To the small farmer and his family, time is a realisable, though too often unrealised, asset, and it is part of our aim to aid the family income by employing their waste time.

Even if we can only cause them to do at home what they now pay someone else to do, we shall not only have improved their budget but shall have contributed to the elevation of the standard of home life, and thus, in no small measure, to the solution of the difficult problem of rural life in Ireland.
I think the reader will now understand the general character of the problem with which we were confronted and the means by which its solution is being sought.

Our policy was not one which was likely to commend itself to the "man in the street." Indeed, to be quite candid, it was a little disappointing even to myself that I could not immortalise my appointment by erecting monuments both to my constructive ability and to my educational zeal in the shape of stately edifices at convenient railway centres, preferably along the tourist routes.

We have had to stand the fire of the critic fresh from his holiday on the Continent where he had seen agricultural and technological institutions, magnificently housed and lavishly equipped, fitting generations of young men and young women for competition with our less fortunate countrymen.
It is hard to prevail in argument against the man who has gone and seen for himself.

It is useless to point out to the man with a kodak that the Corinthian facade and the marble columns of the _aula maxima_ which aroused his patriotic envy are but a small part of the educational structure which he saw and thought he understood.