"In point of principle, no reason can be assigned for the difference between England and Ireland. If it be wrong in Ireland to endow and aid a purely Roman Catholic school, it is equally so in England. The difference established between the two countries can neither be justified nor accounted for upon any rational principle. It fosters the belief in the mind of every Irishman that his country is treated as an inferior. In many Irishmen it promotes the belief that religious instruction, which is free in English schools, is placed under restriction in Ireland, because the faith of the majority of the Irish people is proscribed"--(p. xi.) And may we not ask has not the Irish Catholic sufficient grounds for adopting this opinion? Has not all the legislation of the country for centuries been directed to the destruction of Catholicity? The question is next referred to of the tendency of the national system to throw the whole education of the country into the hands of the government. "I do not shrink from inviting your consideration to the complaint--that the Irish national system, as now constituted, is one gigantic contrivance for bringing the whole education of Ireland under government control. I appeal with confidence to you, as an English statesman, against the attempt to 'Anglicise' the education of the Irish people--against the project of bringing up, in government academies, an army of schoolmasters, who, in school, and still more out of school, are to form for government a moral and intellectual police--against the system of lavish bribery by which it is plainly proposed to attract all talent in the humbler classes of Irishmen into the service of an anti-Irish Board--against the institution in our country of a great system of universal education, subject to influences that are not Irish, and administered in a spirit of distrust of the whole Irish people, their national prejudices, and their religion"--(p. xii.) In the course of the work, proofs are given of the way in which it was sought to establish government influence. In the beginning, according to the letter of Lord Stanley, only one model school was to be erected in Ireland, and the minor schools through the country were to remain quite independent. In 1835, the commissioners began to manifest more extensive designs, and in a report to Lord Mulgrave, it was proposed to establish a model school in each county, to take the training of all the teachers of the kingdom into the hands of the Board, and, at the same time, the plan was adopted to introduce books treating of common Christianity, and compiled by Dr. Whateley, and, in fact, to make the authority of the commissioners paramount in everything connected with the education of the future generations in Ireland. On this Mr. Butt observes:--