ondition, and that the clergy urge the demand only in
order that they may obtain more power than they already possess. The
conditions in University College are some answer to this charge. It is,
as I have said, under the control of the Jesuits, and a very able member
of that Society is its President. Founded though it was for Catholics,
the proportion--namely, about 10 per cent.--of non-Catholic students has
for the last twenty years been greater than that of Catholics attending
Queen's College, Belfast. Of its professorial staff only five out of
twenty-one are priests. There have always been some Protestants among
them, and on the governing council only one member is a priest, and of
the five laymen one is a Protestant.

The history of the University question in recent years is instructive.
In 1868 Lord Mayo, the Chief Secretary, endeavoured without success to
formulate a scheme. In 1873 Mr. Gladstone brought in a Bill which risked
the life of his Government, and failed to pass. Three years later a Bill
of Isaac Butt's was introduced, but was unsuccessful, and after another
three years, in 1879, was established the federal Royal University. In
1885 the Conservative Chief Secretary, Sir Michael Hicks Beach,
expressed a hope on the part of the Government that in the following
session they would be able to bring in a Bill in settlement of the
question. The letter of Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Justice
FitzGibbon, which has been quoted elsewhere, shows that at the end of
the same year the Conservative Government was anxious to make an end of
the matter by legislation. In 1889 Mr. Balfour, as Chief Secretary, on
two occasions expressed in the House of Commons the intention of the
Government to proceed to a solution, for the conditions in Ireland, he
went on to say, were "such as to leave them no alternative but to devise
a scheme by which the wants of the Roman Catholics would be met." We
have seen in another connection the quotation from the Life of Lord
Randolph Churchill urging legislation in 1892, and in 1896 Lord Cadogan,
as Viceroy, explicitly spoke of it as "a question with which the present
Government will have to deal."

Eight years ago, in 1899, Mr. Balfour launched a manifesto on this
question which proposed the maintenance of Dublin University with its
Episcopalian atmosphere, while a St. Patrick's University was to be
founded in Dublin with a Catholic atmosphere, and a University of
Belfast with a Presbyte