The Daily News of yesterday seems angry at our explanation
of the method of the University of London in relation to the exclusion from a Mixed University's curriculum of authors likely to excite controversial feelings, and replies that where books are not prescribed by the University of London, it is in order to "prevent undue limitation of the subject ; " that "the University of London has never had to provide for, and never has contemplated, such a state of things as exists in Ireland, or anything analogous to it ; " and that, in the curriculum for the London Bachelor of Laws' degree, Sir Henry Maine's "Ancient Law" and Austin's "Lectures on Jurisprudence," both likely to be disagreeable to Roman Cathelics, are still prescribed. On the latter point, as to the specification of these two authors for the Law degree, the Daily News is right, and we were in error. But then Bachelors of Laws have almost always passed the Bachelor of Arts' degree, and are mature men, no longer under College training, and the difficulties which arise in relation to Catholics still in statu pupillari do not affect them. It is matter of fact, and one perfectly well known to the writer of the article, that the motive with which books like Mill's "Political Economy" and "Logic," and other books of that nature, were banished from the University's curriculum, was not merely the wish to avoid undue limitation, but to get over the religious difficulty which affects the University of London in a less degree indeed than it would affect a mixed University in Ireland, but still in a very substantial degree,—and also that the expedient is largely successful. The argument of the Daily News of yesterday amounts pretty nearly to this,•••••.4 the Catholics of Ireland won't be satisfied with any fair mixed system,'—which surely is a question for them,—, and if they will, they shan't, because we won't concede it,' which is intelli- gible enough, but hardly statesmanlike. Moreover it is hardly worthy of the usually cultivated equanimity of our contemporary, which has an unfortunate strain of the Orangeman's intolerance mixed in its otherwise strenuous Liberalism.
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