MR. GOLDWIN SMITH ON IRELAND.
[To Tan germs OP TIM “SPSCTATOR.1
Sra,—Reckless statements made, and religions antipathies shown by prominent Unionists, increase much the difficulties we Irish defenders of the integrity of the Empire have to contend with. I ask your permission to protest against one of the latest exhibitions of that anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feeling which deprives us of the sympathy of many true and loyal men. In a letter written at the beginning of this month (to the Times) by Mr. Goldwin Smith, claiming for himself a special knowledge of Ireland on account of his having spent a summer at the Chief Secretary's lodge, he lets both his imagination and his bigotry ran riot.
"No Irishman, Catholic or Protestant," he says, "could possibly have done for national education in Ireland what was being done by Sir Alexander Macdonald,—a Scotchman, yet as heartily devoted to Ireland as any of her own sons." Yet not only was Sir Alexander an Irishman racy of the soil, but his successor, Sir Patrick Keenan—who, bettering his example, has not only brought our primary education to its present high state of excellence, but framed, and, with Sir M. Hicks-Beach's assistance, carried through Parliament, our admirable system of intermediate education—is both an Irishman and a Catholic. So mach for reckless statement. Now for religious antipathy. In the same letter he denounces the Catholic Church as "an obscurantist Church which, by repressing intelligence, cripples industry." Surely this is the very blindness of bigotry. We know, and unpleasantly feel, that the industry of children of this obscurantist and industry-crippling Church in Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces is running us rather hard in the markets of the world.
The true obscurantiste, in my opinion, are those statesmen who, year after year, omit to redress the monstrous injustice of our University system. Over and over again, to the late, as well as to the present Government, the cruel wrong which that system inflicts upon our people has been shown. While the higher education of the minority is richly, and even lavishly endowed, not one endowed lay Catholic College exists from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear.
Not many years ago, the best Chief Secretary which the generation has seen said to me :—" Is it not a poor thing that, in preparing measures for Irish education, I must consider the wishes of English Dissenters and Scotch Presbyterians rather than of the Irish people ?"
This scandalous wrong has done much to alienate from our cause many of our beet men, both lay and clerical. I doubt whether English Churchmen, from the Archbishopof Canterbury downwards, would be very warm supporters of a system of government which gave Oxford and Cambridge to Catholics or Dissenters, and left them out in the cold.
Mr. Goldwin Smith would do more to support the Union by devoting his splendid abilities to the removal of this injustice, than by ignoring Irish capacity and reviling the Church of the Irish people.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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