soft-sawder, in coming to terms with him and effecting a compromise. The first amendment was given up, and January 1, 1871, agreed upon as the date on which the Act should come into operation. With respect to the second, the sum of ten millions, which it was originally proposed to restore to the Church, was increased by £840,000. The first part of the third amendment, relating to the suspension of the distribution of the surplus, was given up; but the second part, regarding the application of the surplus, accepted. The fourth amendment was, like the first one, abandoned, the Government, however, agreeing that the surplus funds should be mainly applied to the relief of unavoidable suffering and calamity.

The distress of the monopolists at the passing of the Act was pitiable to behold. The floodgates of reform had at last been opened, and all the useless accumulations of the past were to be swept away. Some raved in private; others bellowed their fury where their fury was as harmless and ridiculous as themselves; others, again, assumed the garb of medieval martyrs, who were suffering for a noble cause, and reaped the harvest of their tribulations in the soothing plaudits of their friends; and some few were ashamed to betray their mercenary chagrin, aware of the discredit of the Irish Establishment and the grim necessity for its interment.1

Gladstone's measure was at length carried, and received the Royal assent on July 26, the debates upon it having taken up twenty-one days. By the provisions of the Bill, as it passed into law in 1879, the Irish Church was on January 1, 1871, to cease to be recognized by the State, and no longer "to rear its mitred front in Parliament." The Irish Ecclesiastical Commission was to come to an end, and to be succeeded by a new commission which was to carry out the transition from the established state of the Church to that of a free episcopal Church, analogous to the Episcopalian Church of Scotland. Previous to Disestablishment the Church's income had been £600,000, and its entire capital estimated at fourteen millions. By Gladstone's Act seven and a half millions, charged with the payment of annuities amounting to £596,000, were allotted to it by way of commutation, and half-a-million in lieu of private endowments. The Crown was to resign the right of appointing Irish bishops, and the latter were concurrently to lose their seats

1 Lord Derby died with his last speech still chafing the ears of wiser men"My Lords, I am an old man, and, like many of your lordships, past the allotted span of three-score years and ten. My official life is at an end, my political life is nearly closed, and in the course of nature my natural life cannot be long. . . If it

be for the last time that I have the honour of addressing your lordships, I declare that it will be to my dying day a satisfaction that I have been able to lift up my voice against the adoption of a measure the political impolicy of which is equalled only by it moral iniquity."

in the House of Lords. The Union between the Churches of England and Ireland was to be formally dissolved; all Irish Ecclesiastical courts were to be abolished, and the Ecclesiastical law was to remain a voluntary compact until altered by the Disestablished Church itself.

The Regium Donum, which had up till that time been allowed to the Presbyterian Church, as well as the grant to Maynooth for the Irish Catholic priesthood, were no longer to be charges defrayed by the State, but compensation for the two bodies was to be met out of the property of the Disestablished Church. The institution of the Regium Donum was of long standing. The pastors of the Scotch colony of 1610 had been put in possession of the titles of their parishes, and enjoyed them until the death of Charles I, when, owing to their refusal to accept the new Government, the Commonwealth stopped their income. Henry Cromwell, however, allowed the body £100 a year, and this sum was increased out of the Secret Service money by Charles II in 1672 to £600, but towards the end of his reign, and during that of James II, the grant was discontinued. William III renewed the grant, increasing it to £1,200, but it was later on again withdrawn, and once more restored on the accession of George I, and increased to £2,000. In 1785 it was still further increased to £2,200, and in 1792 to £5,000. In 1803 a measure was carried through Parliament by Castlereagh, which quintupled the Presbyterian dole, and by necessarily increasing the dependence of the Presbyterian clergy on the State strengthened the ties that bound Ulster to Great Britain. The Regium Donum had up till that time been handed over to a Commission of the Presbyterian body who apportioned an equal sum, amounting usually to £16, to each minister. The new Act provided for three scales of payment, rising from £50 to £100; but each recipient was to receive his share, not from the Synod, but from the State, and the gift was to depend upon the assurance that he was a loyal subject. In 1852 the total yearly grant to nonconforming ministers in Ireland had amounted to £38,561.

Provision was also made in Gladstone's Bill to enable the Church to reorganize itself. It was invested with the fullest powers of concerted action in Provincial Synods and a general Synod, and given the right of almost complete self-government. A representative body was also attached to it, charged with the duty of administering its funds and protecting its interests. Moreover, it was to retain its cathedrals and parish churches, and to be able to acquire its glebes and parochial houses on easy terms. Vested interests were to be respected, the ministers of the Disestablished Church being entitled to receive their former incomes from the funds of the Church set apart for the purpose. As this arrangement, however, would have led to difficulty and

delay, a "Commutation Fund was created by advances made by the State on the revenues of the Church in order to meet these claims. After the provision thus made for vested interests, the surplus funds of the Church, still a sum of many millions sterling, were to be employed in compensation for the withdrawal of the Regium Donum and the Maynooth grant; and the residue was to be appropriated from time to time to the relief of unavoidable suffering and calamity. Power was also taken to enable clergymen who wished to leave Ireland and pursue their callings elsewhere, to compound for their incomes, whilst it was provided that the lands of the Church should be, as far as possible, sold to the tenants occupying its estates, the purchasemoney being in part secured or advanced by the State in furtherance of a policy recently proposed by Bright.

The body appointed to represent the Disestablished Church was incorporated in 1870, and up till about 1888 had received, besides other sums, about nine millions sterling for commuted salaries, and half-a-million in lieu of private endowments. A sum, moreover, of £777,888 had been paid to lay patrons, whilst the compensation for the Regium Donum and other disbursements to Nonconformists were fixed at £769,599, and that for the Maynooth grant at £371,331. Out of the residue Parliament had appropriated a million to intermediate education in Ireland, £1,300,000 to a pension fund for national schoolteachers, £1,271,500 for distress works, £950,000 under the Arrears of Rent Act of 1882, and a quarter of a million for seafisheries. In the disposal of Church lands tenants were given the refusal, and could leave three-fourths of the purchase-money on mortgage at 4 per cent. The ordinary tenants of the Church in 1888 numbered 8,432, and up to November 1, 1880, 6,057 of these had become owners of their holdings at an average price of 22 years' purchase. In 1881 the powers and property of the Commissioners were transferred to the Irish Land Commission.

A striking tribute to Gladstone's ability in framing this complicated measure was paid by the Commissioners under the Bill

"It might have been expected that in administering a measure so intricate, and which dealt with such a variety of interests, we should have discovered many omissions, and that cases would have constantly arisen that were unprovided for in its clauses. Without asserting that there were no such cases, we can state that they were extraordinarily few in number, and that the skill and foresight with which the statute was drawn up were very striking as it came to be practically carried out."

The chief flaw in the measure was that it made no provision

for the Irish Catholic clergy out of the huge fund which the disendowment of the Protestant Church placed at the disposal of the Government of the day. No steps were taken to carry out the plan of endowment which Pitt, before he turned his coat, had intended to make a part of the Act of Union, which O'Connell had expressly approved, and which had been advocated by nearly every statesman of mark from 1800 to 1868, and by no one more distinctly than Russell himself. But the reform, although incomplete, had been a giant's work-one of the labours of Hercules-and it was no pleasant task, this cleaning out of the Irish stable. A curious transformation takes place when a great actor steps on the stage. The principal figures dwindle to ordinary stature, whilst the subordinate actors, despised and unnoticed before, seem to rise to the occasion. They all meet upon one level, and he stands above them and dominates the play. The scenery is shifted, the passions of a century are compressed into a day, and so rapid is the movement, so stupendous the performance of the central worker, that the world seems to wait upon him, not he upon the world. So was it with Gladstone. He uprooted this stubborn weed that had poisoned the ground for two centuries. It had waited all that time for its destroyer, and he had come.1

1 Appendix LX, Irish Disestablished Church in 1901.

CHAPTER XIII

LAND ACT OF 1870

"These poor people have been accustomed to as much injustice and oppression from their landlords, the great men, and those who should have done them right, as any people in that we call Christendom. Sir, if justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful."-OLIVER CROMWELL in 1649.

"The landlord may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them, fairly or unfairly. The Russian Government has been called despotism tempered with assassination. In Ireland for many years landlordism was tempered with assassination. . . . Every circumstance combined in that country to exasperate the relations between landlord and tenant. The landlords were, for the most part, aliens in blood and aliens in religion. They represented conquest and confiscation, and they had gone on from generation to generation with an indifference for the welfare of the people which would not have been tolerated in England and Scotland.”—JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE (On the Uses of a Landed Gentry: in Short Studies on Great Subjects).

THE Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 soon began to bear its natural fruit. Even the rulers of Ireland, past masters as they were in the devices of combination, could not grow figs from thistles; out of their breasts they could not expect milk to flow. In October 1849 the Callan Tenant Protection Society had been founded, and on May 11, 1850, a conference was summoned in Ireland to devise some specific measure of land tenure reform and some plan of united action for its accomplishment. The same year the Irish Tenant Right League was formally established, and its members drew up a series of demands, many of which were eventually conceded by the Land Acts of a later year. These were embodied in a formula known as the "Three F's," which, being interpreted, signified fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale; that is to say, a mode of land tenure analogous to the one already in existence in Ulster, and known as the Ulster Custom. By the first F, rent was to be adjusted, not by voluntary contract, but according to the figure which the State or the arbitrating authorities might deem to be equitable; by the second, the tenant was to remain in undisturbed possession of his farm as long as the "fair" rent was paid; and by the third head of this Irish hydra, so terrible a portent to Irish landlords, he was to have the right to sell his farm, under certain conditions, and to appropriate the proceeds. The League also aimed at a partial discharge of