"It must be remembered that the effect of such a proposal was to substitute for the varying forms of individual energy and local exertion one great uniform system. While the education of the people was eked out by the sacrifices of the people themselves, or supplied by the desultory efforts of individuals, there was always room for the play of national and local feelings. So far as a plan like that propounded in this report was successful, it destroyed all other industrial energies among the lower orders. The old hedge schoolmaster could no longer make out his bread. The poor scholar could no longer wander from house to house, teaching the old history of Ireland in return for the food and lodging he received. All the lower orders of the people were to be taught by masters trained in a government college, and drilled in a system from which all national feeling was excluded--masters, of whom it was put forward as their chief merit that they would be political and moral agents of the government, inculcating order on a lawless, and teaching civilization to a barbarous, people. "The report of 1835 suggested, of necessity, the question of religion. The masters, according to its proposal, were plainly to be indoctrinated in matters from which religion could not be separated. They were to be instructed in mental philosophy by a professor, specially appointed for that purpose. This training must be given them that they may be qualified to direct 'the thoughts and inclinations of Irish children in a right direction'. Would it have been unreasonable, is it unreasonable now, that the guardians of the faith of any portion of the Irish people should feel anxious to have some security for the character of the 'mental philosophy' in which the teachers of the people were trained? "Comparing the plan announced in Lord Stanley's published letter with that which was carried into effect, under the joint operation of the interpolated passage and the report of 1835, it is obvious that those who might be perfectly satisfied with the arrangements of the first, either as to religious or national feeling, might yet be wholly dissatisfied upon the very same points with the second. "Under the covert and guarded language of the report of 1835, we can clearly trace the inauguration of a new system--a system wholly unlike anything that had preceded it or had ever been recommended--a system which was to establish in every parish a government agent, under the name of a national schoolmaster, and which was also to become a great government university for the teaching of the middle classes.