We have seen in the previous chapter how earnestly and consistently throughout his working life he urged the State to take into its control, and so far as was needed to subsidize, the Education of the whole nation.  “How vain, how meaningless,” he cried, “to tell a man who, for the instruction of his offspring, receives aid from the State, that he is humiliated!  Humiliated by receiving help for himself as an individual from himself in his corporate and associated capacity! help to which his own money, as a tax-payer, contributes, and for which, as a result of the joint energy and intelligence of the whole community in employing as powers, he himself deserves some of the praise!...  He is no more humiliated than when he crosses London Bridge or walks down the King’s Road, or visits the British Museum.  But it is one of the extraordinary inconsistencies of some English people in this matter, that they keep all their cry of humiliation and degradation for help which the State offers.”  We shall see in a subsequent chapter that he was as strong for Established Churches as for State-regulated Schools, and for the same reason.  In Religion, as in Education, he disparaged private institutions and individual ventures.  The State, “the nation in its corporate and collective capacity,” ought to transcend the individual citizen:  it should supply him, to help him as one of its units to supply himself, with the thing which he wanted—­Education or Religion—­in the grand style, on a large scale, with all the authority which comes from national recognition, with all the dignity of a historical descent.

Arnold’s appeal for State-supplied and State-controlled Education has, as we have already seen, met with some practical response, and in the main falls in with the modern drift of Liberal ideas.  In upholding State-supported and State-controlled Religion, he was rather continuing an old tradition than starting a new idea, and modern Liberalism is moving away from him.

But in some important respects, all strictly political, his advocacy of extended action by the State fell in with the Liberal movement of his time.  The hideous misgovernment of Ireland he had always deplored.  It touched him long before it touched the great majority of Englishmen.  With a view to informing people on the Irish question, he compiled a book of Burke’s most telling utterances on Ireland and her woes.  Those utterances, as he said, “Show at work all the causes which have brought Ireland to its present state—­the tyranny of the grantees of confiscation; of the English garrison; Protestant ascendancy; the reliance of the English Government upon this ascendancy and its instruments as their means of government; the yielding to menaces of danger and insurrection what was never yielded to considerations of equity and reason; the recurrence to the old perversity of mismanagement as soon as ever the danger was passed.”  To all these evils he would have applied the remedies