Thus through the medium of a propaganda which at first sight would seem merely literary and archæological, many practical issues of life were related to a purely educational purpose. There is no doubt that the Gaelic League, now a widespread and solidly established organisation, spending on the whole, perhaps, £30,000 or £40,000 a year on its enterprise, has done as much to promote temperance, and to further Irish industries, as it has accomplished in its peculiar task of reviving the old tongue. Primarily a teaching institution—for each of the League's eight hundred branches exists to hold classes for Irish study—it has linked with the linguistic teaching a moral idea. The reaction has been mutual, for there is more intelligent thought on the methods of linguistic teaching in the Gaelic League than one would easily find in all the schools and universities of Ireland. The appeal to pride of race has quickened intelligence no less than enthusiasm.
It is a very remarkable fact, that the great teaching order of the Christian Brothers has taken up the teaching of Irish and generally the Gaelic League's whole propaganda more thoroughly than any other organisation in Ireland; very remarkable, for their practical success is so conspicuous that Protestant clergymen have repeatedly from the pulpit appealed for extra support to Protestant schools whose pupils, as one preacher said in my hearing, were being ousted in all competition for employment by the lads from the Christian Brothers' schools. Whatever the post was, the preacher said, this body of lay Catholics seemed always to have a candidate specially prepared for it. One of the greatest institutions in charge of that order is the industrial school at Artane, near Dublin, where eight hundred boys are being prepared for different trades. Every single one of those boys is now being taught Irish; that is to say, a linguistic training with a special appeal to the learner's patriotism has been superimposed on the ordinary rudiments. It is a great experiment made by enthusiasts who are also teachers with an intensely practical bent.
It is too early even to forecast the effect which is likely to be produced upon Irish education generally by the new university colleges set up under Mr. Birrell's Act. Yet this may be said. Irish education needs reform from the top downwards, not from the bottom upwards. It has lacked idealism, and these universities in which Ireland, whether of the north or the south, will be free to express its own character, can and should set up ideals which will govern every school in the country. Trinity College has been free to follow its own bent, and its eyes to-day are, in scriptural phrase, "on the ends of the earth." Primary education, secondary studies, as governed by the machinery controlled through the Board of Intermediate Education, and university teaching as directed and rewarded through the Royal University, have all in the last resort been inspired by Englishmen who thought it very desirable that Irish boys and girls should learn to read and write and cipher, and that young men and young women should equip themselves for clerkships in the civil service, but who never for one instant realised that the end of education is divergence not conformity—to elicit, whether from the race or from the individual, a full and characteristic development. In twenty years perhaps a paper of interest may be written to show the positive results of education upon Irish character. At present the most noticeable facts are negative, and may be summed up by affirming a total lack of correspondence between the system employed and the needs and qualities of the Irish people.
THE IRISH GENTRY.
At the height on the struggle over the Home Rule Bill, there was published a book interesting as the biography of a remarkable individual, but no less interesting as depicting the crucial moment in the history of an aristocracy. Colonel Moore wisely entitles the life of his father simply An Irish Gentleman. Versatile, eloquent, quick-tempered and lovable, excessive in generosity, excessive in courage and self-confidence, with the racecourse for his ruling passion and horsemanship for his supreme achievement, George Henry Moore was the paragon of his class. He displayed in the highest degree those qualities on which the Irish gentry prided themselves and which they most admired: he shared the prestige and power of Irish landlords when prestige and power were at their height; and he confronted the decisive hour when he, and men like him, had to choose between the interest of their country and the interest of their class. There he separated himself from his fellows; he parted from all to whom he was bound by ties of immediate advantage, of pleasure, of association, of affection, and he threw in his lot with Ireland. He saw first the moral bankruptcy of his own class, then their widespread financial ruin; and though he helped to break their political power, and in so doing earned the general love of his countrymen, yet the troubles which beset the landlord class did not spare him, and he died, broken-hearted, forty-three years ago, at the beginning of a struggle which is not ended yet. It is well worth while to consider the circumstances of that stormy career.
First a brilliant schoolboy, then an idle law student, George Henry Moore was driven to travel by the complications of a passionate love affair, and he travelled adventurously, being a pioneer of exploration in the Caucasus and Syria. Sketches reproduced in the book show that he could draw no less well than he wrote. Returning to Ireland at the age of twenty-seven, he devoted himself entirely to hunting and racing, and few men were better known on the turf, nor were there even in the West of Ireland more desperate riders than his brother and himself. George Henry was carried off the field at Cahir in 1843 to all appearance dead; he was alive enough to hear discussion as to his burial. Augustus, less lucky, died of a fall he took riding Mickey Free in the Grand National two years later. The brothers were closely bound to each other in affection, and this was a heavy blow to the survivor; but George Moore continued to race, and in 1846 made the coup of his life, winning £10,000 on "Coranna" for the Chester Cup. He sent £1,000 of it home for distribution among his tenants, and there was soon sore need of the money, for that year saw the second and disastrous failure of the potato crop. The Irish Famine made the turning-point in Moore's history, as in that of his class. The catastrophe which brought him into public life and into the service of his country demonstrated, cruelly enough—though this was the least of its cruelties—the futility of the Irish gentry as a whole.
By the shock of his brother's death in 1845 Moore's mind had been turned to serious thoughts. Matter was not lacking. The report of the Devon Commission upon Irish land, joined to the first failure of the potato crop—with its accompaniment of distress and widespread agrarian crime—gave any Irish landlord food for reflection, and in March, 1846, when a vacancy occurred in the representation of Mayo, Moore came forward as a Whig candidate. The whole landlord interest was at his back, but a Repealer opposed him, and O'Connell's influence carried the day. There were fierce encounters, the landlords marching their tenants to the poll under guards of soldiers, the popular side falling upon these escorts and sometimes carrying off the voters—or enabling them to escape. One of Moore's friends, Mr. Browne, afterwards Lord Oranmore, wrote: "I now see we owe our lives to the priests, as they can excite the whole people against us whenever they like. Whatever may be the cause, Ireland needs reconquering."
That was a typical expression of the gentry's view. Plainly Ireland was in rebellion when landlords could no longer carry their tenants to the polls to vote as the landlord directed. Moore however differed from the generality of Irish landlords in one important respect. He was not divided by religion from the people over whom he ruled, and he can never have had Mr. Browne's feeling of aloofness from Ireland as a country which might need reconquering to re-establish the ascendancy of the "English garrison"; nor was it natural to him to distrust the priests as leaders of a separate and subject race.