trial workers, where agricultural advisers in their turn would be
out of place. Control so exercised over the policy of State institutions
would vitalize them, and tend to make them enter more intimately into
the department of national effort they were created to foster. The
stagnation which falls on most Government departments is due to this,
that the responsible heads rarely have a knowledge great enough to
enable them to inaugurate new methods, that parliamentary control is
never adequate, is rarely exercised with knowledge, and there is always
a party in power to defend the policy of their Minister, for if one
Minister is successfully attacked a whole party goes out of power. We,
in Ireland, should desire above all things efficiency in our public
servants. They will stagnate in their offices unless they are
continually stimulated by intimate connection with the class they work
for and who have a power of control. This system would also, I believe,
lead to less jobbery. Men in an assembly, where theoretically every
class and interest are represented, often conspire to make bad
appointments, because only a minority have knowledge of what
qualifications the official ought to have, and they are outvoted by
representatives who do their friends such good turns often in sheer
ignorance that they are betraying their constituents. Where specialists
have power, and where the well-being of their own industry is concerned,
they never willingly appoint the inefficient. Such an organization
of our County Council system would operate also to break up sectarian
cliques. The feeling of organized classes, farmers, or industrialists,
concerned about their own well-being, would oppose itself to sectarian
sentiment where its application was unfitting.

In the system of representative government I have outlined, we would
have one supreme or national assembly concerned with general interests,
justice, taxation, education, the apportioning of revenue to its
various uses, reserving to itself direct control over the policy of
the departments of treasury, police, judiciary, all that affects the
citizens equally; and, beneath it, other councils, representative of
classes and special interests, controlling the policy and administration
of the State departments concerned with their work. Where everybody
was concerned everybody would have that measure of control which a vote
confers; where particular interests were concerned these interests would