Such voidable Acts, and even parliamentary resolutions,[91] would go like a watchword through the country and encourage throughout Ireland popular resistance to Imperial law.

A profound observer has remarked that people do not reckon highly enough the importance at a revolutionary crisis of any show or appearance of legality.[92] Revolution acquires new force when masked under the form of law.

This is a point which Englishmen constantly overlook.

They know the moral influence of leagues and combinations; they do not reflect that a Parliament or House of Commons in sympathy with resistance to Imperial demands would possess tenfold the moral authority of any National League.

Note too that the Irish Ministry and the Irish Parliament would play into one another's hands, and would further be strengthened by their Irish allies at Westminster, as also by the Irish electoral vote in England.
For the true stronghold of the Irish Government lies, under the new constitution, at Westminster.[93] There they would command at least eighty votes: the Irish members could still, as now, and far more effectively than now, coerce under ordinary circumstances any Ministry disposed to enforce the rights of the Imperial Government, or, in other words, of England.
Take a concrete case to which I have already referred.[94] Irish farmers who have purchased under the Ashbourne Act grow weary of paying instalments which are equivalent to rent.