would fall the very intention to do impartial and indifferent justice could not presumed in advance. For all such appeals involve two classes of cases. The first deals with appeals from interpretation of the ordinary law. The second deals with appeals from interpretations of the Fundamental Law of the Constitution. Now appeals from an interpretation of the ordinary law heard in some country where the principles of that law are unfamiliar would, as has been indicated, involve injustices enough; but they would concern only the individual or some corporate enterprise. The injustice would exist; but it would be limited; and lawyers of another country might be supposed to wish to search for justice, even if the trading enterprise had its seat in their own nation and the individual were Irish. But a Constitution is the very charter of a nation's freedom.
Cases concerning an interpretation of the Constitution are vital to a whole people, and, as between two nations, vital to international safety and polity. And such cases could, under the circumstances, only arise between two nations, Ireland, whose the Constitution is, and England, whose the Constitution is not, and where parties might arise to power who would intrigue to impeach that Constitution. Moreover, in England it is frequently the practice to recruit the higher offices of the Judiciary, not from men of acknowledged skill in the achievement of equity, but rather from men who have snatched a casual eminence in the heat of party strife, men of political passions and political prejudices, who have come to the front by the very profession of partisanship. It is such men who will form for the most part the lawyers of the Judicial Committee. Even if the road to that Committee were of the straightest and purest legal character, no reasonable person would expect it to deliver impartial judgment on the Fundamental Law of another nation, especially if an adjustment of the liberties of two nations were concerned, one of those nations being, more than conceivably, their own. But since the road is, admittedly, neither of the straightest
