anded. They
were also the victims of the malign opposition extended to the policy
of Conciliation, even when it embraced a deed so essentially
charitable as the relief of the families who had borne the burden and
the heat of the day in the fierce agrarian wars. Lamentable to relate,
Mr Dillon tried to intimidate Mr T.W. Russell and Mr Harrington from
joining the Conference, and when he failed, publicly denounced their
Report. And if there are still some of them "on the roadside," as I
regret to think they are, the blame does not lie with the
Conciliationists, but with those who persistently opposed their
labours.

In the settlement of the University Question Cork also took the lead
when its prospects were in a very bad way. This had been for over a
century a vexed and perplexing problem. I have dealt cursorily with
primary education, which is even still in a deplorably backward state
in Ireland. Secondary education has not yet been placed on a
scientific basis, and is not that natural stepping-stone between the
primary school and the university that it ought to be. There is no
intelligent co-ordination of studies in Ireland and we suffer as no
other country from ignorantly imposed "systems" which have had for
their object, not the development of Irish brains but the
Anglicisation of Irish youth, who were drenched with the mire of
"foreign" learning when they should have been bathed in the pure
stream of Irish thought and culture.

It would require a volume in itself to deal with all the evils, not
only intellectual and educational, but social, economic and political,
which Ireland has suffered owing to the absence of a higher education
directed to the development of her special psychological and material
needs. It took eighty years of agitation before anything like
educational equality in the higher realms of study was established.
The Protestants had in Trinity College a university with a noble
tradition and a great historic past. The Catholics had only University
College and a Royal University, which conferred degrees without
compulsion of residence. In hounding Mr Wyndham from office and
killing him (in the political sense, though one would be sorely
tempted to add, also in the physical sense), the Irish Party also
destroyed, amongst other things, the prospects of a University
settlement in 1904. A University Bill had, as a matter of fact, been
promised as the principal business for that session. The question was