as proceeded. This falls naturally, both as regards that which is
done by the central authority for the country at large and that which is
locally administered, into two divisions. The first consists of direct
aid to agriculture and other rural industries, and to sea and inland
fisheries. The second consists of indirect aid given to these objects,
and also to town manufactures and commerce, through education--a term
which must be interpreted in its widest sense. Needless to say, direct
aids, being tangible and immediately beneficial, are the more popular: a
bull, a boat, or a hand-loom is more readily appreciated than a lecture,
a leaflet, or an idea. Yet in the Department we all realise--and, what
is more important, the people are coming to realise--that by far the
most important work we have to do is that which belongs to the sphere of
education, especially education which has a distinctly practical aim. To
this branch of the subject I shall, therefore, first direct the reader's
attention.

It must be remembered that, for reasons fully set out in the earlier
portions of the book, I am treating the Irish Question as being, in its
most important economic and social aspects, the problem of rural life.
The Department's scheme of technical instruction, therefore, need not
here be detailed in its application to the needs of our few
manufacturing towns, but only in its application to agriculture and the
subsidiary industries. I do not suggest that the questions relating to
the revival of industry in our large manufacturing centres and
provincial towns are not of the first importance. The local authorities
in these places have eagerly come into the movement, and the Department
has already taken part in founding, in our cities and larger towns,
comprehensive schemes of technical education, as to the outcome of which
we have every reason to be hopeful. Not only that, but it is highly
necessary for the Department to consider these schemes in close relation
to its work upon the more specially rural problems, for, as I have said
elsewhere,[48] the interdependence of town and country, and the
establishment of proper relations between their systems of industry and
education, is a prime factor in Irish prosperity. But the rural problem,
as I have so often reiterated, is the core of the Irish Question; and to
deal at all adequately with technical education, so far as we carry it
on upon lines common both to Great Britain and Ireland, w