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III.-LOCAL ADMINISTRATION.

One great reform, however, has been forced on the Castle, and by a Unionist Ministry, the Local Government Act of 1898. The effect of this Act has been to introduce the representative principle into local administration and to overthrow the old oligarchy.

Up till then local administration in Ireland,2 as indeed in England till 1888, had been essentially aristocratic. Each of the 32 Irish counties had a Grand Jury, nominated by the Sheriff, or in other words by the Castle, from amongst the landlords of the county, Peers alone being excluded. This body, under the direction of the Judge of Assize, struck the rates, and raised the revenue requisite for local services. They met once a year at the county town; and the novels of Miss Edgeworth, now almost forgotten, give us a vivid picture not only of misdeeds and malversations on the part of these strange administrators, but also of their pomp and circumstance. The town was brilliantly decorated for the Judge's visit, and he sat at a sumptuous dinner with the Grand Jury, while, without, the condemned prisoners were being handed over to the executioner and hanged. This corruption and luxury gradually disappeared in the nineteenth century, and the Grand Juries were brought into close dependence upon the Castle. In 1836 provision was further made that all proposed expenditure must first be approved by a Presentment Sessions, a certain number of whose members were elective; but the change was insignificant, and local administration remained almost exclusively in the hands of the landlords. The state of things was much the same as regards the relief of the

161 and 62 Vic., c. 37 (August 12th, 1898). Cf. Annual Reports of the Local Government Board. O'Connor Morris, Present Irish Questions, 1901, p. 309.

2 Cf. J. Flack, Le Gouvernement local de l'Irlande, Paris, 1889. De Beaumont, op. cit. I., 272. There were, however, certain differences between the two countries, especially with regard to the function of the Grand Jury.

poor, and the medical and sanitary services. These functions were exercised in each of the 163 Poor Law Unions by a Board of Guardians, consisting in part of ex-officio members (Justices of the Peace), and in part of representatives elected by public vote on a restricted franchise. As for the towns and boroughs the "Gentry " continued to control them for a good part of the nineteenth century, and their administration was so prolific in abuses that only a very few cities were granted even a restricted franchise. It has only to be added that politics had already struck root here and there in Urban Councils and in Boards of Guardians. The growth has thriven, and these bodies are to-day centres of violent anti-English demonstrations.

A very real revolution was effected in this superannuated system by the Act of 1898. The Grand Juries cease to exist as administrative bodies.3 Local administration passes into the hands of elected Councils, and its area is divided between 33 County Councils (to which must be added the Councils of the six great cities,4 reconstructed on the same model) and 302 Urban and Rural District Councils. All the Councils are elected on a wide franchise, which includes women.5 The Castle, functioning through the Local Government Board, exercises a general supervision over their work. It is the exit of the Garrison, and the entrance of the people. Everywhere, except in Ulster, the Nationalist vote secures possession of the great majority of the seats, leaving only a small minority to the landlords. With the control of seats there passes as a corollary the control of the patronage for positions, such as those of clerk, workhouse master, rate collector,

3 The Grand Jury retains only its judicial function, which was the only power it ever possessed in England.

4 The six County Boroughs are Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Derry, Limerick and Waterford.

5 Clergymen are ineligible. The County Councils have power to send delegates to the General Council of County Councils, a body which, although it possesses little legal power, is in its very institution a sort of landmark on the way to national autonomy. The Separatists desire to make it into a Ñational Parliament, and to withdraw from the Westminster Parliament.

dispensary doctor, and the like, which were formerly retained in the hands of the Garrison, and from which, even at present, Catholics are rigorously excluded in many parts of Ulster. The democracy becomes practically supreme in local affairs, under the supervision of a central Board.

Now, what has been the record of the Irish democracy? Admittedly the Act was a delicate experiment which imposed a very severe task on a people, deprived by British policy of any earlier training in political responsibility. The Cassandras of reaction prophesied all kinds of disaster. Nothing would come of these popular bodies, they said, but corruption, wastefulness, and the exploitation of minorities. These gloomy vaticinations have been belied by the facts, and in a very striking way; for the success of the new order is conceded, with certain reserves, even by hostile Unionist opinion and by the Local Government Board in its annual Reports. There have, of course, been many blunders due to inexperience. The local councils delight in political resolutions, and anti-English demonstrations. Their meetings are often noisy, and in the villages the councillors are not always entirely sober. But whether peasants or artisans, they have a very keen sense of the line that divides excitement from business, and although hampered by an excessive complexity of rules and regulations, they have shown themselves better administrators than the landlords. Being themselves for the most part poor they understand the value of money, and have been more economical than their predecessors.

"Nowhere in Great Britain," wrote a Unionist lately, "have I seen local bodies taking more real interest in their work." 6 The danger of the future is, beyond

6 Irish Times, November 18th, 1902. It is not a rare thing to find newly-created elective bodies at first very economical and afterwards very extravagant. E.g. the Algerian delegations. Certain cities, like Limerick, Dublin, etc., are proverbial for bad management. Their Corporation meetings are notorious for turbulence and empty political demonstrations.

doubt, favouritism and jobbery. Even at present there is a tendency to "corner" offices and even contracts for the members of this or that political league; the custom of combinazione is widely diffused; everybody is on the scent for places for his friends and relatives; and the reign of rings and bosses seems to be opening.7 A strong central authority is needed to keep these tendencies in check. Unhappily the Local Government Board is not strong but merely bureaucratic, arbitrary, narrowminded and anti-national. It is guilty of all the abuses of authority, and is filled with a passion for directing and complicating everything. Money being nothing to it, it arranges its plans on the same large and stately scale as in England, and forces the councils to extravagant expenditure which the poverty of the country does not justify. In fact, its despotic and irresponsible arrogance makes its rule as intolerable to the Unionists of Ulster as to the Nationalists of the South.8

The struggle between this foreign power and the elected councils, between centralised authority and popular representation, must end fatally for the one or the other. Either term of the antithesis must be suppressed or subsumed under the other. In other words, England will find herself compelled either to take back from the Irish what she has already given them, namely, a certain control over local affairs, or to concede what she has for a century refused, namely, some part in the management of their national affairs. Therein lies the political significance of the establishment of Local Government in Ireland. The experiment must needs be fruitful in results. It gives Ireland one reason and one argument the more on which to found her demand for autonomy; for an actual experience of government has developed her public spirit and her practical sense, and has trained

7 The gloomy pictures (somewhat too gloomy indeed) of municipal corruption painted by Edward Martyn in A Tale of a Town (1902), and by George Moore in The Bending of the Bough, refer back to the period before 1898.

8 Cf. Hansard, May 24th, 1900, and August 9th, 1901.

up a corps of administrators. For, as has been well said, the local councils are the primary schools of freedom. Local Government has given Ireland at the same time a new weapon for the enforcement of her claims, a point of support and a lever with which to operate against the Castle, and a permanent organization which may one day, perhaps, render political "leagues "superfluous. It has, in short, increased tenfold the political power of Ireland, and dislodged England from one of her most formidable positions in the Sister Island.

IV. THE POLICE.

England meantime retains a firm hold of one instrument of government, which is, perhaps, the most necessary to her of all, the police. It is very doubtful whether the Constabulary in question ought to be called a police force at all. It consists of 12,000 men, or rather of 12,000 soldiers, armed with carbines and bayonets, and disposed through the country in a thousand or fifteen hundred fortified posts. These "police stations" are regular blockhouses, situated in strong strategic positions, and defended by iron doors and shutters. The picture contrasts strangely with that popular institution of Great Britain, the corpulent and legendary "bobby," with his paternal airs and his readiness to oblige, and a truncheon for sole symbol of authority! The Constabulary in Ireland is a military force, an army of occupation encamped in a conquered country. It is a supplementary corps of the regular army which is stationed in Ireland as a main guarantee of the security of British rule.

The Irish police force differs from the English in being an imperial service. It is controlled by the Castle, and maintained out of the Imperial Treasury; but the annual

I Cf. Comte de Franqueville, Le Système Judiciaire de la Grande Bretagne, Paris, 1893. Ħansard, May 4th, 1901; March 1st and 14th, 1902; and July 10th, 1902.

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