ld be as sub-divisions, committees for
local government, agriculture, and technical instruction or trade to
deal with local administration in these matters. These committees
should send representatives to general councils of local government,
agriculture, and trade. The election should not be by the County Council
as a body, but by the committees, so that traders would have no voice
in choosing a representative for farmers, nor farmers interfere in
the choice of manufacturers or traders selecting a representative on a
general Council of Trade, and it should be regarded as ridiculous any
such intervention as for a War Office to claim it should have a voice
along with the Admiralty in the selection of captains and commanders of
vessels of war. At these general councils, which might meet twice a year
for whatever number of days may be expedient, general policies would be
decided and boards elected to ensure the carrying out by the officials
of the policies decided upon. By this process of selection men who had
to control Boards of Agriculture, Trade, or Local Government would be
three times elected, each time by a gradually decreasing electorate,
with a gradually increasing special knowledge of the matters to be
dealt with. A really useless person may contrive to be chosen as
representative by a thousand electors. It requires an able man
to convince a committee of ten persons, themselves more or less
specialists, that his is the best brain among them. Where national
education, a thorny subject in Ireland, is concerned, I think the
educationalists in provinces might be asked to elect representatives
from their own profession on a Council of Education to act as an
advisory body to the Minister of Education. County Council elections are
not exactly means by which miracles of culture are discovered. A man who
came to be member of a board of control would at least have proved
his ability to others engaged on work like his own who have special
knowledge of it and of his capacity to deal with it. If this system
was accepted, we would not have traders on our Council of Agriculture
protesting against the farmers organizing their industry, because none
but persons concerned with agriculture would be a owed to be members
of agricultural committees, and this would, of course, involve the
concentration of merchants and manufacturers upon the work of a Board of
Trade and the control of a policy of technical instruction suitable for
indus