seldom turned to account. The Irish grand juries were thus oligarchic bodies, survivals of the Protestant ascendency of a bygone age, and with a tendency, in their later history, to become subordinate boards of the Castle. I pass on to the Irish poor law system, another considerable department of Irish local government. As we have seen, unlike what had been the case in England, no poor law existed in Ireland until 1838; the want of such a measure was one of the causes of the pressure of a huge mass of indigence on the soil before the catastrophe of 1845-47. The Irish poor law, with some marked distinctions, was analogous to the new English poor law, as it has long been called; it has now been in operation for about sixty years. The country was divided into a series of unions, which have varied from 130 to 163 in number; at present there are 159 of these; these were the principal units for carrying the poor law system into effect. The unions were again subdivided into lesser districts, electoral divisions for the county, wards for the larger towns; the persons chosen to administer the poor law were taken from these areas; and the unions and all that pertained to them were placed under the control of the Central Government, represented by the Local Government Board of Ireland. The persons returned from the electoral divisions and the wards were selected by the votes of the ratepayers, and were known as the elected guardians; a popular element was thus introduced into the administration of the law, which had never been introduced into Irish county government. The vote of the ratepayers, however, was cumulative, not single; the largest ratepayers had the most votes, a safeguard, it has been assumed, for property; and the elected guardians, in theory at least, were balanced by an equal number of _ex-officio_ guardians, composed of magistrates within the unions. The chief duties of the elected and the _ex-officio_ guardians, collectively known as Boards of Guardians, were to provide for the wants of the poor, and to assess and levy poor rates for that purpose; but many other duties were gradually imposed on them, the principal of these being the care of the sanitary state of the lesser towns within their districts. There was a marked difference between the incidence of the poor rate and of the county rate, or cess, of the grand juries. The county cess, we have seen, was mainly a charge on the Catholic occupiers of the soil, the poor rate was, to a very considerable extent, a charge on the owners, for the most part Protestants; for the landlord was bound to pay the whole poor rate in the case of the pettiest holdings, and to allow his tenants half the poor rate in the case of other holdings; by these means the burden of at least half the poor rate, it is believed, was borne by the Irish landed gentry. It should be added that the elected guardians have practically had the administration of the poor law in their hands; the _ex-officio_ guardians,