rwise have
given them, such men will in my opinion be quite justified in modifying
their policy. As a matter of expediency they will argue that it is
better that these Catholics should receive an indifferent university
education than none at all; and that it is exceedingly desirable that
what is felt to be a grievance by many honest, upright and loyal men
should be removed. As a matter of principle, they contend that in a
country where higher education is largely and variously endowed from
public sources, it is a real grievance that there should be one large
body of the people who can derive little or no benefit from those
endowments. It is no sufficient answer to say that the objection of the
Catholic parents is in most cases not spontaneous, but is due to the
orders of their priests, since we are dealing with men who believe it to
be a matter of conscience on such questions to obey their priests. Nor
is it, I think, sufficient to argue--as very many enlightened men will
do--that everything that could be in the smallest degree repugnant to
the faith of a Catholic has been eliminated from the education which is
imposed on them in existing universities; that every post of honour,
emolument and power has been thrown open to them; that for generations
they gladly followed the courses of Dublin University, and are even now
permitted by their ecclesiastics to follow those of Oxford and
Cambridge; that, the nation having adopted the broad principle of
unsectarian education open to all, no single sect has a right to
exceptional treatment, though every sect has an undoubted right to set
up at its own expense such education as it pleases. The answer is that
the objection of a certain class of Roman Catholics in Ireland is not to
any abuses that may take place under the system of mixed and
undenominational education, but to the system itself, and that the
particular type of education of which alone one considerable class of
taxpayers can conscientiously avail themselves has only been set up by
voluntary effort, and is only inadequately and indirectly endowed by
the State.[42] Slowly and very reluctantly governments in England
have come to recognise the fact that the trend of Catholic opinion
in Ireland is as clearly in the direction of denominationalism as
the trend of Nonconformist English opinion is in the direction of
undenominationalism, and that it is impossible to carry on the education
of a priest-ridden Catholic people on