.

B.

It is a grave difficulty that there is no public opinion in Ireland as to the form of the Irish Constitution.  That is an almost inevitable result of political conditions past and present.  Violent intestinal antagonisms are not favourable to constructive thought.  The best men of a country, working in harmony, are needed to devise a good Constitution, and if any Irishman could succeed in convening a Conference like that which created the South African Union, he would be famous and honoured for ever in the annals of the future Ireland.  That Conference, we must remember, was itself the result of the grants of Home Rule two years previously, and these grants in their turn were greatly facilitated by the co-operation of Britons and Dutchmen.[73] Canada, in 1840, is a warning of the errors made in constructing a Constitution without such co-operation.  Eventually it had to be torn up and refashioned.  The best way of avoiding any such error in Ireland’s case is to expel the spirit of distrust which animated the framers of the Canadian Union Act of 1840.

C.