Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/74

 nullity. Moreover, while the farmers met in council to study their exclusive interests their President openly expressed his intention to study the interests of traders, even when the two interests were opposed to one another; and as the Council of Farmers had no means of enforcing its will, and no court to which, to appeal, it fell into decay, and by neglect came in the end to be largely an echo of its President's will.

Yet, though the Department of Agriculture is an eloquent example of how things ought not to be done, it does in fact contain a striking idea, evolved by. consultation of Irishmen on Irish soil, that carries the conception of the old Irish State. If an Irish Assembly, or Parliament, were surrounded by a number of such councils, representing each of the special interests or concerns of the Nation, the elder State would be translated into modern conditions and transfigure those conditions by drawing the arbitrary and purely theoretical business of parliaments into a definite relation to the life of a nation. Instead of the monarch and his court would appear a government and the representative assembly from which it is drawn and to which it is responsible. Instead of three or four special councils representing the comparatively simple texture of the life in the first millenium would appear a number of such special councils representing the proportionately greater complexity of the life of to-day. And just as in the old State each council held authority in its own concerns leaving to the monarch the co-ordination of the whole, so the