nominational, but in the teeth of this unanimity the principle adopted
was that of united secular and separate religious instruction.

One would have thought that on the establishment of the National System
the danger of its capture by the Protestant ascendancy, which was very
obviously anxious to secure its control, would have ensured the
insistence on safeguards for the rights of the weaker section of the
community at a time when no longer held good that _obiter dictum_
pronounced from the Bench in 1758, which was equally true for many years
after, that "the law does not suppose a Papist to exist in the kingdom,
nor can they breathe without the connivance of the Government." On its
formation the National Board included among its members Dr. Murray, the
Catholic Archbishop of Dublin; Dr. Whately, the Protestant Archbishop of
that city; and Dr. Carlisle, a Presbyterian Minister. No attempt was
made to effect anything approaching a proportional representation of the
creeds concerned, and the two Catholic members were outvoted by their
five Protestant colleagues on the Board for the control of the education
of the children of a population in which Catholics were to Protestants
in the ratio of about 4 to 1.

The English Archbishop and the Scottish Presbyterian, in whom power was
in this way placed, set themselves by their regulations to effect the
Anglicising of the Irish children in the schools of the country. The use
of the English language was enforced for the education of children,
thousands of whom spoke Gaelic, and though this may possibly be
justified on grounds of its greater use in the transactions of everyday
life, the same cannot be said of the manner in which the history books
employed were of a kind in which the subjection of Ireland by Elizabeth,
James I., and William of Orange were extolled, as was also the defection
from Rome of England in the sixteenth century.

Whately's policy was avowedly to Anglicise the children in the schools,
to effect the "consolidation," as he called it, of Great Britain and
Ireland, and in a reading book produced under his auspices occur the
following lines, written with that aim in view:--"On the east of Ireland
is England, where the Queen lives. Many people who live in Ireland were
born in England, and we speak the same language, and are called one
nation."

From the reading-books as first published were expunged such verses as
Campbell's "Downfall of Roland" and Scott's "Br