or the Government, while the University should be open alike to all who
had obtained distinction in the provincial colleges. Any measure of
narrower scope would, they contended, leave dullness and bigotry where
it found them.

Mr. O'Connell, on the other hand, insisted on the inviolability of
Dublin College as a Protestant institution, inaccessible to Catholics,
except through the slough of perverted and perjured faith. He would then
have new colleges purely Catholic and entirely under the control of the
Catholic bishops, but endowed by the State, and chartered to confer
literary degrees. He would extend the same right to the members of other
religious persuasions. It was answered that these positions and his
arguments addressed to the academic question were irreconcilable and
incompatible. Catholics were already admissible to Dublin College, and
entitled to certain degrees and a vote. He either intended that they
should be thenceforth excluded or he did not. If not, then the argument
against mixed education would hold for nothing: if he did, then he
attempted what was impracticable, or, if not impracticable, preposterous
and absurd. It is not conceivable that Catholic young men, of laudable
ambition, would be deterred from entering the lists with their
Protestant contemporaries where most honour was won by superior
eminence, or that they would be swayed by a warning that a college
course would be attended with risk to their faith and morals, when they
remembered that for the past century, while the risk was infinitely more
imminent, no such warning had been ever heard from council, synod or
conference. It is a strange fact in the history of these troubled times
that no voice of denunciation against Dublin College could be heard in
the polemical din, although it was well known that its literary honours
stamped preliminary degradation on the Catholic aspirant, and were used
at once to mock his political condition and pervert his faith--no voice
was heard although one at least of the prelates had obtained degrees in
the University, while the bishop and priests of an entire diocese, in
conclave assembled, solemnly resolved that they would refuse sacraments
to any Catholic parent who sent his son to one of the Godless colleges.
But supposing it were practicable to exclude Roman Catholics from the
University, and that the system of exclusive education among the middle
and upper classes were applied in all its rigour, when w