icts almost wholly Roman Catholic, with large
powers of patronage, almost invariably appoint the best men, regardless
of creed and local influence. Anyone who wishes to gain a glimpse of the
real Belfast of the present and the future, as distinguished from the
ugly, bigoted caricature of a great city which some even of its own
citizens perversely insist on displaying to their English friends, a
Belfast as tolerant and generous as it is energetic and progressive,
should visit the magnificent Municipal Technical Institute, where 6,000
boys and girls, Roman Catholic and Protestant, mix together on equal
terms, and derive the same benefit from an extraordinary variety of
educational courses in a building furnished with lecture-rooms,
laboratories, experimental plant, and gymnasia, of a perfection hardly
to be surpassed in any city of the United Kingdom.

Here is something grand and fruitful accomplished in eleven years, and
it is the outcome, be it remembered, of original, constructive thought
devoted by Irishmen to the needs of their own country.

Let us also remember that it represents the application of State-aid to
economic development. But with the utmost caution, and the utmost
efforts to elicit self-help, one may go too far in the direction of
State-aid, and even in this sphere it is by no means certain that
Ireland is free from danger. Let us pass to another movement whose
essence is self-help: I mean the movement for Agricultural Co-operation.
Here again Sir Horace Plunkett was the originator. Indeed, with him and
his able associates and advisers, of whom Lord Monteagle and Mr. R.A.
Anderson, the Secretary of the I.A.O.S., were the first, the twin aims
of self-help and State-aid were combined as they should be, in one big,
harmonious policy. Self-help must, indeed, they held, be antecedent to,
and preparatory for, State-aid. The position confronting them was that
half a million unorganized tenant farmers, for the most part cultivating
excessively small holdings, and just beginning to emerge after
generations of agrarian war from an economic serfdom, were face to face
with the competition of highly organized European countries, and of vast
and rapidly developing territories of North and South America. It was as
far back as 1889 that the first propaganda was begun, and in 1894, a
year before the Recess Committee met, the Irish Agricultural
Organization Society was formed. By unwearied pains and patience,
seemingly h