the presumption
that his party is that which harmonises with the popular feeling,
and what he means by improving the character of the House is to
add some fifty or sixty men who may be willing to accept peerages
upon the condition of becoming a body-guard to this Government.

The 'Times' yesterday and the day before attacked Lord Grey with
a virulence and indecency about the Peers that is too much even
for those who take the same line, and he now sees where his
subserviency to the press has conducted him. In the House of
Commons the night before last, Ministers would have been beaten
on the sugar duties if Baring Wall, who had got ten people to
dinner, had chosen to go down in time.

[Page Head: IRISH NATIONAL EDUCATION.]

The principal subject of discussion this last week has been the
Education Board in Ireland, the object of which is to combine the
education of Catholics and Protestants by an arrangement with
regard to the religious part of their instruction that may be
compatible with the doctrines and practice of both. This
arrangement consists in there being only certain selections from
the Bible, which are admitted generally, while particular days
and hours are set apart for the separate religious exercises of
each class. This will not do for the zealous Protestants, who
bellow for the whole Bible as Reformers do for the whole Bill.
While the whole system is crumbling to dust under their feet,
while the Church is prostrate, property of all kind threatened,
and robbery, murder, starvation, and agitation rioting over the
land, these wise legislators are debating whether the brats at
school shall read the whole Bible or only parts of it. They do
nothing but rave of the barbarism and ignorance of the Catholics;
they know that education alone can better their moral condition,
and that their religious tenets prohibit the admission of any
system of education (in which Protestants and Catholics can be
joined) except such an one as this, and yet they would rather
knock the system on the head, and prevent all the good that may
flow from it, than consent to a departure from the good old rules
of Orange ascendency and Popish subserviency and degradation,
knowing too, above all, that those who are to read and be taught
are equally indifferent to the whole Bible or to parts of it,
that they comprehend it not, have no clear and definite ideas on
the subject but as matter of debate, vehicle of dispute and
dissension, and al