the ideal arrangement, one must admit that there is a
striking testimony contained in the Report on Primary Education drawn up
in 1904 by Mr. F.H. Dale, as to the efficiency and good management of
the Convent Schools in Ireland, which, it should be noted, are at the
same time those of least expense to the State. The cleanliness and
neatness of the premises, the supervision and management on the part of
the Community, the order and tone of the children, are all highly
praised; and in a further Report on Intermediate Education, prepared by
the same Inspector of Schools jointly with a colleague, will be found
equally strong insistence on the well-known success and efficiency of
the three hundred schools of the Christian Brothers, in which, without
a penny of State aid, are educated some 30,000 pupils; and it was no
doubt to the education given by the Christian Brothers that the
Protestant Bishop of Killaloe referred when, in an address to his
diocesan synod five years ago, he generously recognised the superiority
of the Catholic over the Protestant schools in Ireland.

It was Lord Lytton, I think, who described the Established Church in
Ireland as the greatest bull in the language, since it was so called
because it was a church not for the Irish. All who are acquainted with
those masterpieces of Swift's satire--the Drapier Letters--and who
appreciate the fact that Berkeley--the most distinguished of Irish
Protestant bishops--was refused the Primacy of Ireland because he was an
Irishman, and that to appoint any but an Englishman or a Scotsman would
be to depart from the policy followed throughout the whole of the
eighteenth century, will see that at that time, at any rate, it deserved
the censure which it has received as a foreign body maintained for
denationalising purposes.

The maintenance until thirty-eight years ago of the Established Church,
which raised its mitred head in a country where its adherents formed
one-eighth of the population, but where its funds were extorted from
those who regarded its doctrines as heresy, was, I verily believe, the
_fons et origo_ of the sectarian bitterness which still persists among
Catholics, "Lui demander," wrote a French observer of the position of
the Catholic Church in the days before 1870, "de s'associer a une telle
entreprise lui parait une injure; lui forcer est une violence; la
continuance de cette violence est une persecution." You would find it
hard to make me believe tha