to raise the Protestant clergy from their fallen
state, and to assert the authority of the law by taking away the
inducements which now exist for setting the law at defiance. Those
who undertake to govern the country are above all things bound to
see that the laws are obeyed, and they do not deserve the name of
a Government if they submit to, much less if they connive at, a
permanent state of anarchy in any part of the country. They know
that the law in Ireland is a dead letter, that neither to statute
nor common law do the lower orders of Irish Catholics (the bulk of
the nation) pay the slightest obedience, and that they are
countenanced and urged on in their disobedience by those agitators
with whom the Government act in political fellowship, and in
deference to whom their measures have been shaped. Granting that
after the adoption of the resolution by the House of Commons they
were bound to insert it in their Bill, what justification is there
for their refusal to receive the Bill back from the Lords with no
other alteration than the omission of the appropriation clause? In
so refusing they destroy their own measure; they publish to the
world that it is the principle of appropriation, and not the Tithe
composition, that they really care for; and in thus strangling
their own Bill, because they cannot tack that principle on to it,
they make themselves accomplices of the outrages and violence
which are perpetrated in the Tithe warfare, and abettors of the
regular and systematic violation of the law. The King's Government
exhibits itself in a conspiracy with Catholic agitators and
Protestant republicans against the clergy of the Established
Church and against the laws of the land. If they are sincere in
their own statements and declarations they must of necessity deem
no object commensurate with this in point of urgency and
importance; and what is the object to which this is postponed?
That of maintaining their own consistency; because they turned the
late Government out on this question they must now adhere to it
with desperate tenacity; their interests as a party demand that
they should; O'Connell and the Radicals will not forgive them if
they give it up. They might if they would declare their unchanged
opinion in favour of the principle of appropriation, and their
determination to press the adoption of it at all times and by all
means, and never to desist till they had accomplished its
recognition, but at the same tim