a new organ.  Others say that they are over-staffed; but all government departments in the world are over-staffed.  Still others say that they are stupid and corrupt.  As for corruption, it certainly does exist under many discreet veils, but its old glory is fading.  Incompetent the great officials never were.  A poet tells us that there are only two people in the world who ever understand a man—­the woman who loves him, and the enemy who hates him best.  In one of these ways, if not in the other, Dublin Castle understands Ireland.  Did it not know what the people of Ireland want, it could not so infallibly have maintained its tradition of giving them the opposite.  Other critics again find the deadly disease of the Boards to reside in the fact that they are a bureaucracy.  This diagnosis comes closer to the truth, but it is not yet the truth.  Bureaucracies of trained experts are becoming more and not less necessary.  What is really wrong with the Castle is that it is a bureaucracy which has usurped the throne of the nation.  “In England,” declared Mr Gladstone, “when the nation attends, it can prevail.”  In Ireland, though it should attend seven days in the week, it could never under present arrangements stamp the image of its will on public policy.  The real sin of the Castle regime is that it is a sham, a rococo, a despotism painted to look like representative government.  To quote a radiant commonplace, the rich significance of which few of us adequately grasp, it does not rest on the consent of the governed.

“From whatever point of view we envisage the English Government in Ireland,” writes Mr Paul-Dubois, “we are confronted with the same appearance of constitutional forms masking a state of things which is a compound of autocracy, oppression, and corruption.”

Such a system does not possess within itself the seed of continuance.  Disraeli announced, somewhat prematurely, the advent of an age in which institutions that could not bear discussion would have to go.  Matthew Arnold yearned for a time in which the manifestly absurd would be abandoned.  In the flame of either dictum the present “government” of Ireland shrivels to ashes, and affairs are ripe for the application of both.  Here, as in the Colonies, the people must enter into its heritage.  The days are for ever dead in which a nation could be ruled in daily disregard of its history, its ideals, its definite programme.

On the minutiae of administration I do not mean to touch.  When the whole spirit, atmosphere, and ethos are anti-moral it is idle to chronicle any chance rectitude of detail.  If a man is a murderer it is not much to his credit to observe that he has triumphed over the primitive temptation to eat peas with his knife.  If a government is based on contempt for public opinion, as its fundamental principle, no useful purpose is served by a record of the occasions on which a policeman has been known to pass a citizen in the street without beating him.  But there is