In 1857 the question was mooted once more, but no action ensued; and again, on the resignation of Lord Londonderry in 1889, a number of Irish Unionists, headed by the Marquis of Waterford, urged Lord Salisbury to consider the advisability of abolishing the office, together with the Viceregal Court, which a recent French observer has stigmatised as “peuple de snobs, de parasites et de parvenus."[1] In the event Lord Salisbury, so far from acceding to the request, nominated the Marquis of Zetland to the vacant post, and the proposal to abolish it has not since been raised in public.  Men like Archbishop Whately, in the middle of the nineteenth century, whose ambition it was to see what they called the consolidation of Great Britain and Ireland effected, were strongly in favour of the proposal, and its rejection on so many occasions has been doubtless due to the fact that to mix and confound the administration of Ireland with that of Great Britain would necessitate the abandonment of the extreme centralisation of Irish Government, and those who were most anxious, as the phrase went, to make Cork like York were the very people who were most opposed to any abdication of Executive powers which an assimilation of methods of government would have inevitably brought in its train.

The government of Ireland is effected by more than forty boards—­the forty thieves the late Mr. Davitt used to call them—­and it will be for the reader, after he has studied the account which I propose to give of them, to say whether or not they deserve the name.

It is nearly twenty years since Mr. Chamberlain, in a celebrated speech at Islington, made the following remarkable declaration:—­“I say the time has come to reform altogether the absurd and irritating anachronism which is known as Dublin Castle, to sweep away altogether the alien boards of foreign officials and to substitute for them a genuine Irish administration for purely Irish business.”  Change of opinions, no one can refuse to admit, in a statesman any more than in other men, and as regards the latter part of the extract which I have quoted Mr. Chamberlain may have changed his views, but it is to the earlier part of the sentence that I would refer.  There is in it a definite statement of facts which no change in opinion on the part of the speaker could alter, and which express, as well as they can be expressed, the views of the Nationalists as to the Castle, the alien boards of foreign officials in which remained undisturbed during the course of the seven years after the coalition of Unionists and Tories, in which Mr. Chamberlain was the most powerful Minister of the Crown.