hould no longer be treated as mere machines for the
making of goods and the earning of wages, but should be enabled and
compelled to have their faculties developed by the instruction suited
to their years. This provision in the Factories Act may be regarded as
the first step towards that system of national education which it took
so much trouble and so many years to establish in these countries.
Lord Ashley had great work still to accomplish; but even if his noble
career had closed with the passing of the Factories Act in 1833, his
name would always be remembered as that of a man who, more than any
other, helped to turn the first Reformed Parliament to the work of
emancipating the English laboring classes in cities and towns from a
servitude hardly less in conflict with the best interests of humanity
than that which up to the same year had prevailed on the plantations of
Jamaica and Demerara. The Reformed Parliament had still much difficult
work to call out its best energies and to employ its new resources, but
it had begun its tasks well, and had already given the country good
earnest of its splendid future.

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CHAPTER LXXV.

THE STATE CHURCH IN IRELAND.

[Sidenote: 1832--"Dark Rosaleen"]

A saying which has been ascribed to a well-known living Englishman, who
has made a name for himself in letters as well as in politics, may be
used as the introduction to this chapter. The saying was that no man
should ever be sent as Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland who could not prove that he had thoroughly mastered the meaning
of the noble Irish poem rendered by Clarence Mangan as "Dark Rosaleen."
The author and statesman to whom we refer used to point the moral of
his observation, sometimes, by declaring that many or most of the
political colleagues for whose benefit he had spoken had never heard
either of Clarence Mangan or of "Dark Rosaleen." Now, as it is barely
possible that some of the readers of this volume may be in a condition
of similar ignorance, it is well to mention that Clarence Mangan was an
Irish poet who was dear to the generation which saw the rise of the
Young Ireland movement during O'Connell's later years, and that the
dark Rosaleen whom Mangan found in the earlier poet's ballad is
supposed to typify his native country. The idea of the author and
statesman was that no Englishman who had not studied this poem, and got
at the heart of its mystery, so far as to be able to rea