A series of Reports of Commissions and other records show that the education afforded in all these schools was not what it ought to have been; but this was to be expected in the case of a country where Protestant ascendency was supreme, where all administration was selfish and corrupt, and where the schools were the monopoly of a fraction of the people only. As to the education of the Irish Catholic poor in these centuries, it was discouraged, and ultimately prohibited by the penal code; the Catholic child could not learn the rudiments in his own land; but in spite of this, 'hedge schools,' a significant name, grew up, in hundreds, throughout the country, in which, to adopt the words of Davis, a man of genius-- 'Still crouching 'neath the sheltering hedge, or stretched on mountain fern, The teacher and his pupils met feloniously to learn.' As may, however, be supposed the instruction afforded in these schools was usually bad; throughout the eighteenth century and a part of the nineteenth, the young of Catholic Ireland were brought up in ignorance. In 1733 an odious experiment was made, and continued for a long period, to cause education to wean the Catholic child from his faith. An institution, called the Charter School, was established; the object of its founders was to make 'the young of the Papists' Protestant, by attracting them to seminaries where they were kept apart from their parents and priests, boarded, lodged, and handed over to Protestant tradesmen; millions were spent in furthering a detestable policy, which literally set up Mammon against God. The Charter Schools, however, completely failed; they never had more than fourteen hundred pupils, and they became wretched Dotheboys Halls where cruel and pampered Squeerses, eating up funds set apart for education such as it was, starved and ill-treated children victims of every kind of disease.