If, indeed, the present Ordinance does not work, it is difficult to conceive any that will.  It seems exactly fitted for the needs of Trinidad.  I do not say that it is fitted for the needs of any and every country.  In Ireland, for instance, such a system would be, in my opinion, simply retrograde.  The Irishman, to his honour, has passed, centuries since, beyond the stage at which he requires to be educated by a priesthood in the primary laws of religion and morality.  His morality is—­on certain important points—­superior to that of almost any people.  What he needs is to be trained to loyalty and order; to be brought more in contact with the secular science and civilisation of the rest of Europe:  and that must be done by a secular, and not by an ecclesiastical system of education.

The higher education, in Trinidad, seems in a more satisfactory state than the elementary.  The young ladies, many of them, go ’home’—­i.e. to England or France—­for their schooling; and some of the young men to Oxford, Cambridge, London, or Edinburgh.  The Gilchrist Trust of the University of London has lately offered annually a Scholarship of 100 pounds a year for three years, to lads from the West India colonies, the examinations for it to be held in Jamaica, Barbadoes, Trinidad, and Demerara; and in Trinidad itself two Exhibitions of 150 pounds a year each, tenable for three years, are attainable by lads of the Queen’s Collegiate School, to help them toward their studies at a British University.

The Collegiate School received aid from the State to the amount of 3000 pounds per annum—­less by the students’ fees; and was open to all denominations.  But in it, again, the secular system would not work.  The great majority of Roman Catholic lads were educated at St. Mary’s College, which received no State aid at all. 417 Catholic pupils at the former school, as against 111 at the latter, were—­as Mr. Keenan says—­’a poor expression of confidence or favour on the part of the colonists.’  The Roman Catholic religion was the creed of the great majority of the islanders, and especially of the wealthier and better educated of the coloured families.  Justice seemed to demand that if State aid were given, it should be given to all creeds alike; and prudence certainly demanded that the respectable young men of Trinidad should not be arrayed in two alien camps, in which the differences of creed were intensified by those of race, and—­in one camp at least—­by a sense of something very like injustice on the part of a Protestant, and, it must always be remembered, originally conquering, Government.  To give the lads as much as possible the same interests, the same views; to make them all alike feel that they were growing up, not merely English subjects, but English men, was one of the most important social problems in Trinidad.  And the simplest way of solving it was, to educate them as much as possible side by side in the same school, on terms of perfect equality.