Mr. Forbes with undaunted perseverance again brought in his bill for limiting pensions. A pension bill had at all times been a favourite object of the patriots: but every former effort to procure it had, like the present, proved abortive. He contended, that from the mode of resistance offered by the enemies to that measure both in that and the preceding session, he was warranted in concluding that the majority of the house admitted the principle of the bill: they would not otherwise have moved to adjourn it to a distant day, but have met it with a direct negative. He urged it upon the double principle of œconomy and constitution, and complained of pensions granted during pleasure to members of parliament even since the last session. Several gentlemen of the opposition made very long and animated speeches upon the abuses of the pension list, not only by rewarding demerit and infamy, and by corrupting the members of that house in particular by doubling the pensions of those, who before possessed them: but by introducing a new species of prostitution into that list, by the previous grant of honours and titles, for the direct purpose of engrafting pensions upon them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Monk Mason, and Sir Henry Cavendish were the only opposers of the bill, who spoke to the question: the first alleged, that as a similar bill had before been rejected by that house, and nothing had happened to render that proper then, which had before been improper, he should move to have it read a second time on the 1st of August: the second also insisted, that the new bill ought to be founded on some actual abuse, and none had been proved, and the third said, the bill went too far: the best way would be to take the pensioners singly, every man upon his own merit. The sportsman who fired at the whole covey, seldom hit a feather. In consonance with this idea, Mr. Jones said, that had he not full confidence, that the house would from its moderation adopt the bill, he should have moved, as an amendment: that an enquiry might be made into the character, circumstances, and situation of the persons, to whom pensions were then paid. The bill was lost by a division of 129 against 65.

adopt so silly an intolerance, or so abject a panic. He said, that this law would render the established church odious to the country, and of course, prevent the progress of the established religion; that it would expose the maintenance of the great body of the clergy, to be stripped of the scanty pittance, to which the cruelly unequal distribution of church revenues had confined them; that it would involve us in all the horrors of religious war; would throw us back into the miseries of a weak, a licentious and a divided people: it would be a repeal of the acts, which our wisdom had made in favour of our Catholic brethren, in admitting them to the natural rights of fellow subjects and fellow christians. He therefore thought himself bound as a man anxious for the rights of the country, for its peace, its religion, and its morals, to vote against the committing of the bill.

On the 13th of March, 1787, Mr. Grattan, who appears to have been equally anxious to check the lawlessness, and relieve the distressess of the poor, brought forward the subject of tithes. In that session they had on the subject of tumults, made some progress, though not much. It had been admitted, that such a thing did exist, among the lower order of people, as distress; they had condemned their violence, they had made provisions for its punishment, but they had admitted also, that the peasantry were ground to the earth; they had admitted the fact of distress: they had acknowledged, that this distress should make part of the parliamentary enquiry; they had thought proper indeed to postpone the day, but were agreed, notwithstanding, in two things, the existence of present distress, and the necessity of future remedy. The system of supporting the clergy was liable to radical objections; in the south, it went against the first principle of human existence; in the south they tithed potatoes. The peasant paid often 71. an acre for land, got 6d. a day for his labour, and paid from eight to twelve shillings for his tithe. That fact was sufficient to call for their interference: it attacked cultivation in its cradle, and tithed the lowest, the most general, and the most compassionate subsistence of human life. That was the more severely felt, because chiefly confined to the south, one of the great regions of poverty. In Connaught, potatoes paid no tithe, in the north a moderate modus took place; but in the south they paid a great tithe, and in the south they had perpetual disturbances. The tithe of potatoes was not the only distress; 6 or 71. an acre for land, and 6d. a day for labour, were also causes of misery; but the addition of eight, ten, or twelve shillings tithe, to the two other causes, was a very great aggravation of that misery; nor was it because they could not well interfere in regulating the rent of land or price of labour, that they therefore should not interfere where they could regulate and relieve; why they should suffer a most heavy tithe to be added to the high price of rent and the low price of labour; it was a false supposition, that a diminution of the tithe of potatoes would be only an augmentation of the rent, for rent was not higher in counties where potatoes were not tithed, nor could an existing lease be cancelled and the rent increased by the diminishing or taking off the tithe: neither was there any similitude between tithe and rent, which would justify the comparison; rent was payment for land, tithe payment for capital and labour expended on land; the proportion of rent diminished with the proportion of the produce, that is of the industry; the proportion of tithe increased with the industry, rent therefore, even a high rent, might be a compulsion on labour, and tithe a penalty. The cottier paid tithe, and the grazier did not; the rich grazier, with a very beneficial lease,

and without any system of husbandry, was exempted, and threw the parson on labour and poverty. As this was against the first principle of husbandry, so another regulation was against the first principle of manufacture; they tithed flax, rape and hemp, the rudiments of manufacture. Hence, in the north, they had no flax farmers, though many cultivated flax. You gave a premium for the growth of flax, a premium for the land carriage and export of corn, and they gave the parson the tithe of the land, labour, and cultivation occupied therein, contrary to the prosperity of either; as far as they had settled they were wrong, and wrong where they had unsettled. What was the tithe was one question, what was titheable another. Claims had been made to the tithe of turf, the tithe of roots, moduses had been disputed, litigation had been added to oppression, the business had been ever shamefully neglected by parliament, and had been left to be regulated, more or less, by the dexterity of the tithe proctor, and the violence of the parish; so that distress had not been confined to the people, it had extended to the parson; their system was not only against the first principle of human existence, against the first principle of good husbandry, against the first principle of manufacture, against the first principle of public quiet, it went also against the security and dignity of the clergy. Their case had been reduced to two propositions, that they were not supported by the real tithes or the tenths; and that they were supported by a degrading annual contract; the real tithe or tenth is therefore unnecessary for their support, for they had done without it; and the annual contract was improper by their own admission, and the interference of parliament proper therefore. Certainly the annual contract was below the dignity of a clergyman; he was to make a bargain with the squire, the farmer, and the peasant, on a subject which they did, and he did not understand; the more his humanity and his erudition the less his income? it was a situation where the parson's property fell with his virtues, and rose with his bad qualities. Just so the parishioner; he lost by being ingenuous, and he saved by dishonesty. The pastor of the people was made a spy on the husbandman: he was reduced to become the annual teazing contractor and litigant with a flock, among whom he was to extend religion by his personal popularity; an agent became necessary for him, it relieved him in this situation, and this agent or proctor involved him in new odium and new disputes; the squire not seldom defrauded him, and he was obliged to submit in repose and protection, and to reprise on the cottier, so that it often happened, that the clergyman did not receive the thirtieth, and the peasant paid more than the tenth; the natural result of that, was a system,

which made the parson dependent on the rich for his repose, and on the poor for his subsistence. The spirit of many clergymen, and the justice of many country gentlemen, resisted such an evil in many cases, but the evil was laid in the law, which it was their duty and interest to regulate. From a situ ation so ungracious, from the disgrace and loss of making in his own person a little bargain with squires, farmers, and peasants, of each and every description, and from non-residence, the parson was obliged to take refuge in the assistance of a character, by name a tithe farmer, and by profession an extortioner; that extortioner became part of the establishment of the church; by interest and situation, there were two descriptions of men he was sure to defraud; the one was the parson, and the other the people; he collected sometimes at fifty per cent. he gave the clergyman less than he ought to receive, and took from the peasants more than they ought to pay; he was not an agent, who was to collect a certain rent, he was an adventurer, who gave a certain rate for the privilege of making a bad use of an unsettled claim; that claim, over the powers of collection, and what was teazing or provoking in the law, was in his hand an instrument not of justice but of usury; he sometimes set the tithes to a second tithe farmer, so that the land became a prey to a subordination of vultures.

In arbitrary countries the revenue was collected by men, who farmed it, and it was a mode of oppression the most severe; in the most arbitrary country the farming of the revenue was given to the Jews. They introduced that practice into the collection of tithes, and the tithe farmer frequently called in aid of christianity the arts of the synagogue; obnoxious on account of all that, the unoffending clergyman thrown off the rich upon the poor, cheated exceedingly by his tithe farmer, and afterwards involved in his odium, became an object of outrage: his property and person were both attacked, and in both the religion and laws of the country scandalized and disgraced. The same cause, which produced a violent attack on the clergyman among the lower order of the community, produced among some of the higher orders a languor and neutrality in defending him. Thus outraged and forsaken he came to parliament; they abhorred the barbarity, they punished the tumult, they acknowledged the injury, but they were afraid of administering any radical or effectual relief; because they were afraid of the claims of the church; they claimed the tenth of whatever by capital, industry, or premium, was produced from land. One thousand men claimed this; and they claimed this without any stipulation, for what appears for the support of the poor, the repair of the church, or even the residence of the preacher. Alarmed at the extent of such a claim, they conceived, that the difficulty of col

lection was their security, and feared to give powers, which might be necessary for the collection of customary tithes, lest the clergy should use those powers for the enforcing of a long catalogue of dangerous pretensions. They had reason for that apprehension; and the last clause in the Riot Act had prompted a clergyman in the south to demand the tithe of agistment, and to attempt to renew a confusion, which their act intended to compose. The present state of the clergyman was, that he could not collect his customary tithe without the interference of parliament, and parliament could not interfere without making a general regulation, lest any assistance then given should be applied to the enforcement of dormant claims, ambiguous and unlimited.

Thus the situation of the clergy, as well as of the people, called on the house to take up at large the subject of the tithe. They had two grounds for such an investigation, the distress of the clergy, and the distress of the people.

He then moved the following resolution: "That if it appear, "at the commencement of the next session of parliament, that "public tranquillity has been restored in those parts of the "kingdom that have lately been disturbed, and due obedience "paid to the laws, this house will take into consideration the "subject of tithes, and endeavour to form some plan for the "honourable support of the clergy, and the ease of the peo"ple."

Mr. Secretary Orde differed from Mr. Grattan, and insisted, that in the existing circumstances of the country it was impossible in any degree to hold out an expectation, that the house would even enter upon the subject. Sir Henry Harstonge seconded Mr. Grattan's motion, because the people was admitted on all hands to suffer great hardships and oppression. The debate was continued with much animation to a very late hour: and several of the gentlemen, who usually voted with Mr. Grattan, expressed their wishes, that he would withdraw his motion. This brought him up again at a very late hour; and he observed, that the subject had been agitated in such a variety of different ways, and opposed by so many gentlemen, that even at that late hour of the night he felt himself under the necessity of making some observations; and at the same time he assured the house, that nothing but a conviction of the propriety of the motion could make him resist the wishes of so many gentlemen, whom personally he loved and respected; but he should appear a very light man, were he, by withdrawing the motion, to give any ground to suppose, that he had taken up the subject without the most mature consideration, or that he would hazard such a motion without duly considering its consequences. This was not the case; and therefore it was not the smallness of the mi