POVERTY AND COERCION.
We are now in the nineteenth century, without any relief for the Irish
peasantry. The rebellion of '98, so cruelly crushed, left an abiding
sense of terror in the hearts of the Roman Catholic population.
Their condition was one of almost hopeless prostration. The Union was
effected without the promised relief from their religious disabilities
which was to be one of its essential conditions. The established
church was secured, the rights of property were secured, but there was
no security for the mass of the people. Domestic politics were almost
forgotten in the gigantic struggle with Napoleon, which exhausted
the energies of the empire. Any signs of political life that showed
themselves in Ireland were connected with Catholic emancipation, and
the visit of George IV., in 1820, held forth promises of relief which
excited unbounded joy. The king loved his Irish subjects, and would
never miss an opportunity of realising the good wishes for their
happiness which he had so often and so fervently expressed to his Whig
friends, when he was Prince Regent. O'Connell's agitation commenced
soon after, and in nine years after the royal visit emancipation was
extorted by the dread of civil war, frankly avowed by the Duke of
Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. But this boon left the masses nearly
where they had been, only more conscious of their power, and more
determined to use it, in the removal of their grievances.
Lord Redesdale, writing to Lord Eldon in 1821, said:--'In England
the machine goes on almost of itself, and therefore a bad driver
may manage it tolerably well. It is not so in Ireland. The country
requires great exertion to bring it into a state of order and
submission to law. The whole population--high and low, rich and poor,
Catholic and Protestant--must all be brought to obedience to law; all
must be taught to look up to the law for protection. The gentry are
ready enough to attend grand juries, to obtain presentments for their
own benefit, but they desert the quarter-sessions of the peace. The
first act of a constable in arresting must not be to knock down the
prisoner; and many, many reforms must be made, which only can be
effected by a judicious and able Government _on the spot_. Ireland, in
its present state, cannot be governed in England. If insubordination
compels you to give, how are you to retain by law what you propose to
maintain while insubordination remains? It can only be by establishing
completely the empire of the law.'
Sir Archibald Alison ascribed the unhappy relations of classes in
Ireland to what he calls 'the atrocious system of confiscation, which,
in conformity with feudal usages, the victors introduced on every
occasion of rebellion against their authority.' Sir George Nicholls
has shown, in his valuable history of the Irish poor law, that as
early as 1310 the parliament assembled at Kilkenny resolved that none
should keep Irish, or kern, in time of peace to live upon the poor of
the country; 'but those which will have them shall keep them at their
own charges, so that the free tenants and farmers be not charged with
them.' And 130 years afterwards, the parliament assembled in Dublin
declared that divers of the English were in the habit of maintaining
sundry thieves, robbers, and rebels, and that they were to be adjudged
traitors for so doing, and suffer accordingly. In 1450, this class
of depredators had increased very much, and by their 'thefts and
manslaughters caused the land to fall into decay, poverty wasting it
every day more and more; whereupon it was ordained that it should
be lawful for every liege man to kill or take notorious thieves, and
thieves found robbing, spoiling, or breaking houses; and that every
man that kills or takes any such thieves shall have one penny of every
plough, and one farthing of every cottage within the barony where the
manslaughter is done, for every thief.' These extracts show a very
barbarous state of society, but Sir George Nicholls remarks that
at the same period the condition of England and Scotland was very
similar, save only that that of Ireland was aggravated by the civil
conflicts between the colonists and the natives. There were some
efforts made in Ireland, by various enactments, to put down this evil,
and to provide employment for the large numbers that were disposed to
prey upon the industry of their neighbours, by robbery, beggary, and
destruction of property. But while there was a legal provision made
for the poor in England, there was none in Ireland, where the people
were, _en masse_, deprived of the means of self-support by the action
of the Government. Hence, so late as the year 1836, the poor-law
commissioners reported to the following effect:--
It appeared that in Great Britain the agricultural families
constituted little more than a fourth, whilst in Ireland they
constituted about two-thirds, of the whole population; that there
were in Great Britain, in 1831, 1,055,982 agricultural labourers;
in Ireland, 1,131,715, although the cultivated land of Great Britain
amounted to about 34,250,000 acres and that of Ireland only to about
14,600,000. So that there were in Ireland about five agricultural
labourers for every two that there were for the same quantity of land
in Great Britain. It further appeared that the agricultural progress
of Great Britain was more than four times that of Ireland; in which
agricultural wages varied from sixpence to one shilling a day; the
average of the country being about eightpence-halfpenny; and that the
earnings of the labourers came, on an average of the whole class, to
from two shillings to two and sixpence a week or thereabouts for the
year round. Thus circumstanced, the commissioners observed, 'It is
impossible for the able-bodied in general to provide against sickness
or the temporary absence of employment, or against old age, or the
destitution of their widows and children in the contingent event of
their own premature decease. A great portion of them are, it is said,
insufficiently provided with the commonest necessaries of life. Their
habitations are wretched hovels, several of a family sleep together
on straw, or upon the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes
even without so much to cover them; their food commonly consists of
dry potatoes, and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as
to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day.
There are even instances of persons being driven by hunger to seek
sustenance in wild herbs. They sometimes get a herring or a little
milk, but they never get meat except at Christmas, Easter, and
Shrovetide. Some go in search of employment to Great Britain, during
the harvest; others wander through Ireland with the same view. The
wives and children of many are occasionally obliged to beg; but they
do so reluctantly and with shame, and in general go to a distance from
home, that they may not be known. Mendicity, too, is the sole resource
of the aged and impotent of the poorer classes in general, when
children or relatives are unable to support them. To it, therefore,
crowds are driven for the means of existence, and the knowledge that
such is the fact leads to an indiscriminate giving of alms, which
encourages idleness, imposture, and general crime.' Such was the
wretched condition of the great body of the labouring classes in
Ireland; 'and with these facts before us,' the commissioners say, 'we
cannot hesitate to state that we consider remedial measures requisite
to ameliorate the condition of the Irish poor. What those measures
should be is a question complicated, and involving considerations
of the deepest importance to the whole body of the people, both in
Ireland and Great Britain.'
Sir George Nicholls, who had been an English poor-law commissioner,
was sent over to Ireland to make preliminary enquiries. He found
that the Irish peasantry had generally an appearance of apathy and
depression, seen in their mode of living, their habitations, their
dress and conduct; they seemed to have no pride, no emulation, to
be heedless of the present and careless of the future. They did not
strive to improve their appearance or add to their comforts: their
cabins were slovenly, smoky, dirty, almost without furniture, or any
article of convenience or common decency. The woman and her children
were seen seated on the floor, surrounded by pigs and poultry: the man
lounging at the door, which could be approached only through mud and
filth: the former too slatternly to sweep the dirt and offal from the
door, the latter too lazy to make a dry footway, though the materials
were close at hand. If the mother were asked why she did not keep
herself and her children clean with a stream of water running near the
cabin, her answer invariably was--Sure, how can we help it? We are so
poor.' The husband made the same reply, while smoking his pipe at the
fire or basking in the sunshine. Sir George Nicholls rightly concluded
that poverty was not the sole cause of this state of things. He found
them also remarkable for their desultory and reckless habits. Though
their crops were rotting in the fields from excessive wet, and every
moment of sunshine should be taken advantage of, yet if there was a
market, a fair, or a funeral, a horse-race, a fight, or a wedding,
forgetting everything else, they would hurry off to the scene of
excitement. Working for wages was rare and uncertain, and hence arose
a disregard of the value of time, a desultory, sauntering habit,
without industry or steadiness of application. 'Such,' he proceeds,
'is too generally the character and such the habits of the Irish
peasantry; and it may not be uninstructive to mark the resemblance
which these bear to the character and habits of the English peasantry
in the pauperised districts, under the abuses of the old poor law.
Mendicancy and indiscriminate almsgiving have produced in Ireland
results similar to what indiscriminate relief produced in England--the
like reckless disregard of the future, the like idle and disorderly
conduct, and the same proneness to outrage having then characterised
the English pauper labourer which are now too generally the
characteristics of the Irish peasant. An abuse of a good law caused
the evil in the one case, and a removal of that abuse is now rapidly
effecting a remedy. In the other case the evil appears to have arisen
rather from the want than the abuse of a law; but the corrective for
both will, I believe, be found to be essentially the same.'
The expectation that such a neglected people, made wretched by bad
land laws, should be loyal, was surely unreasonable. For them,
it might be said, there was no Government, no protection, no
encouragement. There could not be more tempting materials for
agitators to work upon. Lord Cloncurry vividly sketches the state
of things resulting from the want of principle and earnestness among
politicians in dealing with Irish questions at that time.
'From the Union up to the year 1829, the type of British colonial
government was the order of the day. The Protestants were upheld as
a superior caste, and paid in power and official emoluments for their
services in the army of occupation. During the second viceroyalty of
Lord Anglesea, an effort was made by him to evoke the energies of the
whole nation for its own regeneration. That effort was defeated by
the conjoint influence of the cowardice of the English cabinet,
the petulance of Mr. Stanley, and the unseasonable violence and
selfishness of the lately emancipated popular leaders. Upon Lord
Anglesea's recall the modern Whig model of statemanship was set up and
followed: popular grievances were allowed to remain unredressed; the
discontent and violence engendered by those grievances were used from
time to time for party purposes; the people were hung and bayoneted
when their roused passions exceeded the due measure of factious
requirement; and the state patronage was employed to stimulate and
to reward a staff of demagogues, by whom the masses were alternately
excited to madness, and betrayed, according to the necessities of the
English factions. When Russells and Greys were out or in danger, there
were free promises of equal laws and privileges and franchises for
oppressed Ireland; the minister expectant or trembling for his place,
spoke loudly of justice and compensation, of fraternity and freedom.
To these key-notes the place-hunting demagogue pitched his brawling.
His talk was of pike-making, and sword-fleshing, and monster marching.
The simple people were goaded into a madness, the end whereof was for
them suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the hulks, and the gallows;
for their stimulators, silk gowns and commissionerships and seats on
the bench. Under this treatment the public mind became debauched; the
lower classes, forced to bear the charges of agitation, as well as to
suffer its penalties, lost all faith in their social future; they saw
not and looked not beyond the momentary excitement of a procession or
a monster meeting.'
Sir Robert Peel, when introducing the Emancipation Bill, had to
confess the utter failure of the coercive policy which had been so
persistently pursued. He showed that Ireland had been governed, since
the Union, almost invariably by coercive acts. There was always some
political organisation antagonistic to the British Government. The
Catholic Association had just been suppressed; but another would soon
spring out of its ashes, if the Catholic question were not settled.
Mr. O'Connell had boasted that he could drive a coach-and-six through
the former act for its suppression; and Lord Eldon had engaged to
drive 'the meanest conveyance, even a donkey cart, through the act of
1829.' The new member for Oxford (Sir Robert Inglis) also stated that
twenty-three counties in Ireland were prepared to follow the example
of Clare. 'What will you do,' asked Sir Robert Peel, 'with that power,
that tremendous power, which the elective franchise, exercised
under the control of religion, at this moment confers upon the Roman
Catholics? What will you do with the thirty or forty seats that will
be claimed in Ireland by the persevering efforts of the agitators,
directed by the Catholic Association, and carried out by the agency
of every priest and bishop in Ireland?' If Parliament began to recede
there could be no limit to the retrogression. Such a course would
produce a reaction, violent in proportion to the hopes that had been
excited. Fresh rigours would become necessary; the re-enactment of the
penal code would not be sufficient. They must abolish trial by jury,
or, at least, incapacitate Catholics from sitting on juries. 2,000,000
of Protestants must have a complete monopoly of power and privilege in
a country which contained 5,000,000 of Catholics, who were in most
of the country four to one--in some districts twenty to one--of the
Protestants. True, there were difficulties in the way of a settlement.
'But,' asked Sir Robert Peel, 'what great measure, which has stamped
its name upon the era, has ever been carried without difficulty?
At the present moment there is a loud cry in the English press for the
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and for the old remedy, coercion.
Those who raise the cry would do well to read Mr. Shiel's speech at
the Clare election in 1828. He said:--
'We have put a great engine into action, and applied the entire force
of that powerful machinery which the law has placed under our control.
We are masters of the passions of the people, and we have employed
our dominion with a terrible effect. But, sir, do you, or does any man
here, imagine that we could have acquired this formidable ability to
sunder the strongest ties by which the different classes of society
are fastened, unless we found the materials of excitement in the state
of society itself? Do you think that Daniel O'Connell has himself,
and by the single powers of his own mind, unaided by any external
co-operation, brought the country to this great crisis of agitation?
Mr. O'Connell, with all his talent for excitation, would have been
utterly powerless and incapable, unless he had been allied with a
great conspirator against the public peace; and I will tell you who
that confederate is--it is the law of the land itself that has been
Mr. O'Connell's main associate, and that ought to be denounced as the
mighty agitator of Ireland. The rod of oppression is the wand of this
enchanter, and the book of his spells is the penal code? Break the
wand of this political Prospero, and take from him the volume of his
magic, and he will evoke the spirits which are now under his control
no longer. But why should I have recourse to illustration, which may
be accounted fantastical, in order to elucidate what is in itself
so plain and obvious? Protestant gentlemen, who do me the honour to
listen to me, look, I pray you, a little dispassionately at the real
causes of the events which have taken place amongst you.... In no
other country, except in this, would such a revolution have been
effected. Wherefore? Because in no other country are the people
divided by the law from their superiors, and cast into the hands of a
set of men who are supplied with the means of national excitement
by the system of government under which we live. Surely, no man can
believe that such an anomalous body as the Catholic Association could
exist excepting in a community that has been alienated from the state
by the state itself. The discontent and the resentment of 7,000,000
of the population have generated that domestic government which sways
public opinion, and uses the national passions as the instruments
of its will. It would be utterly impossible, if there were no
exasperating distinctions amongst us, to create any artificial causes
of discontent. Let men declaim for a century, and if they have no real
grievance their harangues will be empty sound and idle air. But
when what they tell the people is true--when they are sustained by
substantial facts, effects are produced of which what has taken place
at this election is only an example. The whole body of the people
having been previously excited, the moment any incident such as this
election occurs, all the popular passions start simultaneously up, and
bear down every obstacle before them. Do not, therefore, be surprised
that the peasantry should throw off their allegiance when they are
under the operation of emotions which it would be wonderful if they
could resist. The feeling by which they are actuated would make them
not only vote against their landlord, but would make them scale the
batteries of a fortress, and mount the breach; and, gentlemen, give
me leave to ask you whether, after due reflection upon the motives by
which your vassals (for so they are accounted) are governed, you will
be disposed to exercise any measure of severity in their regard?'
The greatest warrior of the age rebuked the men who cried in that day
that the sword should be the arbiter of the Irish question; and Sir
Robert Peel, in his own vindication of the Emancipation Act, said:--
'I well know that there are those upon whom such considerations as
these to which I have been adverting will make but a faint impression.
Their answer to all such appeals is the short, in their opinion the
conclusive, declaration--" The Protestant constitution in church
and state must be maintained at all hazards, and by any means; the
maintenance of it is a question of principle, and every concession
or compromise is the sacrifice of principle to a low and vulgar
expediency." This is easily said; but how was Ireland to be governed?
How was the Protestant constitution in church and state to be
maintained in that part of the empire? Again I can anticipate the
reply--"By the overwhelming sense of the people of Great Britain; by
the application, if necessary, of physical force for the maintenance
of authority; by the employment of the organised strength of
government, the police and the military, to enforce obedience to the
law." I deliberately affirm that a minister of the crown, responsible
at the time of which I am speaking for the public peace and the public
welfare, would have grossly and scandalously neglected his duty if he
had failed to consider whether it might not be possible that the fever
of political and religious excitement which was quickening the pulse
and fluttering the bosom of the whole Catholic population--which had
inspired the serf of Clare with the resolution and energy of a free
man--which had, in the twinkling of an eye, made all considerations of
personal gratitude, ancient family connection, local preferences, the
fear of worldly injury, the hope of worldly advantage, subordinate
to the all-absorbing sense of religious obligation and public
duty--whether, I say, it might not be possible that the contagion of
that feverish excitement might spread beyond the barriers which,
under ordinary circumstances, the habits of military obedience and
the strictness of military discipline opposed to all such external
influences.'
The officer who commanded the military force in Clare during the
election, testified, as the result of his observation there, that,
even in the constabulary and the army, the sympathies of a common
cause, political and religious, could not be altogether repressed,
and that implicit reliance could not long be placed on the effect of
discipline and the duty of obedience. On July 20, Lord Anglesea wrote
as follows:--
'We hear occasionally of the Catholic soldiers being ill-disposed, and
entirely under the influence of the priests. One regiment of infantry
is said to be divided into Orange and Catholic factions. It is certain
that, on July 12, the guard at the castle had Orange lilies about
them.' On July 26, the viceroy wrote another letter, from which the
following is an extract:--'The priests are using very inflammatory
language, and are certainly working upon the Catholics of the army.
I think it important that the depôts of Irish recruits should be
gradually removed, under the appearance of being required to join
their regiments, and that whatever regiments are sent here should be
those of Scotland, or, at all events, of men not recruited from the
south of Ireland. I desired Sir John Byng to convey this opinion to
Lord Hill.'
Emancipation was carried, and the people were disaffected still.
And why should they not be disaffected still? Emancipation had
done nothing for them. The farmers were still at the mercy of the
landlords, whose pride they humbled at the hustings of Clare and
Waterford. They were still tormented by the tithe-proctor seizing the
tenth of all that their labour produced on the land. The labourers
were still wretched, deprived of the forty-shilling freehold, which
protected them from the horrors of eviction and of transportation in
a floating hell across the Atlantic. I well remember the celebrated
anti-tithe war in 1831, as well as the system by which it was
provoked, and I can bear witness to the accuracy of the following
description of the tithe-proctor by Henry Grattan. He said:--
'The use of the tithe-farmer is to get from the parishioners what the
parson would be ashamed to demand, and so enable the parson to absent
himself from his duty. The powers of the tithe-farmer are summary laws
and ecclesiastical courts; his livelihood is extortion; his rank in
society is generally the lowest; and his occupation is to pounce on
the poor in the name of the Lord! He is a species of wolf left by
the shepherd to take care of the flock in his absence.' A single
tithe-proctor had on one occasion processed 1,100 persons for tithes,
nearly all of the lower order of farmers or peasants, the expense of
each process being about 8 s. They had heard of opinions delivered
in parliament, on the platform, and from the press by Protestant
statesmen of the highest consideration, that it was a cruel oppression
to extort in that manner from the majority of the tillers of the soil
the tenth of its produce, in order to support the clergy of another
church, who, in many cases, had no flocks, or only a few followers,
who were well able to pay for their own religious instruction. The
system would be intolerable even were the state clergy the pastors of
the majority; but as the proportion between the Protestants and the
Roman Catholics was in many parts as one to ten, and in some as one to
twenty, the injustice necessarily involved in the mode of levying the
impost was aggravated a hundredfold. It would be scarcely possible
to devise any mode of levying an impost more exasperating, which
came home to the bosoms of men with more irritating, humiliating,
and maddening power, and which violated more recklessly men's natural
sense of justice. If a plan were devised for the purpose of driving
men into insurrection, nothing could be more effectual than
the tithe-proctor system. Besides, it tended directly to the
impoverishment of the country, retarding agricultural improvement and
limiting production. If a man kept all his land in pasture, he escaped
the impost; but the moment he tilled it, he was subjected to a tax of
ten per cent. on the gross produce. The valuation being made by the
tithe-proctor--a man whose interest it was to defraud both the tenant
and the parson--the consequence was, that the gentry and the large
farmers, to a great extent, evaded the tax, and left the small
occupiers to bear nearly the whole burden; they even avoided mowing
the meadows in some cases, because then they should pay tithe for the
hay.
There was besides a tax called church cess, levied by Protestants in
vestry meetings upon Roman Catholics for cleaning the church, ringing
the bell, washing the minister's surplice, purchasing bread and wine
for the communion, and paying the salary of the parish clerk. This
tax was felt to be a direct and flagrant violation of the rights of
conscience, and of the principles of the British constitution; and
against it there was a determined opposition, which manifested itself
in tumultuous and violent assemblages at the parish churches all
over the country on Easter Monday, when the rector or his curate, as
chairman of the meeting, came into angry collision with flocks who
disowned him, and denounced him as a tyrant, a persecutor, and a
robber.
But the tithe impost was the one most grievously felt, and at last the
peasantry resolved to resist it by force.
Nothing could be more violent than the contrasts presented at this
time in the social life of Ireland. On the one side there was a rapid
succession of atrocities and tragedies fearful to contemplate: the
bailiffs, constabulary, and military driving away cattle, sheep, pigs,
and geese to be sold by public auction, to pay the minister who had no
congregation to whom he could preach the gospel; the cattle-prisons
or 'pounds' surrounded by high walls, but uncovered, wet and dirty,
crowded with all sorts of animals, cold and starved, and uttering
doleful sounds; the driving away of the animals in the night from one
farm to another to avoid seizures; the auctions without bidders,
in the midst of groaning and jeering multitudes; the slaughter
of policemen, and in some instances of clergymen, with fiendish
expressions of hatred and yells of triumph; the mingling of fierce
passions with the strongest natural affections; the exultation in
murder as if it were a glorious deed of war; the Roman Catholic press
and platform almost justifying those deeds of outrage and blood; the
mass of the Roman Catholic population sustaining this insurrection
against the law with their support and sympathy and prayers, as if it
were a holy war, in which the victims were martyrs. On the other side
were presented pictures which excited the deepest interest of the
Protestant community throughout the United Kingdom. We behold the
clergyman and his family in the glebe-house, lately the abode of
plenty, comfort, and elegance, a model of domestic happiness and
gentlemanly life; but the income of the rector fell off, till he was
bereft of nearly all his means. In order to procure the necessaries
of life for his family, he was obliged to part with the cows that gave
milk for his household, the horse and car, which were necessary in the
remote place where his glebe-house was situated, and everything that
could be spared, till at length he was obliged to make his greatest
sacrifice, and to send his books--the dear and valued companions of
his life--to Dublin, to be sold by auction. His boys could no longer
be respectably clad, his wife and daughters were obliged to part with
their jewellery and all their superfluities. There was no longer wine
or medicine, that the mother was accustomed to dispense kindly and
liberally to the poor around her, in their sickness and sorrow,
without distinction of creed.
The glebe, which once presented an aspect of so much comfort and ease
and affluence, now looked bare and desolate and void of life. But for
the contributions of Christian friends at a distance, many of
those once happy little centres of Christian civilisation--those
well-springs of consolation to the afflicted--must have been abandoned
to the overwhelming sand of desolation swept upon them by the
hurricane of the anti-tithe agitation.
During this desperate struggle, force was employed on several
occasions with fatal effect. At Newtownbarry, in the county of
Wexford, some cattle were impounded by a tithe-proctor. The peasantry
assembled in large numbers to rescue them, when they came into
collision with the yeomanry, who fired, killing twelve persons. It was
a market day, and a placard was posted on the walls: 'There will be an
end of church plunder; your pot, blanket, and pig will not hereafter
be sold by auction to support in luxury, idleness, and ease persons
who endeavour to make it appear that it is essential to the peace and
prosperity of the country and your eternal salvation, while the most
of you are starving. Attend to an auction of your neighbours' cattle.'
At Carrickshock there was a fearful tragedy. A number of writs against
defaulters were issued by the court of exchequer, and entrusted to
the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong body of police,
proceeded on their mission with secrecy and dispatch. Bonfires along
the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles soon convinced
them that the people were not unprepared for their visitors. But
the yeomanry pushed boldly on. Suddenly an immense assemblage of
peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them.
A terrible hand-to-hand struggle ensued, and in the course of a few
moments eighteen of the police, including the commanding officer,
were slaughtered. The remainder consulted safety and fled, marking the
course of their retreat by the blood that trickled from their wounds.
A coroner's jury pronounced this deed of death as 'wilful murder'
against some persons unknown. A large government reward was offered,
but it failed to produce a single conviction. At Castlepollard, in
Westmeath, on the occasion of an attempted rescue, the chief constable
was knocked down. The police fired, and nine or ten persons were
killed. One of the most lamentable of these conflicts occurred at
Gurtroe, near Rathcormac, in the county of Cork. Archdeacon Ryder
brought a number of the military to recover the tithes of a farm
belonging to a widow named Ryan. The assembled people resisted, the
military were ordered to fire, eight persons were killed and thirteen
wounded; and among the killed was the widow's son.
These disorders appealed with irresistible force to the Government and
the legislature, to put an end to a system fraught with so much evil,
and threatening the utter disruption of society in Ireland. In the
first place, something must be done to meet the wants of the destitute
clergy and their families. Accordingly, Lord Stanley brought in a
bill, in May 1832, authorising the lord lieutenant of Ireland to
advance 60,000 l. as a fund for the payment of the clergy, who were
unable to collect their tithes for the year 1831. This measure was
designed to meet the present necessity, and was only a preliminary to
the promised settlement of the tithe question. It was therefore passed
quickly through both Houses, and became law on June 1. But the money
thus advanced was not placed on the consolidated fund.
The Government took upon itself the collection of the arrears of
tithes for that one year. It was a maxim with Lord Stanley that the
people should be made to respect the law; that they should not
be allowed to trample upon it with impunity. The odious task thus
assumed, produced a state of unparalleled excitement. The people were
driven to frenzy, instead of being frightened by the chief secretary
becoming tithe-collector-general, and the army being employed in
its collection. They knew that the king's speech had recommended the
settlement of the tithe question. They had heard of the evidence of
Bishop Doyle and other champions, exposing what they believed to be
the iniquity of the tithe system. They had seen the condemnation of it
in the testimony of the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, who declared
his conviction that it could not be collected except at the point of
the bayonet, and by keeping up a chronic war between the Government
and the Roman Catholic people. They had been told that parliamentary
committees had recommended the complete extinction of tithes, and
their commutation into a rent-charge. Their own leaders had everywhere
resolved:--
'That it was a glaring wrong to compel an impoverished Catholic people
to support in pampered luxury the richest clergy in the world--a
clergy from whom, the Catholics do not experience even the return of
common gratitude--a clergy who, in times past, opposed to the last
the political freedom of the Irish people, and at the present day
are opposed to reform and a liberal scheme of education for their
countrymen. The ministers of the God of charity should not, by
misapplication of all the tithes to their own private uses, thus
deprive the poor of their patrimony; nor should ministers of
peace adhere with such desperate tenacity to a system fraught with
dissension, hatred, and ill-will.' The first proceeding of the
Government to recover the tithes, under the act of June 1, was
therefore the signal for general war. Bonfires blazed upon the hills,
the rallying sounds of horns were heard along the valleys, and the
mustering tread of thousands upon the roads, hurrying to the scene
of a seizure or an auction. It was a bloody campaign; there was
considerable loss of life, and the Church and the Government thus
became more obnoxious to the people than ever. Lord Stanley being the
commander-in-chief on one side, and Mr. O'Connell on the other, the
contest was embittered by their personal antipathies. It was found
that the amount of the arrears for the year 1831 was 104,285 l., and
that the whole amount which the Government was able to levy, after
putting forth its strength in every possible way, was 12,000 l., the
cost of collection being 15,000 l., so the Government was not able to
raise as much money as would pay the expenses of the campaign. This
was how Lord Stanley illustrated his favourite sentiment that the
people should be made to respect the law. But the Liberal party among
the Protestants fully sympathised with the anti-tithe recusants.
Of course the Government did not persevere in prosecutions from which
no parties but the lawyers reaped any advantage; consequently, all
processes under the existing law were abandoned. It was found that,
after paying to the clergy the arrears of 1831 and 1832, and what
would be due in 1833, about a million sterling would be required,
and this sum was provided by an issue of exchequer bills. The
reimbursement of the advance was to be effected by a land tax.
Together with these temporary arrangements to meet the exigency of the
case, for the payment of the clergy and the pacification of Ireland,
an act was passed to render tithe composition in Ireland compulsory
and permanent. But Ireland was not yet pacified.[1]
[Footnote 1: The foregoing sketch of the tithe war was written by the
author seven years ago for Cassell's _History of England_, from which
it is now extracted.]