The progress made by secondary schools in Ireland, even in the nineteenth century, has not been rapid. It is not to be named with the immense development of public schools in England, within the same period, caused, in some measure, by the genius of Arnold; secondary Irish schools, in fact, have been largely a failure, like other institutions of British origin. This is mainly to be attributed to three reasons: the higher upper classes in Ireland usually send their sons to be educated in the great English public schools; the Irish secondary schools are seldom well endowed; above all, the upper middle class in Ireland is small and has little influence. Two Commissions, appointed in 1854 and in 1878, examined secondary education in Ireland as it then existed; their reports give a far from favourable account of the system. The secondary Irish schools have not been much affected by an Act of Parliament passed in 1885, which provided for making better schemes for their management; but certainly they have derived very great benefit from the Intermediate Education Act of Lord Cairns, which established a system of competition between them, and secured prizes for successful competitors. In these honourable trials the Catholic schools have done well; but even now the secondary schools are decidedly inferior to what they ought to be, and do not exhibit many signs of improvement. An impartial inquirer thus described them in 1871:[186] 'Upon the whole, secondary instruction, throughout the country, was as some one--I believe Lord Cairns--said, "bad in quality and deficient in quantity." The fact seems incredible, but there can be no doubt of its authenticity, viz. that out of a total population of 5,500,000, there were only 10,814 boys in Ireland learning Latin, Greek, or modern languages in 1871. Or, to put the matter in another way, while in England about ten or fifteen in every 1000 were instructed in these languages, only two in every 1000 were instructed in them in Ireland.'[187]