Britain and Ireland effected, were strongly in
favour of the proposal, and its rejection on so many occasions has been
doubtless due to the fact that to mix and confound the administration of
Ireland with that of Great Britain would necessitate the abandonment of
the extreme centralisation of Irish Government, and those who were most
anxious, as the phrase went, to make Cork like York were the very people
who were most opposed to any abdication of Executive powers which an
assimilation of methods of government would have inevitably brought in
its train.

The government of Ireland is effected by more than forty boards--the
forty thieves the late Mr. Davitt used to call them--and it will be for
the reader, after he has studied the account which I propose to give of
them, to say whether or not they deserve the name.

It is nearly twenty years since Mr. Chamberlain, in a celebrated speech
at Islington, made the following remarkable declaration:--"I say the
time has come to reform altogether the absurd and irritating anachronism
which is known as Dublin Castle, to sweep away altogether the alien
boards of foreign officials and to substitute for them a genuine Irish
administration for purely Irish business." Change of opinions, no one
can refuse to admit, in a statesman any more than in other men, and as
regards the latter part of the extract which I have quoted Mr.
Chamberlain may have changed his views, but it is to the earlier part of
the sentence that I would refer. There is in it a definite statement of
facts which no change in opinion on the part of the speaker could alter,
and which express, as well as they can be expressed, the views of the
Nationalists as to the Castle, the alien boards of foreign officials in
which remained undisturbed during the course of the seven years after
the coalition of Unionists and Tories, in which Mr. Chamberlain was the
most powerful Minister of the Crown.

Of the purely domestic branches of the Civil Service in Great Britain,
the Treasury, the Home Office, the Boards of Education, of Trade, and of
Agriculture, the Post Office, the Local Government Board, and the Office
of Works, are all responsible to the public directly, through
representative Ministers with seats in the House of Commons, the
liability of whom to be examined by private members as to minutiae of
their departmental policy is one of the most valuable checks against
official incompetence or scandals, and is the only prot