A profound observer has remarked that people do not reckon highly
enough the importance at a revolutionary crisis of any show or
appearance of legality.[92] Revolution acquires new force when masked
under the form of law. This is a point which Englishmen constantly
overlook. They know the moral influence of leagues and combinations;
they do not reflect that a Parliament or House of Commons in sympathy
with resistance to Imperial demands would possess tenfold the moral
authority of any National League. Note too that the Irish Ministry and
the Irish Parliament would play into one another's hands, and would
further be strengthened by their Irish allies at Westminster, as also by
the Irish electoral vote in England.

For the true stronghold of the Irish Government lies, under the new
constitution, at Westminster.[93]

There they would command at least eighty votes: the Irish members could
still, as now, and far more effectively than now, coerce under ordinary
circumstances any Ministry disposed to enforce the rights of the
Imperial Government, or, in other words, of England.

Take a concrete case to which I have already referred.[94] Irish farmers
who have purchased under the Ashbourne Act grow weary of paying
instalments which are equivalent to rent. The Irish Cabinet refuses to
collect the rent; it urges its absolute inability to pay the sums due to
the Imperial Exchequer and asks for remission. Meanwhile the Irish House
of Commons passes a resolution supporting the conduct of the Irish
Government. The British Ministers are stern, and reject the request of
the Irish Cabinet. The Cabinet at Dublin retire from office. No
successors can be appointed who command the support of the Irish
Parliament. The Lord Lieutenant advises the Government at home that
things have come to a deadlock and that a dissolution will change
nothing. Thereupon the Irish members at Westminster begin to move; they
threaten general hostility to the British Ministry.

They proffer their support to the Opposition. It may of course happen
that the British Ministry can, like the Unionist Government of 1886,
defy the Opposition and the Irish members combined. If so the English
Cabinet can risk a constitutional conflict in Ireland, though it is a
conflict likely to end in disturbance or civil war. But judging the
future by the past the eighty members will hold the balance of power. If
so their course is clear. They expel from office the Ministers who have