So matters were allowed to rest until, with the advent to power of the present Government, the lacuna, which owing to the recalcitrancy of Mr. Justice Madden, had been left in the public information on the problem by the omission of Trinity from the Robertson report, was filled up by the appointment of a new Royal Commission.

Early this year their report was published.  Five of the Commissioners are in favour of a modified Dunraven scheme, three follow the Robertson scheme, and one—­the only Catholic Fellow of Trinity, one of the very few of that faith who had ever been elected to that office—­is in favour of no change, an opinion which he expounds in three lines.

It must be remembered in connection with the minority recommendation that the importance of its coincidence with that of the Robertson report may easily be exaggerated if sufficiently strong insistence be not laid upon the exclusion of the University of Dublin from the purview of the latter.

The chief respect in which the majority recommendations differ from those of Lord Dunraven is in the inclusion in the new federal Dublin University of the present Queen’s College in Cork, and possibly of that of Galway.  It is important to study this proposal, because it is, according to Mr. Bryce’s last words on resigning office, to be the means by which the Government hope to effect a solution.

The fact that both the Robertson and the Fry Commissions reported against Mr. Balfour’s plan, to the promotion of the success of which in the eight years which have elapsed he has done nothing, on the grounds of the difficulty of bringing it into play, show that for the moment opinion is set against the multiplication of Universities, and the choice for the present lies between the two methods of dealing with the two existing Universities, one of which does not teach, while to the other the students of the country cannot in conscience go to be taught.

After Mr. Bryce’s speech we can no longer ask British statesmen, “How long halt ye between two opinions?” That the plan adopted by the Government is the better of the two at present mooted I shall endeavour to show.  In the first place, it is a mere accident that Trinity College has continued so long the sole College in the University of Dublin, Chief Baron Palles, in a very able note appended to the report, disentangles from a number of legal decisions and statutory declarations the distinctions between Trinity College and the University of Dublin which it is endeavoured to confound.  The Charter of James I., conferring on Dublin the privilege of a University, foreshadowed the establishment of other Colleges.  Both the Act of Settlement, 14 & 15 Car.  II. (1660), and the Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1793, expressly authorise the erection of another College in the University—­a fact which makes the proposed change which partisans are anxious to paint as revolutionary vandalism appear in truth merely