time to time. His spare time he divides between commending Dublin Castle
to the seven devils that made it, and praying for the advent of Home
Rule.

In either case the sovereignty of Ireland relapses into the hands of the
permanent officials, that camarilla of Olympians. To the official lives
of these gentlemen, regarded as works of art, I raise my hat in
respectful envy. They have realised the vision of Lucretius. From the
secure remoteness of their ivory towers they look down unmoved on the
stormy and drifting tides below, and they enjoy the privilege, so rare
in Ireland, of knowing the causes of things. To the ordinary man their
political origins are shrouded in twilight. They seem to him to have
come like water, but unhappily it cannot be said that they go like wind.
While they are with us they are absolute, seen by nobody, felt by all
the world, the Manchu mandarins of the West. They have been attacked on
many foolish counts; let us in justice to them and ourselves be quite
clear as to what is wrong with them. Some people say that there are too
many Boards, but it is to be remembered that for every new function with
which we endow the State it must have a new organ. Others say that they
are over-staffed; but all government departments in the world are
over-staffed. Still others say that they are stupid and corrupt. As for
corruption, it certainly does exist under many discreet veils, but its
old glory is fading. Incompetent the great officials never were. A poet
tells us that there are only two people in the world who ever understand
a man--the woman who loves him, and the enemy who hates him best. In one
of these ways, if not in the other, Dublin Castle understands Ireland.
Did it not know what the people of Ireland want, it could not so
infallibly have maintained its tradition of giving them the opposite.
Other critics again find the deadly disease of the Boards to reside in
the fact that they are a bureaucracy. This diagnosis comes closer to the