the absence of dirt, it checks and
hampers that desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order and
taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools.

There could hardly be a better moral influence in Ireland than
tastefully and brightly decorated schools, cleanly kept. But to secure
this the State must provide money, and must give individual freedom.
Instead of that, it adapts its institution to the lowest standard of
living; and the raggedest child out of the dirtiest cottage will
probably be in full keeping with his environment when he takes his place
in class.

The same tyranny of compromise sterilises the whole teaching on the
moral side. Nothing must be taught anywhere which could offend any
susceptibility--except in the hour licensed for the teaching of
denominational religion. There must be no appeal to Irish patriotism,
whether it be of Protestant or Catholic. Irish history may not be taught
as a subject, and, until lately, anything bearing on it, however
remotely, was tabooed. The poem _Breathes there a man with soul so dead_
was struck out of a lesson book, lest it should encourage sedition.
To-day certain accepted books on Irish history may be used as readers;
the Irish language may be taught, and is taught; and gradually with
these changes new moral influences are coming in. Irish children are
being encouraged to remember their nationality. Yet, meanwhile, the
teacher, who is to instruct them in the duties of a good citizen, is
debarred from taking any part in local politics, from serving on any
local council. He is forbidden, in fact, to be himself a good citizen;
forbidden to be anything more than the colourless instrument of a system
of compromise and countercheck. Nothing is more certain than this, that
to get a good teacher you need a man's whole personality; you must
enlist all his beliefs and his feelings in the exercise of that moral
function of education which can never be fulfilled by a mere machine for
imparting the rudiments. Man everywhere, but especially in Ireland, is,
as Aristotle said, a political animal. The State in Ireland, when
organising education, tries as far as possible to eliminate the man and
produce the pedagogue.

Take, for contrast with all this, the purely native institution, now
unhappily extinct, of the old "classical academies" kept in the country
parts of Munster by private laymen. In the eighteenth century, and on
into the nineteenth, these men kept alive the