se,--no extravagant supposition,--that George the Third
had not recovered, that the rest of his long life had been passed
in seclusion, Great Britain and Ireland would then have been, during
thirty-two years, as completely separated as Great Britain and Spain.
There would have been nothing in common between the governments, neither
executive power nor legislative power. It is plain, therefore, that a
total separation between the two islands might, in the natural course of
things, and without the smallest violation of the constitution on either
side, be the effect of the arrangement recommended by the honourable and
learned gentleman, who solemnly declares that he should consider such a
separation as the greatest of calamities.

No doubt, Sir, in several continental kingdoms there have been two
legislatures, and indeed more than two legislatures, under the same
Crown. But the explanation is simple. Those legislatures were of no real
weight in the government. Under Louis the Fourteenth Brittany had its
States; Burgundy had its States; and yet there was no collision between
the States of Brittany and the States of Burgundy. But why? Because
neither the States of Brittany nor the States of Burgundy imposed
any real restraint on the arbitrary power of the monarch. So, in
the dominions of the House of Hapsburg, there is the semblance of a
legislature in Hungary and the semblance of a legislature in the Tyrol:
but all the real power is with the Emperor. I do not say that you cannot
have one executive power and two mock parliaments, two parliaments which
merely transact parish business, two parliaments which exercise no more
influence on great affairs of state than the vestry of St Pancras or the
vestry of Marylebone. What I do say, and what common sense teaches, and
what all history teaches, is this, that you cannot have one executive
power and two real parliaments, two parliaments possessing such
powers as the parliament of this country has possessed ever since
the Revolution, two parliaments to the deliberate sense of which the
Sovereign must conform. If they differ, how can he conform to the sense
of both? The thing is as plain as a proposition in Euclid.

It is impossible for me to believe that considerations so obvious and so
important should not have occurred to the honourable and learned Member
for Dublin. Doubtless they have occurred to him; and therefore it
is that he shrinks from arguing the question here. Nay, even