industries, its operation has been limited to the poorest parts of Connaught and Munster. There is no reason why the spread of industrial activity should thus be confined. The methods of organization we have been describing, admirably as they have succeeded so far, can hardly be applied on a large scale. The funds of a purely voluntary society like the Industries Association are necessarily limited, and the resources of the Congested Districts Board have already been found altogether inadequate to its multifarious duties, of which that of aiding struggling industries is but a small part. If industries are to be established in rural Ireland, an effective system of industrial education is essential. As yet none exists. That it should be so is a somewhat melancholy and disappointing outcome of the time, the thought, and the public money which have been lavished on education in Ireland. But unluckily the money has for the most part been devoted to a system which has ignored or neglected the primary wants of the children entrusted to its training.

Excellently adapted as is the system of the National Board Schools for imparting the literary education at which it almost exclusively aims, it has only given Ireland clerks where she wanted artisans, and supplied her with village politicians when she needed skilful tillers of the field. The National Schools turn out every year material enough to fill capably every vacant desk in the mercantile offices of the Three Kingdoms and the lower grades of the Civil Service; they scarcely produce manual skill enough to provide the labour for a single factory. The children are taught everything but the use of their hands, and the result is what might naturally be expected. Children who know nothing of industries cannot succeed in industrial life. Nor is it their ambition so to succeed. The purely literary education they receive imbues them in many cases with disdain for the work of the hands; and the consequences are disastrous, for there is not room in Ireland for the book-learning of the National Board pupils. Attempts have been made by the Board to remedy this state of things, but with very moderate success. It has not yet been proved that its agricultural schools are of much real value in teaching practical agriculture, while its efforts in other directions have not been more successful. Handicrafts for boys,' according to the testimony of the Board itself in its latest report, 'have not been taken up to any material extent throughout the country as a branch of school work'; a result which is not surprising, when the teacher is obliged to provide at his own risk the raw materials for technical instruction. Such effective help as the Board

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lends to industrial or technical education is vicarious, taking the form of grants in aid of qualified industrial teachers for convent schools. The business of industrial education has never been seriously taken up by the Board, and has been a mere adjunct to the literary education so efficiently imparted. The failure of the Board system has only been partly compensated by the remarkable success which has attended industrial teaching by institutions from which less was to be expected. It is to the Industrial Schools for her street Arabs and waifs, and to the Reformatories for her juvenile criminals, that Ireland mainly owes whatever measure of technical education she possesses; and there is surely something wrong in an educational system under which it is only from criminals and paupers that the industrial classes can be recruited.

That the prosperity of the labouring classes, not only in the poorer districts of the West, but throughout the country, could be materially improved by an efficient system of education in handicrafts and home industries, cannot be questioned. The success which has attended the Industries Association, the Congested Districts Board, the Industrial Schools, and several of the Convent and Christian Brothers Schools, sufficiently attests the fact. Nor is there any reason why the like success should not attend like efforts on a larger scale. We cannot too emphatically assert our belief that, until the importance of industrial education is recognised by the State as equal to that of purely literary instruction, the best efforts to foster Irish industries must often end in failure and disappointment.

But it is in the great industry of agriculture that the need of education and organization is most felt. It would be travelling too far afield to discuss the possible remedies for the longprevailing depression under which in Ireland, as in Great Britain, that great industry has so long suffered. Irish interests are in this respect bound up with those of England, and she must look for improvement in her economic conditions to processes that, under the existing commercial policy of the country, even the most paternal Government can do little to influence. The recognition of this truth forms the basis and animating motive of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, a body mainly composed of the farming classes, which has in a comparatively brief period succeeded in doing what in Ireland has often been of all things most difficult. It has united for a common object men of opposite creeds and politics, and embraced within its ranks representatives of every grade of the agricultural community. We have spoken of the spread of a spirit of helpfulness as well as of hopefulness

in Ireland; and the statement is surely justified by this fact among others, that a society, starting with the proposition that the Irish farmer must work out his own salvation, and with the declared object of teaching him that by his own intelligence, energy, and will he can do for himself what neither Government nor any outside power can do for him,' has taken firm root in the South of Ireland. The chief instrument by which this organization seeks to improve the condition of Irish agriculture is by the promotion of the principles and methods of co-operation as applied to farming industries. The co-operative system has, in more than one European country, produced astonishing results; and has, for instance, enabled Denmark to outstrip Ireland in the production of the very commodities in respect of which the latter once held an unquestioned supremacy in the English markets. It is claimed by the President of the Society, Mr. Horace Plunkett, M.P., that its members have benefited largely by its action, and the organization is daily growing in power. Whether it will be strong enough to resist adverse influences-its efforts to eliminate the profit of the middleman has provoked some hostility from the small traders in country towns-it is perhaps premature to predict. But as it has obtained the active help of Members of Parliament of opposite views, it may be hoped that the Society will not be killed, like too many other movements, by the frost of politics, and that it may even ripen, as its founders desire, into a permanent Chamber of Agriculture, representative of the whole country.

But while it is thus happily apparent that Irish agriculturists are able and willing to help themselves, it is not on that account the less, but the more, incumbent on Ministers to offer to a depressed industry whatever aid they may prudently afford. And there is one demand which is being put forward with a unanimity so general as to deserve sympathetic consideration. That an agricultural country should have a separate Board of Agriculture is not an unreasonable claim; and although it would be foolish to suppose-recent experience in England has provided a lesson to the contrary—that the establishment of a department will cure any of the more deeply-rooted causes of depression, such difficulties as are traceable to the defects of the administrative machine ought surely to be removed. In Ireland, where, even more than in England, the advice, guidance, and authority of a strongly constituted central body are needed, the supervision of agriculture is divided among a number of public departments of varying powers and sometimes conflicting interests. Without asserting that the separate functions exercised by the Privy Council, the Local Government Board,

the

the Board of Works, the Irish Land Commission, and the Congested Districts Board, are otherwise than efficiently discharged, it is manifest from the bare enumeration of these bodies that there is not, in the relation of the State in Ireland to the greatest of Irish industries, that unity and simplicity of organization which it is evidently desirable to establish. The conceptions and the initiative of statesmanship cannot well be given effect to through a Circumlocution office; and were there no other object to be gained than the simplification of official machinery, the creation of a centralised Board would plainly be expedient. The creation of a Board of Agriculture, or, as we should prefer to call it, a Board of Agriculture and Industry, supported as it is by a consensus of opinion, both practical and political, and endorsed by every section of the Irish press, is however still more desirable for the help which an efficient department could give to the policy of fostering the industries allied to farming. What is really required is that the whole of rural Ireland should receive such sympathetic and intelligent supervision as the Congested Districts Board affords to the backward districts of the West. Of course we do not mean that all Ireland is a congested district or that it should be treated as such; but the Congested Districts are not all Ireland, and it would be a grave error, in considering how to improve the material welfare of the country, to attend only to the special needs of a part of the island which, though capable of vast improvement, is certainly not that in which the greatest additions may be made to the sum of national prosperity.

If Great Britain has as yet failed to ascertain how the material resources of Ireland may best be developed and made available for the benefit of her people, it has not been for lack of frequent and careful enquiry. While in her body politic she has endured a long course of experimental vivisection, Ireland has been the subject of equally continuous investigations into her material condition by all the means of diagnosis known to the State. The perennial poverty of the country has been the constant subject of discussion. Royal Commissions and Committees of the House of Commons without number have been appointed at the instance of successive Governments, as each fresh evidence of the backwardness of the country has forced itself on the attention of Parliament. They have, all of them, unfortunately been much more successful in indicating the opulent possibilities of the land, than in showing how these may be transformed into realities. They have remarked on the extraordinary natural facilities afforded by the climate, situation, and fertility of Ireland, and they have invariably proclaimed their inability to

reconcile

reconcile the natural wealth of the country with the unnatural poverty of her people. Man seems the only growth that dwindles here,' is the depressing conclusion which one draws from the optimist testimony contained in the reports of these enquiries, from the time of Sir John Davis to the present day.

It would be wearisome to refer in detail to the earlier of these numerous enquiries, and it is the less necessary because many of the suggestions resulting from them have been either fulfilled by legislation or condemned by experience. In recent years, however, the material condition of Ireland has been the subject of three separate and most interesting investigations. Of these, the proceedings of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, presided over by Sir Eardley Wilmot, in 1885, and of the Royal Commission on Technical Education, which reported in 1884, and gave special consideration to the case of Ireland, are the most valuable as records of facts and evidence ; while the Royal Commission on Irish Public Works, which sat in 1888, is the most important for the practical character of its suggestions. Though the immediate objects of the two enquiries were thus separate and independent, it is noticeable that they reached conclusions in many respects identical. Both attest the defectiveness of the agricultural system pursued in Ireland, and attribute it to the absence of proper means of education; both emphasise the importance, and are satisfied of the feasibility, of promoting handicrafts and home industries in the manner we have described; and both, it is remarkable to note, concur in indicating as the indispensable condition precedent to the development of Irish resources, the provision of increased facilities for the conveyance of goods and products.

The testimony to this effect was so complete that one of the first acts of Lord Salisbury's Government, on taking office in 1886, was the appointment of a Royal Commission to enquire into three great questions directly affecting the material and industrial development of Ireland. These were the condition of the Deep Sea Fisheries, Arterial Drainage, and the state of Irish Railways. The Commission charged with this threefold task was one of the most useful that has ever presented a report to Her Majesty. Like most effective Committees, it was small in number, and it was unbiassed by political considerations; at least, no politician sat on it. It was presided over by the late Sir James Allport, an engineer of great eminence in his profession, and a man of much practical sagacity, and its conclusions were presented in a report of unusual power and comprehensiveness. Indeed it is to be regretted that a State paper of so much value, summarising with so much lucidity

such