Page:The Irish Constitution Explained.djvu/21

 Constitutions they devised therefore could come of effect they had to be passed as Imperial Acts by the Parliament at Westminster.

Yet that also has now changed. Ireland has wrought the change; and the deep influence of that change cannot be foretold. For the Bail elected to pass the Constitution will act, not as a Constituent Convention, but as a Constituent Assembly. It will not only devise the Constitution, with the present Constitution before it as a Bill for discussion, but, having devised it, will prescribe it; and thus, through their elected representatives, the people of Ireland will have conferred it on themselves as their Fundamental Law.

That is a sovereign act; and that act will differ in no degree from a similar act by any other sovereign people. From this, however, one last consideration follows; and, though it is simple, it is not usually remembered. For if the passing of a Constitution is an act of full sovereignty, and if that Constitution, being a Fundamental Law, restricts and limits all future law-making, then the assemblies to come which will pass those future laws will not be sovereign.

They will not be able to do what they will, and they will not be able to act as they will, for they must obey the requirements and act within the limits of the Constitution, as prescribed by the first Assembly, which alone was of full sovereignty. For this reason every nation has gone to great care to choose persons of special competence for the body which is to act as a Constituent Assembly—^the body, indeed, which is to act as the first, and, so long as that Constitution shall remain, the last Sovereign Assembly of the nation. The act of prescribing a Constitution being the Highest act that a nation can make, care has always been taken to make it the fullest and the freest. For, once done, it cannot be undone, except at great trouble, and perhaps as the result of great convulsion.