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and ministers concurred in his suggestion, an explanation of the lines to be followed in carrying it out being given by Russell six days later. One million had been voted as a loan for the clergy; and out of that sum £640,000 had been actually advanced. Russell now proposed that the £640,000 should be considered as a free gift, and that £260,000 of the original loan voted should be applied to the remission of the outstanding arrears. This arrangement was accepted by all parties, and Russell's Tithe Bill at length emerged from the workshop of Irish legislative failures and passed into law at the end of August 1838.

On the passing of the Act O'Connell was vigorously attacked in various quarters for the compromise which he had effected between himself and the Government. Father Davern, a Tipperary priest, published a series of letters condemning this surrender of religious principle. But the government of men is carried on by compromise, and to give a little on the one side is not only permissible, but politic, when you can take a little on the other. Thus the Tithe Act, as it took its place upon the Statute Book, contained no secular appropriation clause, the Government having decided to abandon the principle of nonecclesiastical appropriation in return for a concession made by the Opposition in regard to the Municipal Franchise Bill, although the latter failed eventually to pass. It converted the existing tithe composition into a land tax or rent charge of 75 per cent. of the nominal value of the tithe, which was to be charged to the owner and not the occupier of land—that is, in the great mass of cases to the Protestant landlord, not to the Catholic peasant. This income was to be secured to the existing incumbents by a State guarantee. The claim of the nation to repayment of the advances, which had already been made to the tithe owners, namely £640,000, was abandoned, and the remaining £260,000 was to be devoted to the extinction of arrears. The tithe proctor, having no more to do, was to disappear from Ireland.1

The Government had renounced their pledges in respect of the appropriation clause, and laid themselves open to a charge of bad faith, which Peel, no inexperienced judge in the matter of apostasy, lost no time in pressing home upon them. He recounted in Parliament how he had offered to carry a measure of reform like the present one and been taunted with having derived it from the preceding Government; how he was compelled to resign because a measure of the kind ought not, so his opponents said, to be passed without an Appropriation clause; how those opponents had staked their political existence on this principle, and how they were now proposing without a blush to Appendix XXXIIIC, epitome of Parliamentary history of Tithe question.

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carry a Tithe Bill after all without the appropriation. Grote also said in regard to this transaction, that it afforded a melancholy proof of the way in which great principles were made subservient to party purposes, and that he believed history would note this as one of the most discreditable instances of tergiversation on record. The apostasy was indeed undeniable. The Ministry had certainly succeeded in introducing a Poor Law into Ireland and converting Irish tithes into a rent charge, but the first of these measures had been forced upon the Irish against their wish, and the second had only been carried by the abandonment of the principle by which they had climbed to power. It was Drummond, and not the Liberal Government, who deserved the gratitude of Ireland. Under his rule crime, the crime peculiar to that country, practically ceased. Order was re-established, where chaos had paralyzed all attempts to govern before, and a new spirit had begun to spread abroad in the land, the spirit of hope, which several hundred years of misrule had been unable to completely kill.1

1 In 1839 it was stated in the House of Commons by David Richard Pigot (afterwards Chief Baron of Exchequer in Ireland) that "from 1834 to 1838 homicide had diminished 13 per cent. ; firing at the person 55 per cent. ; incendiary fires 17 per cent.; stealing cattle 46 per cent. ; attacks upon houses 63 per cent. ; killing or maiming cattle 12 per cent. ; levelling houses 65 per cent. ; illegal meetings 70 per cent. ;" whilst during Drummond's tenure of office in Ireland the troops quartered there had been reduced from 32,035 in 1834 to 14,956 in 1840.

CHAPTER VI

POOR LAW OF 1838

"We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centuries of injustice to our neighbour Island. Injustice, doubt it not, abounds, or Ireland would not be miserable. The Earth is good, bountifully sends food and increase; if man's unwisdom did not intervene and forbid. It was an evil day when Strigul first meddled with that people. He could not extirpate them; could they but have agreed together, and extirpated him! Violent men there have been and merciful; unjust rulers and just; conflicting in a great element of violence, these five wild centuries now; and the violent and unjust have carried it, and we are come to this. England is guilty towards Ireland; and reaps at last, in full measure, the fruit of fifteen generations of wrong-doing."THOMAS CARLYLE (Chartism).

"I will at once declare that I see no chance of tranquillity and welfare for that impoverished and long distracted land, until the Irish people enjoy the right to which the people of all countries are entitled-namely, to be maintained by the soil that they cultivate by their labour. I cannot find terms to express my sense of the injustice and the impolicy, the folly and the wickedness of any longer delaying to Ireland the consolation and the blessing of a well-regulated system of poor laws."-BENJAMIN DISRAELI, in 1834, at High Wycombe.

THE first measure of poor relief was an Act passed in 1703 for the erection of a workhouse in Dublin. The guardians of the institution were empowered to apprehend and keep at work within it all adult vagrants and beggars in the city for any time not exceeding seven years, while juvenile paupers above the age of five years were to be detained until they reached the age of sixteen, when they were to be apprenticed to some Protestant until twenty-one years of age, if girls, and twenty-four, if boys, a rate of threepence in the pound being levied on all householders for the support of this establishment. In 1707 another measure, entitled "An Act for the more effectual suppression of Tories and Rapparees," was carried to meet the growing evils of pauperism, by which all vagrants and persons of loose character were, on the presentment of a grand jury, to be committed to the county jail until transported for seven years, unless they could give security for their good behaviour. In 1715 a third Act was passed, the most important provision of which empowered ministers and churchwardens, with the consent of a justice of the peace, to bind out any child found begging within their parish, or any other poor child with the consent of the parents, to "any honest and substantial Protestant housekeeper or tradesman" until the age of twenty-one in the case of girls, and twenty-four in that of boys. Twenty years later a further

step was taken, an Act being passed in 1735 for the establishment of a workhouse in Cork, similar to the one founded in Dublin in 1703. After this nothing of any significance was done for thirty years to remedy the state of poor relief in Ireland. In 1765, however, a measure was passed for the establishment of county infirmaries to be supported by grand jury presentment. In 1771 the Dublin workhouse merged in the "Foundling Hospital," and provisions were made during the course of the next year for the foundation of "Houses of Industry" throughout Ireland. These establishments resembled in part hospitals, in part houses of correction, and were supported by grand jury presentments. Their governors were empowered to grant badges or licences for begging to approved paupers, and to punish unlicensed beggars by imprisonment and flogging; and they also had the power to hand over the children of licensed paupers to the directors of the Charter schools. 1781 the fever hospitals were established.

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These various attempts to cure the evil of Irish pauperism were like offering a blade of grass with a dewdrop on it to a man with a raging thirst. The poverty of some of the towns was inconceivable; and the disease, the vice, and the misery that tossed upon the same pallet were a vast indictment of the whole system.1

In 1805 an Act was passed for setting up dispensaries in connection with the county infirmaries, and the grand juries obtained during the next year increased powers of presentment for maintaining fever hospitals and infirmaries. In 1809 Commissioners were appointed to consider the practicability of reclaiming the Irish bogs and thus adding to the resources of the country and providing labour for the poorer classes. In 1814-18 the grand juries obtained further powers of presentment for the support of fever hospitals. In 1817 lunatic asylums were established, and two years later sanitary officers were appointed to attend to the health and comforts of the inhabitants. In 1822 a terrible famine occurred in Ireland, which mowed down the inhabitants like hay. There had already been a famine in 1817, and an accompanying period of typhus fever after the calamity had spent its strength. The Committee appointed to inquire into the condition of the people reported on June 7, 1819, that the state of the country was appalling, and that the Government should provide work"seeing that landlords in Ireland threw expenses of buildings and repairs on the tenant, and bearing in mind the lamentable circumstance, almost peculiar to that country, of the nonresidence of a great proportion of proprietors, they think that Ireland has a claim to the generous consideration of Parliament." 1 Appendix XXXIV, quotation from the Rev. James Whitelaw.

The famine of 1822 was worse than its predecessor, and the landlords were largely to blame, as was demonstrated by the Committee of the London Tavern, a committee of English gentlemen which was formed to relieve the distress, and whose agents visited the famine-stricken districts.1

A stone of potatoes, which had usually been sold for Id. or Id., could not be bought now for less than 61d., and, whilst Cabinet Ministers were speculating as to the expediency of one more Coercion Act, gaunt hunger stalked through the land. Thirteen thousand people in the barony of Clonderalaw in Clare County were reported to be without seed for the next crop. The parish of Finloe contained 817 persons, and 696 of these were in absolute want of food. In a parish in Clare the population, after mass, inquired what crimes were punishable by imprisonment, for they were willing, they declared, to be sent to jail for the sake of obtaining bread. At Tralee the poor were actually dying of starvation, whilst in Cork it was no uncommon sight to see persons fainting away in the streets for mere want of food. Fever was soon added to famine, and they struggled together in the emaciated frame. Thousands of the Irish died. Outrage and riot succumbed at last to exhaustion, and the voice of despair was hushed in the grave. Meanwhile the fashionable world, appreciating the propriety of fulfilling the formalities of sudden charity, gave a great ball in London for the purpose of raising subscriptions, and danced away for the Irish famine.

On April 22 a debate took place on the renewal of Sir John Newport's motion for inquiry into the state of Ireland. Grant, the late Chief Secretary, who had succeeded Peel in August 1819, declared that not merely was the landlord an absentee, but frequently the agent also, and that the agent and his deputy used to exact from the tenants the miserable pittance which had been left to them after the payment of their rackrent. Newport's motion was eventually withdrawn, but Goulburn, who had succeeded Grant in the Chief Secretaryship in 1822, introduced a Bill appropriating half-a-million to facilitate the employment of the poor in road-making and other public works. They were to be carefully supervised by Government officers, and the amount of money granted was not to exceed the sum for which grand juries had made presentments. Many of these works, however, were absolutely profitless, such as the obelisk on Killiney Hill, which has remained a memorial not only of the famine but of the mental vacuity of the Government of the day. In 1825 an Act was passed for facilitating the transmission of "distressed children" to the Foundling Hospital,

1 Appendix XXXIVA, extracts from report of the Committee and Annual Register. 2 Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg (1778-1866).

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