down to the reign of Queen Victoria, and inclosing the panel in his own case, which he submitted might raise reasonable doubts whether the Stuarts had not fallen short of the skill exhibited in that compilation by the agents of a Liberal Government with a philosophical historian in the Cabinet.

Among the array of my peers and neighbours indifferently chosen, I told him he would find the jeweller of the Lord-Lieutenant, the hairdresser of the LordLieutenant, his Excellency's shoemaker, the chandler to the Chief Secretary, the bootmaker to the Commander of the Forces, the engineer to the Drainage Commissioners, the cutler, grocer, and purveyor to the Castle, the saddler and seedsman of a former Lord-Lieutenant, three Government contractors, a compositor in the College Printing Office, two vicars-choral of St. Patrick's Cathedral, the auctioneer to the Commissioner of Woods and Forests, and the Consul of King Ernest of Hanover. This model panel, which contained but twenty Catholics, who by their position on it were likely to be called upon before a jury was sworn, contained nevertheless eleven Englishmen or Scotchmen and one Frenchman; and, though there were 4,000 qualified persons from whom to select, it contained thirty jurors either challenged by the prisoner or set aside by the Crown on previous trials.

Lord O'Hagan, Mr. Gladstone's Irish Chancellor, carried an Act which took away from sheriffs the power of packing panels. To pack a panel under the existing Jury Act is no longer possible. It may seem strange that there should still be complaints in political trials that juries are unfairly arrayed in Ireland. But it arises from a different cause. The power of challenging jurors was taken away from the Crown so long back as the reign of Edward I., except for a specific cause stated; 3 but law officers in England and Ireland have established an adroit practice by which the same end is attained. They cannot challenge a juror peremptorily, but they direct him in the name of the Crown to stand aside' till the panel is exhausted, and by this method evade the law and accomplish their purpose. Some future Chancellor or Attorney-General will find a reform awaiting him here which is very expedient, and which, happily, may be accomplished any day of the year, for it requires only the assent of the Cabinet.

The education of the middle class was the next subject taken seriously in hand. I shall not attempt to trace the question to its remote beginnings; it is too long and too painful a narrative.

3 33 Eɔ. I.—Ordinatio de inquisitionibus.

Who

'It is agreed or ordained by the King and all his Council, that from henceforth, notwithstanding it be alleged by them that sue for the King that the Jurors of those Inquests, or some of them, be not indifferent for the King, yet such inquests shall not remain untaken for that cause, but if they that sue for the King will challenge any of those Jurors they shall assign for their challenge a cause certain, and the truth of the same challenge shall be inquired of according to the custom of the court.'

This Act, together with all other early English statutes, was made law in Ireland by Poyning's Act in the reign of Henry the Seventh.

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ever desires to understand it à fond will find it treated at large in Dr. Sigerson's Modern Ireland,'4 a book fit for the hands of statesmen from the abundant knowledge and consummate fairness with which contemporary politics are treated. Sir Robert Peel failed to settle the question and Mr. Gladstone failed after him, though both of them approached it in a generous spirit. But we are dealing here not with work attempted, but with work accomplished, and I pass to the final result. In 1878, Lord Beaconsfield being then Prime Minister, Lord Cairns carried a measure which settled this chronic difficulty in a manner that has satisfied public opinion. A Board of Intermediate. Education was created, empowered to institute public examinations at convenient centres throughout Ireland, and to grant exhibitions tenable for a short period, and prizes in money or books to successful students. Another provision enabled them to go still closer to the root of the question; they were authorised to grant to teachers of public schools for classical and scientific education result fees' for such of their scholars as passed a prescribed examination.

The system has been only five years in operation, but it has proved an undoubted success. Last year examinations were held in sixty-six localities, spread over the four provinces, by examiners fairly selected, and upwards of 5,000 boys and nearly 2,000 girls presented themselves, of whom 4,000 passed. The curriculum embraces ancient and modern languages and the native language of the country, ancient and modern history and the history and literature of Great Britain and Ireland, a wide range of science, and even civilising accomplishments such as music and drawing. The system is administered by two paid commissioners; the controlling board, which consists of seven members, includes two ex-chancellors and a chief baron, and some of these eminent persons are understood to give their time liberally to the necessary superintendence.

Here at last, it would seem, is an institution which fulfils all the claims of justice, and to which even faction can take no objection. Alas, it is a system which at bottom would have been proffered, as a fair and final settlement of a long contest between conflicting creeds, to no country in Christendom except Poland or Ireland. Education has always been a passion of the Irish race. The ancient Erin, the Island of Saints, was as indisputably the chief seat of learning and missionary zeal in Western Europe as Manchester is a seat of manufacturing industry; repeated invasions destroyed the native schools and colleges, and the Reformation seized whatever endowments remained and converted them to purposes of its own. By a shameful misdirection of the national resources, colleges. were created for the service of the new Church alone, to the complete exclusion of the Church of the nation. Elizabeth endowed Trinity ↑ Modern Ireland, by George Sigerson, M.D., M.R.I.A. London: Longmans, 1869.

College, Dublin, from the forfeiture of a religious house, and James I. strengthened it by the confiscation of a university which the Catholics maintained at their own cost for their own wants. At the plantation of Ulster a large slice of native lands was granted for the establishment of Royal Schools in the northern counties. Grammar schools were established throughout the island by other public grants. After the Restoration a London alderman, who had obtained extensive confiscations during the Commonwealth, devoted his Irish spoils to the establishment of free grammar schools which are still in existence. All these institutions were and are in the hands of the minority. Since the Union the Belfast Academical Institution was founded by the State for the education of Presbyterians, and still exists. Not a shilling was ever granted for the education of Catholics; nor for any system in which they could share, except at the risk of abandoning their faith, down to 1846, when Sir Robert Peel founded the Queen's Colleges, which, by an unhappy misunderstanding, never served the purpose for which they were designed.

When this new settlement was made five years ago, it was made in the same spirit which governed the disestablishment of the Church. The minority were left in possession of all the schools founded by grants of public money or public lands, and the Catholics, who had no schools but those founded out of their own scanty resources, were not ' levelled up' by aid from any source. Of the small sum available for exhibitions and prizes, the scholars of the endowed schools, who had great advantages at the start, naturally win a liberal share, and the sum available for Catholic students is about as much as the salary of one Cabinet Minister. As the endowment was not taken from the consolidated revenue, but from the Church fund, the property of the Irish nation, there was no difficulty in making a more reasonable settlement. A sum equal to the present value of the endowments enjoyed by the minority would not have been an excessive boon in aid of the schools of the majority. Both would then have started fair, and no one would be entitled to say that one principle is still applied to the claims of a favoured class, and a widely different principle to the claims of the bulk of the nation.

The necessary coping-stone of any adequate system of public instruction is a university, not only to complete the training begun in intermediate schools, but to confer degrees which are the steppingstones to the learned professions. The Established Church was in possession of such an institution, profusely endowed from national property. In 1853 the Catholics, despairing of the initiative of the State, established a university for themselves, towards the support of which the Irish race throughout the world contributed over a quarter of a million sterling. All they sought in the first instance was a small endowment, and the right to confer degrees, without which a

university is only a name. To vindicate their claim to exercise this power one of the most distinguished university scholars in Europe, the present Cardinal Newman, took control of the Catholic University at its foundation. But no Minister dare at that time propose to grant either the endowment or the authority required.

Several years later, at the inspiration of Mr. Disraeli it was believed, something was whispered by the late Lord Mayo of 'levelling up,' meaning doubtless to leave the minority in possession of the university which they held, and from its superfluities, or from some other source, to grant certain aid to the majority. But Parliament scoffed at the proposal of any endowment to Catholics; its most determined opponents being English Radicals. At length, when Lord Beaconsfield had a secure majority in both Houses, he carried an Act which settled the question on the same principle as intermediate education. It was perhaps all he could accomplish, for Mr. Gladstone had already failed to do more, mainly by the sectarian jealousy of his own supporters.

The Act created a Royal University resembling in its functions the University of London, and placed under the control of a Senate fairly chosen from all parties; and entirely satisfactory if it were the sole university in the country. There are no resident students indeed, companionship and competition being the soul of a university, but students from all public schools may compete at its examinations. It is empowered to confer degrees in arts, engineering, medicine, and law, and grant exhibitions, fellowships, and other prizes; as far as an endowment not to exceed 5,000l. a quarter will enable it to do so. The Catholic University on which the Irish race spent so profusely, but which, it must be admitted, gradually lost its original prestige, has subsided into an intermediate school, but the disestablished Church continues in possession not only of all the public schools established by the State, but of the University of Dublin and all its endowments. How far this was a just settlement of a national claim may be left to the conscience of English gentlemen.

The Gladstone Government passed a Land Act in 1870 on which it is not necessary to pause, as it was superseded by the Land Act of 1881. This last measure was for the first time such a one as Peel foreshadowed in 1846; it aimed to do complete and generous justice. It had one serious defect indeed; unlike the memorable agrarian reforms throughout Europe, it did not establish perpetuity of tenure, eo nomine. But perpetuity of tenure, the essential condition of agricultural prosperity, will flow from it. There were doubtless other defects, but when one remembers the constitution of the two Houses through which it was carried, it is a marvel of fairness and liberality. It was a measure which deserved national gratitude, and will assuredly win it in the end. If it was received with distrust at the outset, it is fair to remember how often the Irish people had

been cheated by some plausible pretence of reform, which in the end proved worthless. And indeed Mr. Gladstone in supporting the Bill before Parliament (embarrassed by difficulties which we can surmise) sometimes used language which struck a chill into the national heart. If Irish landlords were as blameless as he supposed no Land Bill would have been necessary; and if the measure was not likely to produce any greater reduction of rent than he predicted, it would have been nearly worthless. It was a singular misfortune also that when the Act was launched the experiment should have been contemporaneous with the imprisonment of 800 men and women for resistance to a system of cruel, and often fraudulent, evictions. That some of the arrests were just and necessary it is impossible to doubt, since James Carey and several of his associates were détenus, but in the bulk of cases a spectator was tempted to echo the language of Michael Sadler, the Conservative economist, half a century ago, that it was a scandal to see the power of the State strained to protect the excesses of those whose conduct had occasioned the worst evils under which Ireland groaned, and whose property would not be worth a day's purchase were the proprietors its sole protectors.' The Commons were mesmerised by Mr. Gladstone, but the other House did not easily abandon the traditional method of dealing with Ireland. When the bill reached the Lords it would confessedly have been treated as tithe bills and municipal bills had been treated in a former generation, but that there was an agitation on foot which was not to be trifled with. It was not prudent, in the interests of Irish landlords, to reject the measure totally, but it was mutilated by what were called amendments.' An appeal, for example, was given from the Land Court to the Judges, and whatever has disappointed reasonable expectation in the new law is traceable to the decisions of the Court of Appeal.

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When the Act had been a little time in operation, the critical task of administering it was interrupted by harsh and premature criticism from the same quarter. A committee of Peers was appointed to report upon it, and commissioners and sub-commissioners were taken away from their duties in Ireland to attend on their Lordships in Westminster. At the close of the second session, hot on the examination of the last witness, a report was adopted, which, if it contained a just and reasonable statement of facts, must have caused the Land Court to be shut up. But the Commissioners replied on their noble censors, and a more exhaustive answer has rarely fallen in my way. It evaded nothing and omitted nothing in the indictment; with perfect temper and perfect logic it joined issue on the whole case, and I am persuaded that twelve upright men could not be put into a jury box in any part of the world who would not have found with them on every count.