wisest line of economic development. Such an undertaking will amount to a unification of Irish life altogether without precedent. It will draw the great personalities of industry for the first time into the central current of public affairs. It will furnish them with a platform upon which they will have to talk in terms of the plough, the loom, and the ledger, and not in terms of the wolf-dog and the orange-lily, and will render fruitful for the service of the country innumerable talents, now unknown or estranged by political superstitions. It will do all that State action can do to generate a boom in Irish enterprises, and to tempt Irish capital into them in a more abundant stream. And the proceedings and conclusions of such a body, circulated broadcast somewhat after the Washington plan, will provide for all classes in the community a liberal education in Economics. Will "Ulster" fight against such an attempt to increase its prosperity? Will the shipbuilders, the spinners, and the weavers close down their works in order to patronise Sir Edward Carson's performance on a pop-gun? It is not probable.
Work is the best remedy against such vapours, and an Ireland, occupied in this fashion-with wealth-producing labour, will have no time for civil war or "religious" riots.
As for concrete projects, the Irish Parliament will not be able to begin on a very ambitious scale. But there are two or three matters which it must at once put in hand. There is, for instance, the drainage of the Barrow and the Bann. These two rivers are in a remarkable degree non-political and non-sectarian. Just as the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so do their rain-swollen floods spoil with serene impartiality Nationalist hay and Orange hay, Catholic oats and Presbyterian oats. Will "Ulster" fight against an effort to check the mischief? Then there is re-afforestation. As the result mainly of the waste of war, Ireland, which ought to be a richly wooded country, is very poor in that regard. In consequence of this, a climate, moister than need be, distributes colds and consumption among the population, without any religious test, and unchecked winds lodge the corn of all denominations. Re-afforestation, as offering a profit certain but a little remote, and promising a climatic advantage diffused over the whole area of the country, is eminently a matter for public enterprise. Are we to be denied the hope that fir, and spruce, and Austrian pine may conceivably be lifted out of the plane of Party politics? Further, to take instances at haphazard, the State, whatever else its economic functions may
be, will be one of the largest purchasers of commodities in the country. It is thinkable that the Irish State may give its civil servants Irish-made paper to write on in their offices. It may even so arrange things that when Captain Craig comes to the House of Commons at College Green he shall sit on an Irish-made bench, dine off a cloth of Belfast linen, and be ruthlessly compelled to eat Meath beef, Dublin potatoes, and Tipperary butter. In such horrible manifestations of Home Rule I do not discern the material for a revolution. Again, it may be proposed that in order to develop manufactures, municipalities and county councils may be given power to remit local rates on newly established factories for an initial period of, say, ten years. It may occur to evil-minded people to increase the provision for technical instruction in certain centres for the same end. The Irish State may think it well to maintain agents in London, New York, and some of the continental capitals with a view to widening the external market for Irish products. I do not say that a Home Rule Parliament will do all these things, but they are the sort of thing that it will do. And the mere naked enumeration of them is sufficient to show that such an Assembly will have ample matter of economic development upon which to keep its
teeth polished without devouring either priests or Protestants.
There are other urgent questions upon which unanimity exists even at present, for example Poor Law Reform. I have outlined in an earlier chapter the honourable record of Ireland in this regard. We were agreed in 1836 that the workhouse should never have come; we are now agreed that it must go. Whether in Antrim or in Clare, the same vicious system has produced the same vicious results. Uniform experience has issued in unanimous agreement as to the lines upon which reform ought to proceed. At the same time there are differences as to detail, and the task of fusing together various views and hammering out of them a workable Bill will be an ideal task for a representative assembly. But it is difficult to believe that the discussion will be, in all particulars, governed either by the Council of Trent, or by the Westminster Confession.
Then there is education. English public men have been brought up to assume that in Ireland education must be a battleground inevitably, and from the first. It would be a mere paradox to say that this question, which sunders parties the world over as with a sword, will leave opinion in Ireland inviolately unanimous. But our
march to the field of controversy will be over a non-controversial road. Union policy has left us a rich inheritance of obvious evils. The position of the primary teachers is unsatisfactory, that of the secondary teachers is impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King in constitutional theory, is above politics. When its frosts get at the noses, and fingers, and sometimes the bare toes, of the children it leaves them neither green nor orange but simply blue. Then again other schools, especially in Belfast, are shamefully over-crowded. Classes are held on the stairs, in the cloak-room, the hall, or the yard. For the more fortunate, class-rooms are provided with an air-space per individual only slightly less than that available in the Black Hole of Calcutta. All over the country, children go to school breakfastless and stupid with hunger, and the local authorities have no power to feed them as in England,
and in most European countries. Then again, even where the physical conditions are reasonable, the programme lacks actuality. It is unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life and locality, a veritable castle hung absurdly in the air and not based on any solid foundation. The view still lingers in high places that the business of education is to break the spirit of a people, to put them down and not to lift them up. In token of this, the teachers are denied the civil rights of freemen. Now all these ineptitudes are contrary to the humane tradition of Ireland. Go they must, but, when an Irish Parliament starts to remove them, I cannot imagine Captain Craig, with a Union Jack wrapped around his bosom, straddling like Apollyon across the path. The Captain has far too much sense, and too much feeling in him.
It will be observed that we are getting on. A nation so busy with realities will have no time to waste on civil war. Inter leges arma silent. But this is a mere outline sketch of the preliminary task of the initial sessions of an Irish Parliament. Problems with a far heavier fist will thunder at its doors, the problems of labour. The democratic group in Ireland, that group which everywhere holds the commission of the