n cattle were sold by public auction no
bidder ventured to come forward but the farmer himself who owned the
cattle, and they had to be knocked down to him at a purely nominal
price because there was no possible competitor. The farmer drove home
his beasts amid the exultation of the whole neighborhood, and the
clergymen was as far off his tithes as ever. The passive resistance in
fact was harder to deal with, as far as practical results went, than
even the resistance that was active. Summon together by lawful
authority a number of soldiers and police, and it is easy to shoot down
a few unarmed peasants, and to dispose for the hour of popular
resistance in this prompt and peremptory way. But what is to be done
when the resistance takes the form of a resolute organized refusal to
pay up the amounts claimed or to offer any price for the cattle seized
in default of payment? There were in every district numbers of quiet
Catholic parishioners who would much rather have paid their share of
the tithes to the Protestant clergymen than become drawn into quarrels
and local disturbances and confusion. But such men soon found that if
they paid their tithes they put themselves in direct antagonism to the
whole mass of their Catholic neighbors. Intimidation of the most
serious kind was sometimes brought to bear upon them, and in any case
there was that very powerful kind of intimidation which consists in
making the offender feel that he has brought on himself the contempt
and the hatred of nearly all his fellow-parishioners and his
fellow-religionists. In those days it was not lawful to hold a public
political meeting in Ireland, but there were anti-tithe demonstrations
got up, nevertheless, over three parts of Ireland. These
demonstrations took the outward form of what were called hurling
matches, great rivalries of combatants, in a peculiar Irish game of
ball. Each of these demonstrations was made to be, and was known to
be, a practical protest against the collection of the tithes. {210}
Whenever it became certain that the recusant farmer's cattle were to be
seized, a great hurling match was announced to be held in the immediate
vicinity, and the local magistrates, who perhaps had at their disposal
only a few handfuls of police or soldiery, were not much inclined to
order the seizure in the presence of such a cloud of witnesses. Nor
would any Catholic parishioner who had quietly paid up his tithes
without resistance have