run. They want not to interfere with | Ministry have ever been. The fact is, to your interests-all they want is to be able conciliate the people of Ireland, you must to watch over their own, and they insist conciliate the Catholic prelates. To preupon having the means of ascertaining pare a measure which will be acceptable to whether that interest is not sacrificed. the people, you must consult the Catholic These are the grounds on which we stand. prelates. The bishops are now assembled, It is not that the bishops say that Pro- and you are aware as to what they should testantism will mislead the Catholic; all consider a sufficient protection to their rethat they insist upon is, that Protestantism ligion. At present they have proclaimed is capable of misleading the Catholic. the Bill dangerous to faith and morals. This has already been exhibited in Belfast. That is their present proclamation, and There professors of Unitarian persuasions there is no sincere Catholic in Ireland who are accused of introducing into their lec- does not know that as far as religious intures Unitarian matter. The fact there is struction is concerned, he is bound by the already proved; and really if it was not decision of his bishop. Scientific instrucso proved, it is in human nature that it tion is another thing. But as far as reshould be so, and that the danger appre-ligion instruction is concerned, or rather hended should exist. The hon. Member when a scheme is presented to that people, for Newcastle-under-Lyne (Mr. Colqu- from which religious instruction is exhoun) stated distinctly that the professors there broached infidel opinions in giving their lectures. I think direct allusion was made to the chair of moral philosophy. [Mr. Colquhoun: To the professor of Greek.] To the professor of Greek! Now, speaking of the matter, independently of the fact that it really is so, what excellent speeches might be made in this House, what cheers might be elicited, by its being asked, "Do you suspect the professor of Greek? what has he to do with religion? he is only teaching a language, teaching the different forms of words, teaching his pupils to conjugate rúm and the like." To say that there was any danger from him, would make us only be laughed at. And yet, this very professor of Greek is caught in the fact of inculcating infidelity upon his scholars. What do the bishops insist upon? Simply that there shall be no possibility of this in future taking place. As to your Amendments of this Bill, what in reality have you done? You have taken more power to yourselves. We want protection against you, against the Ministry of the day, whatever and whoever they may be. The Catholics require that they shall not be subject to the caprices or mistakes of the Ministry. The Ministry have not time to examine professors of anatomy and science-they must take their information from others, and, in nine instances out of ten, so long as I have been a Member of this House, we should have known the political tenets of these professors from those who appointed them. I really believe that future Ministers would take as much care of their friends, and be as sure not to promote their enemies as any cluded, they cannot consent to receive education based upon such a principle. You may think the clamour gone which was raised in England. The clamour against the Maynooth Bill was the most senseless and atrocious display of calumny, hatred, bigotry, and bad feeling, which ever disgraced any country. That had now exhausted itself. You do not now perceive a symptom of it remaining. It has gone by, as has the snow of the past winter. You having nothing now to fear from it. You carried your Bill manfully. You did, and it did you great credit. I come not here with overweening expressions of gratitude; but I am grateful for that measure. I am here to declare that there never was a measure brought in with more complete fair play and justice, and with a more honest intention of carrying it out fairly for the people for whom it was intended. That measure was perfect in its kind, equal to any which ever passed through Parliament, and you are entitled to great credit for having carried it against the senseless and unjust clamour which bigotry for the time succeeded in raising against it. Take one step more, and consider whether this Bill may not be made to accord with the feelings of the Catholic ecclesiastics of Ireland. I ought not to detain you. I am not speaking here in any spirit of hostility. I should be most happy to give every assistance in my humble power to make this Bill work well. I have the most anxious wish to have the Bill work well, because I am desirous of seeing education promoted in Ireland; but even education may be misapplied power. I admit that at one time I thought the plan of a mixed education proper; and I still think that in literature and in science a system of mixed education would be proper; but with regard to religious education, I think that each denomination of Christians should be educated by their respective religious instructors. Let the students be put upon terms of perfect equality in respect to religion, and then you will have a basis laid for an equality of education in literary and scientific pursuits which would gain the cordial assent of all parties in Ireland. Certainly the Bill as it now stands may seem to confer very formidable powers on the Minister of the day in the nomination of the professors, and the degree of control which they will be enabled to exercise over these Colleges; and more especially they may appear so to a thorough Radical like myself; but I am not afraid of these powers. The smuggler meets his check in the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and so, in as far as the powers confered by this Bill are concerned, where the Ministers may acquire the means of making one man, perhaps, grateful, they, in all probability, will incur the hatred of fifty. Again, I repeat, I am most anxious for the success of this Bill; but I fairly tell you it cannot succeed without the Catholic bishops. They have the faith of six millions of people in their hands. There may have been harsh expressions in the public papers, but depend upon it great anxiety exists in Ireland to have such a measure, if you will but make it effective-and if you choose to make it effective you have it in your power. For myself I am not indisposed to vote with the noble Lord, but that is without prejudice to any better mode being considered when we come into Committee. But let me here express a hope that there will be no persevering with the Committee this night. A few days' delay may have a most important effect. I am so strongly impressed with that opinion, that I do hope that the right hon. Baronet will not proceed with the Bill in Committee tonight. However, which way soever you may decide in that respect, I trust the House will believe that what has fallen from me has been uttered in the fairest spirit of good faith. My political power elsewhere may be deemed a jest, but here it is a reality. I am ready to join in any measure that may be useful to the people of Ireland, and that may tend to do away with the spirit of disaffection existing in that country. It is not a political disaffection; it is not a religious disaffection; but it is a physical disaffection. You, Gentlemen of England, have no notion of its extent or of its intensity, and though it may not display itself at this moment sufficient to alarm you or arouse you, still the time may come, after some of us shall have gone to our graves, when that physical disaffection may have the most frightful consequences. Sir Robert Inglis had not intended, when he entered the House, to take any part in the debate of the evening, nor would he even now discuss the general subject; but he was unwilling to omit the opportunity of noticing one part of the speech of the hon. and learned Member for the county of Cork (Mr. O'Connell). That one part contained more errors than he believed had ever before been compressed into so small a compass. The hon. and learned Gentleman had, in a kind of episode and parenthesis, referred to the case of Galileo; and had alleged, that it had been most erroneously quoted as a proof of the persecution exercised by the Church of Rome towards that individual, and towards science in general. The proofs which he gave, in order to satisfy the House that the Pope and his Church had been calumniated, were two: first, that Pope, said the hon. and learned Gentleman, (he, Sir R. Inglis, took down his words at the time,) “had enabled Copernicus to publish his observations;" and could not, therefore, have been an enemy to science in general: and, secondly, Galileo, so far from having been a long time in the Inquisition, was there for three days only. Now, in the first place, the Pope, who was reigning even when Galileo was first questioned by the Inquisition, was Paul V. (Borghese), who begun to reign in 1605, and died in 1621: Copernicus died in 1543. It is scarcely necessary to say, that it would have been impossible for a Pope-beginning to reign in 1605-to have assisted any man to publish any observations, who himself had died in 1543. Then, in the next place, the hon. and learned Member stated that Galileo was 66 only three days in the Inquisition." Any one who knows what the Inquisition was, would say, that three days, or even one day, was a period much too long for any one to be there confined; but, in point of fact, at the period when Galileo was actually in the hands of the Inquisition, he had been under their surveillance at least, at a distance from his home, for many months; even if he were not within their walls for more than the four days when his retractation was forced from him. Then, as to the general conclusion which, in the last place, the hon. and learned Member draws from his own statements-to the effect, that the Church of Rome was not hostile to science. Can he forget, that two of the most learned mathematicians in the last century, the Jesuit editors of Newton's works, felt compelled-even at that comparatively late period-to declare, that though they were obliged, in order to explain the Principia of Newton, to assume his facts, yet they did it, as acting the part of another per son; and for themselves they declare that they held the doctrines which were sanctioned by the Church of Rome? Their expressions were "Ceterum latis à summis pontificibus decretis contrà telluris motum nos obsequi profitemur:" laying, it may be presumed, a strong emphasis, in their own pronunciation, on the word profitemur. He thought that he had now sufficiently proved, that the hon. and learned Member, whatever other merits he might possess, was not entitled to claim implicit credence to his statements of history. to have adhered to that principle, and not have been parties to taking money out of the pockets of the people of England for the promotion of a religion of which the people of England disapproved. Sir A. B. Brooke protested against what had been said of the state of Fermanagh. There had not been a murder committed there for many years. Lord Claude Hamilton said, no man could have heard the speech of the hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. O'Connell) without feeling that he who possessed such great powers of eloquence, and who could command an audience at will, had not on self. It impressed him with the belief that the present occasion been quite equal to himthe hon. and learned Gentleman was unwillingly doing the work of others, in whose narrow-viewed and bigoted notions he did not coincide. What was the proposition of the hon. and learned Gentleman? Why, although many fair schemes had been shipwrecked by an endeavour to inculcate creeds which did not coincide with all parties in Ireland, yet when it was now proposed to adopt a scheme that was free from any such impeachable attempt, the hon. and learned Gentleman came forward and objected to the plan, because it did not embody the very thing which had hitherto made all attempts at establishing a general system of education in Ireland abortive. The hon. and learned Gentleman had given a description of the miseries of the people of Ireland,; but he did not, at the same time state that the Roman Catholic clergy were deriving a larger revenue than any other Mr. O'Connell said, that he would tomorrow prove that he was right, and that the hon. Baronet was wrong. If there were any mistake on his part, it was only that the act which he attributed to a Pope, was done by that same Pope when a Cardi-Church in Europe. He could not agree nal. to the Amendment of his noble Friend, because it was his conviction that the only principle on which this measure could be successful was to leave the Colleges entirely free of all religion, trusting to the judgment of the parents and guardians the religious education of the Mr. Sharman Crawford said, he would always be ready to aid his countrymen in obtaining a redress of their grievances; but he must protest against the doctrine he had heard that night. If hon. Members were to be called to account by any ecclesiastical body, there was an end of their independ-students. ence. Was not every hon. Member there Mr. Shaw begged, even at that late for his Protestant and Catholic constituents hour, to be allowed, in very few words, to alike? He claimed the right of independ-explain the vote he was about to give. ent action, free from the domination of any ecclesiastical authority, Catholic or Protestant. The hon. and learned Member had spoken of the "senseless cry against the Maynooth Bill." He belonged to a section of that House who had opposed the Maynooth measure from motives as honourable as those of any Gentleman in the House, feeling bound by the voluntary principle to do so; and the Catholics of Ireland ought Feeling that further means of education for the middle classes were required in Ireland, and that upon the whole, and under all the complicated difficulties of the case, the Government had proposed a plan more practicable than any other that had been suggested for the purpose, he had voted for the second reading of the Bill. He was deeply sensible that there could be no real education unless upon the basis of religion, and that the present measure was deficient in that respect. The Amendment of his noble Friend, upon a general statement of it, and at first sight, struck him as calculated to give a more religious character to the measure; but upon reflection he was constrained to say that he did not think that would be its practical effect. First, because he agreed with his right hon. Friend (Sir Robert Peel) that to provide a temporary fund from the lecture fees would operate as a discouragement to private endowments; and, next, because he objected to an endowment of different religious professors, and so, he understood, did his noble Friend (Lord Mahon). He could not help feeling that there was in principle no great difference between a direct endowment by a grant of money from that House, and an enactment that by compulsory fees different religious professors should be in fact maintained. He should be glad if his noble Friend (Lord Mahon) did not divide; but if he did, then for the reasons he had stated, he should be obliged, although reluctantly, to vote against the Amendment of his noble Friend. Mr. Hindley complained of the hon. and learned Member for Cork (Mr. O'Connell) having described the opposition to the Maynooth endowment as a senseless clamour. The hon. and learned Gentleman had himself, on former occasions, spoken strongly against the Maynooth grant, and avowed himself an advocate of the voluntary principle. He had presented 1,200 petitions against the Maynooth endowment, upon the principle which had been advocated by the hon. and learned Member himself-namely, the voluntary principle; and he thought it therefore hard that their conscientious opposition should be called senseless clamour. He wished to ask the hon. and learned Gentleman whether he still ad hered to the voluntary principle, and included in his censure the petitioners whose petitions he had presented. Mr. O'Connell certainly included in his censure many of the petitions presented by the hon. Member. He would undertake to-morrow to produce fifty petitions presented by him, containing the most outrageous calumnies against the Catholics of Ireland. The House divided on the Question that the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question:-Ayes 189; Noes 49:Majority 140. List of the Aves. Ackers, J. Brotherton, J. Copeland, Ald. Dawnay, hon. W. H. the Second Reading of the Lunatic Asylums and Pauper Lunatics Bill. Sir J. Graham observed, that he had already expressed his decided opinion that the period had arrived when the management of lunatic asylums ought to be compulsory. In ten years parishes would find themselves great gainers by the change. The interest on the money advanced, he apprehended, would be the same as on Exchequer Bills. Bill read a second time. House adjourned at half-past twelve. HOUSE OF LORDS, Tuesday, June 24, 1845. MINUTES. BILLS Public.-1. Courts of Common Law 2 Sampson's Estate (Ward's); Reversionary Interest So- Reported.-Blackburn Waterworks; Lord Monson (or 3 and passed:-Lord Barrington's Estate; Lynn and Ely NON-ATTENDANCE OF MEMBERS ON COMMITTEES.] The Earl of Charleville, presented a Report from the Select Committee on the Glasgow Bridges Bill, that The Bill committed pro formá. Amend-three Members of that Committee had atments made. House resumed. Bill to be tended to-day; but that owing to the abrecommitted. sence of Lord Gardner, a Member of the Committee, it had been compelled to ad LUNATIC ASYLUMS.] Lord Ashley moved journ without transacting any business. |