LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE ROMAN CATHOLICS AND MIXED SCHOOLS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE “SPECTATOR."]
SIR,-It was justly said by Mr. Chichester Fortescue that though the question of the Irish Church happened to take the religious form, it was in truth a question of the ascendancy of a conquering race, a question whether the original harsh relation of conqueror and conquered should be still kept up in Ireland, or whether, by putting an end to Protestant ascendancy, we should thenceforth really look upon and treat the people of Ireland as our fellow- subjects and citizens, on terms of complete political equality.. It was on this ground, of the duty of giving complete equality of citizenship to the Irish with ourselves, that the English and Scotch constituencies and their representatives supported Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Fortescue in carrying the disestablishment of the Irish Church, notwithstanding the deep and widespread dislike felt through those constituencies for the religious creed of the Irish Roman Catholics. But though the disestablishment of the Church inflicted a mortal wound upon that ascendancy which has hitherto enabled the Protestant and the Saxon to maintain all the differ- ence between conqueror and conquered still existing between him and the Roman Catholic Celt, yet there is enough of life still remaining in the late dominant party to make it needful that we should understand well what it is doing, and trying to get us to help it in doing, in order that it may yet maintain its ascend- ancy. It is now taking its stand on the question of education ; and while its owdobject is the preservation of the old ascendancy, it is enlisting in its service two opposite kinds of English opinion. In Ireland it is the party of Protestant ascendancy which is supporting the cause of "mixed education," but it finds supporters, on the one hand, from the popular English feeling against Popery ; and on the other, from the advocates of pure secular and state education so ably represented by the Pall Mall Gazette. The former are persuaded that by supporting the "Mixed Education" system, they will resist the spread of Popery by schools under the control of Cardinal Cullen and the Roman Catholic priests ; the latter hope that by the maintenance of the " mixed " system, which is at least a State and quasi-secular scheme, they may at the same time facilitate the introduction into England and Scotland of a purely secular and State education, and so gratify at once their love for abstract theories of Govern- ment, and their hatred for priests, Protestant no less than Popish. But if we will consider it in both these aspects—the Protestant and the doctrinaire—it is only the old story of ascendancy in a new form. I doubt whether history can show a grander specimen of doctrinaire statecraft, and of Protestant zeal combined, than the establishment of the Protestant Church in Ireland. Not only did it seem when first invented to be the most perfect scheme for civilizing and spiritualizing Ireland, and making it an integral part of the English nation, but it is only now, in the present generation, and almost the present year, that many of our wisest statesmen and theologians have, after three hundred years of experience of its utter failure, been able to sur- render the hope that so noble a design might after all succeed. But it has been given up at last, this magnificent doctrinaire and Protestant design ; and now the doctrinaires and the Protestants of the present day are ready to build up another design of the same kind, by maintaining and developing "mixed education," and forcing it upon the recusant Irish by the agency of the representatives of the old ascendancy. The mixed education scheme is not, indeed, now first devised, and it was, when devised, accepted by the Roman Catho- lics. But when so devised and accepted, it was a compromise by which the dominant power consented to grant toleration to those it had hitherto sternly kept down. But toleration is but the first step to equality, a step which must be left behind before equality is reached ; and it is equality, not toleration, which the Roman Catholic people of Ireland now claim. And they repudiate "mixed education," because they know it threatens to be, and to be meant to be, a new badge of ascendancy to replace the old one.
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