Mr. Gladstone and the Nonconformist Council are both making political
capital out of the statement that Mr. Balfour at one time "held out hopes of the endowment of a Roman Catholic University," which is not true ; while it is certainly true that Mr. Gladstone, in his great and impressive speech in 1873, alleged that the Irish people have a great grievance in regard to the inequality between their position in relation to University education, and the position of the Protestants, who have free access to Trinity College, Dublin, with the full approval of their religious advisers. For our own parts, we think strongly, and have always thought, that the Catholic University College which alone suits strict Catholics, ought to have a library and laboratories of a kind which would put it on a fair equality with Trinity College, Dublin; but that would not mean the endowment of any religious teaching or religious opinion. It seems to us a very quaint political situation when the party which advocates a Legislature that would be largely under the control of Archbishop Walsh, girds at its opponents because they have thought the very straitened means of the Catholic University College for procuring an apparatus for secular instruction, an evil which ought to be removed. It is the grievance of the wolf against the lamb for disturbing the stream out of which they were both drinking, over again.
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