What is really wrong with the Castle is that it is a bureaucracy which has usurped the throne of the nation.

"In England," declared Mr Gladstone, "when the nation attends, it can prevail." In Ireland, though it should attend seven days in the week, it could never under present arrangements stamp the image of its will on public policy.

The real sin of the Castle regime is that it is a sham, a rococo, a despotism painted to look like representative government.

To quote a radiant commonplace, the rich significance of which few of us adequately grasp, it does not rest on the consent of the governed.
"From whatever point of view we envisage the English Government in Ireland," writes Mr Paul-Dubois, "we are confronted with the same appearance of constitutional forms masking a state of things which is a compound of autocracy, oppression, and corruption." Such a system does not possess within itself the seed of continuance.
Disraeli announced, somewhat prematurely, the advent of an age in which institutions that could not bear discussion would have to go.

Matthew Arnold yearned for a time in which the manifestly absurd would be abandoned.