rish Local Government Bill was accordingly introduced and passed in the
following session (1898).

Of this Act, which involved not merely the creation of new popular
Authorities, but also an entire re-arrangement of local taxation, and
some important changes in the system of poor relief, I will only say
here that it must be counted as another of the great remedial measures
which Ireland owes to the Unionist Party, and which it would have been
difficult, if not impossible, to carry out in a satisfactory manner
without assistance on a generous scale from the ample resources of the
Imperial Exchequer.

IRISH DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND TECHNICAL INSTRUCTION.

The way was now open for the measure to which I had looked forward from
the first moment of my going to Ireland, and which was to constitute the
final abandonment of the old _laissez faire_ policy in connection with
Irish agriculture and industries. Great care and labour were devoted to
the framing of the new Bill, and I was in constant touch throughout with
members of the Recess Committee. It contained clauses dealing with urban
as well as rural industries, but these lie outside my present subject,
and I shall not refer to them further here. On the side of rural
development the Bill embodied a novel experiment in the art of
government--novel at all events in British or Irish experience, though
something like it had already been tried with conspicuous success in
various countries on the Continent. It was the continental example which
had inspired the Report of the Recess Committee, and it was the
recommendations of the Recess Committee which in their turn suggested
the main features of the Bill of 1899.

There was indeed one body in Ireland whose functions corresponded in
some degree with those of the Authority it was now proposed to set up.
This body was the Congested Districts Board; and it might be said with
some approximation to the truth that the object we had in view was to do
for the rest of Ireland, _mutatis mutandis_, what the Congested
Districts Board was intended to do for the poverty-stricken districts of
the West. But there was this very important difference. The operations
of the Congested Districts Board were carried out, and necessarily
carried out, on strictly "paternal" lines; the dominant note in the new
departure was to be the encouragement of self-help. This difference
carried with it an equally important difference in the constitution and