very unpopular body," the commissioner wildly declared, “but we know perfectly well that . . . if anybody attempted to put his hand on us his fate would be that of the person who put his hand on the ark." Yet the fact remained that warfare between the teachers and their inspectors was passionate. Every appeal, small or great," the commissioner boasted, came to his hands. But the multiplication of appeals demanded this special inquiry.

The justification of this particular commissioner may be sought in the reforms between 1900 and 1913. When Mr. Balfour wrote in 1899 he painted a black picture. "The study of agriculture, the only practical subject which has received attention," Mr. Balfour asserted, "has fluctuated between ruinous extravagance and a mechanical study of textbooks. The great inadequacy and insufficiency of the education given [in Ireland] during nine-tenths of the last century can hardly be exaggerated. More teachers, all fully qualified, well paid and well pensioned; a raising after school age; no half-time; better attendance; better buildings; provision for transfer to higher education." So said Mr. Balfour in 1899. Dr. Starkie ascribed any failure to carry out these reforms to "the apathy of the executive and the opposition of the treasury." The worst behavior of the treasury and the Castle, apparently, was to hold up plans for new schools, for six years. But when the government and the teachers and the inspectors had all been blamed, and full credit allowed for the introduction of kindergarten and object-lessons and elementary science and the increase of pay from £52 and £43 in 1877 to £112 and £90 in 1910 (for men and women teachers respectively), the fact

remained that the local managers of the schools almost always the clergymen appoint and dismiss the teachers without any local consultation, and that the attendance only reached 73%. The 15,704 employees of the school board could be as great a civilizing influence as the Danish school teachers or the American school teachers. As it is, they are seething with unhappiness.

The problem of sectarianism is subsiding. "The first fifty years of the national board," said the resident commissioner, " were spent in quarrelling over the meaning of the word undenominational. . . . At first the Catholics were the only people who approved of the system. The church of Ireland did not accept it for a very long time, and some of their schools are coming in only now. The Presbyterians went so far as to found gun clubs to shoot the inspectors. In the north of Ireland. The great question with the Presbyterians in those days (and there is a strange recrudescence of it in the last week or two) was whether it was right, as they put it, ' to edit the Holy Ghost.'" But the ferment caused by an uncontrolled board, an uncontrolled commissioner, an uncontrolled treasury, has retarded primary education in every part of the country, Belfast not less than Clonmel. This goes back to the utter distrust of the people, the attempt to placate sectarianism by giving the schools to clerical management, under one scheme or another. It is a striking and indeed terrible example of the evil result of British government in Ireland. Education, high and low, has been cruelly sacrificed to the suspicion and intolerance of remote and blind authority. This is one great reason for self-government. The nation itself must force its

admission to the government of the national school system and the problems of the teacher. The salvation of the country depends almost entirely on education. It cannot continue to be a mere bone of contention between church and state.

THE IRISH IDYL

SORDID!

"CALL the Irish imaginative!" Lady Waterford exclaimed to Lord Morley. "So they are on one side, or on the surface; in substance they are not imaginative at all; they are sordid and prosaic. Look at marriage - love no part in it, 'tis an affair of so many cows; sentiment, not a spark of it! The woods in the park open for the public on summer evenings do you ever see lads and lasses in lovers' pairs? Never, never. They are actors, and they all know they are actors; and each man knows that the man to whom he is talking is not only playing a part, but knows that he knows that he is playing a part. They cannot help lying, and they have no shame, not merely in being found out, but in being known to be lying as the words come fresh from their lips. Man, woman, and child, they are soaked and saturated in insincerity."

Lord Morley's comment was silence. He saw that the lady was without heat or anger or contempt. The terrible picture was to her a complete picture. "I listened," writes Lord Morley, "with the patience required by manners."

Nothing is more gratifying, I think, than to sum up racial character in the manner of the old

geographies. But it is difficult, even with plain facts in front of you, to make a sound inference unless, of course, you are infallible. What would Lady Waterford have thought of the cabman who tied a shoe lace for Mrs. Martin, reported in Somerville and Ross's Irish Memories. "She thanked him with her usual and special skill in such matters, and, as she slowly moved away, she was pleased to hear her cabman remark to a fellow:

"That's a dam pleshant owld heifer!'”

If you were sufficiently literal, any such remark would be grossly "sordid and prosaic." It delighted Mrs. Martin. The difficulty is that patriotism compels a great many Irishmen to deny the halftruth that is back of Lady Waterford's harsh observation, and to insist that the genuine Ireland is idyllic.

This idyl is largely false.

There is nothing idyllic, in honest fact, about the loveless marriages that are so often arranged over two pints of stout in the smelly parlor of a publichouse, a counterpart of the property-marriages of royal families. Neither is there anything elegiac about the funerals that are one of the few occasions for conviviality in the remoter districts in Ireland. A few years ago a friend took me to the funeral of one of his customers a woman publican in a village in the hills on the borders of Kilkenny, Waterford and Tipperary. I shall never forget the "mourners" who came in a steady procession into the back-parlor of the public house, to receive, with a minimum of conversation, what was evidently welcomed as a drink free of charge. The host, collarless and coatless, but wearing a