chiefly designed for Presbyterians, while the Colleges of Cork and Galway are to have a new and richer sister added to them in Dublin, and these three are to form the National University of Ireland. This is to be a real University, which will give no degrees without attendance at lectures, and it is a University which will be national in the sense that it will be open to everybody and contain no tests, and it has been accepted by the spokesmen of the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin has just been elected its Chancellor. It appears at first sight, and no doubt will turn out to be, a thoroughly satisfactory solution of the university difficulty, for though the first Senate has been nominated by the Crown, the next Senate, which will supersede the present one in five years’ time, will be an academic Senate, on which the Crown has reserved to itself the power of appointing only four nominees out of thirty-five, and one of these four must be a woman. In other words it is the biggest piece of Home Rule ever conceded by England to Ireland since the establishment of Local Government. At the present moment a statutory committee, also appointed by the Crown, but consisting of men both trusted and reliable, are busy drafting statutes, considering what the site of the new College will be, deliberating what chairs are to be founded, what professors appointed, how much money will be spent upon various subjects of learning, and so on, while the Senate meets occasionally to keep in touch with the Committee.
And here it is that the country has suddenly, to the intense astonishment of those who did not know the popular feeling, sprung to its feet, galvanised as it were into an absorbing interest in the proceedings of the Senate. The question now fiercely debated in the newspapers, in the County Councils, in the Boards of Guardians, in the District Councils, in branches of the Gaelic League, in debating societies, in branches of the United Irish League, as well as at great public meetings in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Galway, and scores of other towns is this, ‘What is the Senate going to do about the Irish language? Is it going to be merely an
