IRELAND REJECTS THE NEW ROMAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sra,—The author in your columns of last week of the very able review of my " History of the Irish Parliamentary Party " enters a plea in mitigation of the pro-clerical policy of the British Government in Ireland. I admit that it is a very fair plea. So long as the Irish Parliamentary Party is supposed to represent Ireland, pro-clericalism seems at least -excusable on the part of the British Government. As; how- ,ever, I point out in my " History," the British electoral laws in force in Ireland, coupled with the American money and Molly Maguire and other sub-Tammany organisations, return a body of Members to Parliament who represent little but a small 'body of wirepullers and dictators.
To come to the University question, I merely quote a -popular Irish paper which stands outside the Tammany ring. It is the Sinn Fein of March 26th last. It prints what is common knowledge, that the educated Catholics will not send their sons to the pseudo-National University, chancellored by a priest, and having eight of its leading Chairs in the Arts -Faculty monopolised by priests, while the whole of the seminarists of Maynooth College have been foisted on its -roll without the necessity of attendance ! You remember that
the necessity of attendance was the grand pretext for sub- stituting the psendo-National for the Royal
The National University," says Sinn win, "remains without students. The Cork College has practically out itself off, and is now engaged in pulling various strings to secure the status of a University for itself. The Catholic students of the North are going into the Belfast University, and Trinity College has in the year of grace 1910 more Catholic students entered on its books than it has had since 1689. The National University is fact, accord- ing to English Act of Parliament, bat in no other sense is it a fact. Many of its professors have no students to beach, and no likelihood of having them as things stand. Matters have now gone so far that we are able to state definitely that a section of those con- nected with the University are in favour of reverting to a former plan and making a deal by which the National University would become a College within the University of Dublin,' Trinity forming the other College. Thus before the National University has been a year born it is almoet iw eartranis."
The grant of a special University to the clericals has been followed by a general flight of Catholic students into Queen's University, Belfast., and Trinity College, Dublin! I am told that more than two hundred Catholics have gone to Trinity, and a still larger body to the Queen's at Belfast. If we had decent secondary schools and entrance scholarships on the scale demanded by a poor country, we should have two thousand Irish Catholic laymen attending usurectarian Universities along- side of their Protestant fellow-cotaarymen. May I respectfully plead that those hundreds of young lovers of impartial learn- ing are a worthier representation of Ireland than Pat Ford's stipendiaries at Westminster P—I am, Sir, S:c.,
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