Accordingly Mr Balfour’s good intentions were fought and frustrated from two opposing sources.  His Land Act of 1906 and his Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898, were furiously opposed by the Irish Unionists and the Dillonites alike.  The Land Bill was by no means a heroic measure, and made no serious effort to deal with the land problem in a big or comprehensive fashion.  The Local Government Bill, on the other hand, was a most far-reaching measure, one of national scope and importance, full of the most tremendous opportunities and possibilities, and how any Irish leader in his senses could have been so short-sighted as to oppose it will for ever remain one of the mysteries of political life.  This Bill broke for ever the back of landlord power in Irish administration.  It gave into the hands of the people for the first time the absolute control of their own local affairs.  It enfranchised the workers in town and country, enabling them to vote for the man of their choice at all local elections.  It put an end to the pernicious power of the landed gentry, who hitherto raised the rates for all local services, dispersed patronage and were guilty of many misdeeds and malversations, as well of being prolific in every conceivable form of abuse which a rotten and corrupt system could lend itself to.  To this the Local Government Act of 1898 put a violent and abrupt end.  The Grand Juries and the Presentment Sessions were abolished.  Elected Councils took their place.  The franchise was extended to embrace every householder and even a considerable body of women.  It was the exit of “the garrison” and the entrance of the people—­the triumph of the democratic principle and the end of aristocratic power in local life.

Next to the grant of Home Rule there could not be a more remarkable concession to popular right and feeling.  Yet Mr Dillon had to find fault with it because its provisions, to use his own words, included “blackmail to the landlords” and arranged for “a flagitious waste of public funds”—­the foundation on which these charges rested being that, following an unvarying tradition, the Unionist Government bribed the landlords into acceptance of the Bill by relieving them of half their payment for Poor Rate, whilst it gave a corresponding relief of half the County Dues to the tenants.  He also ventured the prediction, easily falsified in the results, that the tenants’ portion of the rate relief would be transferred to the landlords in the shape of increased rents.  As a matter of fact, the second term judicial rents, subsequently fixed, were down by an average of 22 per cent.

Mr Redmond, wiser than Mr Dillon, saw that the Bill had magnificent possibilities; he welcomed it, and he promised that the influence of his friends and himself would be directed to obtain for the principles it contained a fair and successful working.  But, with a surprising lack of political acumen, he likewise expressed his determination to preserve in the new councils the presence and power of the landlord and ex-officio element.  This was, in the circumstances, with the Land Question unsettled and landlordism still an insidious power, a rather gratuitous surrender to the privileged classes.