optional subject, or will they make it an essential?’ That, of course, is what we do not yet know.
The Gaelic League, while laying stress upon the fact that this is really a great national question and not a Gaelic League question at all, has of course thrown itself altogether upon the side of making Irish an essential for matriculation, and hundreds of thousands of people who have never joined the Gaelic League have taken the same side. Their argument is that now, at last, Ireland has got a real University of her own, which she can mould after her own fashion, and that she does not wish it to be a mere Catholic replica of Trinity College or a University to rear people for export, but a self-centred national institution, far more interested in raising Irishmen for home consumption than for colonial posts, and almost as much interested in turning them out good Irishmen as good scholars. They argue that if their University, for which they have made such unheard-of sacrifices in the past (generation after generation growing up without any university education whatever, and thus voluntarily condemning themselves to obscurity and poverty rather than go to Trinity College), is to be only an imitation of an English institution, Irishmen will be greatly distressed, and indeed violently indignant. They point out that in the long-run the money for this University will come out of their own pockets, and that consequently the people who pay for it have the right to make their voice heard as to the kind of University they desire. They insist that in spite of all the battles fought with the Boards of Primary and Intermediate Education, and all the concessions wrung from them during the last fifteen years, the old Irish nation must yet go down and Ireland become an English province—an unhappy, second-hand, second-rate English province—unless she now succeeds in nationalising her higher education also, and thus continuing the national language and tradition.
In order to do this they put forward a very simple and at the same time a very far-reaching demand, which is that a knowledge of the Irish language should be essential for
