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 conditions are reasonable, the programme lacks actuality.  It is unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life and locality, a veritable castle hung absurdly in the air and not based on any solid foundation.  The view still lingers in high places that the business of education is to break the spirit of a people, to put them down and not to lift them up.  In token of this, the teachers are denied the civil rights of freemen.  Now all these ineptitudes are contrary to the humane tradition of Ireland.  Go they must, but, when an Irish Parliament starts to remove them, I cannot imagine Captain Craig, with a Union Jack wrapped around his bosom, straddling like Apollyon across the path.  The Captain has far too much sense, and too much feeling in him.

It will be observed that we are getting on.  A nation so busy with realities will have no time to waste on civil war. Inter leges arma silent.  But this is a mere outline sketch of the preliminary task of the initial sessions of an Irish Parliament.  Problems with a far heavier fist will thunder at its doors, the problems of labour.  The democratic group in Ireland, that group which everywhere holds the commission of the future, has long since declared that, to it, Home Rule would be a barren counter-sense unless it meant the redemption of the back streets.  The Titanic conflict between what is called capital and what is called labour, shaking the pillars of our modern Society, has not passed Ireland by like the unregarded wind.  We can no longer think of ourselves as insulated from the world, immune from strikes, Socialists, and Syndicalism.  The problems of labour have got to be faced.  But will they be solved by a grapple between the Orange Lodges and the Ancient Order of Hibernians?  It is obvious that under their pressure the old order must change, yielding place to a new.  Every Trade Union has already bridged the Boyne.  Every strike has already torn the Orange Flag and the Green Flag into two pieces, and stitched them together again after a new and portentous pattern.