Education in Ireland has been too long a thing apart from the economic realities of the country—­with what result we know.  In the work of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland, an attempt is being made to establish a vital relation between industrial education and industrial life.  It is desired to try, at this critical stage of our development, the experiment—­I call it an experiment only because it does not seem to have been tried before in Ireland—­of directing our instruction with a conscious and careful regard to the probable future careers of those we are educating.

This attempt touches, of course, only one department of the whole educational problem, much of which it would be quite outside my present purpose to discuss.  But I must guard against the supposition that in our insistence upon the importance of the practical side of education we are under any doubt as to the great importance of the literary side.  My friends and I have been deeply impressed by the educational experience of Denmark, where the people, who are as much dependent on agriculture as are the Irish, have brought it by means of organisation to a more genuine success than it has attained anywhere else in Europe.  Yet an inquirer will at once discover that it is to the “High Schools” founded by Bishop Grundtvig, and not to the agricultural schools, which are also excellent, that the extraordinary national progress is mainly due.  A friend of mine who was studying the Danish system of State aid to agriculture, found this to be the opinion of the Danes of all classes, and was astounded at the achievements of the associations of farmers, not only in the manufacture of butter, but in a far more difficult undertaking, the manufacture of bacon in large factories equipped with all the most modern machinery and appliances which science had devised for the production of the finished article.  He at first concluded that this success in a highly technical industry by bodies of farmers indicated a very perfect system of technical education.  But he soon found another cause.  As one of the leading educators and agriculturists of the country put it to him:  ’It’s not technical instruction, it’s the humanities.’  I would like to add that it is also, if I may coin a term, the ‘nationalities,’ for nothing is more evident to the student of Danish education or, I might add, of the excellent system of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, than that one of the secrets of their success is to be found in their national basis and their foundation upon the history and literature of the country.