and were construed and tried by the same rules of law."[1]
But while the machinery of legislation was the same, the development of the great principles which lie at the root of the British constitution was in the two countries widely different. Thus, for instance, the struggle between the prerogative of the Crown and the rights of the people culminated in England in 1688 in the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty. Ireland was, however, governed for nearly a century after that Revolution on the principles of the Stuarts. In England the constitutional struggle was between the monarch and the Parliament. In Ireland the contest lay between the Irish Parliament and the English Ministry. After the Revolution the English Ministry, who saw themselves dependent on the English Parliament, used the prerogatives wrested by that Parliament from the Stuarts, in the attempt to destroy the independence and enfeeble the powers of the Irish Legislature. The aim of the Irish patriot party in and out of Parliament was to extend to Ireland the rights gained by England at the Revolution, and thus to assimilate in spirit as well as in form the Irish to the English Constitution. "You struggled," said Grattan in the Irish House of Commons, " for the British Constitution in opposition to the claim of the British Parliament."[2] The aim of the English Government was, on the contrary, to make the
- ↑ "Proceedings of the Home Rule Conference, 1873," pp. 6, 7.
- ↑ "Irish Debates," vol. xv. p. 5.
