Next to parliamentary reform the state of Ireland was by far the most important subject which engaged the attention of the legislature in 1831-32. The population had increased from 6,801,827 in 1821 to 7,767,401 in 1831, and the increase, unlike that in England, had been almost exclusively in the agricultural districts. While the political motive for multiplying small freeholds had ceased, the motives for multiplying small tenancies were as strong as ever, and were felt by landlords no less than by cottiers. This class, often inhabiting huts like those of savage tribes and living in a squalor hardly to be seen elsewhere in western Europe, chiefly depended for their subsistence on potatoes—the most uncertain and the least nutritious of the crops used for human food. Many hundred thousands of them had no employment in their own country and no means of livelihood except the produce of the scanty patches around their own turf cabins. Tens of thousands flocked to England annually seeking harvest work, and a small number emigrated to Canada or the United States, the passage money for an emigrant being then almost prohibitive. Those who could not pay rent were liable to eviction, and eviction was a more cruel fate then than now, since there was no poor law in Ireland. Fever was rife in their miserable abodes, following in the steps of hunger, and for relief of any kind they could rely only on the mercy of their landlords or the charity of their neighbours. Under such conditions of life crime and disaffection could not but flourish, and the Irish peasant could hardly be blamed if he listened eagerly to the counsels of O'Connell. For him catholic emancipation had no meaning except so far as it gave him a hope that parliament, swayed by the great Irish demagogue, would abolish tithes, if not rent, and find some means of making Irishmen happy in their own country.
ANGLESEY LORD LIEUTENANT OF IRELAND.
Had O'Connell been a true patriot, or even an honest politician, he would have devoted his vast powers and influence to practical schemes for the good of Ireland, and specially to a solution of the agrarian question. Unhappily, smarting under a not unfounded sense of injustice, when he was disabled from taking his seat for Clare, he threw his whole energy into a new campaign for the repeal of the union, which occupied the rest of his life. So far from acknowledging any gratitude to the whigs, through whose support emancipation had been carried, he exhausted all the resources of his scurrilous rhetoric upon them, lavishing the epithets "base, brutal, and bloody," with something like Homeric iteration. In December, 1830, Anglesey had returned to succeed the Duke of Northumberland, and Stanley occupied the post of chief secretary, in place of Hardinge. The ministers were privately advised to buy O'Connell at any price, and it was intimated that he would not object to become a law officer of the crown, or at least would not refuse a judicial appointment. It may well be doubted whether the offer of such a bargain to such a man could have been justified by success; it is more than probable that it would have failed, and it is quite certain that failure would have brought infinite discredit upon the government. At all events the attempt was not made, and other catholic aspirants to legal promotion were passed over with less excuse.
Lord Anglesey proved a resolute viceroy, and proclaimed the various associations, meetings, and processions organised by O'Connell, with little regard for his own popularity. O'Connell's policy, carried out with the cunning of a skilful lawyer, was to obey the law in the letter, but to break it almost defiantly in the spirit. At last, however, he went a step too far by advising the people who had come for a prohibited meeting to reassemble and hold it elsewhere. He was arrested on January 18, 1831, and pleaded "Not guilty," but on February 17, when his trial came on, he allowed judgment to go by default against him on those counts of the indictment which charged him with a statutable offence, provided that other counts, which charged him with a conspiracy at common law, should be withdrawn. The attorney-general assented, and the case was adjourned until the first day in Easter term. Before that day arrived, however, the reform bill had been introduced, and O'Connell had made a powerful speech in support of it. In the desperate struggle which ensued, the ministers shrunk from estranging so formidable an ally, a further adjournment of the case was allowed, a sudden dissolution of parliament took place, the act under which O'Connell was to be sentenced expired with the parliament, and no further action was taken.
"TITHE-WAR" IN IRELAND.
During the year 1831, the agitation for repeal which O'Connell had set on foot, as soon as the emancipation act had been passed, was for a while thrust into the shade by the fiercer agitation against tithes. This agitation was connected, in theory, with the demand for the abolition or reduction of the Irish Church establishment, but was, in fact, entirely independent of that or any other constitutional movement. It may seem inexplicable to political students of a later age that Irish questions of secondary importance, and eminently capable of equitable treatment, should have convulsed the whole island and disturbed the whole course of imperial politics, during the reign of William IV. The rebellion against tithes or "tithe-war," as it was called, had not the semblance of justification in law or reason. Every tenant who took part in it had inherited or acquired his farm, subject to payment of tithes, and might have been charged a higher rent if he could have obtained it tithe-free. The tithe was the property of the parson as much as the land was the property of the landlord, and the wilful refusal of it was from a legal point of view sheer robbery. On the other hand, the mode of collection was extremely vexatious, perhaps involving the seizure of a pig, a bag of meal, or a sack of potatoes; and a starving cottier, paying fees to his own priest, was easily persuaded by demagogues that it was an arbitrary tribute extorted by clerical tyrants of an alien faith.
Thus it came to pass that the history of the Irish "tithe-war" exhibits the Irish peasantry in their very worst moods, and it is stained with atrocities never surpassed in later records of Irish agrarian conspiracy. It is among the strange and sad anomalies of national character that a people so kindly in their domestic relations, so little prone to ordinary crime, and so amenable to better influences, should have shown, in all ages, down to the very latest, a capacity for dastardly inhumanity, under vindictive and gregarious impulses, only to be matched by Spanish and Italian brigands among the races of modern Europe. Yet so it is, and no "coercion" (so-called) ultimately enforced by legal authority was comparable in severity with the coercion which bloodthirsty miscreants ruthlessly applied to honest and peaceable neighbours, only guilty of paying their lawful debts. It is not too much to say that anarchy prevailed over a great part of Ireland, especially of Leinster, during the years 1831 and 1832. The collection of tithes became almost impossible. The tithe-proctors were tortured or murdered; the few willing tithe-payers were cruelly maltreated or intimidated; the police, unless mustered in large bodies, were held at bay; cattle were driven, or, if seized and offered for sale, could find no purchasers; and the protestant clergy, who had acted on the whole with great forbearance, were reduced to extremities of privations. Five of the police were shot dead on one occasion; on another, twelve who were escorting a tithe-proctor were massacred in cold blood. A large number of rioters were killed in encounters with the police, which sometimes assumed the form of pitched battles and closely resembled civil war. Special commissions were sent down into certain districts, and a few executions took place, but in most cases Irish juries proved as regardless of their oaths as they ever have on trials of prisoners for popular crimes. O'Connell, and even Sheil, tacitly countenanced these lawless proceedings, and openly palliated them in the house of commons.
The whig government, engaged in a life-and-death contest with the English borough-mongers, hesitated to crush the Irish insurgents by military force, or to initiate a sweeping reform of the Irish Church. Early in 1832, however, committees of both houses reported in favour of giving the clergy temporary relief out of public funds, and of ultimately commuting tithes into a charge upon the land. A preliminary bill for the former purpose was promptly carried by Stanley, and made the government responsible for recovering the arrears. The committee, pursuing their inquiries, produced fuller reports, and again recommended a complete extinction of tithes in Ireland. But the method proposed and embodied in three bills introduced by Stanley in the same year, was too complicated to serve as a permanent settlement, and was denounced as illusory by the Irish members. The first bill was, in fact, a compulsory extension of acts already passed in 1822 and 1823, the former of which had permitted the tithe-owner to lease the tithe to the landlord, while the latter permitted the tithe-owner and tithe-payers of each parish to arrange a composition. Unfortunately, the act of 1823 had provided that the payment in commutation of tithe should be distributed over grass-lands hitherto tithe-free in Ireland as well as over land hitherto liable to tithe. The act was in consequence unpopular with a section of farmers, while at the same time the bishops resented the commutation, as likely to diminish the value of beneficies. But in spite of this opposition the act of 1823 had been widely adopted. Stanley's bill to render such commutations compulsory passed, but his other two bills, providing a new ecclesiastical machinery for buying up tithes, were abandoned at the end of the session. Of course the substitution of the government for the clergyman as creditor in respect of arrears had no soothing effect on the debtors. The reign of terror continued unabated, and O'Connell contented himself with pointing out that without repeal there could be no peace in Ireland. We may so far anticipate the legislation of 1833 as to notice the inevitable failure of the experiment which converted the government into a tithe-proctor. It was then replaced by a new plan, under which the government abandoned all processes under the existing law, advanced £1,000,000 to clear off all arrears of tithe, and sought reimbursement by a land tax payable for a period of five years.
EDUCATION IN IRELAND.
It reflects credit on the unreformed house of commons that in its very last session, harassed by the irreconcilable attitude of the catholic population in Ireland, it should have found time and patience not only for the pressing question of Irish tithes, but for the consideration of a resolution introductory to an Irish poor law, of a bill (which became law) for checking the abuses of Irish party processions, and of a grant for a board to superintend the mixed education of Irish catholic and protestant children. The discussion of Sadler's motion in favour of an Irish poor law was somewhat academic, and produced a division among the Irish members, O'Connell, with gross inconsistency, declaring himself vehemently opposed to any such measure. The ministers professed sympathy with its principle, but would not pledge themselves to deal immediately with so difficult and complicated a subject, perhaps foreseeing the necessity of radical change in the English poor law system. The processions bill was vigorously resisted on behalf of the Orangemen, as specially aimed at their annual demonstrations on July 12, but it was so manifestly wise to remove every wanton aggravation of party spirit in Ireland, that it was passed just before the prorogation.