haphazard, the State, whatever else its economic functions may be, will be one of the largest purchasers of commodities in the country.  It is thinkable that the Irish State may give its civil servants Irish-made paper to write on in their offices.  It may even so arrange things that when Captain Craig comes to the House of Commons at College Green he shall sit on an Irish-made bench, dine off a cloth of Belfast linen, and be ruthlessly compelled to eat Meath beef, Dublin potatoes, and Tipperary butter.  In such horrible manifestations of Home Rule I do not discern the material for a revolution.  Again, it may be proposed that in order to develop manufactures, municipalities and county councils may be given power to remit local rates on newly established factories for an initial period of, say, ten years.  It may occur to evil-minded people to increase the provision for technical instruction in certain centres for the same end.  The Irish State may think it well to maintain agents in London, New York, and some of the continental capitals with a view to widening the external market for Irish products.  I do not say that a Home Rule Parliament will do all these things, but they are the sort of thing that it will do.  And the mere naked enumeration of them is sufficient to show that such an Assembly will have ample matter of economic development upon which to keep its teeth polished without devouring either priests or Protestants.

There are other urgent questions upon which unanimity exists even at present, for 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