CHAPTER XXI
THE REAL IRISH PROBLEM
It was well we went to Cong when we did, for the next day was cold and rainy, with a clammy mist in the air which settled into the valleys and soaked everything it touched. I walked over to the village, after breakfast, to keep my promise to the school-teacher. The school is a dingy frame building with two rooms and two teachers, a man for the older pupils and a woman for the younger ones. They are brother and sister, and from their poor clothes and half-fed appearance, I judge that teachers are even worse paid in Ireland than elsewhere. But they both welcomed me warmly, and the man hastened to set out for me the only chair in the place, carefully dusting it beforehand.
He called the roll, and it was delightful to hear the soft, childish voices answer "Prisent, sorr," "Prisent, sorr." Then he counted heads to be sure, I suppose, that some child hadn't answered twice, once for himself and once for some absent friend. There were about thirty children present, ranging in age from six to fifteen; and they were all barefoot, of course, and such clothing as they had was very worn and ragged, and most of them had walked four or five miles, that morning, down out of the hills. The teacher said sadly that the attendance should be twice as large, but there was no way of enforcing the compulsory education law, though the priest did what he could.
I wish I could paint you a picture of that school, so that you could see it, as I can, when I close my eyes. In the larger room there was a little furniture—a chair and cheap desk for the teacher, some rude forms for the children, and a small blackboard; but the other room was absolutely bare, and the children sat around on the floor in a circle, with their legs sticking out in front of them, red with cold, while the teacher stood in their midst to hear them recite. Each of them had over his shoulder a cheap little satchel, usually tied together with string; and in this he carried his two or three books—thin, paper-covered affairs, which cost a penny each; and all the children, large and small, had to carry their books about with them all the time they were in school because there was no place to put them.
The reading lesson had just started when I entered the room where the smaller children were, and it was about the advantages of an education. It brought tears to the eyes to hear them, in their soft voices and sweet dialect, read aloud with intense earnestness what a great help education is in the battle of life and in how many ways it is useful. When the reading was done, the teacher asked them the meaning of the longest words, and had them tell again in their own way what the lesson had said, to be certain that they understood it.
Poor kiddies! As I looked at them, I could see in my mind's eye our schoolhouses back home, heated and ventilated by the best systems—there was ventilation enough here, heaven knows, for the door was wide open, but no heat, though the day was very raw and chilly, and the children were shivering—equipped with expensive furniture and the latest devices of charts and maps; and I could see the well-fed, well-clothed children, with their beautiful costly books which make teachers almost unnecessary, languidly reading some such lesson as was being read here in Connaught, on the advantages of an education! It would not have been read so earnestly, be sure of that, nor with such poignant meaning.
And in that moment, I thrilled with a realisation of Ireland's greatest and truest need. It is not land purchase, or reform of the franchise, or temperance, or home rule, though these needs are great enough; it is education. It is education only that can solve her industrial problems and her labour problems; and, however she may prosper under the favouring laws of a new political régime, it is only by education, by the banishment of ignorance and illiteracy, that she can hope to take her place among the nations of the world.
It was a sort of vision I had, standing there in that bare little room, of a new Ireland, dotted with schools and colleges, as she was a thousand years ago, illumined with the white light of knowledge; but here, meanwhile, were these eager, bright-eyed, ragged little children, stumbling along the path of knowledge as well as they could; but a rocky path they find it, and how deserving of help they are! I wish you could have seen those soiled, thumbed little readers, which cost, as I have said, only a penny each, and which, if they had cost more, would have been beyond the reach of the average Connaught family.
I bought a few of them, afterwards, to bring home with me, and when I looked through them, I found them very primitive indeed. Here, for instance, is Lesson Six in the primer: