t that the
Gaelic League, now a widespread and solidly established organisation,
spending on the whole, perhaps, L30,000 or L40,000 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, an