of Nationalist meetings, and batoning of Nationalist skulls. And he absolutely must say from time to time in public that the Irish Question in essence is not political but economic. This is the whole duty of a Tory Chief Secretary. A Liberal Chief Secretary functions on somewhat different lines. Administration presents itself to him as a colossal heap of recalcitrant, wet sand out of which he has to fashion a statue of fair-play. Having, with great labour, left his personal impress on two or three handfuls, the weary Titan abandons his impossible task. He falls back in good order on the House of Commons, where his party majority enables him to pass an Irish Bill from time to time. His spare time he divides between commending Dublin Castle to the seven devils that made it, and praying for the advent of Home Rule.
In either case the sovereignty of Ireland relapses into the hands of the permanent officials, that camarilla of Olympians. To the official lives of these gentlemen, regarded as works of art, I raise my hat in respectful envy. They have realised the vision of Lucretius. From the secure remoteness of their ivory towers they look down unmoved on the stormy and drifting tides below, and they enjoy the privilege, so rare in Ireland, of knowing the
causes of things. To the ordinary man their political origins are shrouded in twilight. They seem to him to have come like water, but unhappily it cannot be said that they go like wind. While they are with us they are absolute, seen by nobody, felt by all the world, the Manchu mandarins of the West. They have been attacked on many foolish counts; let us in justice to them and ourselves be quite clear as to what is wrong with them. Some people say that there are too many Boards, but it is to be remembered that for every new function with which we endow the State it must have a new organ. Others say that they are over-staffed; but all government departments in the world are over-staffed. Still others say that they are stupid and corrupt. As for corruption, it certainly does exist under many discreet veils, but its old glory is fading. Incompetent the great officials never were. A poet tells us that there are only two people in the world who ever understand a man—the woman who loves him, and the enemy who hates him best. In one of these ways, if not in the other, Dublin Castle understands Ireland. Did it not know what the people of Ireland want, it could not so infallibly have maintained its tradition of giving them the opposite. Other critics again find the deadly disease of the
Boards to reside in the fact that they are a bureaucracy. This diagnosis comes closer to the truth, but it is not yet the truth. Bureaucracies of trained experts are becoming more and not less necessary. What is really wrong with the Castle is that it is a bureaucracy which has usurped the throne of the nation. "In England," declared Mr Gladstone, "when the nation attends, it can prevail." In Ireland, though it should attend seven days in the week, it could never under present arrangements stamp the image of its will on public policy. The real sin of the Castle regime is that it is a sham, a rococo, a despotism painted to look like representative government. To quote a radiant commonplace, the rich significance of which few of us adequately grasp, it does not rest on the consent of the governed.
"From whatever point of view we envisage the English Government in Ireland," writes Mr Paul-Dubois, "we are confronted with the same appearance of constitutional forms masking a state of things which is a compound of autocracy, oppression, and corruption."
Such a system does not possess within itself the seed of continuance. Disraeli announced, somewhat prematurely, the advent of an age in
which institutions that could not bear discussion would have to go. Matthew Arnold yearned for a time in which the manifestly absurd would be abandoned. In the flame of either dictum the present "government" of Ireland shrivels to ashes, and affairs are ripe for the application of both. Here, as in the Colonies, the people must enter into its heritage. The days are for ever dead in which a nation could be ruled in daily disregard of its history, its ideals, its definite programme.
On the minutiae of administration I do not mean to touch. When the whole spirit, atmosphere, and ethos are anti-moral it is idle to chronicle any chance rectitude of detail. If a man is a murderer it is not much to his credit to observe that he has triumphed over the primitive temptation to eat peas with his knife. If a government is based on contempt for public opinion, as its fundamental principle, no useful purpose is served by a record of the occasions on which a policeman has been known to pass a citizen in the street without beating him. But there is one further confirmation of the view, here advanced, to omit which would be to ignore the most significant fact of our time. Certain departments such as the Congested Districts Board and the Department of Agriculture,
recent creations, have been freshened by the introduction of a representative, non-official element. Others such as the Estates Commission have been under the control of officials of a new type, able men who do not conceal the fact that they believe in Ireland. All of these new Boards have struck root in the national life to a depth never reached by any of their predecessors. The lesson of this change is the lesson of freedom. In the precise degree in which government trusts the people will the people trust government. It remains to complete the process by a scheme of autonomy that shall make every administrator a trustee and executant of the will of the nation.
There are other organs of "government" in Ireland of which the reader may reasonably expect to hear something. He will permit me to discharge my obligations by copying out certain paragraphs from an old note-book: