[Footnote 52: A late number of The Catholic Opinion (London) gives us the following statistics: There are, it is said 700,000 Anglicans in Ireland and 36,000,000 Catholics in France; that is, 51 times as many Catholics in France as Anglicans in Ireland. The budget therefore of Catholic worship in France should be 51 times £800,000, or £40,800,000, to write which is enough to show the monstrous iniquity of which Ireland has been the victim. The Presbyterians, numbering 523,291 persons, receive a regium donum for their ministers amounting to £40,547, and a subsidy of £2050 for their theological college at Belfast, making a total of £42,597. Protestant dissenters have no endowment, nor yet Catholics, excepting a subsidy to the college at Maynooth of £26,360. Thus the Anglican Establishment in Ireland has a revenue of about £800,000 for 700,000 persons, or about £1 3s. per head. The Presbyterians receive from the government £42,597 for 523,291 persons, or about 1s. 7 1/2d. per head. Catholics, £26,360 for 4,505,265 persons, that is, LESS THAN ONE PENNY HALFPENNY per head.
According to the last census, that of 1861, there were in Ireland:
| Per Cent of the whole Population. | ||
| 4,505,265 | Catholics, that is | 77.7 |
| 693,357 | Members of the Established Church | 11.9 |
| 523,291 | Presbyterians | 9.0 |
| 76,661 | Protestant dissenters | 1.2 |
| 393 | Jews | 0.0 |
| 5,798,967 | Total | 100.0 |
The holders of advowsons, or the right to appoint to church livings—with the exception of the queen, corporations sole and aggregate dissolved by the act, and trustees, officers, and persons acting in a public capacity—are entitled to certain compensation to be ascertained by arbitration; one million five hundred thousand dollars being allowed for the liquidation of this description of claims. As no Catholic can exercise this right, even though the owner of the land in fee from which the right to appoint arises, it follows that whatever compensation is made will go to Protestants only. It would seem to any person other than an Anglican landlord that this clause is not only not in harmony with the equitable spirit of the body of the act, but that it is manifestly unjust. Advowsons are as much a relic of ancient feudal barbarism as any that were abolished by law under the commonwealth or Charles II., and should have been swept away when all the other devices for defrauding the industrious poor were abolished centuries ago. We waive altogether the question of their simoniacal character; for a custom so convenient for the land-holder and so profitable for younger sons of aristocratic families would hardly be condemned on that account by those who so largely profit by it. In addition to all the money which the commissioners are to reimburse as above mentioned, we find that upon the property of the Irish Church there is a building debt of some one million and a quarter dollars for the repair of churches, glebes, etc., which the commissioners are instructed to pay.
Thus we see that the sum of nearly thirty-two millions of dollars has been set aside as an inducement to the loosening of the grip of a very small and mercenary faction on the public purse ostensibly, but in reality on the very vitals of the industrial interests of the country. Let us now see what corresponding compensation has been made for the Catholics and dissenters.
It is well known that for over a century the Presbyterians of Ireland have been annually in the receipt of a limited sum of money called the regium donum. At first, as the term indicates, this was simply a gift from the crown, but of late years it has been regularly voted by parliament, and last year it amounted to £45,000. This grant is to be withdrawn; and as an equivalent, a sum of about four millions of dollars is to be capitalized by the commissioners, the annual interest of which will be nearly equal to the present donation. In addition to this, seventy-five thousand dollars are to be bestowed on the Presbyterian college of Belfast.
But the Catholics, who, notwithstanding the vast emigration of the last twenty-five years, form three fourths of the entire population, fare even worse than their dissenting brethren. The paltry grant of £26,000 to Maynooth College is to cease, and a sum equal to less than a half of that appropriated to the Presbyterians is to be substituted, the interest only of which will be devoted to the support of that distinguished nursery of Catholic learning. The building debt of some twenty thousand pounds which the college owes to the Board of Public Works is to be paid off by the commissioners; but, apart from this trifling sum, the Catholics of Ireland gain no direct material advantage from the enforcement of the new act; and it is to be hoped that, when time confirms the sagacity of the statesmen who have suggested the introduction of the present reform, and has done full justice to the moral courage of the men who have proposed it to the imperial parliament, the self-denial and disinterestedness of the Irish Catholic hierarchy, clergy, and people will be duly appreciated. However little flattering such unequal distribution of funds may be to the rightful claims of Catholics, we presume they will not think it worth their while to object to it. Many of them, we are disposed to think, would be willing to dispense altogether with state aid, if the rule were made general as far as regards Protestant sects. The Catholic Church in Ireland has never been desirous of leaning for support on the arm of the British government, and the experience of its members at home and in this country has amply proved that the church is always more prosperous and more powerful for good in inverse proportion to its reliance on the secular arm.
There is no provision made for Trinity college, that being left for future legislation, with an intimation from the premier that, while its interests will be properly attended to, it shall be deprived of its exclusively sectarian character. This is well. Trinity was endowed with many thousand broad acres violently taken from the rightful owners, the Irish chiefs, by Elizabeth, which must now yield an enormous revenue. It has been in times past, to a great extent, the nursery of enlightened intolerance and philosophic indifference; but when we recall the names of Swift and Mollineux, Grattan, Curran, the Emmets, Petrie, and McCullough, and many other illustrious friends of Ireland, who studied in its venerable halls, and there partially developed the germs of that keen wit, fiery eloquence, and scientific lore which graced a nation even in its darkest hour of humiliation, we can forgive their old alma mater a great many backslidings. Trinity should be allowed to retain her revenues, and when her wide gates are thrown open for the reception alike of the Catholic, the Anglican, and the Dissenter, her sphere of usefulness will not only be enlarged, but doubly increased by the competition between the diverse elements of which the population of Ireland is composed. She will then cease to be sectarian, and become, in the truest sense, national.
We now come to the matter of assets to be reduced into possession by the commissioners, out of which the several sums above mentioned are to be paid—assets which, according to Mr. Gladstone's estimates, will amount to £16,000,000, or eighty million dollars. Of this sum, £9,000,000, it is expected, will be derived from the commutation or obliteration of tithe rent charges; that is to say, the owners of lands from which tithes are now derived can, by the payment of a fixed sum to the commissioners, be for ever relieved from the tithe exaction; and, should they be unable to pay the whole sum down, they are to be allowed forty-five years wherein to pay it by instalments. Tithes, it must be remembered, have not, for nearly forty years, been collected directly from the cultivator of the soil, but from the owner, who, of course, added it to the rent, and thus, though the objectionable adjuncts of distrain and imprisonment for tithes, as such, were done away, the tenant had still to pay the odious tax in another form. As the clause of the act regulating this branch of the duties of the commissioners is perhaps the last of such a nature that will ever be allowed to encumber the statute-book of the British parliament, we quote it entire, simply premising that it seems fair enough, and in terms decidedly favorable to the landlords. Section 32 recites:
"The commissioners may at any time after the 1st day of January, 1871, sell any rent charge in lieu of tithes bestowed on them under this act to the owner of the land charged therewith, in consideration of a sum equal to twenty-two and a half times the amount of such rent charge, and upon any such sale being so made, the commissioners shall, by order, declare the rent charge to be merged in the land out of which it issued, and the same shall merge and be extinguished accordingly. Upon the application of any owner so purchasing, the commissioners may, by order, declare his purchase money, or any part thereof, to be payable by instalments, and the land out of which such rent charge issued to be accordingly charged as from a day to be mentioned in such order, for forty-five years thence next ensuing, with an annual sum equal to four pounds ten shillings for every one hundred pounds of the purchase money, or part thereof, so payable in instalments. The annual sum charged by such order shall have priority over all charges and incumbrances, except quit or crown rents, and shall be payable by the same persons, and be recoverable in the same manner as the rent charge in lieu of tithes, heretofore payable out of the same lands. Owner, for the purposes of this section, shall mean the person for the time being liable to pay rent charge in lieu of tithes under the provisions of the acts of the first and second years of the reign of her present majesty, chap. 109."