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 conditi