THE IRISH UNIVERSITY BILL.

THIS bill, whose defeat caused the Gladstone Ministry to resign, was to the following tenor: The old universities were to have their charters withdrawn, and from their endowments a new National University of Ireland was to be established, in which the only requirement for degrees should be the passing of the examinations.

At present the only places where degrees can be got in Ireland are the Queen's University and Trinity College, Dublin. In neither of them is there now any requirement which students must fulfil in order to be matriculated, though at Trinity there used to be a law that only those who had signed the "Thirty-nine Articles" should have a scholarship or even a degree. Gladstone's bill would have made legal what has hitherto been granted to Roman Catholics and Non-Conformists only by sufferance and custom. But this measure, though approved by the liberal and thoughtful men of all parties, did not suit the Roman Cardinal, who insisted that Trinity and Queen's should be left as they are, and that a new college should be endowed, to be under the exclusive control of the Roman clergy. To such a project the Premier could not have given his support if he had wished; for it would have involved him in the inconsistency of urging the Non-Conforming Scotch and English to disestablish the Episcopal Church in Ireland, and at the same time to recognize the Catholic Hierarchy. So Cardinal Cullen, resolved to accept nothing less than the full measure of his demands, orders the Catholic members of Parliament to side with the Tories to defeat the bill of the Ministers. Gladstone falls by the ingratitude of those whose chief benefactor for five years he has been; nor are the students of Dublin sufficiently free from bigotry, or sufficiently under the influence of independent thought, to refrain from insulting the statesman by burning him in effigy.