*

German peoples think it worth while to spend on the instruction of their 'masters of industry' and their superior artisans in their magnificently equipped technical institutes. And this scientific training must be based, if it is to be successful, on a sound system of secondary education, such as we are assured by Mr. Sadler is to be found in the excellent Realschulen of Prussia. Other causes (such as the greater adaptability shown by their traders) may to some extent account for the more rapid development of German than of English commerce in recent years, but we cannot but believe that one of the chief causes is to be found in the more systematic and higher training given to their commercial and manufacturing classes.

'They are convinced,' said Sir Philip Magnus of the Germans in the Report we have referred to, that the nation which has the best schools is the best prepared for the great industrial warfare which lies before us; and no money appears to be grudged for the erection, equipment, and maintenance of educational institutions of all grades.

The education of a secondary school is in every way more accessible in Germany than here. The grades and differences of schools are better defined and more clearly understood; the instruction is more disciplinary and exercises a deep influence in the forma tion of habits and in the training of character; the teaching of modern languages is insisted upon to a far greater extent than in any of our own schools, with results of the greatest possible benefit to the German clerk and commercial agent; the absence of frequent and conflicting external examinations gives more time for careful study; the remission of two years' military service to those who reach a certain standard in a secondary school is a powerful encouragement to steady application; and the fees are much lower than in schools of corresponding grade in this country.'

There is yet another ground on which the reorganisation of secondary education may be supported, viz., that it is necessary for the proper regulation of our elementary school system. This was the constant contention of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold. So long,' he said in one of his latest official reports, as public institution and supervision stop there (i.e. at popular instruction), and no contact and 'correlation are established between our popular instruction and the instruction above it, so long the condition of our 'popular instruction itself will and must remain un' satisfactory.'

The intimate connexion between the two cannot be

* See Special Reports on Education Subjects, 1896-97. Edited by M. E. Sadler, p. 375.

denied. Many of our so-called elementary schools are, as we have already pointed out, in their upper classes, really secondary schools; while many of our so-called secondary schools are in fact continuation schools, and their curriculum ought to be adjusted so as to supplement the instruction given in the elementary schools. These intimate relations have been fully recognised, and some important proposals for their regulation made, in a joint memorandum published last August as a parliamentary paper. This memorandum, which has been adopted both by the Head Masters' Association and by the Higher-grade Schools' Association, demands an official differentiation' of the aims and work of primary and secondary schools, and declares that this can only be satisfactorily accomplished by a Central Educational Council, a body that will obviously require statutory authority to enforce its decisions.

It appears to be imagined in some quarters that the longer the delay, the easier it will be to effect the reforms required. We believe this to be a fallacy. Every year new vested interests are growing up, new schools and institutes are being established; every year the various local authorities are ever taking firmer root in the educational soil, and it becomes more and more difficult to disturb them; every year the unfortunate restrictions of the Technical Instruction Acts are more and more distorting and impeding the developement of our higher instruction, especially on its literary side.

If another Session ends without a reasonably complete measure on secondary education being passed into law, England will, we think, have a right to complain. Not only is it most desirable to bring to an end the period of suspense which has troubled educationalists for the last five years, but Englishmen are beginning to feel that in this matter they have been neglected as compared with their neighbours in Wales. The wonderful outburst of zeal for higher instruction witnessed in the Principality since the passing of the Welsh Intermediate Education Act of 1889 has resulted, we believe, in already providing every district of that comparatively poor country with a fairly good secondary school. It is true that the farmers and middle classes of England have themselves very much to blame for the delay. Their notorious indifference to education, especially in the agricultural districts of the south, has prevented our statesmen from regarding the problem as so urgent in England as in Wales. But many of them are now

beginning to realise the advantages enjoyed, not only by some foreign countries, but by the adjoining parts of the United Kingdom. Paying rates as they do for the instruction of the children of the working classes, they naturally think they have a right to demand some facilities for the higher education of their own children. At present they hardly realise exactly where the shoe pinches, but they will not fail to complain of any Government which, after a long tenure of office, shall neglect to do anything to supply the needs of which they are conscious.

In conclusion, strongly as we deprecate a policy of delay, we deprecate still more earnestly any refusal to accept substantial instalments of the reforms desired. If the Government, however mistakenly in our opinion, insist on such piecemeal legislation as they foreshadowed last August, we would accept their conclusion and frankly recognise the reorganisation of the central authority to be an essential and important step in the right direction.

But even if we are yet to wait some time for a comprehensive measure dealing with the local authorities, we would at least urge the desirability of removing without any further delay the two greatest hindrances to wise and economical administration on the part of these authorities by (1) appropriating the residue' permanently to educational purposes, and (2) extending its application to the whole field of secondary instruction. These two simple but important objects might (as was shown in the Bill of 1896) be attained in a single clause of no great length. A small expenditure of parliamentary time would thus achieve great and farreaching results. The uncertainties and dangers arising from the precariousness of the grants and the undue stimulus given to the scientific side of the school curriculum would speedily disappear. Technical and technological instruction, which has taken deep root, especially in our large towns, would still be carefully fostered; while the humanities would no longer be left to wither and starve in the absence of adequate endowment. Another great step would thus be taken towards that complete reorganisation of higher instruction, which we are satisfied forms one of the most pressing problems with which British statesmen have to deal in the immediate future,

ART. VIII.—Mr. Gregory's Letter-box, 1813-1830. by Lady GREGORY. London: 1898.

6

Edited

IN justifying the publication of these excerpts from the correspondence of a long-forgotten Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, Lady Gregory reports an observation of Mr. Lecky's to which every one interested in Irish history must regretfully subscribe. Far less is known,' said the historian, of the early part of this century in Ireland 'than of the close of the last.' The fact is incontestable; and Lady Gregory's volume, while it helps to lessen our ignorance, serves also to account for it. It is unquestionable that the abolition of her separate legislature deprived Ireland of many of the sources of that picturesque interest in virtue of which the eighteenth century, and especially its closing years, must always remain for the historian the grand epoch of Irish history.

A period widely different followed the Legislative Union and preceded Catholic Emancipation. It was a period deficient in incident and unfruitful in great personalities. With the passing of the Union Ireland relapsed politically into the dulness and provincialism of the age which had intervened between the days of Swift and those of Grattan. The men who had filled great parts in Dublin were, with a few signal exceptions, lost and unknown in the arena of Westminster; and of the younger generation of the members of the Irish Parliament, none achieved fame at St. Stephen's who had not already won it at College Green. In political memoirs directly relating to Ireland the period is almost barren; and the affairs of that island are referred to in the letters and papers of the English statesmen of the day only as episodes in which little interest was taken and of which even less was understood. Of the effect of this neglect in producing apathy and dulness in Irish society two illustrations may suffice. It anglicised the career of so essentially Irish a spirit as Thomas Moore's. Too mercurial to be content with a province, Moore transferred to the salon of Holland House and the gardens of Bowood the social talents which, had a Parliament remained in Dublin, would have been exerted at the table of the Viceroy or in the drawingrooms of Carton. Again, it is difficult to imagine a contrast more complete than that between the pictures drawn by Jonah Barrington and Richard Lalor Sheil of the times with which they were respectively familiar. Of the

two writers, the younger was far the abler and owned the more accomplished pen; and the inferiority of Sheil's sketches to those of Barrington only emphasises the difference in the scale of interest between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. When Barrington wrote his Recollections, he could call them, grandiosely indeed, but not absurdly, the Historic Memoirs of Ireland.' When Sheil wished to depict the Dublin of his day, he was reduced to the humbler title of 'Sketches of the Irish Bar.'

The history of Ireland in the nineteenth century falls naturally into two main periods of nearly equal length. But so sharply are the contrasts drawn that to modern observation they seem to be separated by a century; so opposite are the social characteristics and so different the political ideas which belong to each. The first stretches from the Union to the Young Ireland movement and the Potato Famine, and belongs to history; the second reaches from that point to the present moment. Of these periods the first may itself be divided into two; of which one runs from 1800 to 1828, and is occupied with the struggle for religious freedom. The second and shorter begins with the triumph of O'Connell in the latter year, and ends in the social cataclysm of the famine and the political anarchy caused by the schism between Old and Young Ireland; from the throes of which have emerged all the movements that are still living in the Ireland of to-day. is with the earliest of these strongly marked and separated eras that we have to do in these pages.

It

The Ireland of Swift is hardly more remote from the Ireland of Parnell than is the Ireland of this epoch when the principle of Catholic Emancipation was struggling for recognition, and when resistance to that demand was avowedly based by statesmen on the inconsistency between the concession of the Catholic claims and the maintenance of the /Protestant Constitution in Church and State. In those days Ireland still remained absolutely in the hands of the territorial aristocracy which had held power throughout the eighteenth century. As lately as 1825 the whole parliamentary representation was in the control of the country gentlemen. The Union had altered nothing in this respect. Although Catholic Emancipation was the foremost subject of contention, the cleavage of parties in the country was not as yet synonymous with the antagonism of creeds. In the generation that succeeded the Union, parties followed