98 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



fancy for country life and agricultural pursuits, suggesting 

 rather clerkships and commercial or industrial occupations. 

 The inquiry by a Departmental Committee (Lord Reay's) 

 already referred to, producing most interesting and instruc- 

 tive evidence — upon which a thoroughly illuminating 

 Report has been based — has made the defects and deficien- 

 cies of the present system perfectly plain. The pith of 

 the judgment there pronounced is summed up in the words 

 spoken by Lord Barnard when acting as President : " There 

 is no system." There has been piecemeal action — not a 

 little of it — at this point and that, here a little and there 

 a little. But that has been without clearness of aim, or 

 a settled, comprehensive plan — perhaps it is not too much 

 to say, without any plan whatever. It has been like the 

 Irish jarvey of the anecdote, who upon being told that he 

 must be quick, lashed his horse into a gallop before he had 

 so much as been told where he was to go. 



Evidently there has been a great deal of goodwill. The 

 Board of Agriculture and Fisheries has shown itself most 

 laudably active and zealous — more particularly after Lord 

 Reay's Committee had reported, after which it promptly 

 elaborated the outlines of a new plan, moulded so much on 

 the lines of the Prussian regulations that one cannot help 

 concluding that the Prussian was advisedly selected as a 

 model. That means no blame to the Board. For the 

 Prussian system has been found to be sound and effective, 

 and had previously already served as a pattern, among other 

 nations, for our keen-eyed cousins across the Atlantic,who are 

 with reason very well satisfied with what they have now got. 

 No doubt that system has been very judiciously adapted. 

 However, our new system is still " new." We are, as Mr. 

 Middleton points out, in this matter full thirty years behind 

 Prussia. And our system is not by any means complete 

 in itself, more particularly inasmuch as it lacks the essential 

 feature of which Prussians have readily discovered the 

 value — as has also Sir Horace Plunkett when devising his 

 system for the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical 

 Instruction — that is, effective machinery for applying the 

 principle laid down. The Prussian Government does not 



