If Ireland does not govern herself it is quite certain that the British Parliament does not govern her.

Changing the venue of inquiry from London to Dublin we find ourselves still in regions of the fantastic.

From the sober and unemotional pages of "Whitaker's Almanack" one learns, to begin with, that "the government of Ireland is semi-independent." The separatism of geography has in this case triumphed.

The _de facto_ rulers of Ireland in ordinary slack times, and in the daily round of business, are the heads of the great Departments.

Some of these are not even nominally responsible to Parliament.