Last year, of the 1,114 students on the books of the College only 261 were resident within the College—­there being accommodation for only 275.  Of the 853 returned as residing outside the College, more than a hundred do not attend lectures or classes, and are entitled to call themselves members of the College though their only connection with it is in the examination hall—­an evil system which the Commission has condemned, and which one must suppose was borrowed from the Royal University.

Everyone is agreed that a university to be worth the name should, if possible, be residential.  The absence of disciplinary control in Trinity on those residing out of College, the omission on the part of the authorities to enact rules which would allow terms to be kept only in licensed lodging-houses, subject to inspection and to a rigid “lock-up rule” at twelve o’clock, are absent in Dublin not only at Trinity, but at the University College, where one can only suppose its absence to be due to the unorganised condition of a small and temporary makeshift.  Not only, however, for the exercise of disciplinary control, but also because of the close association of men with each other which residence ensures, is this to be regarded as the best means of getting the heart out of a university education.

This being the case, if Trinity were to receive a new accession of numbers its accommodation would have to be largely increased, so that the line of least resistance, which leaves the very largely autonomous constitution of Trinity unimpaired, will be seen to lie in the direction of the establishment of a new college, in which, moreover, it will be possible to make expenses more economical than they are in Trinity.

“It is not for us,” said Mr. Balfour at Partick in December, 1889, “to consider how far the undoubtedly conscientious objections of the Roman Catholic population to use the means at their disposal are wise or unwise.  That is not our business.  What we have to do is to consider what we can do consistently with our conscience to meet their wants.”

The proposals of the Government, as outlined by Mr. Bryce and recommended by the Royal Commission, offend against no one’s conscience.  They assail no vested interest unless one so calls that of which Matthew Arnold spoke as one very cruel result of the Protestant ascendancy; they tend to establish something approaching equality between creeds; they make an end of the mischievous system by which the Royal University has encouraged a false ideal of success by making examination the end-all and the be-all of a so-called university education, and which, moreover, according to the final report of the Robertson Commission, “fails to exhibit the one virtue which is associated with a university of this kind—­that of inspiring public confidence in its examination results.”  The advantages of the present proposal over a reorganised Royal University are that the size and poverty of