of greater importance.  But both are necessary.  Both must be adequately provided for in the supreme matter of higher education.  Above all, the two classes must be educated to regard themselves as united by the bond of a common country—­a sentiment which, if genuine, would treat differences arising from whatever cause, not as a difficulty in the way of national progress, but rather as affording a variety of opportunities for national expansion.

I do not concern myself as to the exact form which the new institution or institutions which are to give us the absolutely essential advantage of higher education should take.  If in view of the difference in the requirements to which I have alluded, and the complicated pedagogic and administrative considerations which have to be taken into account, schemes of co-education of Protestants and Roman Catholics are difficult of immediate accomplishment, let that ideal be postponed.  The two creeds can meet in the playground now:  they can meet everywhere in after life.  Ireland will bring them together soon enough if Ireland is given a chance, and when the time is ripe for their coming together in higher education they will come together.  If the time is not now ripe for this ideal there is no justification for postponing educational reform until the relations between the two creeds have been elevated to a plane which, in my opinion, they will never reach except through the aid of that culture which a widely diffused higher education alone can afford.

* * * * *

When I was beginning to write this chapter I chanced to pick up the Chesterfield Letters.  I opened the book at the two hundredth epistle, and, curiously enough, almost the first sentence which caught my eye ran:  ’Education more than nature is the cause of that difference you see in the character of men.’  I felt myself at first in strong disagreement with this aphorism.  But when I came to reflect how much the nature of one generation must be the outcome of the education of those which went before it, I gradually came to see the truth in Lord Chesterfield’s words.  I must leave it to experts to define the exact steps which ought to be taken to make the general education of this country capable of cultivating the judgment, strengthening the will, and so of building up the character.  But every day, every thought, I give to the problems of Irish progress convinces me more firmly that this is the real task of educational reform, a task that must be accomplished before we can prove to those who brand us with racial inferiority that, in Ireland, it was not nature that has been unkind in causing the difference we find in the character of men.

FOOTNOTES: 

[23] Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, II., 122-4.

[24] Recent Reforms in Irish Education, p. 7.

[25] It was not authorised to give degrees to lay students; and even the admission of lay students to an Arts course was prohibited by Government, lest Catholic students should be drawn away from Trinity College.  See Cornwallis Correspondence, III., 366-8.