titude of the Catholics
takes a new complexion. No suggestion, it will be noted, is made in the
overtures to the bishops to give Catholics any--not to speak of a
proportionate--representation on the Councils of the College. As at
present constituted, the Board, owing to the abolition of celibacy as a
condition of Fellowship and the extinction of the advowsons belonging to
the College by the Irish Church Act of 1869, has become a body of men,
the average age of whom is over seventy and the average time since the
graduation of whom is a little more than half a century. There is at
present one Catholic Junior Fellow in the College, and from the above
facts it will be seen that he may get on the governing board, if he
survives, in about forty years from now.

The government in a college by men whose undergraduate days were fifty
years ago is not calculated to inspire hope for a liberality of
treatment with which a more modern generation might be imbued. The
suggestion that Catholics show narrowmindedness in refusing to throng
the halls of a College admittedly envious of its Protestantism and
maintaining automatically its purely Protestant government for
three-quarters of a century more is very disingenuous.

That if they were to comply, Protestantism would have by some special
means to maintain its supremacy is obvious, for the Episcopalian
Protestants are only thirteen per cent. of the population of Ireland,
and if Catholics were to swamp Trinity and to succeed in obtaining a
share in its councils proportionate to their numbers in the country, the
body for which Trinity was founded would find themselves unable to
obtain any dominant voice in its government.

"Trinity College is quite free from clerical control," said the
Vice-Provost in his statement to the Commissioners, regardless
apparently of the fact that of the seven Senior Fellows who, together
with the Provost, form the College Board, no less than four are
clergymen. In this connection I cannot do better than quote from the
statement submitted by the Committee on Higher Education of the General
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland for the information of
the last Royal Commission:--

"So long as Trinity College remains practically as it is there is a real
grievance for all denominations except the Protestant Episcopalian, and
the members of those denominations will still be able to say that the
best education in the country--and whether it is the best