Home Rule | Page 9

carrying out all the local Acts. They formed, with Dublin Castle,
part of the great machinery of Protestant Ascendancy. Very few
Catholics penetrated within that sacred circle.
These gentlemen, even now for the most part Protestants, still hold the

power of justice. But the power of local government has passed from
their hands. Every county of Ireland now has its County Council.
Beneath the County Councils there are also District Councils exercising
in Ireland, as in England, the powers of Boards of Guardians. Neither
the Irish counties nor the corporations of Ireland's great cities have
power over their police. There are no Irish Parish Councils. Otherwise
Ireland now possesses powers of local government almost as complete
as those of England and Scotland.
How has this system worked? In the discussions that preceded the
establishment of local government in Ireland we heard many
prophecies of doom. So great was the fear of trusting Ireland with any
powers of self-government that the Unionists actually proposed, in
1892, a Local Government Bill, which would have established local
bodies subject to special powers of punishment and coercion.[26]
It was with much fear and trembling, then, that the Protestant Party in
Ireland entered upon the new period of local government. As a matter
of fact, all these fears have been falsified. Instead of proving inefficient
and corrupt, the Irish County Councils have gained the praises of all
parties. They have received testimonials in nearly every report of the
Irish Local Government Board. If, indeed, they possess any fault, it is
that they are too thrifty and economical.[27]
In one respect, indeed, these County and District Councils of Ireland
have conspicuously surpassed the corresponding bodies that exist in
England.
One of the most important measures passed by the British Parliament
during this period of Irish revival has been the Irish Labourers' Act. It
was one of the first measures passed by the new Liberal Parliament of
1906, and it has been since often amended and supplemented. But its
main provisions still stand. In this Act the Imperial Government grants
to the local authorities in Ireland loans at cheap rates for the purpose of
re-housing the Irish agricultural labourers. It places the whole
administration of these loans in the hands of the Irish District
Councils--a very delicate and difficult task.

So efficiently have the District Councils done their work that more than
half the Irish labourers have already been re-housed. It is fully expected
that within a few years the whole Irish agricultural labouring
population will have received under this Act good houses, accompanied
always with a plot of land at a small rent.
Compare with this the administration of the Small Holdings Act by the
English local authorities. That Act, passed in 1908, placed the actual
allocation of small holdings in the hands of the English County
Councils. It is not necessary to dwell here upon the notorious failure of
most of the high hopes with which that measure was passed through the
British Parliament. The cause of that failure is obvious. The promise of
the Small Holdings Act has been practically destroyed by the refusal of
the County Councils to throw either goodwill or efficiency into its
administration.
LAND PURCHASE
But the second of the two great renovating measures--the Irish Land
Purchase Act of 1903--has contributed even more powerfully than the
first to the recovery of Ireland during the last ten years. There again we
have a great instance of the supremacy of the spirit of Parliament over
the prejudices of Party. The whole tendency of democratic government
is so rootedly opposed to coercion that it is difficult for any party to
continue on purely coercive lines for any long period. And yet, as Mr.
Gladstone always pointed out with such prescience, the only
alternatives in Ireland were either coercion or government according to
Irish ideas.
Now, the most noted Irish idea was the desire for personal ownership of
the soil by the cultivator himself. In the years 1901 and 1902, just when
the Unionists were embarrassed with all the complications of the South
African trouble, the Tory Government were faced again with this
imperious desire. They found arising in Ireland a new revolt against the
power of the landlords. The Land Courts of Ireland, set up under the
Act of 1881, had given to the Irish tenant two revisions of rent--the first
in 1882, and the second in 1896--amounting in all to nearly 40 per cent.
But these sweeping reductions had produced a new trouble. They had

brought about a state of acute hostility between landlord and tenant
without any real control of the land by either. The landlords, deprived
of their powers of eviction and rent-raising, were in a state of sullen
fury. The tenants had made the fatal discovery that their best interest
lay in