Alfred Austin was writing about his beloved leader, not ours, when he reported, at the turn of another century: Across the wires the electric message came - "He is no better, he is much the same"
But he might well have had Bertie Ahern, Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney in mind. We find them as we left them before Christmas - sadly, no better, they are much the same.
Indeed, when officials get around to releasing the State papers for January 2000, I suspect they'll be found under a single heading: Crises Continued.
And anyone who asks "Which crisis?" will be shown a very thick file: Unfinished Business - Housing; Health; Transport; Immigration; Poverty, urban and rural; Environment and Social Affairs.
Imagine some modern Myles na Gopaleen (a pillar of the Civil Service before he became a columnist in The Irish Times) as he dots the i's and crosses the t's of his new year's summary:
"Budget a mess. Social partners angry. Public confused. Shannon, as yet undrained, in flood again. Bad news from tribunals; worse feared. Hopes of technology reducing divisions exaggerated. Opposite may be the case."
Quare times. Quare times, indeed, when, in the teeth of a gathering storm, the best the Government can do is to send out Noel Dempsey to run up the flag of electoral reform. What's really wrong with politics, says Noel, is that TDs spend too much time competing with colleagues for votes by doing favours for the public. Not big favours, like appointing them to State boards or finding inside tracks. The kind of clientelism that Noel and the lads object to might help a family find a council house; what helps the builder make a fat profit is something else.
Contractors and financiers prove their patriotism by their contributions to party funds. They don't ask for anything; they don't have to. And to call their dealings clientelism would be, well, crude.
It's like incentives in a way. You incentivise the poor by making it more difficult for them to survive on the dole; the incentives for the rich are to be found in bigger benefits all round.
When the Government wants to help the rich, it's as easy as sticking a line in a finance bill. When it's asked to deal with a social issue, there are complications. For example: house prices go on rising; the numbers of homeless increase; and the McCreevys, Aherns and Harneys would only love to do something about it.
But they're caught between a rock and a hard place. Between the constitutional right to profit from others' need for shelter and obedience to market forces. Somehow, the market forces always win out.
The market also increasingly dictates the way in which health services are organised and operated. That's because here, as in other areas, we move daily closer to the American model in which politicians start by talking about value for money and end with a set-up in which money is all that counts.
In the case of electoral reform, Dempsey and his supporters claim the challenges they propose will make for more efficiency and stability without reducing the choice for the electorate or the chances of the smaller parties.
But to reduce the number of deputies from 166 to 100 would not make the system more efficient; it would merely play into the hands of those who want fewer - and weaker - politicians than we have now.
And those who want weaker politicians are, by and large, the very people who sigh at the mention of tribunals, though tribunals are set up precisely because governments take advantage of the weakness of the Dail.
A parade of scandals has shown that the problems start when ministers feel they don't have to account for themselves and increase when they confuse the public interest with the interests of business friends and contributors to party funds.
One of the ways of putting a stop to this is by increasing the power of the Dail, which can be done by greater use of committees, following the lead given by the Public Accounts Committee which investigated the DIRT scandal.
Another is by moving more rapidly to the point at which parties won't need financial contributions and anyone found in breach of funding laws is severely penalised. The case is made that there are greater demands on TDs and senators than there were in the 1950s and 1960s. This is so: activity is increasing on the European, Northern and Anglo-Irish fronts. If we wanted to show that we were serious about poverty and exclusion at home or providing help to developing countries, we would have separate committees covering these issues. Committees which ensured they were not forgotten when broader issues were being discussed. But the search for stability is a threadbare excuse for wanting to change the electoral system; so threadbare that the electorate saw through it when it was first used 40 years ago.
The electorate turned it down when it was tried again in a slightly different context seven years later. As for the list system, it's no help at all to stability. It certainly hasn't worked wonders for Italy, which, at the last count, was between its 56th and 57th government since the war. PR in multi-seat constituencies has served us well and can be improved. But, if anything, we need more, not fewer, politicians, and a tougher, more powerful parliamentary system.
We need experienced, active, questioning TDs and senators not just to represent an increasing and more diverse population in the old populist sense, but to regulate affairs on behalf of the community as a whole. The Aherns, McCreevys and Harneys, with their associates in industry and finance, and cheerleaders in the media, are intent on making this what they would call a more businesslike place. As far as they're concerned, work-creation is essential to growth and inequality is an inevitable feature of work-creation; redistribution - or any talk of it - is at best a distraction from wealth-creation and at worst its enemy. There is another assumption, to which some FF leaders subscribe - obliquely - and their cheerleaders express more openly, sometimes with a show of bravado.
This is the idea that, on the road to growth, shortcuts may have to be taken; and if that means breaking the law or profiting from an insider track, what of it? (Neither Ahern nor McCreevy saw much wrong with the evasion of DIRT).
And if the rules are broken with style, as they were by Charles Haughey, what's a forelock-touching hack to do but cheer at the old scrounger's neck?
The Germans, Israelis and Italians are anxious to rid themselves of the legacies of shamed leaders and corrupt practices. Here, there's a growing campaign to rehabilitate someone who hasn't even the dignity to acknowledge his guilt.