No student of the recent action of parliaments is at all likely to be weighed to the earth by his overpowering admiration for them as effective instruments for the will of peoples. They are, it is true, the displacement of one kind of arbitrary power by another kind of arbitrary power. They are, in the form in which we best know them, the substitution of a king and his chosen advisers by a government and an assembly of popular representatives to which it is responsible. Accepting that substitution as the central authority by which a State may be created, is it possible to carry into the change the spirit of the old State? The answer to that question is that the spirit of the old State not only may be so conveyed, but that it actually corrects, in great measure, the modern weakness of parliaments, by bringing them into closer relation with the differing and special interests of the Nation. The translation of the old State, that now lives in the intuitions and expectations of the Nation, into the modern conditions that are now part of the Nation’s surface-thinking, corrects the weakness of modern ideas while providing just the kind of centralisation that the old State lacked. The essential part of the working of the old State was clearly the convocation of its great councils. While these met at regular periods the State continued its central function, and existed as a whole. When they were discontinued, as they sometimes were, the State fell into disarray, and existed only in its parts. Now in modern times, as it so happens, Irishmen meeting in their own concerns and acting at their own initiative created just such another council. The work of the Recess Committee resulted in the formation of the Department of Agriculture, the working of which was intended to lie at the instance and in the power of a Council of Farmers elected through the country to manage their own concerns. Perhaps no better instance could be given of the tragic futility of trying to work the conceptions of one Polity through the conditions of its alien rival. For the President of the Council became Minister of an alien bureaucratic government. He took his orders from that government, even though every farmer in Ireland was outraged by the effect of those orders. He took his salary from that government, and existed at the will of that government, with the result that the Council that was supposed to express and control the interest of farming in Ireland was itself controlled by the interests of farmers in somebody else’s country, and so was brought to a nullity. Moreover, while the farmers met in council to study their exclusive interests their President openly expressed his intention to study the interests of traders, even when the two interests were opposed to one another; and as the Council of Farmers had no means of enforcing its will, and no court to which to appeal, it fell into decay, and by neglect came in the end to be largely an echo of its President’s will.