arrangements for promoting an Irish Department on an Irish popular basis while recoiling in terror from the prospect of crowning them with a Minister responsible to ah Irish Parliament?  The consequence is that even in this solitary example of an Irish Department under semi-popular control we see the subtle taint of Crown Colony Government.  Popular opinion, acting indirectly, first through the Council and then through the Boards, can legally paralyze the Department by declining to appropriate money in the way it prescribes, while possessing no legal power to enforce a different policy or change the personnel of administration.  This is only an object-lesson.  I hasten to add that such a paralysis has never taken place, though some acrimonious controversy, natural enough under the anomalous state of things, has arisen over the office of Vice-President.  There is now only one means by which Irish opinion can, if it be so disposed, displace the holder of the office, and that is a thoroughly unreliable and unhealthy means, namely, through pressure brought to bear by one or other of the Irish Parliamentary parties upon a newly elected British Ministry.[53] But why in the world should the British party pendulum determine an important Irish matter like this?  Why, a fortiori, should it determine the appointment to the office of Chief Secretary, the irresponsible Prime Minister, or, rather the autocrat of Ireland?  It is the reductio ad absurdum of the Union.

The Department commands a large measure of confidence.  It would command far greater confidence if it were responsible to an Irish Parliament; but Irishmen are sensible enough to perceive that as long as the Union lasts, everyone is interested in making the existing system work smoothly and well.  The general policy as laid down in the first instance, by the first Vice-President, Sir Horace Plunkett, has been sound and wise;[54] to proceed slowly, while building up a staff of trained instructors, inspectors, organizers; to devote money and labour mainly to education, both industrial and agricultural, and to evoke self-reliance and initiative in the people by, so far as possible, spending money locally only where a local contribution is raised and a local scheme prepared.  The last aim met with a fine response.  Every County Council in Ireland raises a rate, and has a scheme for agricultural and technical instruction.  I can only enumerate some of the multifarious functions which the Department evolved for itself or took over from various other unrelated Boards and concentrated under single control.  It gives instruction in agriculture and rural domestic economy (horticulture, butter-making, bee-keeping, poultry-keeping, etc.) through schools, colleges, or agricultural stations under its own direction, through private schools for both sexes, and through an extensive system of itinerant courses conducted (in 1909) by 128 trained instructors.  It gives premiums for the breeding of horses, cattle, asses,