Central Government over these local democracies are not, I think, sufficient. It is impossible, I have remarked, to say with certainty what the end of this social revolution will be; but some of the results are, even now, apparent. There has, as yet, been little tendency in the local boards to waste, or to attempts to despoil the landed gentry; the check in this respect is of great force; but no one, I repeat, can predict what may be done under the influence of democratic sympathies, especially should the existing agitation acquire increased strength in Ireland. Some of the councils have been very fairly managed; a few others have been badly administered; as a rule, much time has been misspent in irrelevant talk; there has been a good deal of squabbling with the Local Government Board; but, on the whole, the local business of the counties and towns has been conducted as reasonably well as could be expected in the case of a new and immense experiment. But the consequences of giving raw democracies great and sudden power have already been made but too manifest, as persons, who knew Ireland, foresaw would happen. In parts of Ulster representatives of the landed gentry have been elected to the County Councils; property in these has still legitimate influence. But in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, this order of men has been all but completely shut out from these boards; the land is not represented at all; this is an absolutely unnatural position of affairs, pregnant with many ills to the community as a whole. It is not only that the landed gentry have been deprived of an influence they ought to possess, in a society in any degree well ordered; this change has a tendency to make them more and more, what they have largely been made already, a privileged class without duties, akin to the old seigneurie of France, a state of things of which Tocqueville has powerfully described the evils. In the southern provinces, too, the new democracies, composed of Catholic 'Nationalists,' by large majorities, have driven loyal, and especially Protestant, men and women from local offices they had filled with credit, and this too at a considerable charge on the rates, a clear proof how no restraints can be wholly effective. But the main feature in the conduct of the County and other Councils is that in most parts of Ireland they have followed the advice given by Parnell to their weaker forerunners; they have made themselves agencies of the United Irish League, as boards before them were agencies of the Land and the National Leagues, and they have given but too ample proof of disaffection, disloyalty, and hatred of British rule. In some counties, the councils seized the court houses, and refused light and fire to the Superior and the County Court judges. Throughout the South of Ireland most of the boards vied with each other in wild expressions of sympathy with the Boers, and of hopes that disaster would befall the British army; many gave