Ireland remained as disaffected and disturbed as ever. Why? Because Catholic Emancipation (delayed for twenty-nine years), was, when carried, practically made a dead letter; the country was still governed, through the Protestant minority, in opposition to the opinions and feelings of the masses of the people; while the incompetence of Parliament to deal with the tithe question, and the land question, led to an agrarian and tithe war, which the Coercion Acts were powerless to stop. In 1831, indeed, Parliament had established the “national” schools, but the scheme was not what the people wanted. Protestants and Catholics alike desired denominational education, but the Government gave them a mixed system. For many years the system was worked (by a board consisting of five Protestants and two Catholics in a country where Catholics were to Protestants as four to one) in an anti-Irish spirit, and it failed, accordingly, to win popular support or confidence. In truth, the people saw in the “national” schools only institutions for anglicising the country. A Scotch Presbyterian practically managed the system. The books, with one exception, were prepared by Englishmen or Scotchmen. Irish history and national poetry were boycotted. Patriotic songs were suppressed. The limit of folly and absurdity was reached when Scott’s “Breathes there a man” was replaced in one of the books by these lines: “I thank the goodness and the grace That on my birth have smiled, And made me in these Christian days A happy English Child.”(148) In 1832 a worthless Irish Reform Act, under which the representation of the country became “virtually extinguished,”(149) was passed against the protest of the Irish members, all of whose amendments, aiming at making it a genuine measure for the extension of the franchise, were contemptuously rejected. Ignorance and prejudice, the absence of all sense of justice, an utter inability to understand the Irish case, a determination to trample on popular rights and to disregard public opinion—these were the characteristics of English statesmanship in Ireland between 1829 and 1835. Mr. Lecky’s account of the manner in which Catholic Emancipation was carried out is worth quoting: “In 1833—four years after Emancipation—there was not in Ireland a single Catholic judge or stipendiary magistrate. All the high sheriffs, the overwhelming majority of the unpaid magistrates and of the grand jurors, the five inspectors-general, and the thirty-two sub-inspectors of the police, were Protestants. The chief towns were in the hands of narrow, corrupt, and for the most part, intensely bigoted, corporations. For many years promotion had been steadily withheld from those who advocated Catholic Emancipation, and the majority of the people thus found their bitterest enemies in the foremost places.”