140 EDUCATION. 



But an agitation, originated by the Liverpool Financial Reform Associa- 

 tion, about a quarter of a century ago, arose against 

 Agitation in England our whole agricultural system. This association dis- 

 against State Aid. puted the right of the State to train up farmers and 

 stewards at the public cost. In Parliament the asso- 

 ciation, especially amongst advanced free-traders, had many influential 

 exponents. The Government, from time to time, was harassed in its defence 

 of the system. Successive Chief Secretaries, in deference to the views of 

 Parliament, barely tolerated its continuance. Mr. Herbert, Mr. Cardwell, 

 and Sir Robert Peel, were absolutely hostile to it. Mr. Cardwell especially 

 directed his hostility to the countenance given by the Board to agricultural 

 instruction in the workhouse schools at the expense of Parliament, and dis- 

 tmct from its support from the rates, and strongly and successfully urged the 

 Board to abandon this branch of their agricultural system. 



This was in 1862. The workhouse experiment thus lasted only twelve 

 years. The greatest number of workhouse schools having agricultural de- 

 partments attached in any one year during the twelve years of the experi- 

 ment was seventy-nine. The Board recognising this great change in 

 Parliamentary opinion, held their hands, and determined not to add to the 

 number of their farms. They even tried to avert hostility to the system by 

 renting nine of the existing farms to the agriculturists in charge of them, 

 with a view to reducing the cost of the agricultural department. But this 

 latter experiment proved to be a great embarrassment to the administration, 

 and had to be abandoned. In 1870 the Royal Commission upon Primary 

 Education, presided over by Lord Powis, recommended : — - 



" That the position of provincial and district model agricultural 

 schools should be revised by the Commissioners ot National 

 Education, and that their number should be reduced." 



The old Templemoyle School, to which I referred in my opening remarks, 

 died out in 1866. In the beginning of 1872 the agricultural department was 

 at a low ebb in popular favour. It had been proscribed by Chief Secretary 

 after Chief Secretary, and it at all times had to encounter the fiercest hos- 

 tility of the Treasury, who regarded it as a baneful excrescence upon a 

 primary system of education. Besides, the Royal Commission had spoken, 

 as I have quoted, in anything but a sympathetic fashion. 



You, however, my dear Lord Spencer, in your former Lord Lieutenancy, 

 Earl Snencer's hesitated, in face of accumulating opposition, to be- 



_ , f r' lieve that agricultural improvement through all 



ocneme 01 1 arm agencies was hopeless, and in the spring of 1 872 

 Prizes. submitted, as you will remember, through your private 



secretary, Mr. Yates Thompson, the following project to the Board : — 



" I am to state that his Excellency has long taken an especial interest in 

 the welfare of the very numerous class of Irish small tillage farmers, and has 

 held the opinion, which personal observation of their condition and prospects 

 in various parts of the country has amply confirmed, that their present style of 

 farming and the management of their homesteads admits of considerable 

 improvement. It appears that more than half of all the holdings in Ireland, 

 namely, 317,457 out of 608,864 (from both of which figures, however, some 

 deductions must be made for the cases in which two or more separate holdings, 

 being in the occupation of the same individual, are enumerated separately), 

 were valued in 1886 at less than ;^'8 a year. His Excellency thinks it will not 



