a separate university or even a separate college would be ridiculous.  In England Catholics are a small sect.  In Ireland they form the great bulk of the nation.  In Montreal, where Catholics form only forty per cent. of the population, a Catholic University was established by Royal Charter, and the same principle has been applied in the establishment of Catholic Universities in Nova Scotia, in Malta, in New South Wales, and in the founding of the Mahommedan Gordon College at Khartoum.

As long as Trinity maintained tests, so long did the Catholics demand as of right a purely Catholic University on the grounds of civic equity, but in these days of open doors they have again and again expressed their demand for a college or university open to men of all creeds—­Catholic in the sense that Oxford and Cambridge are Protestant, and are in consequence thronged with young Englishmen; Catholic in the way that the Scottish Universities are Presbyterian and that Trinity, Dublin, is Episcopalian.  Not a rich man’s college, but one to which all may go as they do to those in Scotland and like those racy of the soil, and for the rest, in Cardinal Newman’s words—­“Not a seminary, not a convent, but a place where men of the world may be fitted for the world.”

Everyone recognises to-day the grievance of the Dissenters in England and Wales in single school areas under the Education Act of 1902.  Ireland may not unjustly be said to be a single university area, for to call an examining Board a university is a misnomer.  It is surely not too much to assert that the conscientious scruples of the Irish Catholics to forms of education of which they do not approve are as strong as the feelings of the Non-conformist conscience.  The attempt to force undenominationalism on the country has been an expensive failure.  Recognising this, the denominational—­nay, more, the Jesuit—­University College has in a niggardly fashion and by a back door been subsidised by the State.  The demand is for no more than a university which shall be Catholic in the sense that it shall be national, and this in a preponderatingly Catholic country implies Catholicism.  The Irish Catholic bishops in 1897 declared they are prepared to accept a university without tests in which the majority of the governing body are laymen, with a provision that no State funds should be employed for the promotion of religious education.  It is idle, in view of this, to protest that the demand is urged only on behalf of rampant clericalism, and that the only form of university which Catholics will accept is of such a kind as would serve to strengthen the hand of the priests, whose sole aim in this demand is to secure that increase of power.  The shifts of intolerance are many, but I cannot believe that it will long continue to masquerade in this manner as the statesmanlike buffer between a priest-ridden country and an aggressive clergy.  Granting, for the sake of argument, that this was the case, one