new Parliament when the mind of the country upon Irish administration
has been fully ascertained."[2]

The reflections suggested by this account of the evolution of a measure
of party policy cannot be edifying to an Englishman or calculated to
appeal as wise statesmanship to an Irishman. For what were the facts? A
policy denounced as dangerous in the extreme in 1886 by the leader of
the party was propounded as part of the policy of the same party in the
following year with the acquiescence and, one must suppose, the
imprimatur of its chief. Two years later pledges were thrown to the
winds, and the excluded minister was provoked to criticism by the
dropping of that line of action, of which he himself four years later is
found in a private letter to be advising the abandonment on the most
frankly avowed grounds of pure partisan tactics.

Twelve years were allowed to elapse before the promises made by Unionist
leaders in the campaign of 1886 were fulfilled by the Local Government
Act of 1898, which, for the first time in the history of Ireland,
established by law democratic bodies in the country. One feels inclined
to quote, in reference to the history of this question, that phrase of
the largest master of civil wisdom in our tongue, as some one has called
Edmund Burke, "that there is a way of so withholding as to excite
desire, and of so giving as to excite contempt."

Under the provisions of the Act, County Councils, Urban District
Councils, and Rural Councils were set up, and some notion of the
revolution which it effected may be gathered from the fact that in a
country which had hitherto been governed by the Grand Jury in local
affairs the new Act at a sweep established a Nationalist authority in
twenty-seven out of thirty-two counties.