secured the Ministerial majority. Full of personal dislike for O'Connell, the Conservatives had found in this alliance their readiest weapon for assaulting the Ministry. The conciliatory government of Lord Mulgrave was spoken of as a mere truckling to the Irish liberator; the ministers were constantly charged with supporting, on party grounds, the great Association which he had formed, because they believed that its influence would, on the whole, be used to uphold their policy. The Irish Tories and Orangemen filled the ears of the public with their complaints of Government partiality.

Desire of both

Irish questions.

Concession to Ireland had become a necessary item in the party programme of the Liberals; and three great measuresParties to settle the Irish Poor Law Act; the Irish Tithe Act, directed to the alleviation of the permanent condition of disorder which attended the collection of tithes ; and the Irish Municipal Act, for the purpose of allowing to the Irish many of the advantages of self-government which the English Municipal Act had already secured to their fellow-subjects-were directed severally against the crying evils which formed the chief complaints of Irish patriots, the devouring plague of poverty and mendicancy, the anomalous supremacy of a State Church of the minority, and the sole predominance of the English and Protestant party in local government. Again and again, though with much opposition, these Bills had been got through the Lower House only to be rejected by the sturdy Conservatives in the Lords. But Peel and his friends saw clearly enough that the Government was becoming discredited, and that before long it was inevitable that they would be recalled to power. That the much-disputed Irish measures should be settled before that day arrived would be an obvious advantage to them. Their theory of Conservatism allowed of the acceptance of what had been done, while they would have avoided the responsibility of doing it themselves. On the other hand, the Government were naturally disinclined to allow their legislation to be absolutely thwarted, and were eager, in some way at least, to redeem their pledge to Ireland. Under these circumstances thoughts of compromise began to arise.

Revision of

the Irish Poor Law.

Of these three measures, the introduction of some Poor Law offered the least ground for party fight, and was therefore the first to be produced; for there was a pretty general consensus that something must be done, and that the permanent burden of relief should be thrown upon the owners of real property. There was, indeed, the greatest necessity for some such measure. A Commission had reported in 1836, disclosing a terrible

1836]

IRISH POOR LAW

17

condition of poverty. The average wages of the agricultural labourers were estimated at under 2s. 6d. a week, as contrasted with 9s. or 10s. which were the average wages in England. This was the natural result of the state of the population. The agricultural labourers in Ireland were in the ratio of one to every fourteen cultivated acres-in England, of one to thirty-four. Nor was the produce of these acres the same; while in England it was estimated that an acre returned about £4, 10s., in Ireland, the average produce was only £2, 10s. The insufficient wage was eked out by small holdings; nearly onethird of the people depended only upon little plots around their cabins. For many weeks in every year these cottiers could not draw from their land even a sufficiency of potatoes. They crowded over to England in the summer months, and undersold English labour in all directions. Mendicancy was universal, and not considered in the smallest degree disgraceful. The Commissioners by whom this report was issued, including among their numbers Archbishop Whately and Archbishop Murray, the heads of the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches of Ireland, were men on whom every reliance could be placed. Their recommendations, however, seemed wholly inadequate. The amount of destitution was so great, the income of Ireland comparatively so small, that it appeared impossible to the Commissioners to lay so vast a burden upon it as the complete support of the poor. They wished, therefore, to confine parochial relief to the aged and infirm, and to those physically incapacitated from work. The Government, on the other hand, believed that the principle of the English Poor Law might be fully introduced into Ireland. In its amended form, though it had excited considerable discontent, it had on the whole worked well in England. Mr. Nicholls, one of the English Poor Law Commissioners, was sent over to report. In a six weeks' journey (the brevity of which was frequently alleged against its efficiency), he came to very definite conclusions. He urged the division of Ireland into large unions, and the erection in each of a workhouse. He recommended that destitution should form the claim to relief, and that willingness to enter the workhouse should be the test of destitution. In fact, with the exception of parochial settlement, which the migratory habits of the Irish rendered inadvisable, he reported in favour of the strict application of the new English law, the working of which was to be placed in the hands of the English Commissioners. He can scarcely have been correct in asserting that the feeling of the Irish was in favour of any Bill embodying this opinion;

VICT.

Report of Mr.

Nicholls.

1836.

B

O'Connell.

such an assertion must be limited to the upper and middle classes. O'Connell was a truer representative of the real popular feeling. Opposition of He opposed the scheme, both on economical and sentimental grounds. The expenditure on supporting the vast mass of destitution must seriously cripple capital, yet it was the want of capital which caused the destitution; the remedy made the evil worse. He even urged higher economic grounds, and spoke of the ruin of self-dependence and thrift caused by such a Bill; points no doubt of great weight and cogency, but somewhat inapplicable to a people with whom dependence and beggary were quite habitual. His sentimental arguments were those common to all opponents of organised relief; the closing of the gates of charity, the chilling effect which must be produced when the only answer to be given to the man who asked for help was Go to the workhouse." The Government however persisted in bringing in their Bill upon the lines recommended by Mr. Nicholls, and, in spite of the high authority of the Commissioners of 1836, in spite of the combined opposition of all sections of the Irish members (for Mr. Shaw, the leader of the

Poor Law Bill

passed. July 1838.

Orangemen, joined on this point with O'Connell), they succeeded in carrying the measure. Nor was it seriously opposed in the Upper House, and it became law. There is some reason to question the wisdom of inflicting, in all its strictness, the English Poor Law upon a country such as Ireland, where the conditions of life were very different. The rejection of all outdoor relief must be based upon the supposition that work is, on the whole, to be found by every one who desires it. This, which was probably on the whole true of England, was notoriously untrue of Ireland. Again, by the theory of the Poor Law, the relief which an able-bodied man can claim must be so adjusted that it shall be less desirable than even the lowest form of self-earned maintenance. It was impossible in Ireland for the State to arrange a form of life lower than that led by the extreme poor. The only deterrent element in the Poor Law scheme was the incarceration of the recipient of relief-very irksome, no doubt, to a people so intolerant of restraint as the Irish, yet not to be hastily assumed as a sufficiently powerful motive to keep men from the workhouse. It seemed, in fact, almost impossible that the law should be successful, unless it went hand in hand, as was pointed out by Lord Devon, with other measures for the relief of the poor class, such as the establishment of large public works; the increase, by reclamation of waste,lands, of the cultivable area of the country; and legislation which should restrain the tendency towards inordinate

1838]

IRISH TITHE BILL

19

rents, which were eating up whatever little capital the small farmers might possess.

Party difficulties

two Irish Bills.

It was not, perhaps, altogether a comfortable triumph to have forced the Poor Law upon an unwilling people. But the Government had, at all events, passed its measure without much as to the other serious opposition from its English opponents. It remained to be seen how the other two Bills, which in the course of the last five years had become the rallying-points of party fight, could be got through Parliament. Language had however been used by both the Duke of Wellington and Peel as early as the year 1837, which implied the desire of the Conservatives that the questions at issue should be brought to a settlement; and the Government, through Lord John Russell, put itself into communication with its opponents for the purpose of arriving at some compromise. It was found that a little mutual concession would render an arrangement possible. Each of the two Bills had in it a point round which the opposition had centred. With regard to the Municipal Bill the Conservatives had shown themselves ready to confess the evils of the existing system (in which municipal office and power were confined to a very small number of Protestant townsmen), and had expressed their willingness to assist in removing them; but they regarded the substitution of corporations freely elected by constituencies with a low franchise as undesirable and dangerous in the present state of Ireland. They preferred some form of nomination which would virtually have robbed the inhabitants of the advantages of self-government. In the Tithe Act it was the appropriation clause, and the resolutions passed in 1835 as to the use to be made of any surplus arising from a rearrangement of Church property, which excited their anger. Even many moderate Liberals looked with some displeasure at the obstinacy of their leaders, which perpetuated the anarchy and disorder arising from the collection of the tithes, and thought the appropriation clause might well be dropped. Under these circumstances an understanding was arrived at that no opposition should be offered to the passage of some form of Tithe Bill, if the appropriation clause was not insisted upon, and that, in return for such a concession, corporations on the elective principle should be allowed.

The Tithe Bill,

It would seem that in consequence of this arrangement Lord John Russell had intended to proceed by way of resolution— that is to say, he intended to ask the assent of the House to certain principles on which a Bill might then be formed, in the full expectation that it would meet with no resistance till the details

were discussed in Committee. But the Conservatives, carrying their cautious leader further probably than he cared to go, determined to have one more trial of strength. When, therefore, Lord John Russell had explained the principle of the forthcoming Bill, Sir Thomas Acland at once moved that the Resolution come to by the House in 1835 should be rescinded. This seemed to imply that in the Bill, as sketched by Lord John Russell, there was still some trace of the obnoxious appropriation clause, and of an intention to appropriate Church property to other than Church purposes. The motion was indeed lost; but the division disclosed an opposition of formidable strength, for while the majority numbered 307, there was a minority of 298. In the face of so close a division, Lord John Russell thought it prudent to yield, and to give a distinct promise that his Tithe Bill should be simply restricted to the conversion of the tithes into a rent-charge.

Previous efforts to settle the

tithe question.

To understand exactly the effect of Sir Thomas Acland's motion, it is necessary to recollect that this question of tithes had long occupied Parliament, and that every successive Government had tried its hand at it in vain. It had been generally accepted that the best way of handling the tithes was to change them into a rent-charge-that is to say, the landowners were to pay the tithes instead of the tenants. For the trouble thus laid upon them, they were to be remunerated by a deduction, varying in different Bills, of from 40 to 25 per cent., while the Church was to be compensated for the diminution of its receipts by the certainty of their payment. But the Whigs, at the close of the short administration of Sir Robert Peel (April 1835), had driven him from office by insisting upon an addition to this simple measure. A Resolution had been passed that "no measure upon the subject of tithes in Ireland could lead to a satisfactory and final adjustment which did not embody the principle that any surplus remaining after providing for the Established Church should be applied locally to the general education of all classes of Christians." It was this Resolution which had frustrated the efforts of Morpeth to settle the question in July 1835. He too proposed a rent-charge in lieu of tithes, and in this all parties were agreed. But with the Resolution freshly carried, it was impossible not to act in accordance with it; and he was compelled to introduce as part of his measure some provisions for re-arranging the revenues of the Church. There was indeed abundant room for reform; in 199 parishes there was no single churchman, in 860 there were less than fifty. But the effort of