A really useless person may contrive to be chosen as
representative by a thousand electors. It requires an able man to
convince a committee of ten persons, themselves more or less
specialists, that his is the best brain among them. Where national
education, a thorny subject in Ireland, is concerned, I think the
educationalists in provinces might be asked to elect representatives
from their own profession on a Council of Education to act as an
advisory body to the Minister of Education. County Council elections
are not exactly means by which miracles of culture are discovered. A
man who came to be member of a board of control would at least have
proved his ability to others engaged on work like his own who have
special knowledge of it and of his capacity to deal with it. If this
system was accepted, we would not have traders on our Council of
Agriculture protesting against the farmers organizing their industry,
because none but persons concerned with agriculture would be a owed to
be members of agricultural committees, and this would, of course,
involve the concentration of merchants and manufacturers upon the work
of a Board of Trade and the control of a policy of technical instruction
suitable for industrial workers, where agricultural advisers in their
turn would be out of place.
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