t the National Assembly has had no
alternative but to frame legislation to deal with them. And when such
legislation has come before the people by the Referendum, the people have
in many cases adopted them.

The presence, therefore, in our Constitution of both the Referendum and
the Initiative is therefore a sign that the people of Ireland are to be
rulers in their own house--not merely as against foreign control, but as
against the dominance of political parties. It means more. It means that
responsibility is now definitely reposed in them. There are provisions
which, in the present draft of the Constitution, could with advantage be
changed. For to require, in Article 43, that a petition from the people of
not less than "one-twentieth of the voters then on the register" is
necessary (in the alternative of a vote of three-fifths of the Senate),
before a measure may be put to the Referendum, is to impose an almost
impracticable, and certainly an extremely difficult, task. It reveals a
fear of the exercise of the Referendum that experience in other countries
does not justify. With the wide franchise allowed in the Constitution, the
tendency will be to play into the hands of political parties, and one of
the purposes of the Referendum is to destroy the power of political
parties. Yet a slight change here may easily be made. And the essential
fact is that the people of Ireland, having asserted the fact of their
sovereignty, and defined its qualities, proceed to exercise its functions
by holding over the Oireachtas the two instruments of the Referendum and
the Initiative.

How will those functions be exercised? It is impossible to say, except
that there is no education like the education of responsibility.

V.

THE EXECUTIVE POWER.

I have likened a Constitution to a pyramid, the base of which is the
People, and the apex the Executive Authority. In all pyramids, it is the
apex that first catches the eye, not the base; yet it is from the base
upward that democratic constitutions are built. Usually it happens in most
countries that the Executive masters the Law-making body, and that the
Law-making body in turn masters the People. It is therefore necessary to
remember, and to emphasise, that the true order is the other way about,
the People being the master of the Law-making body, and the Law-making
body the master of the Executive. In the degree in which that true order
is asserted, and observed, the health of the State