Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/81

 more unwieldy and uneconomical than the present system, or lack of system, could very well have been devised. It is a patchwork quilt of foreign ideas, that express no realities in Ireland, that are alternately the theme of the mirth and the tears, but always the derision, of Irishmen, and that even in the country of their invention have not proved to be a conspicuous success. Urban Councils, District Councils, Poor Law Guardians, Town Commissioners and County Councils all have their independent lives without being fitted in as parts of a co-related whole. Seen in contrast with the compactness and completeness of the old stateships nothing could seem more haphazard and accidental. So long as they exist, as they now do, it will be impossible to speak of an Irish State, for a State does not exist only by reason of the larger, more central forms of government, but in the degree in which those larger forms are drawn into relation with smaller and local units of government. They neither correspond to any efficiency in the State nor to any efficiency in relation to their own needs. They divide up a given area into a number of separate and even opposed units, whereas the life of that area is generally itself a unit, however variously its activities may be expressed. A small township and the country lying about it, for example, can only artificially be broken up into two units, one the town and the other the country, for their life is woven of one piece. Even the industries of the towns depend on the country lying round about. Any weakening of the whole weakens each one of its