building construction, lace and crochet making, needlework, dressmaking
and embroidery, sprigging, hosiery and other such subjects, have been
numerously and steadily attended.

I do not ignore the argument that such home industries must in time give
way before the competition of highly-organised factory industries. The
simple answer is that it is desirable, and indeed necessary, to employ
the energy now running to waste in our rural districts--energy which
cannot in the nature of things be employed in highly-organised
industries. To the small farmer and his family, time is a realisable,
though too often unrealised, asset, and it is part of our aim to aid the
family income by employing their waste time. Even if we can only cause
them to do at home what they now pay someone else to do, we shall not
only have improved their budget but shall have contributed to the
elevation of the standard of home life, and thus, in no small measure,
to the solution of the difficult problem of rural life in Ireland.

I think the reader will now understand the general character of the
problem with which we were confronted and the means by which its
solution is being sought. Our policy was not one which was likely to
commend itself to the "man in the street." Indeed, to be quite candid,
it was a little disappointing even to myself that I could not
immortalise my appointment by erecting monuments both to my constructive
ability and to my educational zeal in the shape of stately edifices at
convenient railway centres, preferably along the tourist routes. We have
had to stand the fire of the critic fresh from his holiday on the
Continent where he had seen agricultural and technological institutions,
magnificently housed and lavishly equipped, fitting generations of young
men and young women for competition with our less fortunate countrymen.
It is hard to prevail in argument against the man who has gone and seen
for himself. It is useless to point out to the man with a kodak that the
Corinthian facade and the marble columns of the _aula maxima_ which
aroused his patriotic envy are but a small part of the educational
structure which he saw and thought he understood. If he would read the
history of the systems and trace the successive stages by which the need
for these great institutions was established, he would have a little
more sympathy with the difficulties of the Department, a little more
patience with its Fabian policy.

I must not, how