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 which Burke suggested. He would have had the State
endow the religions of Ireland and their ministries, s