the case. The multiplication of irresponsible boards must be stopped,
and to what extent anything, save economies in expenditure, can be
effected without far larger changes remains a moot point. Of one thing,
at any rate, one may be certain--the present Liberal Government when in
Opposition joined forces with the Irish members in driving home the
tremendous admissions of the Royal Commissioners, and it is impossible
to think that, now they are in power, they will repudiate their
obligations, the more so as the present Chancellor of the Exchequer last
year announced the intention of the Government to see how far it is
possible to adjust the financial relations between the two kingdoms on a
fairer basis.

Sir Hercules Langrishe, the friend and correspondent of Edmund Burke, is
said to have accounted for the swampy condition of the Phoenix Park by
saying--"The English Government are too much engaged in _draining_ the
rest of the kingdom to find time to attend to it."

Enough has been said to show that the process of which Sir Hercules
spoke is still going on. One would have thought that counsels of
prudence would have made an end of it. It remains to be seen whether the
uncontestable facts to which they themselves have subscribed will
prevail with the Government. "The liberality, the justice, the honour of
the people of England" are concerned in it now, as truly as when Pitt
spoke. Moreover, it is one of the instances in which the claims of
justice and of expediency coincide. The findings of the Financial
Relations' Commission fully justified the attitude of the Irish Party to
the proposal, under Mr. Gladstone's Bill, that the Irish contribution to
the Imperial Treasury should be one-fourteenth of that of Great Britain,
while Mr. Parnell declared that it ought to have been one-twentieth.
The population, since the publication of the Report of the Commission,