The assailants of popular government point to the misrule of Ireland as a proof that the Parliamentary system is radically vicious. They do not prove their point, because the calamities of Ireland afford no evidence whatever that England, which has been more prosperous for a greater length of time than any other nation in Europe, has essentially suffered from the power of the English Parliament. What these critics do prove is that a representative assembly is a bad form of government for any nation or class whom it does not represent, and they establish to demonstration that a parliamentary despotism may well be a worse government for a dependency than a royal despotism. This is so for two reasons. The rule of Parliament has meant in England government by parties; and whatever be the merits of party spirit in a free, self-governed country, its calamitous defects, when applied to the administration of a dependency, are patent. Down to 1782 Ireland was avowedly subject to the despotism or sovereignty of the British Parliament, and at every turn the interest of the country was sacrificed to the exigencies of English politics Between 1782 to 1800 the nominal independence of Ireland placed a check on the power of the English Parliament, yet in substance the English executive, controlled as it was by the Parliament at Westminster, remained the ultimate sovereign of the kingdom of Ireland. If Pitt could have carried the King and the English Parliament with him, he would, in spite of any opposition at Dublin by the adherents of Ascendancy, have emancipated the Catholics, just as, when backed by the King and the English Parliament, he did, in the face of strenuous opposition in Ireland, pass the Act of Union. And even at the present day the most plausible charge which can be brought against the working of the Act of Union is that Ireland under it fails to obtain the full benefit of the British constitution, and that in spite of her hundred representatives she is not for practical purposes represented at Westminster in the same sense as is Middlesex or Midlothian. A Parliament again is less capable than a King of compensating for the evils of tyranny by the benefit of good administration, and here we come across a matter hardly to be understood by any one who has not with some care compared the action and the spirit of English and of continental administrative systems. It is hardly an exaggeration to assert that even now we have in the United Kingdom nothing like what foreigners mean by an administration. We know nothing of that official hierarchy which on the Continent represents the authority of the State.[12] Englishmen are accustomed to consider that institutions under which the business of the country is carried on by unconnected local bodies, such as the magistrates in quarter session, or the corporations of boroughs, controlled in the last resort only by the law courts, ought to be the subject of unqualified admiration.