There was a 'storm in a teacup' during the General Election of December, 1910, when Lord Aberdeen aroused the wrath of the Conservatives and Unionists by telegraphing to the Liberal candidate in West Aberdeenshire expressing his own belief that the apprehension that under Home {341} Rule the Protestant minority would suffer was unfounded. A Committee of Privileges composed of members of both Houses of Parliament inquired into the matter, and reported that they found that the viceroy's action had not contravened any Standing Order or regulation. This was accepted, and nothing more was heard of the matter. Further criticism fell his way when Ireland was in the grip of a railway strike, and he was spending a holiday in Scotland. There was a clamour for the viceroy's presence in Ireland. He was already on his way thither, but though he had been successful in settling the Carriers' Strike some years previously, the present occasion did not offer an opportunity for personal mediation. [Sidenote: The place-hunters] When his term of office ends, Lord Aberdeen can look back upon several years of success in Ireland. He may not be a racing man, and Punchestown may not be a favourite haunt of his, but sterner qualities than a fondness for horse-racing are necessary to succeed as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. In the most favourable times it requires a vast amount of tact, a keen sense of humour, and a sense of proportion. Place-hunters abound and office-seekers are innumerable. Dublin Castle is regarded as the haven of hope for all younger sons without talent and briefless barristers hungering for a regular income. They are all suppliants of the Lord-Lieutenant, and several hundreds of years of ascendancy have given them a sense of right in receiving favours, and one of indignation and injustice in the case of refusal. But when all is said and done, the {342} outcry over jobbery in Ireland is absurd, for it is a fact that there is more jobbery in London in a month than in the whole of Ireland in a year. There have been some attempts to abolish the viceroyalty, but if ornamental it is also useful, because the Irish instinctively respect royalty, and a country populated by the descendants of kings could not be expected to have an instinctive respect for any form of government savouring of Republicanism, or one that left wholly to the imagination the majesty of the Sovereign ruler.