Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/72

 just that central authority that it needed. However that be, parliaments, or assemblies of popular representatives, have become an essential part of the modern mind, as providers and correctives of a central government. They have proved to be corrupt servers of special interests; but that is because they have been too much trusted without supplementing them with councils each representing its own interest, as the monarch in the Irish State supplemented his executive authority with councils each having power, subject to the national unity of administration, over its special concerns.

No student of the recent action of parliaments is at all likely to be weighed to the earth by his overpowering admiration for them as effective instruments for the will of peoples. They are, it is true, the displacement of one kind of arbitrary power by another kind of arbitrary power. They are, in the form in which we best know them, the substitution of a king and his chosen advisers by a government and an assembly of popular representatives to which it is responsible. Accepting that substitution as the central authority by which a State may be created, is it possible to carry into the change the spirit of the old State? The answer to that question is that the spirit of the old State not only may be so conveyed, but that it actually corrects, in great measure, the modern weakness of parliaments, by bringing them into closer relation with the differing and special interests of the Nation. The translation of the old State, that now lives in the intuitions and expectations of the Nation, into