riot acts, were all founded in more intense severity: perpetuity was also another objection to the bill: and it was strongly urged, that this extreme rigour was not to be handed down to posterity as an inheritance: nor were the provinces of Ulster, Leinster and Connaught to be punished for their tranquillity in the same manner as Munster was for its turbulence: neither should such overstretched severity descend from the fathers to their children, as a kind of original sin, and death and felony be spread in every quarter through the land: should the bill in its then form pass, it would become ineffectual from its excessive rigour: it would be the triumph of the criminal and the stigma of the laws. The attorney general supported the deviations from the English riot act : but abandoned the clause directing the magistrates to demolish the Roman Catholic chapels, in which any combinations should have been formed or an unlawful oath administered. The debate was carried on with great warmth on both sides to a late hour. Mr. Orde, the secretary, particularly remarked, that he never could have concurred in the clause for pulling down the chapels, and was therefore happy, that it had been abandoned by his friend. He

that respected the prostrating places of public worship, and was remarkably pointed and severe upon it. He considered it as casting a stain of impiety on the whole nation, and enjoining the magistrates to commit that very act of violence, which is punished with death in the peasantry. It was a revival of the penal laws, and that in the most dangerous and exceptionable part. He called upon gentlemen to consider, that they had no charge against the Catholics to warrant this measure; to consider, that they had not so much as cause for suspicion of them; to consider, if they were a Popish peasantry, they were actuated by no Popish motive; to consider, that public thanks had been returned to the principal person of the Catholic religion in that country, for his manly exertions to maintain the public peace and to protect the rights of the established clergy: and he thought, if there were any thing sacred or binding in religion, it would operate successfully against the present measure; for it would cast a stigma on the Protestant religion.

He bad heard, he said of transgressors being dragged from the sanctuary, but he never heard of the sanctuary being demolished. It went so far as to hold out the laws as a sanction to sacrilege. If the Roman Catholics were of a different religion, yet they had one common God and one common Saviour with gentlemen themselves; and surely the God of the Protestant temple, was the God of the Catholic temple. What then did the clause enact? That the magistrate should pull down the temple of his God, and should it be rebuilt, and as often as it was rebuilt for three years, he should again prostrate it, and so proceed, in repetition of his abominations, and thus stab the criminal through the sides of bis God: a new idea indeed! But this was not all, the magistrate was to sell by auction the altar of the divinity to pay for the sacrilege, that had been committed on his house. By preventing the chapel from being erected, he contended, that we must prohibit the exercise of religion for three years; and that to remedy disturbance we resorted to irreligion, and endea. voured to establish it by act of parliament. A commission of the peace might fall into the hands of a clergyman, and this clause first occasion him to preclude the practice of religion for three years, then involve him in vile abominations, and afterwards he must preach peace upon earth and good will towards

men.

lamented, that any thing should have appeared in print, purporting, that those insurrections had arisen from a popish conspiracy: he declared, he not only did not believe it, but in some places he could say; he knew it not to be true: and affirmed, that the insurgents had in some places deprived the Roman Catholic clergy of one half of their income. That in respect to the book of a Right Rev. Prelate, (the Bishop of Cloyne) though he differed from him in some of his opinions, he thought highly of his ability and upright intentions.*

• Mr. Curran, in his speech, had particularly noticed the attempts to exaggerate the disturbances of Munster, and to dye them with a religious tint, and he thence took an occasion to advert, for a moment, to the ecclesiastical policy of Ireland for centuries past (7 Par. Deb. 193) The Church of Ireland, said he, 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 was notoriously not to be attained by either. On this ground he vindicated the great body of the native acting clergy of Ireland, from any imputation, because of the small progress which Protestantism had made among them: The pride of episcopacy, and the low state, to which our ministers of the gospel were reduced, abundantly accounted for it. Their distresses and oppression, he said, were the real objects of parliamentary consideration; and we could not 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. He could not justify these outrages; they ought to be punished, but we ought not to forget that we had ourselves expressly admitted that they had proceeded from the supineness of magistrates and the oppression of landlords. But now, he said, an act like this would be a proclamation of a religious war in the kingdom. A publication had been industriously circulated through a number of editions, stating that a scheme was formed between the Catholics and Presbyterians, for the subversion of the established religion and constitution; and the former were gravely informed that their religion absolved them from all tie of allegiance to the state, or observance of their oaths. And this, he said, was not an opinion pronounced upon light authority, it was the deliberate assertion of a Reverend Prelate, whose judgment on one of the abstrusest points of our common law, had been opposed and with success to that of our venerable chancellor, who was perhaps the ablest common lawyer in either kingdom, except only those gentlemen who were 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.

He said, that however the public may excuse the effects of mistaken zeal in the reverend writer, this house would be degraded below itself, if it should

Mr. Forbes with undaunted perseverance again brought in his bill for limiting pensions. A pension bill had at all times been a favourite object of the patriots: but every former effort to procure it had, like the present, proved abortive. He contended, that from the mode of resistance offered by the enemies to that measure both in that and the preceding session, he was warranted in concluding that the majority of the house admitted the principle of the bill: they would not otherwise have moved to adjourn it to a distant day, but have met it with a direct negative. He urged it upon the double principle of œconomy and constitution, and complained of pensions granted during pleasure to members of parliament even since the last session. Several gentlemen of the opposition made very long and animated speeches upon the abuses of the pension list, not only by rewarding demerit and infamy, and by corrupting the members of that house in particular by doubling the pensions of those, who before possessed them: but by introducing a new species of prostitution into that list, by the previous grant of honours and titles, for the direct purpose of engrafting pensions upon them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Monk Mason, and Sir Henry Cavendish were the only opposers of the bill, who spoke to the question: the first alleged, that as a similar bill had before been rejected by that house, and nothing had happened to render that proper then, which had before been improper, he should move to have it read a second time on the 1st of August: the second also insisted, that the new bill ought to be founded on some actual abuse, and none had been proved, and the third said, the bill went too far: the best way would be to take the pensioners singly, every man upon his own merit. The sportsman who fired at the whole covey, seldom hit a feather. In consonance with this idea, Mr. Jones said, that had he not full confidence, that the house would from its moderation adopt the bill, he should have moved, as an amendment: that an enquiry might be made into the character, circumstances, and situation of the persons, to whom pensions were then paid. The bill was lost by a division of 129 against 65.

adopt so silly an intolerance, or so abject a panic. He said, that this law would render the established church odious to the country, and of course, prevent the progress of the established religion; that it would expose the maintenance of the great body of the clergy, to be stripped of the scanty pittance, to which the cruelly unequal distribution of church revenues had confined them; that it would involve us in all the horrors of religious war; would throw us back into the miseries of a weak, a licentious and a divided people; it would be a repeal of the acts, which our wisdom had made in favour of our Catholic brethren, in admitting them to the natural rights of fellow subjects and fellow christians. He therefore thought himself bound as a man anxious for the rights of the country, for its peace, its religion, and its morals, to vote against the committing of the bill.

On the 13th of March, 1787, Mr. Grattan, who appears to have been equally anxious to check the lawlessness, and relieve the distressess of the poor, brought forward the subject of tithes. In that session they had on the subject of tumults, made some progress, though not much. It had been admitted, that such a thing did exist, among the lower order of people, as distress; they had condemned their violence, they had made provisions for its punishment, but they had admitted also, that the peasantry were ground to the earth; they had admitted the fact of distress: they had acknowledged, that this distress should make part of the parliamentary enquiry; they had thought proper indeed to postpone the day, but were agreed, notwithstanding, in two things, the existence of present distress, and the necessity of future remedy. The system of supporting the clergy was liable to radical objections; in the south, it went against the first principle of human existence; in the south they tithed potatoes. The peasant paid often 77. an acre for land, got 6d. a day for his labour, and paid from eight to twelve shillings for his tithe. That fact was sufficient to call for their interference: it attacked cultivation in its cradle, and tithed the lowest, the most general, and the most compassionate subsistence of human life. That was the more severely felt, because chiefly confined to the south, one of the great regions of poverty. In Connaught, potatoes paid no tithe, in the north a moderate modus took place; but in the south they paid a great tithe, and in the south they had perpetual disturbances. The tithe of potatoes was not the only distress; 61. or 71. an acre for land, and 6d. a day for labour, were also causes of misery; but the addition of eight, ten, or twelve shillings tithe, to the two other causes, was a very great aggravation of that misery; nor was it because they could not well interfere in regulating the rent of land or price of labour, that they therefore should not interfere where they could regulate and relieve; why they should suffer a most heavy tithe to be added to the high price of rent and the low price of labour; it was a false supposition, that a diminution of the tithe of potatoes would be only an augmentation of the rent, for rent was not higher in counties where potatoes were not tithed, nor could an existing lease be cancelled and the rent increased by the diminishing or taking off the tithe: neither was there any similitude between tithe and rent, which would justify the comparison; rent was payment for land, tithe pay ment for capital and labour expended on land; the proportion of rent diminished with the proportion of the produce, that is of the industry; the proportion of tithe increased with the industry, rent therefore, even a high rent, might be a compulsion on labour, and, tithe a penalty. The cottier paid tithe, and the grazier did not; the rich grazier, with a very beneficial lease,

and without any system of husbandry, was exempted, and threw the parson on labour and poverty. As this was against the first principle of husbandry, so another regulation was against the first principle of manufacture; they tithed flax, rape and hemp, the rudiments of manufacture. Hence, in the north, they had no flax farmers, though many cultivated flax. You gave a premium for the growth of flax, a premium for the land carriage and export of corn, and they gave the parson the tithe of the land, labour, and cultivation occupied therein, contrary to the prosperity of either; as far as they had settled they were wrong, and wrong where they had unsettled. What was the tithe was one question, what was titheable another. Claims had been made to the tithe of turf, the tithe of roots, moduses had been disputed, litigation had been added to oppression, the business had been ever shamefully neglected by parliament, and had been left to be regulated, more or less, by the dexterity of the tithe proctor, and the violence of the parish; so that distress had not been confined to the people, it had extended to the parson; their system was not only against the first principle of human existence, against the first principle of good husbandry, against the first principle of manufacture, against the first principle of public quiet, it went also against the security and dignity of the clergy. Their case had been reduced to two propositions, that they were not supported by the real tithes or the tenths; and that they were supported by a degrading annual contract; the real tithe or tenth is therefore unnecessary for their support, for they had done without it; and the annual contract was improper by their own admission, and the interference of parliament proper therefore. Certainly the annual contract was below the dignity of a clergyman; he was to make a bargain with the squire, the farmer, and the peasant, on a subject which they did, and he did not understand; the more his humanity and his erudition the less his income? it was a situation where the parson's property fell with his virtues, and rose with his bad qualities. Just so the parishioner; he lost by being ingenuous, and he saved by dishonesty. The pastor of the people was made a spy on the husbandman: he was reduced to become the annual teazing contractor and litigant with a flock, among whom he was to extend religion by his personal popu larity; an agent became necessary for him, it relieved him in this situation, and this agent or proctor involved him in new odium and new disputes; the squire not seldom defrauded him, and he was obliged to submit in repose and protection, and to reprise on the cottier, so that it often happened, that the clergyman did not receive the thirtieth, and the peasant paid more than the tenth; the natural result of that, was a system,