(From a Photograph by W. Lawrence, Dublin.)
The Queen’s speech was read to Parliament by Commission on the 6th of February, and it promised an Irish Education Bill, a Judicature Bill, a Land Transfer Bill, an Education Amendment Act, a Local Taxation Bill, and a Railway Regulation Bill. In the debate on the Address the Opposition leaders dwelt mainly on foreign questions, pressing the Government to say whether they were prepared to recommend the rules under which the Alabama case had been decided to the European Powers; and if so, whether they would recommend them as interpreted by the legal advisers of the Crown, or as interpreted by the majority of the arbitrators. Mr. Gladstone first said that the rules had been recommended for adoption by the Powers, but without any special construction being put on them. Then he had to correct himself before the debate closed, by explaining that he had made a mistake, for the rules had not yet been brought under the notice of Foreign Governments. This confession naturally forced the public to conclude that the Tories could not be far wrong when they declared that foreign affairs were neglected because Lord Granville was indolent and Mr. Gladstone neither knew nor cared anything about them.
PROFESSOR FAWCETT.
(From a Photograph by the London Stereoscopic Company.)
On the 13th of February Mr. Gladstone introduced the Irish University Education Bill. It affiliated several other educational institutions besides Trinity College to the University of Dublin. Two of the Queen’s Colleges, established by Sir Robert Peel, were to be associated with the University, and the Queen’s University itself was to be abolished. Queen’s College at Galway was to be suppressed, because it had failed to attract students to its classrooms. The so-called Catholic University and several other Roman Catholic seminaries were also, in the same manner, to be attached to the Dublin University. The new University was to have an income of £50,000 a year, a fourth of which was taken from Trinity College, a fourth from the endowment for Queen’s University, three-eighths from the Irish Church surplus, whilst fees, it was expected, would make up the balance. It was to have professors for teaching in Dublin all academical subjects excepting history and mental philosophy, which were tabooed as too controversial for Ireland. Bursaries, Scholarships, and Fellowships were liberally endowed. Tests were to be abolished, the Theological Faculty of Trinity College was to be transferred—with an endowment—to the Disestablished Church, and the prohibited subjects, History and Philosophy, were not to be compulsory in examinations for degrees. The constituency of the University was to consist of all graduates of the affiliated colleges. The governing council of twenty-five was to be nominated in the Bill, after which, vacancies were to be filled up alternately by co-optation and Crown nomination. After ten years, however, equal numbers of the council were to be chosen, by the Crown, by co-optation, by the professors, and by the graduates. The Bill, according to the Bishop of Peterborough—by far the ablest Protestant ecclesiastic Ireland has produced in the Victorian period—“was as good as could be under the circumstances,” and “ought to have pleased all parties.”[49] Unfortunately it pleased nobody, and its weak point was obvious. It attempted to provide for separate denominational education in the affiliated colleges, and for mixed secular education in Trinity College and the University of Dublin, to which they were affiliated—the one system being as incompatible with the other as an acid with an alkali. As Mr. Gathorne-Hardy said, the exclusion of History and Philosophy rendered the new University a monster cui lumen ademptum. The proposal to make the Irish Viceroy its Chancellor recalled, he declared, the lines of Milton,
“Its shape,
If shape it can be called, which shape had none
Distinguishable in feature, joint, or limb—”
all the more that