Page:Home rule through federal devolution.djvu/20

 Irish Administration—but that the frequent changes of personnel in the principal offices of the State render impossible the mutual knowledge of one another between rulers and ruled, so especially desirable in Ireland, where traces of the old patriarchial clan system still influence popular feeling. In the last fifty years we have had thirteen Viceroys, of whom Earl Spencer held the position for about nine years, the Earl of Aberdeen ten years, and Earl Cadogan seven years; leaving for the other ten an average tenure of two and a half years. Of Chief Secretaries, in the same period, there have been twenty, of whom Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Mr. Gerald Balfour and Mr. George Wyndham were in office for five years each, and Mr. Birrell for nine years, the remaining sixteen averaging about a year-and-a-half. Of Under-Secretaries there have been eleven.

The remedy for this state of things which suggests itself to every one is the adoption for Ireland of some form of self-government; but no plan has yet been devised which is capable of being carried out without causing at least as much evil as it might conceivably cure. The Act which has been "on the Statute book" since 1914, is admittedly unworkable; so much so that Government is understood to be pledged to pass an amending act before putting it in force. If brought into operation as it stands it must plunge us into confusion, with a probable result of insolvency, and perhaps of civil war. The exemption of the six Protestant counties of Ulster has been demanded, and is vehemently advocated—with unanswerable logic—by the Spectator; but it could not work. The instinct of the whole nation is against it; no one believes in it—not even the partitionists themselves. A similar suggestion during the Revolution in France aggravated the Terror, and was extinguished in blood, to the cry of "La République une et indivisible."

All attempts hitherto made to constitute a separate Government for Ireland have, in the writer's judgment, been based on a radically unsound principle. Instead of