VERNMENT.
to them while not one was made to the Irish Catholics. the next Election than he would have gained by the sacri- If the hill, as Mr. Gladstone first explained it, satisfied floe, and that consideration probably determined him not and even delighted Mr. Horsman, the Bill as it seemed to hold out this olive-branch to speakers like the O'Conor likely by the admission of Ministers to be moulded in Don, who distinctly intimated that this would have made the Committee, had Committee ever been reached, ought to have difference between opposition and support. On the whole, enraptured him. It was friendly to mixed education from then, so far as this single debate was concerned, there were the first, but it was becoming more friendly with every excuses for the action of the Irish Roman Catholics, which Ministerial speech. It seemed likely that two mixed Univer- there were not for the few English and Scotch Liberals who sities would have been left instead of one, and that one of deserted their chief.
these mixed Universities would have been a University depend- But how far was there any such excuse in the general policy ing exclusively on mixed education for its supply of students, of the Government which the Roman Catholics deserted ! while the other would have depended chiefly on mixed edu- Their chief grievance was that without a State endowment for cation for its supply of students. The demand of the Catholics the Roman Catholic College in Dublin, the denominational that the teaching part of the new University should be system of education could not run a fair race with the secular dropped, was ignored; the demand of the Protestants that the and mixed system to which they objected. And for our own teaching part of the new University should be supplemented parts, we have so far admitted the reasonableness of this objec- by chairs of mental philosophy and modern history, was vir- tion, that we hold, with Mr. Chichester Fortescue, that but tually conceded. The dislike of the Catholics to the Queen's for the insuperable obstacle of the popularity attaching to a Colleges was ignored ; the dislike of the Protestants to new and abstract formula which seems to us little more than the suppression of Galway College was soothingly treated mere words, and by no means strictly accepted in any depart- and half promised a favourable consideration. The wish ment of the British Empire, there would be no reason why that
of the Catholics for some guarantee of equality in the request should not be complied with. Still, the Irish University Council was ignored ; the wish of the Protestants Members are not such children as to be unable to recognise
for the exclusion of the representative element was graciously political facts. And neither they nor their spiritual received and treated with that respect which means assent. directors and guides now learn for the first time that the Thus, whatever we may say to the action of the Irish Prime Minister could not have offered, and that the Catholics on the second reading, we must say at least that present Parliament would not even have dreamt of accept- the action of the British " waiters upon Providence " was not ing such a proposal. They might as well have turned Mr. the action of Liberals, but of secret enemies of the Liberal Gladstone out for not proposing Home Rule itself. If the Government. They had every reason to expect a triumph of Irish Catholics in the House had any political moderation, the principles for which they professed to be fighting, and any sense of the limits of political concession, any eye for
yet' out of `superfluity of naughtiness' they preferred to what is practicable, they would no more have demanded an desert. Dr. Lyon Playfair, the most strenuous and by far the endowment from Mr. Gladstone for a denominational College, ablest of this party, was satisfied and voted with the Govern- than they would have asked in 1869 for an endowment for ment. The leaders of the Birmingham Education League the Roman Catholic Church to balance the concession of Church were satisfied and voted with the Government. Mr. Miall was buildings, and other concessions beyond the value of the vested satisfied and voted with the Government. But Mr. Horsman and Mr. Bouverie and Mr. Akroyd and Mr. Foster and Mr. McCullagh Torrens were more Pharisaic than even the Phari- ableness of the former demand, if the latter was unreasonable ! THE DEFEAT OF THE GO weight against the vessel ' that they stiffened their minds by
volition against reason. And they have got their reward. V INE British Liberals and thirty-six representatives of They have used their importance to destroy their importance. 11 Roman Catholic constituencies have by their combina- Their accidental alliance with the Tories and Roman Catholics tion destroyed the Liberal Government. The English and cannot easily recur. They can become important again only Scotch Liberals are worth remembering : they are Mr. by joining the Tories, and then selecting a convenient oppor- Fawcett, Mr. Horsman, Mr. Bouverie, Mr. muCullagh Torrens, tunity of deserting back to their old allies. ' Caves ' work by Mr. Aytoun, Mr. Akroyd, Mr. Foster, Mr. Auberon Herbert, the shock they give to confidence. And the Liberals at least and Mr. Whalley ; we do not include Sir Robert Peel, who, will not easily feel confidence in these men again. though he continues to sit among Liberals, has long ceased As for the Roman Catholics, there is for their action, as we to vote amongst them on party qePstions. , Mr. Fawcett may have said, at least this excuse,—that they saw all the strategy be in some measure excused on a.ccom4. of his close con- of the Government during the debate on the second reading nection with the se..Vame for limiting the reform of Trinity devoted to the conciliation of their opponents. Mr. Card- College, Dublin, to the minimum allowance which social well reserved all his eloquence for showing that the Bill could decency would permit, and for the extreme acerbity of those be modified so as to remove the scruples of the Protestants. prejudices against Ministers which have so frequently clouded Mr. Lowe declared with much humour and not a little rea- an- acute, though somewhat' narrow political nature. Mr. son, but certainly without any remorse for the jar he caused to Anberon Herbert is an enthusiast whose politics are apt to be the feelings of Catholics, that the proper way of viewing the 'in the air,' and like meteoric showers, only to cross the path violent opposition of the Irish Bishops to the Bill was to of practical politics at given epochs, when we have plenty of regard it as you would an earthquake, or a famine, or a streaks of hasty and irregular light. Mr. Whalley is not pestilence, or any other natural calamity which you could not responsible, far he could not have helped himself. If he had prevent., but the evils caused by which you might by energy voted even for the purely nominal relief of a Roman Catholic and time repair. Mr. Gladstone himself devoted the most grievance, he would never have had another happy hour, but eloquent part of his eloquent speech to condemning vehemently would have been a maniac of remorse. Mr. Aytoun is an the policy of concurrent endowment. Indeed, he made a sort of approximation to a Liberal Newdegate, with Mr. Newdegate's solemn political testament on the subject, declaring in thegravest suspicions softened by the faint lights of his feeble Liberalism. mannerhis wish "to leave on record the strong conviction " he en- Of the other five deterters whose votes alone would have saved tertained that it would be a grave and fatal error on the part the Bill from defeat, and given the Government a majority of of the House to give the slightest encouragement"to the demand seven- instead of a deficiency of three, three at least belong .that is made for the introduction into Ireland of the system althost by professioa to that class of " waiters upon Providence " of separate religious institutions for academic purposes, and which Mr. Gladstone so well described as resembling " the thereby to revive and repudiate the policy of 1869." And loose rolling cargo of a ship, certain always in heavy weather though the Prime Minister maintained eloquently the right to give their weight against the vessel." Mr. Horsman and of Roman Catholics who deferred to the views of their Bishops Mr. Bouverie have made a study of the art, and no one ever on denominational education to compete with others on distinguished himself more highly in the practice of it than the equal terms for academic distinctions, he kept all his most former on this occasion,—when he swung over from one of the earnest appeals for the hesitating English Liberals, not for open and unreserved admirers of the measure of the Government the reluctant Irish Catholics. Had he proposed to drop to its most virulent and unfair opponent within less than three the teaching part of the new University, — not by any weeks. These men had no excuse, either on the ground of means absolutely essential to his measure,—he would have fanaticism or on the ground of any neglect shown by the Govern- lost 'several Scotch and English Liberal votes and gained ment to their representations. Every concession made in the several Irish Roman Catholic votes, perhaps more than he bad comae of the discussion was, as we think unfortunately, made lost,—but as he well knew, he would have lost more seats at to them while not one was made to the Irish Catholics. the next Election than he would have gained by the sacri- If the hill, as Mr. Gladstone first explained it, satisfied floe, and that consideration probably determined him not and even delighted Mr. Horsman, the Bill as it seemed to hold out this olive-branch to speakers like the O'Conor likely by the admission of Ministers to be moulded in Don, who distinctly intimated that this would have made the Committee, had Committee ever been reached, ought to have difference between opposition and support. On the whole, enraptured him. It was friendly to mixed education from then, so far as this single debate was concerned, there were the first, but it was becoming more friendly with every excuses for the action of the Irish Roman Catholics, which Ministerial speech. It seemed likely that two mixed Univer- there were not for the few English and Scotch Liberals who sities would have been left instead of one, and that one of deserted their chief.
these mixed Universities would have been a University depend- But how far was there any such excuse in the general policy ing exclusively on mixed education for its supply of students, of the Government which the Roman Catholics deserted ! while the other would have depended chiefly on mixed edu- Their chief grievance was that without a State endowment for cation for its supply of students. The demand of the Catholics the Roman Catholic College in Dublin, the denominational that the teaching part of the new University should be system of education could not run a fair race with the secular dropped, was ignored; the demand of the Protestants that the and mixed system to which they objected. And for our own teaching part of the new University should be supplemented parts, we have so far admitted the reasonableness of this objec- by chairs of mental philosophy and modern history, was vir- tion, that we hold, with Mr. Chichester Fortescue, that but tually conceded. The dislike of the Catholics to the Queen's for the insuperable obstacle of the popularity attaching to a Colleges was ignored ; the dislike of the Protestants to new and abstract formula which seems to us little more than the suppression of Galway College was soothingly treated mere words, and by no means strictly accepted in any depart- and half promised a favourable consideration. The wish ment of the British Empire, there would be no reason why that
of the Catholics for some guarantee of equality in the request should not be complied with. Still, the Irish University Council was ignored ; the wish of the Protestants Members are not such children as to be unable to recognise
for the exclusion of the representative element was graciously political facts. And neither they nor their spiritual received and treated with that respect which means assent. directors and guides now learn for the first time that the Thus, whatever we may say to the action of the Irish Prime Minister could not have offered, and that the Catholics on the second reading, we must say at least that present Parliament would not even have dreamt of accept- the action of the British " waiters upon Providence " was not ing such a proposal. They might as well have turned Mr. the action of Liberals, but of secret enemies of the Liberal Gladstone out for not proposing Home Rule itself. If the Government. They had every reason to expect a triumph of Irish Catholics in the House had any political moderation, the principles for which they professed to be fighting, and any sense of the limits of political concession, any eye for
interests given to the Protestants. Where is the reason- What the Roman Catholics are now pleased to say is, that they cannot conscientiously avail themselves of the mixed
Colleges, that the mixed Colleges are for their proposes anti-' Catholic, and that they would prefer endowed religious rivals like Trinity College as it is, to endowed secular rivals like Trinity College as it was proposed by the Bill to make it. Well, the answer to that is, that if they are serious in this position, they should never have voted for the disestab- lishment and disendowment of the Irish Church,—at all events without the strictest conditions as to the appli- cation of the national property released by the disendowment. The effect of that disestablishment and disendowment was to abstract for neutral and secular purposes a large fund hitherto devoted tp religious purposes. And if Catholics seri- ously hold that to add to the temptations of secular and neutral pursuits is more menacing to Catholicism than to add to the temptations of what they regard as religious error, they were fatally wrong in abstracting from what seems to them the cause of religious error, and leaving to the disposal of the secular power over which they have no control, the large fund obtained by the disendowment of the Protestant Church. When they accepted that polioy they virtually acknowledged that Catholics and Protestants were pretty well agreed as to the neutral objects to which wealth may be devoted, and that there was no great danger of a vital difference as to its appropriation, if once it were agreed that no particular religion was to profit by it. Now they suddenly declare that to devote that wealth to some at least of these neutral aims is more impious, more threaten- ing to the morality of Catholics, than to have it devoted to the interests of what they hold to be a false religion. Why, then, did they take it from that religion till they were assured that it would not be devoted to secular ends more insidiousa still ? The simple truth is, that it never occurred to them in 1869 that secular education was more morally dangerous than heretical religions education. That is a discovery reserved for the violent party spirit of the Catholic Bishops in 1873. Does any one suppose for a moment that a State like the United Kingdom, with the known views of its Ministers, would have been trusted by Catholics with a large sum abstracted from religious purposes, under a clear conviction that other and more dangerous purposes to which it might be devoted were then staring them in the face, without an express con- dition that it should not be so devoted ? In 1869 there were no other such purposes known to the Irish Catholics. In 1873 they have been invented by the violence of party feeling.
We say, then, that this new position of the Roman Catholics is inconsistent with their action in 1869, and is in itself unreasonable. We say more,—that considering what Mr. Gladstone's Government has done for Ireland, considering the immense boon, offered by this Bill, of graduation for de- nominationally educated Roman Catholics on equal terms with secularly educated Catholics or Protestants, and of a generous system of educational scholarships as open to these denominationally educated students as to others • consider- ing, lastly, that the effect of the vote ofWednesday', morning appeared likely to throw Ireland into the hands of men who have resisted all these boons, and who rest their claim to govern on the boast that they have done so, the conduct of the Catholic Liberals, who deserted en masse to the Tories in the division of this week, was petulant, foolish, and full of political ingratitude. It was, indeed, mere deference to a bench of Bishops who do not know what they would be at ; who approve a disestablishment of religious opinion one day which they disapprove the next ; who ask eagerly in 1866 for what they reject with insult in 1873 ; who increase their demands with success, and learn to treat their friends with contumely after those friends have helped them to defeat foes whom they could never have beaten alone. However, there are excuses for the Irish Catholic deserters, though they are poor excuses. There are no excuses for the English and Scotch Protestant deserters. The conduct of Mr. Horsman and Mr. Bouverie and their very few non-fanatical supporters was simply inexplicable, except on considerations in which personal vanity and disappointed ambitions are the most important political ingredients.
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