Every one knows in a general way that the Catholics and Nationalists of Ireland have always been practically deprived of university education, or rather that they never had any university to which they could go without sacrificing their principles or running counter to their bishops. Trinity College (also called Dublin University), with a splendid income, was for over two hundred and fifty years the only university in Ireland, and no Catholic was admitted to a degree in it (although it was largely financed by the rents of land taken from the Catholic Irish) until 1793, nor could a Catholic obtain even a scholarship in it until the year 1873, when the Test Act was repealed. In 1845 Sir Robert Peel created a second university of three colleges, one each in Belfast, Cork, and Galway, and called it the Queen’s University. He meant thereby to solve the Catholic difficulty, and probably went as far as public opinion for the moment would let him, but the Colleges were almost from the outset dubbed the godless Colleges and were rejected by the Irish Catholics, for whom two at least of them had been intended. This Queen’s University having failed to solve the difficulty was dissolved in 1879, and the Royal University of Ireland was established to take its place. This new University, however, was only an examining body. Candidates from the Queen’s Colleges, or from any school that wished, or from private study, came up to Dublin once a year, and passed, if they could, the examinations held in the Royal Buildings. A degree of the Royal University of Ireland did not carry with it any assurance that its owner had ever attended lectures, had ever come under the guiding eye of a professor, had ever mixed with fellow-students, or, in a word, had ever absorbed into himself that finer essence of university education which is not to be expressed in terms of marks at an annual examination. And now in 1909 Irish university education is once more thrown into the melting-pot, and two new Universities have taken or are to take the place of the old Royal, which will expire before next year. The College at Belfast has been enriched and converted into an independent University,
