CHAPTER LXVI

THROUGH THE 'THIRTIES

WHEN Emancipation was won, Repeal of the false and corruptlypurchased "Union" of Ireland with England was the great issue that the Leader started. It had always been mulling in his mind. Indeed there were times when he would have preferred to accept repeal of the Union in preference to repeal of the Penal Laws. He stated that at the time of the Union, and the wish haunted his heart every year after.

In 1810 the grand jurors of Dublin, all of them of course Tories and British-Irish, tried to start the Repeal movement. But the promises of British politicians who dangled before their eyes the bait of Emancipation, kept the Catholic party from joining their Protestant fellow-countrymen on this occasion. Now that Dan was free to throw himself into the repeal movement, and the Catholics almost to a man were behind him, no support could be got from their Protestant fellow-countrymen. There were two reasons for this-the fierceness of the fight for Emancipation had embittered the Protestants against their Catholic fellows; and besides all the offices and patronage of the country which had been securely theirs in pre-Emancipation days were getting shaky in their grasp now that Catholic disabilities were by law removed. Repeal of the Union would now finally break their monopoly; so the overwhelming body of the Protestant population was henceforth as bitterly anti-Repeal as they had formerly been anti-Union -and more bitterly than they had been anti-Emancipation.

Strange to say, the famous Bishop Doyle of Limerick, dearly loving the people whose fearless champion he was, but curiously lacking the Nationalist instinct, withstood O'Connell on Repeal. Richard Lalor Shiel was against him, too-though this will not seem strange to any one who studies the many shallows of Shiel's nature. And it will surprise some who thought that Tom Moore was not a mere drawing-room patriot to learn that he too bitterly resented O'Connell's new national move, saying that it would divide the upper, and madden the lower, classes. And his in

dignation inspired him to write his song: "The dream of those days when I first saw thee, is o'er."

The Government, not desiring to see the 'Thirties repeat the débâcle of the 'Twenties, took an emphatic grip on Time's forelock, and determinedly set themselves to stamp out his repeal agitation at its inception. When in 1830 he started his anti-Union Association they proclaimed it at once; and from that time forward it was an exciting race between O'Connell and the Government-he restarting his repeal movement under a new name each week, and they, close following, proclaiming it.

He started a weekly Repeal Breakfast, and promised that if it was suppressed, he would have Repeal Lunches, Repeal Dinners, Repeal Suppers in succession. Its next form was a General Association for Ireland. When that was proclaimed, he started A Body of Persons, in the Habit of Meeting Weekly for Breakfast, at a place called Holmes' Hotel. When this was proclaimed he had A Party Meeting for Dinner at Gray's Tavern. When it was proclaimed he proposed to make himself the Repeal Association, with an assisting council of thirty-one people. He said they couldn't disperse an individual by proclamation.

But it was never a question of what the Irish Government could do. Whether they could or could not do a thing they would do it and did it. He started his Association under the title of the Irish Society for Legal and Legislative Relief; after that, again the Anti-Union Association; then an Association of Irish Volunteers for Repeal of the Union; and, succeeding that, an Association of Subscribers to the Parliamentary Intelligence Office.

It was an exciting game of hide-and-seek in which he so provoked and tired the Government that at length they arrested him. Even then he outwitted them-for he compromised on a plea of guilty for technical offence against a temporary Act (the Act for Suppression of Illegal Societies) and contrived to have sentence postponed until, at the expiration of Parliament, the Act expired,

too.

To help the English Whigs in their great fight for Parliamentary Reform, O'Connell, much against the wish of many wise ones, slackened the Repeal fight, while he let the popular fight against tithes forge to the front. And he cast all his weight to the English Whigs in their Reform struggle.

The Established (Protestant) Church was supported in Ireland by the farmers of all religions paying to it tithes, a tenth of their products. In this way the poorer five-sixths of the Irish

population was mulcted to support the very rich church of the remaining one-sixth. In the more Catholic parts of Ireland there were thousands of parishes from which the Established clergyman drew an enormous salary for ministering to his own family and the family of his sexton only. Whether his congregation was few or entirely non-existent, both he and his church had to be kept prosperous-by a people of another faith, who oftentimes had not meal for the mouths of their own children. In the year immediately succeeding Emancipation, the smouldering anger against this injustice leaped up in flame tongues, here and there. Little more than a year after the passing of Emancipation the yeomanry killed seventeen people who tried to rescue their seized cattle from the tithe-proctor at Bunclody in Wexford. The Government, after inquiry into the affair, concluded that the arms of the yeomanry were not effective enough for teaching a needed lesson to conscienceless people who could be guilty of hindering a titheproctor's purposes. So they granted them new and better equip

ment.

At Carrickshock in Kilkenny, in November of the same year, the people fell upon an armed force who guarded two tithe process-servers and killed eighteen or twenty of them. The tithe war was almost getting out of hand. The Government, goaded by the suffering church, must make desperate efforts to suppress it. Twenty-five Carrickshock men were put on trial for murder at the Kilkenny assizes before a Special Commission sent down by Government. O'Connell went down to defend them, and here gave another fine example of his quality, most deftly shattering the Government's case, by breaking, at the first going off, the chief prop on which it rested. At the very outset of the trial they put forward their leading witness, a policeman, who gave direct, cleancut, and definite testimony, proving home murder against some of the prisoners. His evidence was so definite in the most minute details as to be eminently convincing to an average jury. On cross-examination, he proved to be a rock that O'Connell could not shake. Things looked dark, almost desperate for the defence, when there was a little note passed from the body of the court to Counsellor O'Connell. He glanced at the note in the most casual manner, and learnt from it that the witness' father was a notorious and convicted sheep stealer. Apparently paying little attention to the note, he went on mechanically asking further questions in such an indifferent way as indicated that the witness' evidence was unshakable. Before dismissing him he paid the witness a couple

of compliments on his evidence-which put the fellow in mighty good humour with himself and the world. Then as the witness was stepping out of the box, triumphant and elated, O'Connell said: "Just one minute, my friend"-and in a casual way said to him, "I suppose you're fond of mutton." "Why, yes, Counsellor O'Connell. I wouldn't make strange with a good piece of mutton." "You don't happen to know any really clever sheepstealers, now?" "No, I can't say that I do." "Did you ever know any sheep-stealers?" "I never had that pleasure." "You, of course, never have had any connection with any such person?" O'Connell spoke in an apologetic way as if he was, under compulsion, asking questions that he was ashamed to ask of a decent man. He led the witness on to swear over and over again, in the most solemn and most definite manner, that he had never known of, associated with, or been related to, any such disreputable per"Then it was," says Fagan, in his Life of O'Connell, "that O'Connell pounced upon him. The court rang and echoed again with the thunders of his voice. The silent-stricken audience looked on with amaze at the portentous change of voice and manner which had taken place in the advocate, as well as in the witness; and, amid the hush of the multitude, the deep breathings of the prisoners, and the silent, heartfelt expectations of all present, the man was obliged to confess that his father had been the expert sheepstealer, which, on his oath, he had so solemnly denied knowing but a few minutes before." And that man's evidence went at once to the scrap-heap.

son.

The tithe war spread like wildfire. The people refused to pay the iniquitous imposition. They fought against the seizing of their cattle. All cows liable to be seized were branded "T" so that nowhere a purchaser could be found for them. Any one who paid was ostracised. Thousands of troops were poured into the country to protect the tithe proctors and process-servers. The Protestant clergy, unable to collect the tithes, were now in such real distress that the Government had to provide a Relief Fund for them. Many parts of Ireland were proclaimed; martial law was instituted; there were shootings, hangings, transportings. All meetings were suppressed. The Government assumed the tithe proctor's business, and after many marchings, countermarchings, and bloody conflicts, collected (out of hundreds of thousands of pounds due) twelve thousand pounds at a cost of fifteen thousand!

They finally rested from an impossible task and talked compromise. They suggested the reduction of the tithe by a fourth, and shifting it in its reduced form to the landlord's shoulders—

who should then increase his tenants' rents in proportion. O'Connell wanted the tithe reduced two-fifths. Neither proposition went into effect, just then. But the Vestry Act and the Church Temporalities Act of '34 made minor reforms and economies in the Establishment-including the suppression of ten ornamental but highly lucrative bishoprics, and a tax upon the fatter livings to help the lean ones. The tithe-war dragged on, in varying intensity, till in '38 was passed the Act which reduced the tithe by a fourth, and shifted it to the landlord. As almost all landlords raised the rent to recoup themselves, the people still had to continue bearing the burden of a foreign church.

In his desire to help the English Whigs in their Reform struggle, O'Connell had put Parliamentary Reform temporarily before Repeal, worked for it with might and main, and with his Irish following finally gave the Whigs the margin of majority that carried the Reform Bill. And when the Whigs came into power in the new Reform Parliament of '34, their first measure was a Coercion Bill for Ireland! The fiercest, too, of the many such boons to Ireland since the century's beginning!

Thus did the Irish leader find himself recompensed for shelving Repeal in the interests of the Whigs. "Six hundred scoundrels" was his designation of the Britishers who sat in the Reform Parliament. And the king's speech, recommending Coercion, he called "a brutal and bloody speech." In his fiery fighting trim, with the forty Repeal members (including eight members of his own family) which the General Election gave him from Ireland, he went to Westminster to try a fall with the "six hundred scoundrels" over the Coercion Bill. "The atrocious attempt to extinguish public liberty makes me young again," he wrote to Edward Dwyer, from London. He was now on the eve of sixty. "I feel the vigour of youth in the elastic spring of my hatred of tyranny." But his Reform friends overwhelmed his opposition, and gave a fresh turn of the screw to his suffering country.

When in '31 he had been warned against abandoning Irish Repeal for British Parliamentary Reform, he said to the people: "Let no one deceive you and say that I have abandoned antiUnionism. It is false. But I am decidedly of opinion that it is only in a reformed Parliament that the question can properly, truly, and dispassionately, be discussed."

Yet, at the very time he said this, he had put Repeal aside to save his English friends. In a letter to his Whig friend, Lord Duncannon, in December, '31, he says: "On my arrival (in Dub