It is often alleged that the anxiety of the Irish for other facilities for higher education than are at present afforded arises from their priest-ridden condition, and that the clergy urge the demand only in order that they may obtain more power than they already possess.  The conditions in University College are some answer to this charge.  It is, as I have said, under the control of the Jesuits, and a very able member of that Society is its President.  Founded though it was for Catholics, the proportion—­namely, about 10 per cent.—­of non-Catholic students has for the last twenty years been greater than that of Catholics attending Queen’s College, Belfast.  Of its professorial staff only five out of twenty-one are priests.  There have always been some Protestants among them, and on the governing council only one member is a priest, and of the five laymen one is a Protestant.

The history of the University question in recent years is instructive.  In 1868 Lord Mayo, the Chief Secretary, endeavoured without success to formulate a scheme.  In 1873 Mr. Gladstone brought in a Bill which risked the life of his Government, and failed to pass.  Three years later a Bill of Isaac Butt’s was introduced, but was unsuccessful, and after another three years, in 1879, was established the federal Royal University.  In 1885 the Conservative Chief Secretary, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, expressed a hope on the part of the Government that in the following session they would be able to bring in a Bill in settlement of the question.  The letter of Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Justice FitzGibbon, which has been quoted elsewhere, shows that at the end of the same year the Conservative Government was anxious to make an end of the matter by legislation.  In 1889 Mr. Balfour, as Chief Secretary, on two occasions expressed in the House of Commons the intention of the Government to proceed to a solution, for the conditions in Ireland, he went on to say, were “such as to leave them no alternative but to devise a scheme by which the wants of the Roman Catholics would be met.”  We have seen in another connection the quotation from the Life of Lord Randolph Churchill urging legislation in 1892, and in 1896 Lord Cadogan, as Viceroy, explicitly spoke of it as “a question with which the present Government will have to deal.”

Eight years ago, in 1899, Mr. Balfour launched a manifesto on this question which proposed the maintenance of Dublin University with its Episcopalian atmosphere, while a St. Patrick’s University was to be founded in Dublin with a Catholic atmosphere, and a University of Belfast with a Presbyterian atmosphere was to be founded on the basis of the existing Queen’s College in that city.  The reasons which Mr. Balfour gave for desiring a settlement of the question deserve quotation:—­