§ Order for Second Reading read.
§ MR. O'DONNELL, in moving that the Bill be now read a second time, said, he by no means proposed to deal in any large or comprehensive manner with the Irish Education Question, or indeed, to do more than deal with a very small though 30 important portion of it. The general question of the state of higher education in Ireland had been frequently before the House, and would come before it again, with, he hoped, better results in the future than in the past. On that point, however, he had little or nothing to say in connection with the present Bill. His object was merely, taking the Queen's Colleges and Queen's University in Ireland as they stand, to try and get out of them as much utility as they were capable of furnishing; and it would remain for the House and the Government to consider whether the amount of utility which they were capable of furnishing was very much after all. With that question he did not accordingly deal. He found that the House and Her Majesty's Government had established certain Colleges in Ireland called Queen's Colleges, since incorporated into a University called the Queen's University, for the ostensible purpose of the advancement of learning in Ireland; and he also found, as he expected to be able to prove to the House that these Colleges had not contributed to the advancement of learning—that, on the contrary, they had done much to hinder that advancement; and, taking them as they were, and looking only to the classes which had chances of profiting by them, he proposed that such guarantees should be added as might secure that even within a very limited area learning might be advanced and not retarded by these institutions. In conformity with the programme expressed by the Government when passing the Act, and generally sanctioned by the majority of hon. Members of the House—though, as usual in such cases, not sanctioned by the majority of the Irish people—the Queen's Colleges were erected, and afterwards the Queen's University was established by Royal Charter for the purpose of granting degrees to the students educated in these Colleges. To come at once, then, to the object of the Bill, he first sought to have the Queen's College, Belfast, recognized as that which it had actually been from the commencement—namely, a College which, to all intents and purposes, was for the exclusive use of the members of the Ulster Presbyterian Church and other Evangelical Protestants in that part of the country, whose general tenets did not differ essentially from those of Pres- 31 byterianism. Secondly, with regard to all the Queen's Colleges, he proposed that some efficient system of public inspection should be established, and that the results of the inspection should be regularly laid before Parliament; and, furthermore, that the public moneys which supported these institutions should be wholly raised in such a form as to permit of the rigorous application of public control. He meant that the whole of the sum devoted to the support of the Queen's Colleges and University should be annually provided by Parliament in the Estimates, and that no portion of it should be practically removed from the control of Parliament by being placed to the account of the Consolidated Fund. The provisions of the Bill were few; but he had reason to believe that they would be effective, and that a thorough system of inspection would fully meet the exigencies of the case. Without some such system, the Colleges and University were likely to continue to live on the public funds, and yet to counteract instead of promoting the objects for which these funds were originally granted. If they were at length to commence to promote the advancement of learning in Ireland a stimulus should be applied, and a corrective brought into exercise, and that stimulus and corrective should, in the first place, be public inspection, and, in the second place, should be the threat that if the inspection did not show that these institutions were what they pretended to be, they should cease to be a burthen on the public purse. The Bill, then, was divided into two portions—one referring to a particular aspect of affairs in the Queen's College, Belfast, and the other seeking generally to provide for the improvement of education in the institutions at large. The provision that had regard to the Belfast College was rather incidental than essential to the general scheme. From the very first hour of its establishment that College had been conducted, not officially and avowedly with a view to provide denominational education for the members of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, but in reality and in fact it had been so conducted. Some hon. Members might be incredulous to hear that statement, but the most stubborn incredulity should yield to the evidence of facts. He granted that the general purpose of the 32 Queen's Colleges was to establish what was called non-sectarian education, and to place non-sectarian and secular knowledge within the reach of all persons and sects in Ireland without discrimination. He would not enter on the question whether there could be such a thing as non-sectarian secular knowledge, but it was a fact that these Colleges were founded to provide it; and the constant claim of the various Governments of the day, and of all who were opposed to granting denominational freedom in education to the Catholics of Ireland was, that in the Queen's Colleges and University the Irish people really had institutions capable of granting such knowledge with the most perfect impartiality, and with the most entire absence of any leaning to the right or to the left, to one religious sect or the other. That theory had been carried out in Galway and Cork Colleges as far as such was practicable, and the only drawback to the working of the mixed education system in these Colleges was that it had not worked at all; that, however perfect might be the practice of the governing body and the professors, no students, or practically no students, had attended; and that, in fact, the attempts to carry out honestly, if he might use the word, the scheme of non-sectarian secular instruction had totally failed in Cork and Galway. In Belfast, on the other hand, they were confronted by the fact that there had been a fair attendance of students. The instruction given in that College seemed to a large extent to meet the wants of the Presbyterian portion of the population. In fact, Belfast College was the one great proof adduced of the success of the mixed education system, and used to induce the House and the country to believe that sooner or later mixed education would take root in Ireland, and that the other Colleges would meet with the same numerical success. Well, in Belfast there were generally more students than in the other two put together, and its success was still more remarkable on comparing the arts faculty there with that in the two other Colleges. As every educated man was aware, the arts faculty was the University faculty; and the general education which made up the culture of the cultivated man, and which it was the primary object—he might say the exclusive object—of the House to promote and advance in estab- 33 lishing the Queen's Colleges, could only be obtained in the faculty of arts, and by the state of that faculty every University must be judged, tried, and either approved or condemned. Well, while there were often from 120 to 150 art students in Belfast, there were seldom or never more either in Galway or Cork than could be accounted for by the number of scholarships and exhibitions—the number of pecuniary inducements—attached to the various stages in arts education in the Southern and Western Colleges. Beyond this class, which were equally numerous in Belfast, there were twice as many in Belfast who continued the arts course without the direct inducement of scholarships; and it was evident that the presence of these extra students spoke far more for the success of Belfast for the reason that mere considerations of pecuniary profit could not explain this attendance. He maintained that this success of the arts faculty in Belfast was not due to its being a faculty of mixed education, but a faculty of Presbyterian education and practically denominational secular knowledge. In other words, in order to purchase the favour of the powerful Presbyterian Body, the Queen's College, Belfast, had been so officered and professored as to allow of its being, to all intents and purposes, the secular side of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary. There was practically nothing of a mixed educational character about the faculty of arts in Belfast; for a Return issued for last year showed there was altogether only one Catholic student in attendance. The House would admit that there was nothing fortuitous or accidental in the monopoly of the Belfast faculty of arts enjoyed by the non-Catholic students. Before the Commission of 1857, Professor M'Douall was asked if the bulk of his class were not gentlemen going into Presbyterian Orders, and his reply was—
Yes; not exactly that they have made up their minds, but they have it in contemplation; very generally they have that object in view.Going further back, it would be seen that the monopoly had been arranged from the very beginning. When, in 1849, the new professors of the faculty of arts were appointed and their qualifications and character canvassed, a resolution was unanimously passed by the 34 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the following terms:—Whereas one of our ministers in whose capacity and paternal care we have entire confidence has been appointed Dean of Residences, and whereas the qualification and character of the persons appointed in the Queen's College, Belfast, for those classes which students of this Church have been hitherto required to pass are such as to influence this Assembly in accepting certificates and degrees from that College, we now permit our students to attend the classes in the Queen's College.Previous to the establishment of the Queen's Colleges, the Presbyterian Assembly had in contemplation the foundation of a religious College for the special purpose of meeting the requirements of young men going in for Presbyterian Orders; but when the intention of the Government to establish Queen's Colleges became known, a deputation was at once sent to see what could be done. Sir Robert Peel assured the Presbyterian delegates that the satisfaction of their desires would be one of the main objects aimed at by the Government, and Dr. Cooke had said that the same assurance was repeated again and again. Those assurances were carried out in the foundation of the College in Belfast, and in the appointment of the original professors, whose characters were such as to merit the approval of the General Assembly, which accepted them as their own teachers in an openly and avowedly denominational institution for the instruction of Presbyterian students. After that came the fact that the arts faculty was almost entirely maintained by the theological students of the Presbyterian Church; and, looking at all these things, and seeing that if the Presbyterian theological students were withdrawn, the faculty of arts in the Belfast College would be an utter and hopeless failure, he was entitled to maintain that the College was a success—not because of its religious impartiality, or its advantages for mixed education, but because it was a Presbyterian College. What he asked the House to do was to legalize what was done now in a surreptitious manner, but done undoubtedly unavoidably—what had been established without their official knowledge, and, so to speak, behind their official backs. While he proposed that, he did not by any means look on it as an essential portion of his Bill, though 35 he sought for the Presbyterians of Ireland a recognition which the Government would not grant to another portion of the people of the country. He recognized the numerical success of the system in Belfast as a fact; but he also said that the bad education in all the three Colleges was a fact, that the necessity of raising the standard of education was a fact; and the object of the rest of his Bill was to provide, by the most convenient means, that, instead of a system at once a numerical and an educational failure, there should be a system which, whether failing numerically or unacceptable to the Catholics of Ireland, should, at any rate, have a right to be considered an institution of University education. Before going on to the second portion of his Bill, he would make this simple remark—that no hon. Member would say that the presence of one Catholic in a faculty of arts of 150 members constituted a fair representation of the 1,000,000 of Catholics who formed the half of the population of Ulster. Coming, then, to the general provisions of the Bill, he proposed that there should be a general inspection of the Colleges, the result of which should be reported to Parliament, and that the entire sum for the support of the institution should be provided out of the Estimates. Whatever the Colleges might be from a religious point of view, it was right they should have a real educational operation, and that, so far as they existed at all, they should exist, in the words of the Act—"for the advancement," and not for the degradation of learning in Ireland. He regretted to say that the tendency of these institutions had been to the detriment of knowledge and learning. Whether the Queen's Colleges be approved or disapproved of by the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland, if they were to exist they should be institutions of secular learning; and no matter how objectionable they might be in the eyes of the Catholic Prelates, their condemnation by Catholic opinion was not, in the opinion of the most advanced secularists, even a sufficient counterpoise to the damning fact—and, unfortunately, it was a fact—of their being worthless as places of secular education. He wished, then, to consider the question of the Colleges purely from the point of view of secular education, and to point out that as such they 36 had deplorably failed; and though he believed he would be fully justified in asking for their summary abolition, he contented himself with requesting that steps should be taken to raise them to that position of secular instruction which they had abandoned. Much more than £750,000—nearly £1,000,000 in fact—had already been spent upon them, and it was for the House to say whether they should continue in the future as in the past—a bad sort of grammar school, masquerading as a portion of a University institution. Dealing, then, with the faculty of arts, it must be granted that, generally speaking, the amount and character of the instruction given during the course would be determined by the character of the degree examination; and that the character of the preliminary knowledge the schoolboy should bring to College would be determined by the entrance examination, so that it would be well to see what those examinations were. Something less than a third of the arts students sought the degree with honours; and, practically, the third class was not superior to an ordinary pass degree, with which the majority contented themselves. Candidates who sought to graduate with honours might select for their examination any one of the following groups:—The Greek and Latin languages, mathematical, or experimental, or natural science, any two modern Continental languages; or might make up an honour course out of any three of the following:—English language and literature, logic, metaphysics, history, political economy. As could be perceived by a little reflection, 17 varieties or selections of honour degrees were thus at once provided; and he need not remind hon. Members how little consonant that was with the theory of an arts education being a general education, or that an honour degree, which was really sub-divided into 17 varieties, did not encourage very strongly that general and uniform standard of high culture which was present to the mind of most educated men when they spoke of a general and liberal education. It would be admitted that there was a very fair scope for the principle of permutation and combination in the selection of the subjects of an honour degree; but even such honour students were only in the minority of the total number of the arts graduates, and those who 37 passed the course without honours were the students who set the general standard as regarded University education. These latter obtained their degree "in any group of subjects provided the sum of the numbers attached to the subjects amounted to four." The subjects, with their numerical values attached, were—English literature and history, 2; mathematical science, 2; experimental physics, 2; chemistry, 2; and so on, so that the student had his choice of any subjects which would go to make up four. There were, however, other subjects—Zoology, Botany, Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Logic, History, and Political Economy; all of which rated as one, so that a student had an extended choice of what subjects he should make up his mind to be examined in. He (Mr. O'Donnell) was not an advocate of a cut-and-dry-system of absolute uniformity; but there were limits to toleration, and men of the most liberal views would hardly admit that that was a course of graduation worthy of the recognition of public opinion. Seventeen varieties of honour degrees would seem various enough; but the permutations of the pass-degree subjects was something extraordinary. He would ask the hon. Members of the House to calculate how many courses of pass graduates of the Queen's University they might conceivably take in order to make up a single man of a real general and liberal education. He would only add that while those regulations had continued to stand as he had quoted them down to a year or two ago, some verbal alterations had been recently introduced, calculated to baffle an inquisitive stranger; but which, to the initiated, strictly maintained the status quo as he had described it. But perhaps it might be said that the standard in each of these subjects, composing those infinitely permutable groups, made up in profundity and breadth for the extraordinary variegation of the degree. As an answer to that, he would mention that the far-reaching and severe tests were in Greek, Xenophon, Cyropædeia, Books 1 and 2; Homer's Iliad, Book IX., with prose composition in Greek; in Latin, Sallust and the Satires and Epistles of Horace, with prose composition in Latin; in English History, the period from 1602 to 1702; or, at most, English History for a couple of centuries. Passing in 38 those subjects, a student was entitled to proclaim himself a graduate of that illustrious institution which was founded to dissipate the darkness of clericalism, and to put the pretensions of the Roman hierarchy to shame. The standard of the examinations for matriculation, they all knew, set the standard for intermediate schools. Now, what was the standard of matriculation in the Queen's University, and what were Queen's Colleges doing to promote and elevate Intermediate Education in Ireland? In a volume of personal experiences published a few years ago, Professor D'Arcy Thompson stated that some of the students of his Greek class had still to learn their elements after they had passed the matriculation in Greek, and many of them came to him utterly innocent of Greek, and for weeks were engaged in mastering declensions and conjugations. Professor Nesbitt said that the requirements of the Queen's University in Ireland were lower than of any other; and Dr. Ryall said half the Harrow boys knew more than the students entered in Cork. Professor Craik, of Belfast, admitted that a man might go through the whole course of the College, and obtain a degree in medicine, without having any competent knowledge of the English language; and, in reply to further questions from the astounded Commissioners, he said—Possibly I could hardly go the length of saying that if a person came entirely ignorant of the English language I would pass him.He (Mr. O'Donnell) could go on accumulating proofs to almost any amount, but he thought he had shown the House that there was, at any rate, a certain need of public inspection—and for a good deal more than there had been for the last 30 years, during which nearly £1,000,000 of the public money had been spent. He desired to keep the religious element as far apart as possible from the question; but it should strike hon. Members that there must have been some motive for this extraordinary playing fast-and-loose with principles of University education. When they saw the handful of students and of graduates which even this lax system produced, they could have some idea of the state of the Colleges if they had ventured to maintain the original stan- 39 dard intended at their foundation. How desperate the state seemed to the managers might be concluded from the evidence given before the Endowed School Commission by a resident master of the Galway Erasmus Smith School. Mr. Killeen said that the grammar school had fallen off because the boys were admitted to the Queen's College before they knew their grammar at school, and he had heard the professors say that they had to teach the pupils grammar after they had been admitted scholars of the College—in fact, they got scholarships when they should have remained two or three years longer at school. That would show hon. Members one of the reasons which led to the deplorable degradation of the matriculation examination. When, in addition, they had the President of the Belfast Queen's College, in his evidence, laying stress on the very painful position the Queen's University would be in if they had no graduates to present to the public "at their annual assemblages in St. Patrick's Hall," and the great difficulty there would be in presenting any graduate except the graduation examination was reduced in the way the House had just heard, they would see the very close connection between the unpopularity of the system in Ireland and the disgraceful laxity of examination by which the Queen's University had endeavoured, so to speak, to outwit the Irish public, and to present the appearance of collegians and bachelors of arts when it was deprived by the popular abstention of the necessary materials for real collegians and real graduates. Although the increased strictness of examination proposed in the Bill might have the effect of exposing the barrenness, and weakness, and unpopularity of the mixed education system to the full extent dreaded by its managers, still the House should not hesitate for a single instant between a real system of education, however unsuccessful from a numerical point of view, and a system of nominal education, which was at once a numerical failure and an educational disgrace. Of course, at that stage he could not give all the details which might be rightly required in Committee; but he thought it would be granted from the facts he had already quoted, the necessity of some system of public inspection being established. They 40 had seen that the Queen's Colleges had reduced their matriculation examination so as practically to abolish it, and, as a consequence, had to make graduates within three years out of the raw boys whom they admitted, and whom they bribed with scholarships to leave their grammar schools. More logically than creditably, then, the Queen's University must proceed to carry out a system of sham graduation in order to match a sham matriculation. It would undoubtedly be very painful if, at the annual meeting at St. Patrick's Hall, they were able to present to the public no degrees, and it was clear they would be able to present hardly any if those degrees were the result of a trying examination. At the same time, he should remind the House that the reduction in the original standard of education, and the general lowering of instruction in these institutions, originally took place in spite of the protests of the Queen's University graduates. The graduates in the three Colleges met the Queen's College Commission with most earnest protests against doing anything to encourage the increased laxity, and asked them, on the contrary, to set bounds to the progress of sham education. The Commissioners, also, refused to approve of the lax system practised by the College authorities, and recommended them forthwith to establish a real entrance examination, which would be a fitting prelude to a real degree examination. The protests of the graduates and the recommendation of the Commissioners were equally neglected and defied, and influences to which he need not particularly refer succeeded in allowing the Queen's University authorities to carry out their system of nominal education and nominal degrees. Such a state of things had existed for more than 20 years, and would continue, unless the House insisted on an improvement. It should not be forgotten that the faculty of arts was the only faculty of education, and this was the case - in a special manner in the Queen's University of Ireland; for in other Universities the training of professional students included a certain portion of general knowledge and learning. In the Irish Queen's College, however, from the moment a medical student passed the ridiculous entrance examination, he was freed from all obligations of general in- 41 struction. The student's knowledge even of the English language was not tested in any subsequent year after he was admitted. Not a single gleam of general instruction lit up the way of the Queen's College medical student. The professional faculties had come to furnish the large majority of the candidates at those so-called examinations. At the last examination, it was stated that out of 831 students nominally on the rolls, 527 were medical students and 45 attended in the department of engineering. The entire of the arts faculty of the three Colleges contained only 247 students—students, he would remind the House, provided by the matriculation and other tests to which he had referred. In fact, they might now describe the Colleges established for the advancement of learning in Ireland as a huge dissecting-room, with medical class-rooms and the class-rooms of an ordinary grammar school attached; for the arts faculty was only a small annex of a considerable system of medical and other professional education. The Queen's University had utterly failed to play any useful part in the general education of the country. When the House remembered that the establishment of a medical faculty was hardly contemplated at first—and, in the words of Sir Robert Kane, the plan of the buildings of the Colleges bad been drawn up and approved by the Government, on the supposition of there being one faculty of arts, with schools of engineering and agriculture, everyone could understand the significance of the total failure of the original plan of the Government. It could not be contended that the objects of the Queen's Colleges Bill could be satisfied by the erection of a number of medical schools in the provincial capitals of Ireland. At present they were little more than medical schools, and so far as the faculty of arts existed, were bad grammar schools, competing, by moans of lavish scholarships, with the regular grammar schools, and lowering the standard of intermediate education by the shameful laxity of their entrance examinations. During the 30 years of the establishment of these institutions, the country had been subsidizing them to the annual tune of some £33,000, and during those 30 years some 950 bachelors in arts had been passed—30 nominal graduates per annum, at a total expense of nearly £1,000,000 42 sterling, or an annual cost to the Exchequer of £1,000 sterling per graduate. He would ask the House if such a result had not been too dearly bought?—and if the House resolved to continue the payment of the public money to these institutions, they ought at least insist that the annual handful of graduates should be graduates and not grammar schoolboys masquerading as University men, in order to prevent the Queen's University being placed in the position of having no graduates to present to the public. If the House came to the conclusion that nothing could really reform the Queen's University except reforming it off the face of the earth, he was not prepared altogether to gainsay such a resolution; but, if the Queen's University were to be maintained, there should be an entrance examination of a real character, and scholarship examinations of a real character enforced. He did not pretend to hold out any hope that a mixed education system would, under any circumstances, recommend itself to the people of Ireland. In the case of the only College which was a numerical success, mixed education had been practically given up, and the Queen's College, Belfast, in its students, professors, and class-books, was a Protestant and Presbyterian institution. But so long as a mixed education system was maintained—be it unpopular, be it rejected 10 times over by the nation for which it was nominally intended—at any rate let it not be utterly unworthy of the name of education. It cost £1,000 to turn out a student from the Queen's University. The British soldier was an expensive article; so were the converts made by the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. But these examples paled before the students of the Queen's University.It being a quarter of an hour before Six of the clock, the debate stood adjourned till To-morrow.