not be said that they go like wind.
While they are with us they are absolute, seen by nobody, felt by all
the world, the Manchu mandarins of the West. They have been attacked on
many foolish counts; let us in justice to them and ourselves be quite
clear as to what is wrong with them. Some people say that there are too
many Boards, but it is to be remembered that for every new function with
which we endow the State it must have a new organ. Others say that they
are over-staffed; but all government departments in the world are
over-staffed. Still others say that they are stupid and corrupt. As for
corruption, it certainly does exist under many discreet veils, but its
old glory is fading. Incompetent the great officials never were. A poet
tells us that there are only two people in the world who ever understand
a man--the woman who loves him, and the enemy who hates him best. In one
of these ways, if not in the other, Dublin Castle understands Ireland.
Did it not know what the people of Ireland want, it could not so
infallibly have maintained its tradition of giving them the opposite.
Other critics again find the deadly disease of the Boards to reside in
the fact that they are a bureaucracy. This diagnosis comes closer to the
truth, but it is not yet the truth. Bureaucracies of trained experts are
becoming more and not less necessary. What is really wrong with the
Castle is that it is a bureaucracy which has usurped the throne of the
nation. "In England," declared Mr Gladstone, "when the nation attends,
it can prevail." In Ireland, though it should attend seven days in the
week, it could never under present arrangements stamp the image of its
will on public policy. The real sin of the Castle regime is that it is a
sham, a rococo, a despotism painted to look like representative
government. To quote a radiant commonplace, the rich significance of
which few of us adequately grasp, it does not rest on the consent of the
governed.

"From whatever point of view we envisage the English Government in
Ireland," writes Mr Paul-Dubois, "we are confronted with the same
appearance of constitutional forms masking a state of things which
is a compound of autocracy, oppression, and corruption."

Such a system does not possess within itself the seed of continuance.
Disraeli announced, somewhat prematurely, the advent of an age in which
institutions that could not bear discussion would have to go. Matthew
Arnold yearned