ignorant and excitable assembly
stimulated by an irresponsible and inexperienced executive. The result
would be recriminations and friction which must deplorably injure and
lower the reputation and prestige of both the Executive and the
Judiciary.

The first thing necessary for securing public and private liberty in a
country like Ireland, where party feeling runs high and internal
disputes have a bitterness from which more fortunate countries are free,
is a strong independent and impartial administration of the law. This
can only be secured by freeing the Courts from any kind of interference
or control on the part of the Executive, and by ensuring that the whole
armed forces of the Executive should be at the disposal of the Courts
for executing and enforcing their decrees. Let us only assume a case to
arise after the statutory period had elapsed, such as is now of frequent
occurrence in the Irish Courts. The Land Judge, for instance, or the
Judge of the Court of Bankruptcy, finds it necessary to order the arrest
of the chairman and secretary of a local branch of the United Irish
League for interfering by gross intimidation with a sale under the order
of his Court. The case excites a good deal of local feeling and the
arrests can only be effected by the employment of a large force of armed
police. The question is raised on a motion for adjournment in the Irish
House of Commons. The majority of the members owe their seats to the
intervention of the United Irish League, many of them--perhaps
most--have themselves been in similar conflicts with the Court. The
result is that Ministers have to choose between a refusal of the police
and expulsion from office. Once the Government could decide which
decrees of the Judiciary it would enforce and which it would not, the
technical immovability of the Judges would be irrelevant, since the real
control of justice would be vested, not in the courts but in the
executive Ministers in Dublin Castle. The very existence of the
limitations and safeguards foreshadowed in the coming Home Rule Bill
would naturally tempt the Irish Government to adopt a policy which would
reduce to a minimum the effective power of these restraints upon the
popular will. The most obvious way of attaining this result would be to
keep the police, and with them the judicature, in a position of greater
dependence upon the Executive than is consistent with the supremacy of
law and the safety of private rights and in