One check, indeed, is placed upon the power of the Irish Cabinet. The military forces of the Crown, and the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police (as long as they exist[62]), are subject to the control of the Imperial or English Ministry.[63] The result is that the English Cabinet will have the means of using force in Ireland for the maintenance of order, for the execution of the law, or for the maintenance of the authority of the Imperial Parliament. But this advantage is after all purchased at the price of placing the country under the rule of something very like two Executives. If the policy of the Irish Cabinet, _e.g._ as to suppressing a riot at Dublin or Belfast, should differ from the policy of the English Cabinet, the ordinary police may be called into action whilst the army or the royal constabulary stand by inactive, or the army may disperse a meeting which the Irish Ministry hold to be a lawful assembly.
II. _The Irish Parliament._ The authority of the Irish Parliament, whilst acting within the limits of the constitution, is extremely wide.[64]
The Parliament appoints the Irish Government of the day; it will determine whether Mr. M'Carthy or Mr. Redmond, Mr. Healy or Mr. Davitt, directs the Irish Administration. In this matter the British Government will have no voice. The English Ministry are under the new constitution expected in many ways to co-operate with the Irish Ministry, yet it is quite conceivable that the Ministers of the Crown at Dublin may be men whose whole ideas of expediency, of policy, of political morality, may be opposed to the ideas of the Ministers of the Crown at Westminster.
The Irish Parliament, again, even if every Restriction on its powers inserted in the Home Rule Bill should pass into law, will be found to have ample scope for legislative action.[65]
It can repeal[66] any Act affecting Ireland which was enacted before the passing of the Home Rule Bill. Thus it can do away with the right to the writ of _habeas corpus_; it can abolish the whole system of trial by jury; it can by wide rules as to the change of venue expose any inhabitant of Belfast, charged with any offence against the Irish Government, to the certainty of being tried in Dublin or in Cork. If an Irish law cannot touch the law of treason or of treason-felony, the leaders of the Irish Parliament may easily invent new offences not called by these names, and the Parliament may impose severe penalties on any one who attempts by act or by speech to bring the Irish Government into contempt. A new law of sacrilege may be passed which would make criticism of the Irish priesthood, or attacks on the Roman Catholic religion, or the public advocacy of Protestantism, practically impossible. The Irish House of Commons may take the decision of election petitions into its own hands, and members nominated by the priests may determine the proper limits of spiritual influence. Thus the party dominant at Dublin can, if they see fit, abolish all freedom of election; nor is this all that the Irish Parliament can accomplish in the way of ensuring the supremacy of an Irish party. After six years from the passing of the Home Rule Bill--let us say in the year 1900--the Irish Parliament can alter the qualification of the electors and the distribution of the members among the constituencies. Parliament can in fact introduce at once universal suffrage, and do everything which the ingenuity of partisanship can suggest for diminishing the representation of property and of Protestantism. If, further, in any part of Ireland there be reason to fear opposition to the laws of the Irish Parliament, a severer Coercion Act may be passed than any which has as yet found its way on to the pages of the English or the Irish Statute Book. Worse than all this, the Irish Parliament has the right to legislate with regard to transactions which have taken place before the passing of the Home Rule Bill. An Act inflicting penalties on magistrates who have been zealous in the enforcement of the Crimes Act, an Act abolishing the right to recover debts incurred before 1893, an Act for compensation to tenants who had suffered from obedience to the behests of the Land League, are all Acts which, however monstrous, the Irish Parliament is, under the new constitution, competent to pass.