looked for guidance.  The air was thick with economic fallacies or half-truths.  We were, it is true, successful beyond our expectations in planting in apparently uncongenial soil sound economic principles.  But our success was mainly due, as I shall show later, to our having used the associative instincts of the Irish peasant to help out the working of our theories; and we became convinced that if a tithe of our priests, public men, national school teachers, and members of our local bodies had received a university education, we should have made much more rapid progress.

I hardly know how to describe the mental atmosphere in which we were working.  It would be no libel upon the public opinion upon which we sought to make an impression to say that it really allowed no question to be discussed on its merits.  Public opinion on social and economic questions is changing now, but I cannot associate the change with any influence emanating from institutions of higher education.  In other countries, so far as my investigations have extended, the universities do guide economic thought and have a distinct though wholly unofficial function as a court of appeal upon questions relating to the material progress of the communities amongst which they are situated.  Of such institutions there are in Ireland only two which could be expected to direct in any large way the thought of the country upon economic and other important national questions—­Maynooth, and Trinity College, Dublin.  Whether in their widely different spheres of influence these two institutions could, under conditions other than those prevailing, have so met the requirements of the country as to have obviated what is at present an urgent necessity for a complete reorganisation of higher education need not be discussed; but it is essential to my argument that I should set forth clearly the results of my own observation upon their influence, or rather lack of influence, upon the people among whom I have worked.

The influence of Maynooth, actual and potential, can hardly be exaggerated, but it is exercised indirectly upon the secular thought of the country.  It is not its function to make a direct impression.  It is in fact only a professional—­I had almost said a technical—­school.  It trains its students, most admirably I am told, in theology, philosophy, and the studies subsidiary to these sciences, but always, for the vast majority of its students, with a distinctly practical and definite missionary end in view.  There is, I believe, an arts course of modest scope, designed rather to meet the deficiencies of students whose general education has been neglected than to serve as anything in the nature of a university arts course.  I am quite aware of the value of a sound training in mental science if given in connection with a full university course, but I am equally convinced that the Maynooth education, on the whole, is no substitute for a university course, and that while its chief end of turning out a large number of trained priests has been fulfilled, it has not given, and could not be expected to have given, that broader and more humane culture which only a university, as distinguished from a professional school, can adequately provide.