Page:The Irish Constitution Explained.djvu/11

 Molyneux, the English colonist, proudly referred to this ruling, and based a great part of his case upon it. The breed of Molyneux is alive to-day. Political differences have divided it from the ancient race which furnished its arguments. But the pride is the same; the sense of possession is essentially the same, obscured though it may have been by the causes of difference; and when a new alignment of political parties has blent the two points of view into one outlook, and made the whole consciousness to merge in one, the living factor of ancient nationhood will arise with a new strength.

That strength will prove a factor for the future. The cause of it is registered in the present draft Constitution; and it is the first of the two sauses that make it unlike those of the other nations with which Ireland is now confederate and co-equal. The second cause is curiously like, and yet curiously unlike, to the first. It is also derived from the fact of nationhood, but from the achievement of nationhood at the other end of history.

For the other nations of the Commonwealth are themselves not now what they were when their constitutions were first framed. They were then but colonies, on whom their mother-country was pleased to bestow constitutions—and if the pleasure was not always the most noticeable part of the bestowal, the legal smile did not diminish the fact of the gift. In their constitutions, therefore, the apron-strings are very much in evidence. It is clear from them that the mother did not propose to let the children wander far from her control, even though she permitted them to walk with their own feet. Not only in the actual provisions of these constitutions, but in their very conception and plan, drawn exactly according to English methods and from English experience, it is evident that a state of perpetual tutelage was imagined for the peoples to whom they were given.

That has now changed. The colonies have come to be nations, very jealous of their nationhood. They have grown with experience, have moved onward with time, and