y. The objection to a continental education may be strong as regards
the convenience of the Irish; but the inconvenience has no longer any
relation to ourselves. No air in Europe can be tainted with a fiercer
animosity to England than the air of Ireland. In this respect the students
of Maynooth _cannot_ be more perilously situated. Whilst we all know by
the Repeal rent and the O'Connell yearly tribute, that the Irish Papists
could easily raise three times the money demanded for Maynooth, if they
were as willing to be just in a service of national duty as they are to be
liberal in a service of conspiracy.

_Thirdly_, Connected with this question of _motives_, arises another
aspect of the case. A college, it may be said, cannot do much in the way
of modifying the political temper of a country, whether for the better or
the worse. If disaffection to the government prevails in Ireland, that may
argue no participation in such a spirit by the rules of Maynooth. But in
another direction, Maynooth cannot plead innocence. The O'Connell
agitation would at any rate, with or without Maynooth, have distempered
all public loyalty amongst the lower classes. _They_ could present no
resistance to influences operating too strongly upon their nationality.
But the priestly order, if originally by their training at all adorned
with the graces proper to their profession, would not have fallen under
the influence of acts so entirely mobbish. Yet we know that by no other
engine has Mr O'Connell so powerfully operated on the Irish mind as
through the agency of the priests. Not O'Connell moulded _them_ for his
service, but they presented themselves ready moulded to _him_; and with
exceptions so rare as to argue a more extensive secularisation of the
priestly mind throughout Ireland, than has ever been witnessed in the
strongholds of Popery. This early preoccupation by a worldly taint of the
clerical mind amongst the Irish Catholics, could not possibly have reached
an excess so entirely without parallel in Europe, unless chiefly through
profligate systems of training at Maynooth. In all Ireland there was found
with difficulty any specimen of the simple rural pastor (so common in
France) who withdrew himself from political strife. The priest who
considered his spiritual character degraded by partisanship, (no matter in
what service,) was nowhere to be heard of. Wherever Mr O'Connell wanted an
agent, an intriguer, an instrument for rousing the people