ection of Indian feeling averse from European rule, the
present administrative system will be paralyzed, as the preliminary to
being revolutionized. It is conceivable, if any one chooses to think so,
that a body of impartial officials could manage the national business in
Ireland much better without the guidance of public opinion and common
sentiment than with it. But if you intend to govern the country as you
think best--and that is the plain and practical English of centralized
administration--why ask the country to send a hundred men to the great
tribunal of supervision to inform you how it would like to be governed?
The Executive cannot set them aside as if they were a hundred dummies;
in refusing to be guided, it cannot escape being harassed, by them. You
may amend procedure, but that is no answer, unless you amend the Irish
members out of voice and vote. They will still count. You cannot gag and
muzzle them effectually, and if you could, they would still be there,
and their presence would still make itself incessantly felt. Partly from
a natural desire to lessen the common difficulties of government, and
partly from a consciousness, due to the prevailing state of the modern
political atmosphere, that there is something wrong in this total
alienation of an Executive from the possessors of parliamentary power,
the officials will incessantly be tempted to make tacks out of their own
course; and thus they lose the coherency and continuity of absolutism
without gaining the pliant strength of popular government. This is not a
presumption of what would be likely to happen, but an account of what
does happen, and what justified Mr. Disraeli in adding a weak Executive
to the alien Church and the absentee aristocracy, as the three great
curses of Ireland. Nothing has occurred since 1844 to render the
Executive stronger, but much to the contrary. There is, and there can
be, no weaker or less effective Government in the world than a highly
centralized system working alongside of a bitterly inimical popular
representation. I say nothing of the effect of the fluctuations of
English parties on Irish administration. I say nothing of the tendency
in an Irish government, awkwardly alternating with that to which I have
just adverted, to look over the heads of the people of Ireland, and to
consider mainly what will be thought by the ignorant public in England.
But these sources of incessant perturbation must not be left out. The
fault