able seat of learning need not fear
comparison with any similar institutions in Great Britain. It may also,
of course, be said that many men who have passed through Trinity College
have impressed the thought of Ireland, and, indeed, of the world, in one
way or another--such men as, to take two very different examples, Burke
and Thomas Davis--but on some of the very best spirits amongst these men
Trinity College and its atmosphere have exerted influence rather by
repulsion than by attraction; and certainly their characteristics of
temper or thought have not been of a kind which those best acquainted
with the atmosphere of Trinity College associate with that institution.
Still nothing can detract from the credit of having educated such men.
But these tests and standards are, for my present purpose, irrelevant. I
am not writing a book on Irish educational history, or even a record of
present-day Irish educational achievement. I am rather trying, from the
standpoint of a practical worker for national progress, to measure the
reality and strength of the educational and other influences which are
actually and actively operating on the character and intellect of the
majority of the Irish people, moulding their thought and directing
their action towards the upbuilding of our national life.

From this point of view I am bound to say that Trinity College, so far
as I have seen, has had but little influence upon the minds or the lives
of the people. Nor can I find that at any period of the extraordinarily
interesting economic and social revolution, which has been in progress
in Ireland since the great catastrophe of the Famine period, Dublin
University has departed from its academic isolation and its aloofness
from the great national problems that were being worked out. The more
one thinks of it, indeed, and the more one realises the opportunities of
an institution like Trinity College in a country like Ireland, the more
one must recognise how small, in recent times, has been its positive
influence on the mind of the country, and how little it has contributed
towards the solution of any of those problems, educational, economic, or
social, that were clamant for solution, and which in any other country
would have naturally secured the attention of men who ought to have been
leaders of thought.

Whatever the causes, and many may be assigned, this unfortunate lack of
influence on the part of Trinity College, has always seemed to me a