The weakest point of the modern English system of government by Cabinets surely is the evanescent tenure by which every Minister holds his place.  Not only has the Cabinet itself no fixed term of office, being in truth but a Committee of the Legislature clothed with executive authority, but any member of the Cabinet may be forced by events or by intrigues to leave it.  In this way Mr. Forster, when he filled the place now held by Mr. Balfour, found himself driven into resigning it by Mr. Gladstone’s indisposition or inability to resist the peremptory pressure put upon the British Premier at a critical moment by our own Government in the spring of 1882.  Mr. Balfour is in no such peril, perhaps.  He is more sure, I take it, of the support of Lord Salisbury and his colleagues than Mr. Forster ever was of the support of Mr. Gladstone; and the “Coercion” law which it is his duty to administer contains no such sweeping and despotic clause as that provision in Mr. Gladstone’s “Coercion Act” of 1881, under which persons claiming American citizenship were arrested and indefinitely locked up on “suspicion,” until it became necessary for our Government, even at the risk of war, to demand their trial or release.

But if Mr. Balfour were Chief Secretary for Ireland “on the American plan”; if he held his office, that is, for a fixed term of years, and cared nothing for a renewal of the lease, he could not be more pre-occupied than he seems to be with simply getting his executive duty done, or less pre-occupied than he seems to be with what may be thought of his way of getting it done.  If all executive officers were of this strain, Parliamentary government might stand in the dock into which Prince Albert put it with more composure, and await the verdict with more confidence.  Surely if Ireland is ever to govern herself, she must learn precisely the lesson which Mr. Balfour, I believe, is trying to teach her—­that the duty of executive officers to execute the laws is not a thing debateable, like the laws themselves, nor yet determinable, like the enactment of laws, by taking the yeas and the nays.  How well this lesson shall be taught must depend, of course, very much upon the quality of the men who make up the machine of Government in Ireland.  That the Irish have almost as great a passion for office-holding as the Spanish, we long ago learned in New York, where the percentage of Irish office-holders considerably exceeds the percentage of Irish citizens.  And as all the witnesses agree that the Irish Government has for years been to an inordinate degree a Government by patronage, there must doubtless be some reasonable ground for the very general impression that “the Castle” needs overhauling.  It is not true, however, I find, although I have often heard it asserted in England, that the Irish Government is officered by Englishmen and Scotchmen exclusively.  The murdered Mr. Burke certainly was not an Englishman; and there is an apparent predominance of Irishmen