THE REFUSAL TO GRANT A CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY. T HE cause of
the Catholic University for Ireland was greatly advanced by the debate of Friday week in the House of Commons. It is true that the debate ended in a hostile vote of 177 to 91, and that the Irish Members contributed to it little of any value, but nevertheless the advance was palpable and serious. The conversion of Sir W. Anson, Conservative of Conservatives and Member for Oxford University, was of itself most significant ; and so was the admirable speech of the Member for the Arfon district of Carnarvorishire. Mr. William Jones is a Non- conformist, " a Protestant of the Protestants," as he called himself, a devotee of undenominational education, to which he attributes much of the content and prosperity of Wales, yet in a speech which extorted hearty applause from both sides of the House he pleaded for a Catholic University in Ireland as essential at once to its cultiva- tion and content. In the cause of enlightenment he postponed " an ideal principle" as, under the circum- stances, inapplicable and injurious. That is a most signi- ficant sign of progress, as was the admiration which Mr. Jones elicited from opponents. Men who hold an opinion with fanatic force do not cordially enjoy speeches which show that they are losing foothold with their strongest supporters. The event of the debate, however, was the speech of Mr. Balfour. The Unionist Leader of the House, who certainly—as, indeed, he said of himself—has no leaning to Roman Catholicism, was obviously in pas- sionate earnest, and though he commenced by declaring that he was on this subject an exhausted man and had said all that was in him to say, he poured out a stream of argument so convincing, of illustration so apposite, and of reflection so enlightening that he drew from Mr. John Morley an almost unprecedented compliment, and would, there is little doubt, had his party not been so afraid of constituents, have carried his Bill as completely as Macaulay carried his amendments to the Copyright Bill, and by the same weapon, irresistible argument, so presented that it awoke no fresh antagonism. Amid the hundreds of speeches that we have heard or read we can remember but one in which a speaker so nearly converted a hostile audience, — the one in which Mr. Gladstone proved that the exemption of charitable funds from the Income-tax was wrong in principle, because fatal to the impartiality of the State. When Mr. Gladstone sat down on that occasion, after announcing that the proposal would go no further, his great opponent declared publicly that had he persevered the House must have given way, being intellectually borne down. Mr. Balfour is often accused of being too academic, but it is not the art of a Pro- fessor which enables an orator to put the most offen- sive of all arguments for his proposal with a grace which extorts from those who favour it enthusiastic cheers. What Mr. Balfour wanted to say was that, as we see in Rhenish Prussia, education inevitably strips Roman Catholicism of its most injurious features, and he so presented that side of the question that every Roman Catholic in the House felt that his creed had been honoured by the argument. " I do not in the least believe that University education will be an instrument for the conversion of Roman Catholics to Protestantism ; but I do believe that, if the evils which we believe to result, at all events, from the growth of Roman Catholicism in some of its forms exist now in Ireland, they will be diminished rather than aggravated by anything you can do in the way of higher education. Take the case of Germany. I do not believe that the actual proportion between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants in Germany has in the last two or three generations been materially altered. At all events, I have no grounds for believing that it has been altered in favour of the Protestants. Yet there you have University education and can see what education can do for the great Roman Catholic population, because the German Roman Catholics are by universal admission, by the admission of every student in every branch of knowledge, the most advanced, the most enlightened, and the most learned of any of their co-religionists." If that triumph of sym- pathetic dialectics is academic, would that we had more professors in the Commons to raise debate to higher planes. And surely it was insight as much as unusual knowledge of a special history which enabled Mr. Balfour thus to make of Scotland, Presbyterian Calvinistic Scotland, an unanswerable illustration of the advantages of a Roman Catholic University. " I remember that of all parts of the United Kingdom Scotland is the one where University education has, perhaps, done more good, where it has penetrated more completely through every section of the population—upper class, middle class, lower class—and I ask myself whether that result would ever have been attained if the Scotch Universities in the periods of their earlier activity had not been in active religious and political sympathy with the people. We are now told that the Irish Roman Catholics are throwing away their opportunities for higher educa- tion in not going to a University whose atmosphere is Protestant, but whose doors are open to them. Supposing the Universities of Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edin- burgh, and St. Andrews had manned their teaching staffs from top to bottom with Roman Catholics since the Reformation, supposing that the main bulk of the students of these Universities had been, in consequence of that fact, Roman Catholic, does any human being believe, knowing anything of history or of human nature, that these four great Universities would have been used by the Scotch as they have been used to such great ad- vantage for four hundred years ? " Mr. Balfour might have added to his arguments from Germany and from Scotland that Rhenish Prussia, being at once educated and Catholic, is devotedly loyal to the greatest of Protes- tant houses, one, moreover, which is as distinctively Protestant as any Nonconformist; and that Scotland, which at first resented the Union as strongly as ever • Ireland did, is as cordially part of Britain as England is; but perhaps he felt that at this moment, when Irish Catholics are dying in heaps for Queen Victoria, that argument from loyalty was superfluous or out of place.
To accept such devotion from Irish Roman Catholics, yet refuse to grant the one method of intellectual eleva- tion for which they all petition, and which their clergy regard as absolutely essential, seems to us almost monstrous, and, in truth, we believe it seems so to a majority within the House. It is not the Member who knows of Germany, and remembers how many Con- tinental sceptics have been trained in the seminary, who requires to be convinced, but the average Pro- testant elector, who cannot rid himself of a vague impression that as education strengthens the man who receives it, in educating Catholics in the Catholic way and amidst a Catholic atmosphere he is strengthening Catholicism, which at heart he believes to be a creed that is both untrue and un-British. It is most difficult to reach him, for his conviction is born of prejudice rather than reason, and the Catholic Church is for the moment fanning its fire by betraying in every direction anti-English sympathies, but we believe that in the end even he will be converted. Englishmen have always this mark of sense about them, that in the end they follow their leaders ; and as they submitted to Catholic emancipation, which they hated and dreaded with all their hearts, so they will sub- mit to see Irish Catholics who are emancipated educated as wt It as Protestants without more than low-voiced mur- murs. Indeed, we are not sure even of the murmurs. They must see in the end, as Mr. Balfour told them, that this is not an ecclesiastical question, but a lay question; that the men to whom they are refusing the means of culture are not priests, but laymen who in every walk of life, and specially on the battlefield, are struggling for the same causes as themselves; who, if they are degraded, degrade the Empire, and if they are elevated, elevate the whole community, Protestant as well as Catholic. If it is truth which is in question, how can they diffuse the mental power of receiving truth more directly than by educating thoroughly the mis- believer ? And as for loyalty, let them ponder the news- paper "great fact" of the day. The Duke of Norfolk is sailing for South Africa to 'fight at the head of a corps which he himself has raised on the side to which the electors are wishing success. The Duke, at least, is not seeking to improve his own position or maintain himself in comfort. He is sacrificing for the flag almost every- thing which makes life enjoyable, and a great official position besides; and he is not only the premier Peer and the recognised leader of English Catholics, but he is a believer of whose fidelity to his Church no one ever entertained a doubts The average Protestant elector is, after all, a person of sense, and we would just ask him whether, if all Irish Catholics shared the sentiments and the education of the Duke of Norfolk, he would think of Ireland as more dangerous or less dangerous than at present. It is not a pleasant argument to use in a cause which ought to succeed because the English people love justice, and will face a risk on its behalf ; but it is an intelligible one, and we would ask the average elector where his answer is.
We shall be told, of course, that the Irish Roman Catholic can go to the Protestant University if he pleases, but the assertion is in all but form untrue. He can go just as an English Evangelical can go to be educated at Stonyhurst. Nothing stops him except his conscience. That conscience may be unenlightened, but of its potency in causing Irish Catholics to reject the means of instruc- tion there can be no doubt whatever. Perhaps of all mankind the Irish Catholic is most desirous of education, if only because it will help him up in the world, and he craves to rise; yet of three million two hundred thousand Irish Catholics only three hundred have become graduates. Is not that proof sufficient that he demands a different University ?
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