It would require a volume in itself to deal with all the evils, not only intellectual and educational, but social, economic and political, which Ireland has suffered owing to the absence of a higher education directed to the development of her special psychological and material needs.  It took eighty years of agitation before anything like educational equality in the higher realms of study was established.  The Protestants had in Trinity College a university with a noble tradition and a great historic past.  The Catholics had only University College and a Royal University, which conferred degrees without compulsion of residence.  In hounding Mr Wyndham from office and killing him (in the political sense, though one would be sorely tempted to add, also in the physical sense), the Irish Party also destroyed, amongst other things, the prospects of a University settlement in 1904.  A University Bill had, as a matter of fact, been promised as the principal business for that session.  The question was in a practically quiescent state, nobody taking any particular interest in it, when the Catholic laity of Cork, supported by the mass of the Protestant laity as well (as was now become the custom on all great questions in the leading Irish county), came together in a mighty and most representative gathering, which instantly impressed statesmen that this educational disability on religious grounds could no longer be tolerated.  Mr Birrell, who failed in most other things during his ill-starred Irish administration, was admirably energetic and suave in getting his University proposals through.  And it was by employing wisely the methods of conciliation and winning over to his side men of opposite political views, like Mr Balfour, Mr Wyndham, Sir Edward Carson, and Professor Butcher that he piloted the Bill safely through its various Parliamentary stages.

With the success of Land Purchase, with the introduction and passage of the Labourers and University Acts, with the settlement of the Evicted Tenants Question, and with the offering of any resistance to the effort made to remove the embargo on Canadian cattle, which would seriously have affected the prospects of the farmers, the Irish Party had exercised no initiative and could not legitimately claim one atom of credit in respect of them.  Yet when their Parliamentary prestige began to shake and show unmistakable signs of an approaching collapse, it was ever their habit to group these among their achievements in the same way that they appropriated the fruits of Parnell’s genius—­it was “the Party” that did everything, and so they demanded that the people should sing eternal Hosannas to its glory.

In justice to the Party, or, more correctly, to Mr J.J.  Clancy, M.P., who stood sponsor for the measures and watched over their progress with paternal care, they did get inscribed on the Statute Book two Acts of considerable importance—­the Town Tenants Act and the Housing of the Working Classes Act, but beyond these the less said of their Parliamentary conquests from 1903 onward the better.  Their achievements were rather of the destructive and mischievous than the constructive and beneficent.