sinecures. The whole seventy-six parishes paid tithe to fourteen rectors, many of whom habitually lived in the metropolis. No doubt they never were missed by their Catholic parishioners. Without the slightest disparagement of the many excellent persons belonging to the Anglican religion, it cannot be denied that its existence as a State Church in Ireland was a grim burlesque on ecclesiastical establishments.

But the grim burlesque was so useful to the policy of divide et impera that in 1800 its preservation was specially provided for as an article of the Union; and the Union was defended on the express ground that it would render the grim burlesque impregnable. That nine or ten per cent. of the inhabitants of Ireland should style their Church the Irish Church was ludicrous. Mr. Under-Secretary Cooke accordingly argued that an Union would remove the anomaly by incorporating the people of this kingdom with their English neighbours, and thus converting the Irish Catholic majority into an Imperial Catholic minority. "With the Union," said he, "Ireland would be in a natural situation; for all the Protestants of the Empire being united, she would have the proportion of fourteen to three in favour of her [Church] Establishment, whereas at present there is a proportion of three to one against it."

The

This is a good sample of Unionist reasoning. autonomy of Ireland was to be demolished, and her vital rights were to be trampled in the dust, in order to perpetuate the oppressive ascendency of the alien Church Establishment. And this monstrous subversion of all national and moral right was called putting Ireland in "a natural situation." The Catholics, however, could not see that the wicked suppression of the Irish Parliament rendered it a whit less dishonest to tax them for Protestant purposes.

The practice of bringing over Englishmen to enjoy the ecclesiastical revenues of Ireland had been to a great extent discontinued during the present century; and the State Church became a fruitful preserve for the junior members of the Irish landed aristocracy. Before the Composition Acts came into force the income divided among the ministers, great and small, of the Establishment, was probably a million per annum. After the enactment of the 1st and 2nd Victoria, chapter 109, which converted the tithe into a rentcharge, payable by the landlords to the rectors, and recover

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able by them from the tenants, the gross income of the State Church has been calculated by the Rev. Maziere Brady at £700,000 per anunm.

Before I come to the period of Disestablishment, I wish to note some instances in which nobility of heart, and the instinct of honourable nationality, enabled Irish Protestants to escape from the demoralising influence of an establishment which was eminently calculated to make its followers bad Irishmen. Foremost among these stands Henry Grattan, a Protestant, whose belief was sincere and fervent, and who declared that his first and last passion was his native country. The fact was, that Home Legislation, except where English intrigue corrupted it, had the strongest tendency to generate national feeling among the Irish Protestants; and national feeling gravitated towards the inclusion of the Catholics in all constitutional privileges. Among the Protestant friends of Catholic Emancipation must be reckoned Plunket, Sir Lawrence Parsons, the Protestant Bishop of Derry,* Curran, Wolfe Tone, Valentine Lord Cloncurry, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Emmetts, Arthur O'Connor, Hamilton Rowan; the Belfast Volunteers, who, so far back as 1783, had instructed their deputies to the Dublin Convention to support the unqualified emancipation of the Catholics; the numerous Protestants in the body of United Irishmen; the students of the Protestant University of Dublin, who, in their noble address to Grattan in April, 1795, expressed their hope "that the harmony and strength of Ireland will be founded on the solid basis of Catholic Emancipation;" and, I may add, on the authority of Earl Fitzwilliam, a majority of the Protestants of Ireland, many of whom asked for, and few in 1795 opposed, the repeal of all the then remaining Catholic disqualifications. Such was the state of good feeling, fraught with the promise of national prosperity and happiness, which was destroyed by the machinations of Pitt and his agents.

* Earl of Bristol in the English peerage.

+"Life of Wolfe Tone," p. 50 (M'Cormick's edition). Tone states (p. 77) that twelve Belfast citizens subscribed £250 each to establish a journal called the Northern Star, in which Catholic Emancipation was advocated.

H

CHAPTER X.

THE DISESTABLISHMENT CAMPAIGN.

"I well remember a phrase used by one not a foe to Church Establishments-I mean Mr. Burke: Don't talk of its being a Church! It is a wholesale robbery!'”—LORD BROUGHAM (1838), on the Anti-Irish Church.

I HAVE recorded the general outbreak against tithes in the years 1831 and 1832. The English Parliament gave the anti-Irish State Church a new lease of its life by transferring the liability of payment from the occupying tenant to his immediate landlord. The Act (1st and 2nd Victoria, chapter 109) to which I have already adverted, empowered the landlord to recover the tithe rent-charge from the tenant in the shape of additional rent. This was sometimes done. There were numerous instances in which it could not be done; instances where the landlord found it difficult enough to obtain his original rent. The law assumed that he could recover the whole of an equivalent to the rector's tithe, and enabled him to retain twenty-five per cent. of such rent-charge to compensate his trouble in becoming that reverend gentleman's tithe proctor. But it was frequently impossible to obtain more than the seventy-five per cent. from the tenant; so that in every such case the landlord got nothing for his trouble and liability.

In May, 1856, Mr. Miall, Member of Parliament for Rochdale, submitted to the House of Commons a resolution declaratory of the justice and expediency of impartially disendowing all churches in Ireland, and of applying their revenues to purposes of secular utility. He was in a minority of 93 in a House of 312. There were twenty-six pairs. The English Dissenters felt themselves aggrieved by being compelled to contribute to the support of the Established Church from which they or their ancestors had seceded. They therefore proclaimed the principle of voluntaryism; which principle had been preached from a thousand Irish platforms during the anti-tithe movement of 1831 and 1832. Our English allies also knew that in order to emancipate themselves from the incubus of State Churchism, they should first, by an active union with the Irish Catholics, effect the disestablishment, and, as they hoped, the disendowment of the anti-Irish State Church. Their efforts were responded to

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in Ireland by a meeting held at Clonakilty in the County Cork, on the 15th of August, 1856, at which resolutions were unanimously passed, expressing thorough approbation of the principles announced by Mr. Miall, gratitude for his advocacy, and promising to co-operate with his party in effecting the overthrow of the pernicious institution which he assailed.

The progressive steps of our agitation may be briefly summarised. The English voluntaries were active, intelligent, and indefatigable. Their alliance was indispensable to success. Yet, in seeking to promote that alliance, I encountered some difficulties. A Catholic Member of Parlia ment whose assistance I solicited, seemed averse to the proposed co-operation, not only because he deemed the theological principles of the English voluntaries violently anti-Catholic, but because whenever any measure affecting Catholic interests came before the House of Commons, their parliamentary representatives invariably "went into the wrong lobby." The objection thus started was by no means confined to the gentleman who made it. There was, however, a more practical and rational view of the question taken by an eminent Catholic dignitary, the Most Reverend Doctor Leahy, Archbishop of Cashel; he saw the great importance of accepting the assistance of the English voluntaries. I was honoured with much of his correspondence at the time when the English alliance was debated; and to his Grace's influence I consider the adoption of that alliance by the Irish Catholic hierarchy is chiefly attributable.

Shortly after the Clonakilty meeting I was visited by Mr. C. J. Foster, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee of the Liberation Society. He was accredited by a letter from Mr. Miall, who introduced him as his alter ego. On both gentlemen I impressed the necessity of keeping attacks on Maynooth as much as possible in the background; not that the disendowment of Maynooth was to be relinquished, but that as heretofore every attack on that college had been made on purely sectarian grounds, it would be hard to separate an aggression on it, in ordinary Catholic apprehension, from an assault on the Catholic religion; even although the present assault was not at all sectarian, but merely directed against it as an endowed institution.

The agitation went on, slowly at first, but gradually acquiring momentum. Something more than eight years after the Clonakilty meeting, an association was formed in

December, 1864, for the threefold purpose of obtaining educational justice for the Catholics, a satisfactory settlement of the land question, and Disendowment of the anti-Irish Church. Our inaugural meeting was held in the Dublin Rotunda. Many Catholic prelates were present. To Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) Cullen and myself was committed the Disendowment question. The Archbishop's resolution condemned the existing malversation of Church property in Ireland. My resolution affirmed the principle of voluntaryism, and disclaimed all desire on the part of the Catholics to acquire sectarian ascendency. Thenceforth the agitation proceeded with vigour. The English Liberationists were invaluable auxiliaries; held numerous meetings, disseminated pamphlets written with distinguished ability, while their able, accomplished, energetic secretary, Mr. Carvell Williams, essentially contributed by his personal exertions to prepare the public mind in England for the impending change. The question had now advanced so far that Sir John Gray, M.P. for Kilkenny, and proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, was induced to give it the support of his influential newspaper. He also issued a commission to inquire into the local details of the ecclesiastical anomaly in the different parts of the kingdom. Meanwhile petitions to Parliament for the abolition of State-Churchism were circulated for signature by the National Association, of which Alderman M'Swiney, Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1864, was one of the principal founders. These were extensively signed; and the signatures would have been greatly more numerous only for a strong popular distrust in the utility of asking the foreign Parliament for any measure of national justice.

In 1867, Sir John Gray introduced the question into the House of Commons in an able speech. His motion was supported by 183 votes against 195. His defeat by only twelve votes showed the great progress the anti-State Church cause had made, and encouraged the English voluntaries to redouble their efforts in behalf of Disestablishment. Early in 1868, Mr. Gladstone moved his celebrated Resolutions in the same direction. He was supported by 331 Ayes against 276 Noes. There were twelve pairs. Mr. Gladstone then introduced a Bill for suspending appointments to any Church benefices in Ireland which might become vacant prior to the final legislation of the following year. The Bill was easily carried in the House of Commons, but it was thrown out by the House of Lords on the 29th of June, 1868, by 192 votes