The Irish Constitution

The articles that are now gathered together in this little book were first published in the Irish Independent at the invitation of its Editor. They were not written for publication in book-form; and they naturally suffer, in their present form, from the conditions that were first imposed on them, conditions proper to their original setting. With the exception of two of them, they were written rather in a spirit of exposition than in a spirit of analysis and criticism; and this intention was only departed from because it seemed that the two matters so dealt with departed, with differing degrees of flagrancy, from the original purpose of the Constitution, which was to make the mechanism of Government malleable at every stage to the will of the people of Ireland. During the early days of the second French Republic a customer entered a bookseller’s and asked: “Have you a copy of the French Constitution? We do not, the bookseller politely replied, deal in periodical literature.