A cynical Irish Secretary once asked whether the Irish people blamed the
Government for the weather; but it must be conceded that the mode of
government made the Irish people more dependent than otherwise they
would have been on climatic conditions, for this reason, that the margin
between their means and a starvation wage was extremely small, and thus
it was that in the middle of the century an act of God brought
sufferings in its train, the results of which have not yet been effaced.
Through it all the country was governed not in the interests of the
majority, but according to the fiat of a small minority kept in power by
armed force, not by the use of the common law, but of a specially
enacted coercive code applicable to the whole or any part of the country
at the mere caprice of the chief of the Executive. The record, it must
be admitted, is not edifying. Irish history, one may well say, is not of
such a nature as to put one "on the side of the angels." Lecky's
"History of the Eighteenth Century" has made many converts to Home Rule,
and I venture to think that when another Lecky comes to write of the
history of the nineteenth century the converts which he will make will
be even more numerous.

Among the anomalies of Irish government there is none greater than that
of the Executive, the head of which is the Viceroy. The position of
this official is very different from that of the governor of a
self-governing colony. If the Viceroy is in the Cabinet his Chief
Secretary is not; but the more common practice of recent years has been
for the Chief Secretary to have a seat in the Cabinet to the exclusion
of the Lord Lieutenant. Whether the latter be in the Cabinet or not he
has no ministers as has a colonial governor, to whose advice he must
listen because they possess the confidence of a representative body, and
moreover, although the Lord Lieutenant is a Minister of the Crown, his
salary is charged on the Consolidated Fund, with the result that his