fulfilment of treaty obligations required differential taxation, but administrative convenience was best served by a uniform system of taxation.  In the struggle between the two, conscience was as usual defeated.  The Chancellor, according to the practice which has overridden the Act of Union budgets for Great Britain, drags the schedule of taxes so fixed through Ireland like a net, and counts the take.  That, in the process, the pledge of England should be broken, and her honour betrayed, is not regarded by the best authorities as an objection or even as a relevant fact.  In the more sacred name of uniformity Ireland is swamped in the Westminster Parliament like a fishing-smack in the wash of a great merchantman.

But let one illusion be buried.  If Ireland does not govern herself it is quite certain that the British Parliament does not govern her.  Changing the venue of inquiry from London to Dublin we find ourselves still in regions of the fantastic.  From the sober and unemotional pages of “Whitaker’s Almanack” one learns, to begin with, that “the government of Ireland is semi-independent.”  The separatism of geography has in this case triumphed.  The de facto rulers of Ireland in ordinary slack times, and in the daily round of business, are the heads of the great Departments.  Some of these are not even nominally responsible to Parliament.  The Intermediate Board, for instance, has for thirty years controlled secondary education, but it has never explained itself to Parliament and, because of the source from which its funds are derived, it is not open to criticism in Parliament.  But none of the heads are really responsible to any authority except their own iron-clad consciences and the officials of the Treasury, with whom, for the sake of appearances, they wage an unreal war.  In theory, the Chief Secretary answers to Parliament for the misdeeds of them all.  In practice, this fines itself down to reading typewritten sophistications in reply to original questions, and improvising jokes, of a well-recognised pattern, to turn the point of supplementary questions for forty minutes on one day in the week during session.  In its own internal economy the government of Ireland is a form of Pantheism, with the Chief Secretary as underlying principle.  He is the source of everything, good and evil, light and darkness, benignity and malignity, with the unfortunate result that he is in perpetual contradiction with himself.  As we know, the equilibrium of modern governments is maintained by mutual strain between the various ministers.  Sometimes, as in the case of Lord Randolph Churchill, a strong personality, moved by a new idea, tears the structure to pieces.  But the Chief Secretary knows no such limitations from without.  Theoretically, he may be produced to infinity in any direction; he is all in every part.  But, as a matter of fact, through the mere necessity of filling so much space his control becomes rarefied to an invisible vapour; he ends by becoming nothing