The first thing necessary for securing public and private liberty in a country like Ireland, where party feeling runs high and internal disputes have a bitterness from which more fortunate countries are free, is a strong independent and impartial administration of the law.  This can only be secured by freeing the Courts from any kind of interference or control on the part of the Executive, and by ensuring that the whole armed forces of the Executive should be at the disposal of the Courts for executing and enforcing their decrees.  Let us only assume a case to arise after the statutory period had elapsed, such as is now of frequent occurrence in the Irish Courts.  The Land Judge, for instance, or the Judge of the Court of Bankruptcy, finds it necessary to order the arrest of the chairman and secretary of a local branch of the United Irish League for interfering by gross intimidation with a sale under the order of his Court.  The case excites a good deal of local feeling and the arrests can only be effected by the employment of a large force of armed police.  The question is raised on a motion for adjournment in the Irish House of Commons.  The majority of the members owe their seats to the intervention of the United Irish League, many of them—­perhaps most—­have themselves been in similar conflicts with the Court.  The result is that Ministers have to choose between a refusal of the police and expulsion from office.  Once the Government could decide which decrees of the Judiciary it would enforce and which it would not, the technical immovability of the Judges would be irrelevant, since the real control of justice would be vested, not in the courts but in the executive Ministers in Dublin Castle.  The very existence of the limitations and safeguards foreshadowed in the coming Home Rule Bill would naturally tempt the Irish Government to adopt a policy which would reduce to a minimum the effective power of these restraints upon the popular will.  The most obvious way of attaining this result would be to keep the police, and with them the judicature, in a position of greater dependence upon the Executive than is consistent with the supremacy of law and the safety of private rights and individual freedom.

We must remember that the men who would have the control of the new Irish Government would be those who have spent the greater part of their lives in violent conflict with the attempts of the Irish Courts to secure respect for the elementary rights of property and of personal freedom in Ireland.  Power which has been won by the open violation of every principle of English law, is not likely either to assert the authority it has lived by defying to maintaining the independence of the courts and institutions which have been its deadliest opponents.  The corruption of judicial authority and prestige in Ireland will be accomplished by entrenching the Executive behind large and shadowy discretionary powers, and also by manipulating the personnel and