When the partial relaxation of the penal laws allowed the children of the Irish Catholics to be taught the rudiments, the 'Christian Brothers' began to found their schools, under the sanction of a Bull of Pius VI.; these schools, sectarian, like the genius of the Irish people, have, though receiving no endowment from the State, grown from small beginnings into a number of excellent Catholic schools. The Quakers in Ireland had established a few elementary schools before the Union; and so had the Presbyterians of Ulster. The Charter Schools lingered down to the year 1832; they disappeared when their subsidies ceased; but the 'Incorporated Irish Society' is in possession of the lands they once held, and it supports a number of good Protestant schools. Primary education, however, in Ireland remained very backward; the Protestant schools did not flourish; the Catholic 'hedge schools' continued until the nineteenth century had far advanced. Attempts were made to promote Irish primary education, in different ways, after the Union; a Board of Commissioners of Education was appointed, and made valuable reports; but these efforts were of little avail for the benefit at least of the Catholic young; the schools thus established were all Protestant; and the evangelical movement, which was then powerful, made them proselytising with scarcely a single exception, a danger which the example of the Charter Schools had especially made the Catholic Irish priesthood dread. An institution, however, called the 'Kildare Place Schools' had, for a time, considerable success; these schools were thrown open to children of all creeds, and had the high approval of O'Connell himself; but it was one of the rules that the Bible should be read in the schools; they became proselytising in no doubtful sense, and ultimately they were tabooed by the Catholic priesthood. Primary education in Ireland was in this state, when the subject was taken up by Mr. Stanley, the Chief Secretary for Ireland of Lord Grey, and, in after years, the 'Rupert of Debate.' He founded in 1831-34 what has ever since been known as the 'National System of Education' of an elementary kind in Ireland. The principles on which he proceeded were in accord with the somewhat shallow Liberalism of the day, but, it must be added, with the ideas of many enlightened Irishmen. Primary education was to be endowed by the State, but it was to be divided into two parts: secular instruction was to be given in the new schools to children assembled together to learn, and that without distinction of creed; but religious instruction was to be given to children kept apart, Protestants and Catholics being completely separate, by the pastors of their respective communions. By these means it was hoped that a sound system of primary education would be formed; that proselytising would be made impossible; and that the youth of the warring races and faiths of Ireland, under the influence of a common teaching, would be made gradually