Whether, in all cases, the tithe-farmer has been a merciful pastor, the tithe-proctor an upright agent, and even the vicar himself a most unbiassed judge.

In this inquiry, or, in forming some regulations for this inquiry, you will not be withheld by the arguments of pride, bigotry, and prejudice; that argument which, reflecting on God, maintains the sacred rights of exaction; that other argument which, reflecting on Parliament, denies your capacity to give redress; that other argument which, reflecting on human nature, supposes that you inflame mankind by redressing their grievances; that other argument which traduces the landed interest of Ireland as an extortioner, and belies one part of the community to continue the miseries of the other; an argument of calumny, an argument of cruelty. Least of all, should you be withheld by that idle intimation stuffed into the speech from the throne, suggesting that the church is in danger, and holding out, from that awful seat of authority, false lights to the nation, as if we had doated back to the nonsense of Sacheveral's days, and were to be ridden once more by the fools and bigots. Parliament is not a bigot; you are no secretary, no polemic; it is your duty to unite all men, to manifest brotherly love and confidence to all men. The parental sentiment is the true principle of government. Men are ever finally disposed to be governed by the instrument of their happiness; the mystery of government, would you learn it? Look on the Gospel, and make the source of your redemption the rule of authority; and, like the hen in the Scriptures, expand your wings, and cover all your people.

Let bigotry and schism, the zealot's fire, the high-priest's intolerance, through all their discordancy, tremble, while an enlightened Parliament, with arms of general protection, overarches the whole community, and roots the Protestant ascendancy in the sovereign mercy of its nature. Laws of coercion, perhaps necessary, certainly severe, you have put forth already, but your great engine of power you have hitherto kept back; that engine, which the pride of the bigot, nor the spite of the zealot, nor the ambition of the high-priest, nor the arsenal of the conqueror, nor the inquisition, with its jaded rack and pale criminal, never thought of; the engine which, armed with physical and moral blessing, comes forth and overlays mankind by services the engine of redress; this is government, and this the only description of government worth your ambition. Were I to raise you to a great act, I should not recur to the history of other nations; I would recite your own acts, and set you in emulation with yourselves. Do you remember that night when you gave your country a

free trade, and with your own hands opened all her harbours? That night when you gave her a free constitution, and broke the chains of a century, while England, eclipsed at your glory and your island, rose as it were from its bed, and got nearer to the sun? In the arts that polish life, the inventions that accommodate, the manufactures that adorn it, you will be for many years inferior to some other parts of Europe; but, to nurse a growing people, to mature a struggling, though hardy community, to mould, to multiply, to consolidate, to inspire, and to exalt a young nation, be these your barbarous accomplishments!

I speak this to you, from a long knowledge of your character, and the various resources of your soil; and I confide my motion to those principles not only of justice, but of fire, which I have observed to exist in your composition, and occasionally to break out in a flame of public zeal, leaving the ministers of the crown in eclipsed degradation. Therefore, I have not come to you furnished merely with a cold mechanical plan, but have submitted to your consideration the living grievances, conceiving that any thing in the shape of oppression made once apparent-oppression, too, of a people you have set freethe evil will catch those warm susceptible properties which abound in your mind, and qualify you for legislation.

14th April, 1788.

The next resolution relates to the sustenance of the poor, as the two others relate immediately to their industry; it is proposed to put the poor of the south on the same footing with the poor of the north, east, and west, by exempting his potato-garden from tithe. When we state that potatoes are the food of the poor, we understate their importance; they are more; they are the protection of the rich against a poor-rate, and therefore invaluable to you, as well as to the peasant.

"Resolved, That potatoes are the principal subsistence of the poor in Ireland, and are, in a great part of the kingdom, most fortunately exempt from tithe.

'Resolved, That it would much contribute to relieve the poor of the south of this kingdom, if the benefit of said exemption was extended to them; and if it shall be made to appear that the owners of tithe shall suffer thereby, this House will make them just compensation."

In three-fourths of this kingdom, potatoes pay no tithe; in the south, they not only pay, but pay most heavily. They pay frequently in proportion to the poverty and helplessness of the countryman; for in the south it is the practice to crouch to the rich, and to encroach

upon the poor; hence, perhaps, in the south, the mutability of the common people. What so galling, what so inflammatory, as the comparative view of the condition of His Majesty's subjects in one part of the kingdom and the other! In one part their sustenance is free, and in the other tithed in the greatest degree; so that a grazier coming from the west to the south shall inform the latter, that with him neither potatoes nor hay are tithed; and a weaver coming from the north shall inform the south, that in his country neither potatoes nor flax are tithed; and thus are men, in the present unequal and unjust state of things, taught to repine, not only by their intercourse with the pastor, but with one another.

To redress this requires no speculation; no extraordinary exercise of the human faculties; no long fatiguing process of reason and calculation, but merely to extend to the poor of the south the benefits which are enjoyed by His Majesty's subjects in the other parts of Ireland; it is to put the people of the south on a level with their fellow-creatures. If it shall be said, that such an exemption would cause a great loss to the parson; what a terrible discovery does that objection disclose! that the clergy of the south are principally supported by the poor, by those whom they ought, as moral men, to relieve, and Christian men support, according to the strictest discipline of the church.

To excite a certain quarter to this principle, perhaps the best method would be the stimulation of example. I shall accordingly produce two examples; one example drawn from the country supposed to be the most bigotted in Europe, and the other from that man supposed to be the most prone to clerical avarice and ambition. The first, the kingdom of Spain, the latter is the Pope. In 1780, Pope Pius VI. sends a brief to the King of Spain, enabling him to dispose of onethird of ecclesiastical estates and benefices in his presentation, to which no cure of souls was annexed, in charity; and further sets forth in his brief this reason, that the relief and succour of the poor was particularly incumbent on him. The King of Spain, in 1783, pursuant to this brief, publishes his edict, reciting the brief, and appointing a commission to dispose of the third, as above recited, in the support of the poor, and then he specifies the objects; endowments of all kinds of retreats and receptacles for the poor, such as hospitals and houses of charity, foundations for orphans and foundlings. The better to enforce the execution of the first edict, the King of Spain publishes another, commanding, in a peremptory manner, the execution of the first; and he adds, a principle inseparable from the claims of tithes, that such charitable aids peculiarly belong to ecclesiastical rents, according to the most sound and constant discipline of the church.

Here are the Sovereign Pontiff of the Catholic faith, and the Catholie King of Spain, distributing one-third of a part of the revenues of their church for the poor; and here are some of the enlightened doctors of our church deprecating such a principle, and guarding their riches against the encroaching of Christian charity. I hope they will never again afford such an opportunity of comparing them with the Pope, or contrasting them with the apostles. I do not think their riches will be diminished; but if they were to be so, is not the question directly put to them, which will they prefer? their flock or their riches? for which did Christ die, or the apostles suffer martyrdom, or Paul preach, or Luther protest? Was it for the tithe of flax, or the tithe of barren land, or the tithe of potatoes, or the tithe-proctor, or the tithe-farmer, or the tithe-pig? Your riches are secure; but if they were impaired by your acts of benevolence, does our religion depend on your riches? On such a principle your Saviour should have accepted of the kingdoms of the earth, and their glory, and have capitulated with the devil for the propagation of the faith. Never was a great principle rendered prevalent by power or riches; low and artificial means are resorted to for the fulfilling the little views of men, their love of power, their avarice, or ambition; but to apply to the great design of God such wretched auxiliaries, is to forget his divinity, and to deny his omnipotence. What! does the word come more powerfully from a dignitary in purple and fine linen, than it came from the poor apostle with nothing but the spirit of the Lord on his lips, and the glory of God standing on his right hand? What! my Lords, not cultivate barren land; not encourage the manufactures of your country; not relieve the poor of your flock, if the church is to be at any expense thereby! Where shall we find this principle? not in the Bible. I have adverted to the sacred writings, without criticism, I allow, but not without devotion; there is not in any part of them such a sentiment; not in the purity of Christ, nor the poverty of the apostles, nor the prophecy of Isaiah, nor the patience of Job, nor the harp of David, nor the wisdom of Solomon! No, my Lords; on this subject your Bible is against you; the precepts and practice of the primitive church against you; the great words increase and multiply, the axiom of philosophy, that nature does nothing in vain; the productive principle that formed the system, and defends it against the ambition and encroachments of its own elements; the reproductive principle which continues the system, and which makes vegetation support life, and life administer back again to vegetation; taking from the grave its sterile quality, and making death itself propagate to life and succession; the plenitude of things, and the majesty of nature,

through all her organs, manifest against such a sentiment; this blind fatality of error, which, under pretence of defending the wealth of the priesthood, checks the growth of mankind, arrests his industry, and makes the sterility of the planet a part of its religion.

As I have proposed three measures for the benefit of the people, I shall now submit a fourth for the benefit of the church. It is a resolution which is as follows:

"Resolved, That this House will be ready to relieve the owners of tithes from the necessity of drawing the same; and to give said owners a power of recovering the value of the same, in all cases, by civil bill, or otherwise, provided said owners of tithe shall conform to certain ratages to be ascertained by act of Parliament."

The resolution will be best explained by a bill, which I have drawn, and which I mean to propose hereafter; the brief of which I will now state to you. The bill enacts, that every owner of tithe shall be relieved from the difficulty of drawing the same, by civil bill, for any sum whatsoever, provided said owner of tithe shall conform to certain ratages in the bill set forth; these ratages will be such as Parliament shall think proper, different, perhaps, according to the different provinces, and the result of the inquiry of provinces, and the result of the inquiry of provincial committees.

I have set forth, in the bill for Munster, such a ratage as was nearly stated by learned authority, as the average ratage of the richest diocese therein; the principal articles of which are, potatoes, the Irish acre, 6s., wheat 6s., barley 5s., meadow 3s., oats 3s.

The bill enacts, that, in the neighbourhood of a city, the tithe of meadow shall be increased; it further enacts, that the owner of tithe shall have a power, on due notice, to enter in order to survey; it enacts, that the above ratages shall be estimated as worth so many stone of bread corn, which is every seven years to be valued by the clerk of the market, who strikes the averages for the kingdom; that septennial valuation of the corn to be the septennial ratages for the owner of tithe.

The bill enacts, that all small dues shall cease, and that instead thereof, in parishes where small dues shall have been paid for these last ten years, a valuation shall be made of such, by a person appointed in vestry; said valuation to be levied, not off the poor, nor the particular individual, but generally after the manner of baronial charges; my idea and fixed attention being to relieve the poor of the south from the tithe of potatoes, and the north from small dues ; an endeavour which, however opposed, will, by perseverance, succeed; it is rational, it is just. The bill contains a proviso, which saves and