THE IRISH-UNIVERSITY QUESTION.
[To THR EDITOR OF THR 4.• SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—Allow me to make a few remarks on your notice of my letter to Professor Fawcett. You state that the statistics which I quoted, and which are taken from the official report of the Census of 1861, relative to the Irish professional men, bear out totally opposite conclusions to those which I draw. I am content to rest my case on a single point. The Bar represents the upper section of the professions. At the Bar, Roman Catholics are not one in two, but their chances of promotion are inversely as their numbers, as is proved by the proportion of Roman Catholics to Protestants on the Irish Bench. Now, I ask, where are the Roman Catholics who are excluded from the Bar through want of a Catholic University to save their "faith and morals" whole ? At the last call to the Bar one student only out of an unusually large number was without a University degree. As to the Roman Catholic clergy, it is obvious that the duties which the Roman Catholic priest is bound to perform necessitate under any circumstances a separate collegiate training.
Are, then, Trinity and the Queen's Colleges to be destroyed, to make room for separate colleges for the Irish Roman Catholic priesthood ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
THOMAS MAGUIRE, Professor of Latin. Queen's College, Galway, 2nd October, 1872.
[Our correspondent is ignorant of our position in the matter. We have never advocated endowed Roman Catholic Colleges in Ireland, but an endowed University, of the London-University type, with scholarships attainable at matriculation, and tenable at any college, sectarian or otherwise. Of course, the number of educated men among Roman Catholics is materially diminished by the want of any good University training and testing for laymen in which the religious teachers of the people can put confidence. And of course, the Bar is not likely to be chosen as a profession except by educated men. We believe no well- informed man doubts that the middle-class—estimated by its means, not by its culture,—is, at least, as largely Roman Catholic as Protestant in Ireland.—En. Spectator.]
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