the chance of obtaining some of the benefits, and compensate England for
some of the evils, of Home Rule. But however this may be, one result it
would produce with certainty; it would dash the Gladstonian party to
pieces. The friends of Disestablishment, the Welsh, or the Scottish,
Home Rulers, the London Socialists, all the revolutionists throughout
the country, know that with the departure of the Irish representatives
from Westminster their own hopes of triumph must be indefinitely
postponed. England is the stronghold of British conservatism, and an
arrangement which leaves the fate of England in the hands of Englishmen
may be favourable to reform, but is fatal to revolution. Has this fact
arrested the attention of Gladstonians? I know not. It is an unfortunate
coincidence that the least defensible portion of an indefensible policy
should, while it threatens ruin to England, offer temporary salvation to
the party who rally round Mr. Gladstone.[55]


C. _The Powers of the Irish Government_

I. _The Irish Executive_. At the head of the Irish Executive will
nominally stand the Lord Lieutenant; he will however in reality occupy
the position of a colonial Governor, and be, for most purposes, little
more than the ornamental figure-head of the Irish Administration. The
real executive government of Ireland[56] must be a parliamentary
Ministry or Cabinet[57] chosen in effect, though not in name, by the
Irish Parliament, or rather by the Irish Legislative Assembly, or House
of Commons, just as the English Cabinet is appointed in effect by the
English House of Commons. Allowing then for the occasional intervention
of the Lord Lieutenant as the representative of the Imperial Parliament
to protect either the interests of the Empire or the special rights of
the United Kingdom,[58] the Irish Ministry is to occupy in Ireland the