poultry, swine.  It conducts original research, it experiments in crops, and, among other things, is slowly resuscitating the depressed industry of flax-growing, and starting a wholly new industry in the southern counties, that of early potatoes.  It sprays potatoes, prescribes for the diseases of trees, crops, and stock, advises on manures and feeding-stuffs, teaches forestry, and gives scholarships at various colleges for proficiency in agricultural science.  On the side of Technical Instruction it teaches and encourages all manner of small industries, such as lace-making.  It superintends all technical instruction in secondary schools, and organizes and subsidizes similar instruction in a multitude of different subjects under schemes prepared by local authorities, while at the same time carrying on an important and extensive system of training teachers.  It also superintends sea-fisheries and improves harbours.

The material results have been great; the moral results perhaps even greater.  Just as we should expect, wherever education goes, and wherever men work together for economic improvement, unnatural antagonisms of race and religion tend to disappear.  This is not the result of any direct influence wielded by the Department, which never finds it necessary to lecture people on the duty of mutual tolerance; it is the result of common sense and a small experience in Home Rule.  High officials of the Department have informed me that their work, for all intents and purposes, is unhampered by local religious prejudices.  A spirit of keen and wholesome rivalry permeates the people.  County and Borough Committees in districts almost wholly Roman Catholic, with large powers of patronage, almost invariably appoint the best men, regardless of creed and local influence.  Anyone who wishes to gain a glimpse of the real Belfast of the present and the future, as distinguished from the ugly, bigoted caricature of a great city which some even of its own citizens perversely insist on displaying to their English friends, a Belfast as tolerant and generous as it is energetic and progressive, should visit the magnificent Municipal Technical Institute, where 6,000 boys and girls, Roman Catholic and Protestant, mix together on equal terms, and derive the same benefit from an extraordinary variety of educational courses in a building furnished with lecture-rooms, laboratories, experimental plant, and gymnasia, of a perfection hardly to be surpassed in any city of the United Kingdom.

Here is something grand and fruitful accomplished in eleven years, and it is the outcome, be it remembered, of original, constructive thought devoted by Irishmen to the needs of their own country.