Chapter XXII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 7 page 4

These words, indiscreet as they were, and calculated to embarrass the ministers, were regarded as in the highest degree precious by the bishops and clergy, and the whole tory party. With the utmost dispatch, they were circulated far and wide, with the design of bringing public feeling to bear against Mr. Ward's motion. In the meantime, great efforts were made by the government to be able to evade the motion. Its position at this time appeared far from enviable, and there was a general impression that ib could not long survive. The new appointments did not give satisfaction. The cabinet was said to be only patched up in order to wear through the session. Lord Grey - aged, worn, and out of spirits - was chagrined at not being able to have lord Durham in the cabinet. Lord Althorp was great in agriculture, and in his good-humoured manner, he was accustomed to say that he wondered why people forced him to become a cabinet minister. Lord Lansdowne had not energy enough, while the lord chancellor had perhaps too much. On the whole, the cabinet wanted unity and confidence in itself, and it was now made evident to all the world that it wanted the support of the sovereign as well as of the house of peers. It was under these discouraging circumstances that lord Althorp had to meet Mr. Ward's motion on Monday, the 2nd of June. In order to avoid a dissolution and a general election, the results of which might turn upon the existence of the Irish church, it was necessary that Mr. Ward's motion should be defeated. He refused to withdraw it, because he apprehended the speedy dissolution of the ministry, and he wished the decision of the house of commons on the Irish church question to be recorded, that it might stand in the way of a less liberal administration. The anticipated contest in the commons that evening excited extraordinary interest. The house was surrounded by a crowd anxious to obtain admittance or to hear the result, while within it was so thronged with members that the ministers found it difficult to get to their seats. Rarely has there been so full a house, the number of members being 516. When Mr. Ward had spoken in favour of his motion, lord Althorp rose to reply. He announced that a special commission of inquiry had been already issued, composed of laymen, who were to visit every parish in Ireland, and were to report on the means of religious instruction for the people; and that, pending this inquiry, he saw no necessity for the house being called upon to affirm the principles of Mr. Ward's motion. He would, therefore, content himself by moving the previous question. This was carried by an overwhelming majority, the numbers being 396 to 120. The Church Temporalities Bill, with some alterations, passed the lower house; it encountered strong opposition in the lords, but it ultimately passed, on the 30th of July, by a majority of fifty-four, several peers having recorded their protests against it, among whom the duke of Cumberland was conspicuous. The commissioners appointed under the bill were the lord primate, the archbishop of Dublin, the lord chancellor and chief justice of Ireland, and four of the bishops, and some time afterwards three laymen were added.

The following were the principal features of this great measure of church reform. Church cess was to be immediately abolished. This was a direct pecuniary relief to the amount of about £80,000 per annum, which had been levied in the most vexatious manner - a reduction of the number of archbishops and bishops prospectively, from four archbishops and eighteen bishops to two archbishops and ten bishops; the revenues of the suppressed sees to be appropriated to the general church purposes.

The archbishoprics of Cashel and Tuam were reduced to bishoprics, ten sees were abolished, the duties connected with them being transferred to other sees - Dromore to Down, Raphoe to Derry, Clogher to Armagh, Elphin to Kilmore, Killala to Tuam, Clonfer to Killaloe, Cork to Cloyne, Waterford to Cashel, Ferns to Ossory, Kildare to Dublin. The whole of Ireland was divided into two provinces by a line drawn from the north of Dublin county to the south of Gal way bay, and the bishoprics were reduced to ten. The revenues of the suppressed bishoprics, together with those of suspended dignities and benefices and disappropriated tithes, were vested by the Church Temporalities Act in the board of ecclesiastical commissioners, to be applied by them to the erection and repairs of churches, to the providing for the church expenses which had been hitherto defrayed by vestry rates, and to other ecclesiastical purposes. The sales which were made of perpetuities of church estates, vested in the ecclesiastical commissioners, produced upwards of £631,353; the value of the whole perpetuities, if sold, was estimated at £1,200,000. The total receipts of the ecclesiastical commissioners in 1834 were £68,729; in 1835, they amounted to £168,027; and in 1836 they reached £181,045. The cost of the official establishment was at one time £15,000; during the later years, however, it averaged less than £6,000. Its total receipts, up to July, 1861, were £3,310,999. The Church Temporalities Act imposed a tax on all benefices and dignities whose net annual value exceeded £300, graduated according to their amount, from two and a half to five per cent., the rate of charge increasing by 2s. 6d. per cent, on every additional £10 above £405. All benefices exceeding £1,195 were taxed at the rate of fifteen per cent. The yearly tax imposed on all bishoprics was graduated as follows: - Where the yearly value shall not exceed £4,000, five per cent.; not exceeding £6,000, seven per cent. -, not exceeding £8.000, ten per cert.; and not exceeding £10,000, twelve per cent. In lieu of tax, the archbishopric of Armagh was to pay to the ecclesiastical commissioner s an annual sum of £4,500, and the see of Derry to pay £6,160. The exact net incomes of the Irish bishops were as follow: - Armagh, £14,634; Meath, £3,764; Derry, £6,022; Down, £3,658; Kilmore, £5,248; Tuam, £3,898; Dublin, £7,636; Ossory, £3,874; Cashel, £4,691; Cork, £2,310; Killaloe, £3,310; Limerick, £3,987; - total, £63,038. The total amount of tithe rent charged payable to ecclesiastical persons - bishops, deans, chapters, incumbents of benefices, and the ecclesiastical commissioners was £401,114. The rental of Ireland is estimated, by the valuators under the poor law act, at about £12,000,000 - this rental being about a third part of the estimated value of the annual produce of the land.

Mr. Stanley left behind him one enduring monument of his administration in Ireland which, though still a subject of controversy and of party strife, has conferred immense advantages upon the country - the national system of education. Sir Archibald Alison remarks that the principle of the Irish establishment was that of a "missionary church;" that it was never based on the principle of being called for by the present wants of the population; that what it looked to was their future spiritual necessities. It was founded on the same reasons which prompt the building of churches in a densely-peopled locality, the running of roads through an uncultivated district, of drains through a desert morass. "The principle," he adds, " was philanthropic, and often, in its application, wise;" but it proceeded on one postulate, which, unfortunately, was here wanting - viz., that the people will embrace the faith intended for them. This was so far from having hitherto been the case that the reverse was the fact. For nearly three centuries this experiment was tried with respect to the education of the rising generations of the Roman catholics, and in every age it was attended by failures the most marked and disastrous. The commissioners of national education refer to this uniformity of failure in their sixth report, in which they observe, - "For nearly the whole of the last century the government of Ireland laboured to promote protestant education, and tolerated no other. Large grants of public money were voted for having children educated in the protestant faith, while it was made a transportable offence in a Roman catholic (and if the party returned, high treason) to act as a schoolmaster, or assistant to a schoolmaster, or even as a tutor in a private family. The acts passed for this purpose continued in force from 1709 to 1782. They were then repealed, but parliament continued to vote money for the support of only the schools conducted on principles which were regarded by the great body of the Roman catholics as exclusively protestant until the present system was established."

In the report drawn up by Mr. Wyse, the chairman of the select committee of the house of commons, appointed to inquire into the foundation schools in Ireland, in 1837, an interesting history is published of the origin, progress, and working of those obnoxious schools, and of other educational societies which followed. The Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland was established by royal charter in 1733, the avowed object being the education of the poor in the principles of the established church. It is sufficient to remark that the annual grants which were made to the schools in connection with it (well known as the charter schools), were, in consequence of the report of the commissioners of 1824, gradually reduced, and finally withdrawn. In 1824, there were of those schools, 32; the number of children in them amounted to 2,255. The grant for 1825 was £21,615. The grant was gradually reduced to £5,750 in 1832, when it was finally withdrawn. During nineteen years this system cost the country £1,612,138, of which £1,027,715 consisted of parliamentary grants. The total number of children apprenticed from the beginning till the end of 1824, was only 12,745; and of these but a unall number received the portion of £5 each, allotted to those who served out their apprenticeship, and married protestants. The Association for Discountenancing Vice was incorporated in 1800. It requires that the masters and mistresses in its schools shall be of the established church; that the Scriptures shall be read by all who have attained sufficient proficiency; and that no catechism be taught except that of the established church. The schools of the association amounted in 1824 to 226, and the number of children to 12,769; of whom it was stated that 7,803 were protestants, and 4,804 were Roman catholics; but the Rev. William Lee, who had inspected 104 of these schools in 1819 and 1820, stated before the commissioners of 1824, that he had found the catechism of the church of Rome in many of them. The Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor was founded upon the 2nd of December, 1811, and was managed by a committee of various religious persuasions. The principles which they had prescribed to themselves for their conduct, were to promote the establishment and assist in the support of schools in which the appointment of governors and teachers, and the admission of scholars, should be uninfluenced by religious distinctions, and in which the Bible or Testament, without note or comment, should be read by all the scholars who had attained a suitable proficiency in reading, excluding catechisms and books of religious controversy; wishing it at the same time distinctly to be understood, that the Bible or Testament should not be used as a school book from which children should be taught to spell or read. A grant was accordingly made to the society of £6,980, Irish currency, in the session of 1814-15. The system ot this society was manifestly the same as that which was formerly called the Lancasterian system in England, and which, although adopted by the great body of the protestant dissenters there, was so much opposed by the bishops and clergy of the established church in general, that they completely prevented its application to schools for children of their communion. The Roman catholic prelates and clergy set themselves with equal resolution against it in Ireland, and with equal success. It was accordingly found in 1824, that of 400,348 children whose parents paid for their education in the general schools of the country, and whose religion was ascertained, there were 81,060 protestants, and 319,288 Roman catholics; while of 56,201 children educated under the Kildare Place Society - although theirs were schools for the poor, and the Roman catholics bear a much greater proportion to protestants in the poorer classes than in the higher - there were 26,237 protestants, and only 29,964 Roman catholics.

Various inquiries had been instituted from time to time by royal commissions and parliamentary committees into the state of education in Ireland. One commission, appointed in 1806, laboured for six years, and published fourteen reports. It included the primate, two bishops, the provost of Trinity College, and Mr. R. Lovell Edge- worth. They recommended a system in which the children of all denominations should be educated together, without interfering with the peculiar tenets of any; and that there should be a board of commissioners, with extensive powers, to carry out the plan. Subsequent commissions and committees adopted the same principle of united secular education, particularly a select committee of the house of commons appointed in 1824. These important reports prepared the way for Mr. Stanley's plan, which he announced in the house of commons on the 9th of September, 1831. His speech on that occasion showed that he had thoroughly mastered the difficult question which he undertook to elucidate. It was remarkable for the clearness of its statements, the power of its arguments, and for the eloquence with which it enforced sound and comprehensive principles.

Mr. Spring Rice having moved that a sum of £30,000 be granted for enabling the lord-lieutenant of Ireland to assist in the education of the people, and the house having agreed to the motion without a division, Mr. Stanley, in the following month, wrote a letter to the duke of Leinster, in which he explained "the plan of national education," which since bore his name.

The first commissioners were the duke of Leinster, archbishop Whately, archbishop Murray, the Rev. Dr. Sadlier, Rev. James Carlile (presbyterian), A. R. Blake (chief remembrancer, a Roman catholic), and Robert Holmes, a unitarian barrister. Mr. Carlile, minister of Mary's Abbey congregation, in Dublin, was the only paid commissioner, and to him, during seven years, was committed a principal share in working the system. He selected the Scripture lessons, directed the compilation of the school books, aided in obtaining the recognition of parental rights, apart from clerical authority; in arranging the machinery, and putting it in working order.