When Dowling, the head constable, came to the police office next morning, and saw the official report in the book kept for the purpose, he caused the leaf containing it to be torn out, and another report by one Sergeant Tomlinson to be substituted for it. Mr. Mansfield, the stipendiary magistrate, who conducted the inquiry, denounced Dowling and Tomlinson for what he called "the disgraceful and discreditable suppression of the report which," he added, "was no doubt true. He had never heard of more disgraceful proceedings in his life."
Pending a fuller investigation, the police office books were impounded, and, as a result of the inquiry, several of the police were suspended. Dowling was dismissed from his post as head constable of Liverpool, and lost a retiring pension which, if all had been well with him, he would have come in for a short time afterwards.
An amusing story is told of a Liverpool daily paper in those days. It was struggling with adversity, and the manager, a worthy Scotsman, sat in his office on Monday morning with the weekly statement before him, showing increasing expense and decreasing revenue.
To him entered a Liverpool parson—very determined and very menacing. He had asked for the editor, but that gentleman had not yet come down, and the manager was the only person in authority visible, so he had to make shift with him.
"I am here," the parson said, "as the mouthpiece of a large number of people who are not satisfied with the attitude of the 'Liverpool ——' on the great question of the hour—Whether Popery is to dominate our liberties or are we to crush Popery?"
"Yes," said the manager, wearily, his mind still on the balance sheet. "What do you complain of?"
"I wish to tell you, sir," said the parson, with impressive emphasis, "that only this morning I have heard the belief expressed by merchants on 'Change that the 'Liverpool ——' is actually in the pay of the Pope of Rome!"
In a second a ray of light seemed to irradiate the gloom of the manager's soul, as he contemplated in a flash of thought the untold treasures of the Vatican—
"Man!" he exclaimed fervently, "I wish to Heaven it was!"
But the numerous exhibitions of bigotry stirred up in connection with Lord John Russell's Ecclesiastical Titles Act were of trifling consequence compared with the injury done to the Irish people arising out of the same Act. For it led to the ruin of the Tenant Right agitation in Ireland, in which the Irish people, Protestant as well as Catholic, had been united as they had not been since 1798 and the days of Grattan's Parliament.