religious persuasions.  It was answered that these positions and his arguments addressed to the academic question were irreconcilable and incompatible.  Catholics were already admissible to Dublin College, and entitled to certain degrees and a vote.  He either intended that they should be thenceforth excluded or he did not.  If not, then the argument against mixed education would hold for nothing:  if he did, then he attempted what was impracticable, or, if not impracticable, preposterous and absurd.  It is not conceivable that Catholic young men, of laudable ambition, would be deterred from entering the lists with their Protestant contemporaries where most honour was won by superior eminence, or that they would be swayed by a warning that a college course would be attended with risk to their faith and morals, when they remembered that for the past century, while the risk was infinitely more imminent, no such warning had been ever heard from council, synod or conference.  It is a strange fact in the history of these troubled times that no voice of denunciation against Dublin College could be heard in the polemical din, although it was well known that its literary honours stamped preliminary degradation on the Catholic aspirant, and were used at once to mock his political condition and pervert his faith—­no voice was heard although one at least of the prelates had obtained degrees in the University, while the bishop and priests of an entire diocese, in conclave assembled, solemnly resolved that they would refuse sacraments to any Catholic parent who sent his son to one of the Godless colleges.  But supposing it were practicable to exclude Roman Catholics from the University, and that the system of exclusive education among the middle and upper classes were applied in all its rigour, when were Protestant and Catholic to meet?  If it were dangerous to faith and morals that they should discuss together the properties of an angle or the altitude of a star, it could hardly be safe to have them decide together a principle of law or determine the value or limits of a political franchise.  All this was urged on Mr. O’Connell, and sometimes apparently with success, for he more than once consented to forego the discussion of the question in the Hall; and he would have strictly adhered to that engagement had he not been goaded by the intemperate counsels of others.

In the desultory history of this question, two facts have been stated requiring distinct proof.  They are:—­First, that Mr. O’Connell was favourable to the principle of mixed education in the commencement.

And, secondly, that the Seceders—­those who were afterwards so glibly denounced as infidels for their support of the Godless bill—­were as much opposed to that bill as he was.

How Mr. O’Connell expressed himself when the bill was first announced has been already stated.  It is at once conceded that the writer’s memory of a conversation, in its nature almost private, were he even above all suspicion, would not be a safe authority.  In this instance there is no need to rely on it—­the statement is more than sustained by Mr. O’Connell’s recorded words.  From a number of occasions, equally available, I select one, because of its solemnity and importance.