Ireland has been lifted by the last five and forty years. On this let me speak out of my own observation. I was just entering upon life when the Catholics of these kingdoms were admitted into Parliament. I well remember the political conflicts from the time of Mr. O'Connell's election for the county of Clare. From that day to this many events and reasons have made me note somewhat closely the course of our legislation: and my clear and firm conviction is, that at no time in the history of the English Monarchy has Ireland had so wide, so various, and so powerful a share in the legislature, in the public opinion, and in the public life of the Empire. The justice of Englishmen has admitted Ireland to the same legal privileges and powers as England and Scotland; and the intelligence and enegy of Irishmen are every year converting what is potential in the Statute Book into actual exercise and possession. It is not my intention now to enter upon political matters; but I must say in passing that I do not forget the inequalities which still depress the Catholic population of these kingdoms. They are not, however, inequalities of the law, which is the same for all; but inequalities of social and personal conditions, which still weigh upon the posterity of those who were a generation ago under penal laws. Who would have believed that, after five and forty years that is, nearly half a century after the admission of Catholics to Parliament-there should not be a single Catholic returned to the House of Commons by any constituency in England or in Scotland? And who would believe that, of the hundred and five Irish members in the House of Commons, the Catholic members should be only one in three to represent a people of whom the Catholics are nearly four to one? Nevertheless, as I am aware, the Protestant representatives of Catholic constituencies are men of honour; and through them also Catholic Ireland makes its just claims felt, so far as they are felt, in the Imperial Legislature. Your Grace will correct me if I be in error; but am I not right in affirming that Ireland has a public opinion of its own which has matured and strengthened in the last forty years beyond all example in the past history of the country? And has not that public opinion a powerful action, through an extensive and active press, upon the public opinion of England and upon the Imperial Legislature? And let me add that, in all the great cities and towns of England and Scotland, there is a response to this public opinion and to this public voice of Ireland which carries home both to the ear and to the intelligence of this country. My belief is that there is a great future for Ireland. If less than fifty years have brought about what I have hardly touched in outline, what may not another fifty years with the

accelerating ratio of improvement accomplish? When I look on foreign nations, and I may say also upon England, I see cause for grave foreboding. Everywhere I see change, or what men call progress, without stability. Governments and nations are marching into the unknown, without a base of operations, and therefore without any line of retreat; without communications open for resource, or means of reforming in case of a disaster. States, I do not say monarchies, for they have sold themselves and are morally gone, but States without faith are therefore without God; and States without God have no stability, because they have no vital coherence. They may hold together by the force of custom for awhile, or by the tenacity of interest even for a long time; but they have no source of life or curative resources in themselves. All these things I see in Ireland. You have a people pervaded by faith, openly serving God by every form of private and public duty. You have a religious unity in doctrine, worship, and communion, which resists and casts off all modern expedients of latitudinarianism or Godless legislation. The progress of Ireland is on the pathway of Christianity, which has made the nations of Christendom and the glory of them. They have departed, or are departing from faith, and their glory likewise is departing from them. For them I see no future. I see no future for Imperial Germany; or for revolutionary Italy; or for Spain, if it abandon its ancient Catholic traditions; or for France, if it continue to deify Voltaire and to glorify the principles of 1789. But I do see a future for Ireland, and I see also a future for England-if Ireland be Ireland still, and if England have still a Christian heart. Here is the trial which has now reached its crisis. The trial is this: Shall the next generation of Irishmen be formed as Catholics? Shall the next generation of Englishmen be formed as Christians?

III.

I am at a loss to understand the blindness which has fallen upon a multitude of men at this day. They would indignantly claim to be Christians. But they deal with Christian education as they would deal with the casting of iron and the combing of wool; as a necessary but expensive work, in which there is no motive for enthusiasm. Not so those who desire to rid the world of the Catholic faith, of doctrinal Christianity, and of religion in any form. They know perfectly well that the school is more fatal to their policy than the church. Our churches would soon stand empty if our schools were not full. They see what we are either blind enough not to see, or, as they may well think, stupid enough not to understand; that the shape, and mould, and form, and character of the next

generation is to be decided in our schools. Bring up the children without religion, and the next generation will pull down the churches. We in England were upon the brink of being terrified by agitation, and juggled by Leagues into some compromise, which is the beginning of interminable concessions. This danger is I hope past, because the momentary scare is over, and the weakness of the agitation is found out. We have need, however, of a hundred eyes, and of keeping them all open, to watch the dangers which beset the Catholic and Christian education of these countries. The popular education of Ireland is indeed safe; not through any favour of legislatures, but through the fidelity and industry of the Catholic Church and its people. Your danger will be in the higher education. And your only safety will be in the same Catholic fidelity and industry; which will render all experiments at mixed education in Ireland useless, because the Catholic laity in Ireland refuse them, and the Catholic Church is resolved to provide colleges and a higher education for its people. When the late proposal for university education in Ireland was first made known, I was, for a time, induced to believe, looking at it as for us in England, that it could be accepted with safety and worked for ultimate good. But this impression, for I will not call it a judgment, or even an opinion, I carefully guarded by the consciousness that those only who are upon the spot and familiar with all local and personal conditions could form an adequate judgment. I was fully aware that what could be tolerated in England might be intolerable in Ireland: and that what would be a gain to a handful of Catholics in a vast non-Catholic population, might be a great loss, and even a wrong, to a Catholic people of which the religious unity and Catholic traditions are unbroken. When, then, the Catholic Episcopate of Ireland refused the proposal on the high Christian principle that it involved two things which the Catholic Church inflexibly refuses, the one mixed education, the other education without faith, I recognised the higher and nobler attitude of its refusal. I saw in it the broad assertion that a Catholic people have a right to Catholic education; that education is impossible without faith; that already enough had been endured by Ireland; and that had been done by Parliament in the establishment of primary schools in which the Catholic religion could not be taught, and in the founding of colleges where education is mixed; that both these things are wrong against a Catholic people; and that it was therefore impossible to consent to a measure which would consolidate, perpetuate, and extend this system of mixed and Godless education in the heart of a people profoundly religious and profoundly Catholic. When I saw this, I at once recog

nised not only the truth and the justice, but also the higher elevation of your reply. Such mixed and Godless schemes of university education have become inevitable in England by reason of our endless religious contentions. England has lost its religious unity and is paying the grievous penalty. But Ireland may well remind the Imperial Parliament that it has not forfeited its religious unity, and that such penal legislation is neither necessary nor tolerable. Even Scotland has made this plea good, in bar of schemes of education at variance with its religious convictions. The Scotch Education Bill is essentially religious and denominational. Parliament has legislated for Scotland wisely and justly, according to the desires and the conscience of the Scotch people. It will assuredly take its measure of any education schemes for England from the ideas and choices of the English people. To their shame be it spoken, there are Englishmen and Scotchmen who will claim this for themselves and will deny it to Irishmen. We have of late years fully unmasked this injustice. For a long time your claim was not denied, because it was not distinctly enunciated. Ireland had borne with a long course of niggard and ungenerous legislation; in which the least possible recognition was admitted that Ireland is a Catholic country, and the Irish a Catholic people. But when certain politicians began to claim Presbyterian education for Presbyterian Scotland, the whole truth was told, and the claim of Ireland was unintentionally established. The Presbyterians in Scotland are as somewhat more than four to one of the population. The Catholics of Ireland are about the same to their non-Catholic fellow countrymen. The late Irish University debates have lifted the whole question, and placed it upon this level: Catholic Ireland justly claims that its higher education shall be Catholic. And from this demand, I trust, under God, it will never go back. The Bishops and people of Ireland who, in resistance of the Godless colleges five and twenty years ago, founded a Catholic University, will not fail now in resisting the scheme of a mixed university, to give permanence and development to the university which already exists. The vigorous unity of the pastors and people of Ireland will not hesitate to take up and to consolidate the work which was so well begun with so much foresight, and with so much self-denial. Its very existence on Stephen's Green is a witness that Catholic Ireland claims a pure Catholic University. I trust that no line, no letter of this noble and explicit inscription, will be effaced. It was the work of the Irish Church and nation. It has stood for more than twenty years, bearing witness to the claims of the laity of Ireland, and to the duty of the Imperial Parliament towards the Irish people. If it served no other purpose

in our day-and it does serve a multitude of other and excellent uses this one alone would suffice to bind the faithful to maintain it in its integrity, and to make it the centre of the higher national education of Ireland.

IV.

If this be done by the spontaneous efforts of the Irish people, the day must come when a juster spirit will prevail in our Legislature. It will not for ever obey the narrow bigotry of Covenanters, nor the jealous fears of Sectarians, nor the imperial haughtiness of tyrannical Liberals, nor the supercilious contempt of infidels. The Parliament of the future will be broader, and more in sympathy with the constituencies of the three kingdoms. England and Scotland will not claim to legislate for Ireland according to English and Scotch interests and prejudices; and Ireland, when it is justly treated, will have no more will then than it has now to make or meddle in the local affairs of England or Scotland. The three peoples are distinct in blood, in religion, in character, and in local interests. They will soon learn to "live and let live," when the vanishing reliquiæ of the Tudor tyranny shall have died out, unless the insane example of Germany shall, for a time, inflame the heads of certain violent politicians to try their hand at what they call an Imperial policy. I have watched with a mixture of sorrow and indignation the writings and the speeches of a handful of boisterous and blustering doctrinaires, who are trying to turn men away from doing what is just towards Ireland by grandiloquent phrases about the Imperial race and an Imperial policy. An Imperial policy, in the mouths of doctrinaires, means a legislation which ignores the special character and legitimate demands of races and localities, and subjects them to the coercion of laws at variance with their most sacred instincts. Not so the Imperial policy of ancient Rome, which wisely consolidated its world-wide power by the most delicate regard to the religion of every race and nation. But our doctrinaires either have no religion, or a Scotch or English creed. They will take good care to make provision for themselves.

Imperial policy means, and may be defined as, legislation to hamper and harass the Catholic Church in Ireland. Such Imperial legislation would be intensely English for England, and Scotch for Scotland; but Imperial, that is, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic for Ireland. Imperial legislation means using Imperial power to force Ireland into subjection to the religious ideas of England. These same gentlemen lament openly that the policy of the Tudors stopped short of exterminating the Irish Catholic race. They are saying: "If we had lived in