of the people what they are likely to draw upon themselves, by perverting their places of worship: and it will rouse those who are most interested in their preservation to exert themselves for the prevention of combinations, and administering unlawful oaths in them. Nor can I give up the principle on which the clause is founded; for we are told, from the highest authority, that when the temple had become a den of thieves, the doors therefore were shut. Besides, I have known this very punishment inflicted in catholic countries, and have actually seen churches shut up by an order of the king of France, for offences of a political nature. However, I shall not press the clause, being convinced, that by appearing in print, it has answered the purpose intended."-Debates, vol. vii., p. 185.

Grattan opposed the excesses of the bill; Curran resisted it altogether:

Mr. Curran said-I came to the house impressed with the insignificant figure to which the house has been reduced, in the course of this business. A committee has been appointed to consider this great subject-they meet, not to inquire into the real state of the country, but blindly to accede to a resolution proposed. Without hearing one single evidence of any fact, we are now called upon to treat this kingdom as if it were in actual rebellion, and to add a new list to the catalogue of capital punishments. If we are reduced to the necessity of adding oppression to misery, and that we must condemn the wretched peasantry of this country unheard, the more blindly we are driven forward the better-our degradation ought to be matter of consolation to us, as it must be of excuse. I will, however, beseech the house to consider the danger contained in the principle of the bill, before they suffer it to go into a committee. [He then went into a view of the state of Ireland previous to and subsequent to 1782.*] In the former period we were treated as a conquered country by Great Britain; cramped in our industry by her jealousy; bound by laws to which we never assented; kept in a state of weakness; unable to resent, by the divisions artfully fomented among us; our peasantry reduced to the most abject misery; our employments, of every description, bestowed upon strangers; our nobles paid without being trusted; the kingdom, of consequence, weak, idle, ignorant, and licentious, and all this because of the civil and religious disunion among the people. A happy change occurred. We have witnessed the increase of knowledge and of industry, emancipation from unconstitutional power, a happy escape from religious intolerance, the admission of our Catholic brethren to the national rights of fellow

* This and all similar abridgements are so in the original reports.

subjects and fellow christians. [He then contrasted the former weakness of a divided people with the state of strength and respect to which Ireland had advanced by her unanimity, in the last war.] When England left you to guard yourselves, the spirit of a people, then happily united, sent into the field an army. of citizens, without distinction of sects or tenets, and united in the common and glorious cause of defending their country. Your enemies were dismayed; and Europe saw us start from a sleep of centuries, and reclaim that station which we so long had relinquished in the scale of nations.

[He then proceeded to state more particularly the present state of the nation, and observed on the general effect of severe laws.] The people are too much raised by a consciousness of their strength and consequence to be proper objects of so sanguinary a code as that now proposed. The overstrained severity of a law amounts universally to the impunity of the offender, for every good and social principle in the heart of man obstructs its execution. The witness, the jury, the judge concur, by every practicable artifice, to save the wretch from a punishment inadequate to his crime. On general principles, therefore, I will oppose the principle of a bill that is written in blood. But the general principle receives double strength from the circumstances of the time. The disturbances of the south are not only exaggerated beyond the truth, by every misrepresentation of artful malignity, but are held up to the public mind in so silly or so wicked point of view, as to make it impossible for parliament to proceed, without the most imminent danger of sacrificing every advantage we have acquired. And here let me advert for a moment to the state of our ecclesiastical policy for centuries past.

The church of Ireland has been in the hands of strangers, advanced to the mitre, not for their virtues or their knowledge, but quartered upon this country, through their own servility or the caprice of their benefactors, inclined naturally to oppress us, to hate us, and to defame us, while the real duties of our religion have been performed by our own native clergy, who, with all the finer feelings of gentlemen and scholars, have been obliged to do the drudgery of their profession for forty, or at most fifty pounds a year; without the means of being liberal, from their poverty,

and without the hope of advancing themselves by their learning or their virtues, in a country where preferment is notoriously not to be attained by either. On this ground I vindicate the great body of the native acting clergy of Ireland, from any imputation because of the small progress which Protestantism has made among us. The pride of Episcopacy, and the low state to which our ministers of the Gospel are reduced, abundantly accounts for it. Their distresses and oppression are the real objects of parliamentary consideration; and we cannot interfere in the manner now proposed, without exposing them to the most imminent danger.

[He then adverted to the nature of the disturbances in the south.] I cannot justify these outrages; they ought to be punished, but we ought not to forget that we have ourselves expressly admitted that they had proceeded from the supineness of magistrates and the oppression of landlords. Now an act like this would be a proclamation of a religious war in this kingdom. A publication has been industriously circulated through a number of editions, stating that a scheme has been formed between the Catholics and the Presbyterians, for the subversion of the established religion and constitution; and the former are gravely informed that their religion absolves them from all tie of allegiance to the state, or observance of their oaths. And this is not an opinion pronounced upon light authority; it is the deliberate assertion of a reverend prelate, whose judgment on one of the abstrusest points of our common law has been opposed, with success, to that of our venerable chancellor, who is, perhaps, the ablest common lawyer in either kingdom, except only those gentlemen who are not of the profession. [He then examined the justice of the learned author's publication, which he condemned, as founded on illiberality and misrepresentation, and tending to obstruct the advancement of our religion, and to annihilate the provision of the established clergy; and tending also manifestly to revive the dissensions from which we had so recently emerged, and to plunge us into the barbarism from which we were emerging, or, perhaps, to imbrue us in the bloodshed of a religious war.]*

This refers to a bulky, able, and insolent pamphlet, by Dr. Woodward, Bishop of Cloyne, in defence of Tithes. It is easily procured, and is worth reading.

However the public may excuse the effects of mistaken zeal in the reverend writer, the house will be degraded below itself, if it adopt so silly an intolerance, or so abject a panic. This law would render the established church odious to the country, and, of course, prevent the progress of the established religion; it would expose the great body of the clergy to be stripped of the scanty pittance to which the cruelly unequal distribution of church revenues has confined them; it would involve us in all the horrors of a religious war; it would throw us back into the miseries of a weak, a licentious, and a divided people; and it would be a repeal of the acts which our wisdom has made in favour of our catholic brethren, in admitting them to the natural rights of fellow subjects and fellow christians. I therefore think myself bound, as a man anxious for the rights of the country, for its peace, its religion, and its morals, to vote against the committal of this bill.-Debates, vol. vii., pp. 192, 3, 4.

The Bill was committed by 192 to 31

February 20th, 1787.

On this day, in Committee, Mr. John O'Neill moved that the application of the Bill should be limited to Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary. In order to explain Curran's opening, we must refer to a passage in his speech of the 19th of January (see page 39, par. 3rd), and quote Major Hobart's speech in this debate :

"I rise to observe upon what fell from an honourable gentleman on the other side, as every thing that falls from him deserves notice. He says he is not prepared to pass a riot act; that the outrages are confined to the lowest of the people; but that there are people of a higher class watching the event, and ready to take advantage of it. I know that the honourable gentleman has communicated these circumstances for the most laudable purposes, and I hope the house will not be intimidated, but take proper advantage of this communication, and act with greater vigour and energy."-Debates, vol. vii., p. 212.

I consider myself called on. What I intended in the sentences alluded to by Mr. Hobart was that many gentlemen would have done more to suppress the insurgents, if they did not consider them as labouring under grievances. That was my meaning on that day, and my belief at the present.

An honourable member has indulged himself in an episodical plenitude; but I shall not imitate him, nor talk of the commander of the church, or the commander of the army, as he has done. I am sorry that when disposed to diffuse the rays of his pane

gyric, they were not vertical; like the beams of the morning, that courted the tops of the mountain, and left the valleys unilluminated, they applied only to the great, while the distressed poor were left in the shade. I consider the clergy of the south an oppressed and unfortunate body of men-confined to poverty by the cruel policy of their own laws; I should be sorry to be thought as seeking for causes of complaint; I have purposely avoided speaking on many. I could have proved that much of the disturbances arise from clerical neglect, and the motives of the insurgents might excuse, though not justify their conduct. I will mention a circumstance of disturbance-in the very diocese from whence the publication, so much reprobated, issued—in a parish worth eight or nine hundred pounds a year-which should make the house blush. It was a rising to banish a seraglio of prostitutes, kept by a rector who received near a thousand pounds a year from the church, and to reinstate the unoffending mother and innocent children in the polluted mansion. Perhaps I am not keeping the secrets of the church as closely as I ought. Two questions arise upon this. Did the learned proclaimer of dissension know this? and if he did not, why did he write upon the state of the country, when he was ignorant of that of his own diocese ?

I object to the universality of the bill, as the severity of it should only fall where it is merited; and so far from any danger to the constitution, in church or state, existing, it is my decided and rooted opinion, that there is no Roman Catholic in the kingdom, possessed of five pounds property, that does not wish for the due observance of the laws; but such is the abject misery and distress of the very lower orders, that they may consider, and I do not doubt that they may be right, even the being employed to act against the laws, as a favourable change in their condition.

As to the arguments of a riot act existing in England, I reply that it was adopted in the time of rebellion, in the days of Edward the Sixth, when the sacred religion of the country was attacked. It was continued by his bloody successor, for the establishment of a different religion. From the time of Elizabeth to the reign of George the First, it remained in that oblivion which it ever should, but it was then revived, to guard the crown,