Lord Dufferin opened the Social Science Congress on Wednesday night
at Belfast, in a speech in which he is stated to have defined the object of Social Science as "the acquisition of such knowledge as shall enable the human community to reach the highest limit of moral and physical well-being." We do not quite see what sort of knowledge is not included in that definition, or how his Lordship distinguishes "social science " from the physical sciences, or from theology. However, the definition did not matter much, as Lord Dufferin launched, as was expected of him, into a general speech on the condition of Ireland, which seems to have been a good one. He defended the proposal of the late Government to affiliate the Catholic University to the Queen's University, and to enable the litter to confer degrees on students who had not been educated in any of the Queen's Colleges ; and he advocated iu relation to the Irish Church question Lord Russell's solution,—namely, the fair division of the present endowments between the three great denominations, Catholics, Anglicans, and .Presbyterians. He admitted that public opinion in England sets towards the Volun- tary system, but thought that if Irish opinion decidedly declared itself on the other side, the new Parliament would not impose the English view on Ireland.
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