Pooh-Bah.  Of course, as First Lord of the Treasury, I could propose a special vote that would cover all expenses if it were not that, as leader of the Opposition, it would be my duty to resist it, tooth and nail.  Or, as Paymaster-General, I could so cook the accounts that, as Lord High Auditor, I should never discover the fraud.  But then, as Archbishop of Jitipu, it would be my duty to denounce my dishonesty, and give myself into my own custody as Commissioner of Police.”

Under such arrangements as these the inevitable happens.  The Chief Secretary accepts his role.  He is, no doubt, consoled to discover that in one sphere, namely in that of patronage, his supremacy is effective.  He discovers further that he can hamstring certain obnoxious Acts, as Mr Walter Long hamstrung the Land Act, by the issue of Regulations.  The rest of his official career depends on his politics.  If a Tory, he learns that the Irish Civil Service is a whispering gallery along which his lightest word is carried to approving ears, and loyally acted upon.  Further “Ulster” expects law and order to be vindicated by the occasional proclamation of Nationalist meetings, and batoning of Nationalist skulls.  And he absolutely must say from time to time in public that the Irish Question in essence is not political but economic.  This is the whole duty of a Tory Chief Secretary.  A Liberal Chief Secretary functions on somewhat different lines.  Administration presents itself to him as a colossal heap of recalcitrant, wet sand out of which he has to fashion a statue of fair-play.  Having, with great labour, left his personal impress on two or three handfuls, the weary Titan abandons his impossible task.  He falls back in good order on the House of Commons, where his party majority enables him to pass an Irish Bill from time to time.  His spare time he divides between commending Dublin Castle to the seven devils that made it, and praying for the advent of Home Rule.

In either case the sovereignty of Ireland relapses into the hands of the permanent officials, that camarilla of Olympians.  To the official lives of these gentlemen, regarded as works of art, I raise my hat in respectful envy.  They have realised the vision of Lucretius.  From the secure remoteness of their ivory towers they look down unmoved on the stormy and drifting tides below, and they enjoy the privilege, so rare in Ireland, of knowing the causes of things.  To the ordinary man their political origins are shrouded in twilight.  They seem to him to have come like water, but unhappily it cannot be said that they go like wind.  While they are with us they are absolute, seen by nobody, felt by all the world, the Manchu mandarins of the West.  They have been attacked on many foolish counts; let us in justice to them and ourselves be quite clear as to what is wrong with them.  Some people say that there are too many Boards, but it is to be remembered that for every new function with which we endow the State it must have