ENGLISH TORIES AND CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN IRELAND.
The motives which impel men to their best actions are not always, perhaps they are not generally, the best possible motives. It is not improbable that more men are driven to the tribunal of penance by attrition than are led thither by contrition. If this be true of men in their individual and private affairs, it is still more strikingly true of politicians and statesmen in their public acts. He would indeed be fanciful and credulous who should imagine that Mr. Gladstone, in framing, advocating, and insisting upon the passage of his bill for the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church in Ireland, was inspired by a pure love of abstract justice and right, and a disinterested desire to relieve the Irish people from a flagrantly unjust burden and a crying wrong. He saw as clearly as any one that this wrong existed, but he perceived also that by removing it he would win popular support for himself and his party. It is tolerably safe to say that had Mr. Gladstone imagined that the passage of the bill for the disestablishment of the church would have resulted in the expulsion of himself and his party from power, he would not have urged the measure. In this case there were two motives: one positively and abstractly good, the other good in the estimation of those who believed that the continuance of power in the hands of the Liberal party was desirable. The latter incentive was the ruling one. Mr. Gladstone, we believe, would not have advocated a measure which he knew to be bad, although this advocacy might have secured him an extension of power. Nor would he have insisted upon the adoption of a measure which he knew to be good had he known that this insistence would deprive him of power. But he saw that while the disestablishment and disendowment of the alien church in Ireland would be an act of justice in itself, it would also be a good political stroke, tending to strengthen his own position and to give a longer lease of power to his party.
One need not trouble himself to assign higher motives than these to the Tory government, which, to the surprise and delight of the Catholics in Ireland, has brought forward a really fair scheme for intermediate education in Ireland, and seems honestly disposed to carry it at the present session of Parliament. Just as we write the bill has passed the House of Lords, and is about to be brought up for final passage in the Commons. The queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament contained a promise that a bill for the promotion of intermediate education in Ireland should be introduced; but it was not until events made probable the speedy dissolution of Parliament and a general election that this promise was redeemed. It is not uncharitable to suppose that the government felt it necessary to have something to offer to Ireland in the event of an appeal to the constituencies under circumstances that would make every vote important. The bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords on the 28th of June—a moment when it was still possible that England might soon find herself embroiled in a foreign war, and when it was given out in governmental circles that Parliament was to be dissolved and a general election ordered. The third reading and final passage of the bill in the Lords took place some two weeks afterwards. Meanwhile the position of affairs had somewhat altered: the conclusion of the labors of the Congress of Berlin and the disclosure of the Treaty of Constantinople had greatly strengthened the hands of the government; the Opposition gave evidence of demoralization and discord in its own ranks, and toward the close of July the inspired journals announced that Parliament would not be dissolved this year, inasmuch as the general approval of the course of the government was too plain to be misunderstood or denied. The Irish Education Bill came up for its second reading in the House of Commons under these circumstances, and its friends fancied that they discovered a little less earnestness on the part of the government in pushing it forward than was displayed under the more critical circumstances in the House of Lords. Still, the probabilities are that the bill will pass and receive the royal assent before the close of the present session; and if this be so, the Tory government of Earl Beaconsfield will go down to posterity as the first administration which has had the courage, the wisdom, and the good-will to award to Ireland anything like justice in the matter of education.
The bill provides for a system of payments by results, and practically is identical with the system which Mr. Isaac Butt laid before the writer during a conversation in London four years ago. We are unaware whether the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cairns—who is, like Mr. Butt, a Protestant, an Irishman, and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin—has availed himself of Mr. Butt’s ideas in the preparation of the measure; but this is not at all improbable. Mr. Butt has expressed his cordial approval of the measure. To what extent the Tory government may have been able to inspire such organs of public opinion as the Saturday Review, and such writers as Matthew Arnold in the Fortnightly, we cannot say; but the fact is that for the first time in its existence the Saturday Review has recognized and defended the right of Irish Catholics to be educated in the way that they considered proper, and that Mr. Arnold seems suddenly to have arrived at the conclusion that the denial of a Catholic university in Ireland is a wicked, absurd, and mischievous freak of English Puritanism. The development of opinion in the Saturday Review is startlingly rapid. In a remarkable article written before the introduction of Lord Cairns’ bill the Review said that “the injustice of refusing either to give the Irish Roman Catholics a university or to allow them to set up one for themselves is so patent that if the demand for a charter were once more put forward it could scarcely be very long resisted.” But in the same pages it warned the Irish Catholics that they must not expect to receive anything like an endowment from the state for denominational education:
“The demand for a state endowment of a Roman Catholic university, or of a Roman Catholic college in a mixed university,” we were told, “may be perfectly just, but it is at the same time perfectly impracticable. For this purpose the surplus revenues of the Irish Disestablished Church will undoubtedly be treated as money belonging to the nation, and unless a radical and almost miraculous change should come over the whole mind and temper of the English people, not a shilling of it will be devoted to a denominational object. This determination on their part may be quite illogical, but it is very firmly rooted. The endowment of a Catholic university or a Catholic college may continue to furnish the text for an annual motion and for any number of annual speeches, but it will do nothing more. The late government attempted to meet the difficulty by establishing a university in which the subjects upon which Romanists and non-Romanists most differ should be temporarily excluded from the university course. Denominational colleges might be incorporated into this university and teach what they liked, but the teaching of the university was to leave burning questions on one side until the university should have become strong enough to run alone, and to decide for itself in what subjects it should give instruction to its students. The scheme fell through.”
Within a few days after this candid expression of opinion the same journal was applauding Lord Cairns’ bill for intermediate education in Ireland, which provides for the application of a certain portion of the surplus revenues of the Disestablished Church for the support of schools that certainly will be “denominational.” True, the money is not to be given directly in payment for religious instruction, but it is to be given in payment to teachers who will impart religious instruction to their pupils. “Not a shilling will be devoted to a denominational object,” said the Review one week; but a fortnight afterwards it was delighted with a measure that proposed to devote a million sterling for the support of a system which is nothing if it be not “denominational.” We rejoice at this sudden and remarkable conversion without inquiring too closely how it came. Catholics everywhere, and Irish Catholics especially, should rejoice when organs of opinion like the Saturday Review speak of a measure that is satisfactory to the hierarchy, the clergy, and the Catholic laity of Ireland as “an honest endeavor to supply Ireland with an article which she really wants, and which nothing but the absurd prejudices of Englishmen has prevented her from attaining before now.” It is certainly encouraging to hear Englishmen told by their most un-Catholic and worldly-minded instructor that in their rejection of Ireland’s claims for Catholic education they have been “singularly unamiable and singularly foolish”; that they have been bent upon educating Irish Catholics in a way in which Irish Catholics have been equally determined not to be educated.
The provisions of Lord Cairns’ bill are briefly these:
“A Board of Intermediate Education of seven commissioners—three to form a quorum—is to be appointed by the lord lieutenant—the members to be removable by him—with two assistant commissioners, who will also act as secretaries and inspectors, at salaries of one thousand pounds each, to be appointed by the same authority. Other officers may, from time to time, be appointed by the board, with the consent of the lord lieutenant and the approval of the treasurer. This board will be a mere examining body, conducting by its officers annual examinations in June and July at convenient local centres over Ireland. The programme of subjects includes six different classes of attainments: (1) languages, literatures, and history of Greece and Rome; (2) the same of England; (3) the same of France, Germany, and Italy; (4) mathematics, including arithmetic and book-keeping; (5) the natural sciences; and (6) another group of subjects to be named by the board. Candidates for examination must show that they have been under instruction in Ireland for the year previous to the date of the examination; and the maximum ages fixed are sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years respectively for the three years’ course. Certificates, or testamurs, will be given, setting forth the results of successful examinations; graded prizes, and also annual exhibitions, of from twenty to fifty pounds, will be awarded, the condition of attendance for at least one hundred days a year in an intermediate school being required in the latter. Holders of any other exhibitions are to be ineligible. The school in which the boy has attended the required number of days receives a bonus of three pounds should he pass in two subjects, four pounds for three, and five pounds for four of the six subjects of the first year’s course; another grant is increased in like ratio for the second and third years. No subject of religion is to enter into the examination or be paid for. A conscience clause (7), while not requiring any such school to be open to all or any classes, is thus framed to protect religious minorities who may attend: ‘The board shall not make any payment to the managers of any school unless it be shown to the satisfaction of the board that no pupil attending such school is permitted to remain in attendance during the time of any religious instruction which the parents or guardians of such pupil shall not have sanctioned, and that the time for giving such religious instruction is so fixed that no pupil not remaining in attendance is excluded directly or indirectly from the advantages of the secular education given in the school.’ One million from the surplus funds of the Disestablished Church is to form the endowment for this scheme, being, in round numbers, £35,000 a year. The Church Temporalities Commissioners are empowered to borrow this sum, pending the close of the liquidation of the assets. The board may alter and amend the whole scheme, save so as to change its leading principles, and may frame codes and rules and lay them before Parliament, when, if not objected to by either House within three weeks, they acquire the force of law.”
The debate in the House of Lords on the second reading of the bill was characterized by a remarkable exhibition of good sense and good feeling among the Protestant members who spoke, while the remarks of the two Catholics who expressed their approval of the measure, Lord O’Hagan and Lord Emly (formerly Mr. Monsell), were discreet and well considered. Lord O’Hagan gave what he properly described as some “startling statistics” concerning the aptitude of Irishmen for fitting themselves for the discharge of public trusts, even under the limited and discouraging conditions of education which had thus far prevailed in Ireland. He showed that England has 72-1/2 per cent. of the population of the United Kingdom, Ireland 17 per cent., and Scotland 10-1/2 per cent. Since 1871 there had been 1,918 places in the excise and customs bestowed in public competition. For these places there had been 11,371 candidates, of whom 11 per cent. were Scotch, 46 per cent. English, and 43 per cent. Irish. Of the places Scotland gained 6 per cent., England 38 per cent., and Ireland 56. Of every 100 Scotch candidates 9 passed, of every 100 English 14, and of every 100 Irish 22.
These figures showed what the youth of Ireland could do when they were educated. But what were their opportunities? As children, up to fifteen they might avail themselves of an excellent primary education, but after that they have few if any opportunities of advancing further. The fact was undeniable that for three hundred years legislation has been directed against education in Ireland, except in a form in which the people would not receive it. The bill now proposed was the first step in the contrary direction, and in Lord O’Hagan’s opinion, if it were administered in the same impartial and fair spirit which had dictated its framing, its results would be most wholesome.
The bill, on the whole, although not perfect, is so great a contrast to all the former educational measures which England has devised for Ireland, and is conceived in so different a spirit, that the Irish Catholics are right in accepting it gladly. It is only to be hoped that the House of Commons will prove to be as reasonable and just as the Lords have been, and allow the bill to pass without mutilating it by mischievous amendments. For half a century England has been tinkering at Irish education, always with the idea that she could compel the Irish to accept Protestant education if Catholic education were made impossible for them. Thus was devised the national system of 1831, the queen’s colleges of 1845, the supplementary charter of 1866, Lord Mayo’s charter scheme of 1867, the unfortunate University Bill introduced by Mr. Gladstone in 1873, the National Teachers’ Act, and Mr. Butt’s University Bill. The English government in their present measure do not storm the Plevna of the religious difficulty; they simply turn it. They do not propose to establish any new institutions, nor to aid the erection of any, nor to subject to inspection and control any of the existing intermediary schools that have been founded by the zeal of the clergy and the charity of the faithful. They leave these alone; but they offer to reward them, and all other similar schools that may be founded, by giving prizes to their pupils, and a bonus to the schools themselves of from fifteen to twenty-five dollars for each pupil who meets certain conditions. The Irish Catholic schoolmasters and schoolboys will not be afraid to enter into this competition; on the contrary, they will “leap at it,” and the best results may be expected to follow. More important still, this step, once taken, will lead ere long, by logical consequence, to the settlement of the Irish university question in the same way. Lord Beaconsfield’s administration of the government of England promises to live in history as an epoch of many brilliant and important events; but if under his rule the Catholic education of Ireland is adequately and satisfactorily provided for, that will be really a more lasting and glorious monument to his memory than his diplomatic victories at Berlin, his second conquest of India, or his virtual annexation of Asia Minor to the British crown.