ed or did
not deserve its confidence. Some of the measures announced by the
Government had to do with the reform of the ecclesiastical courts and
the maintenance of Church discipline, and Sir Robert Peel had himself
given notice of a measure to deal with the Irish tithe system, the
principal object of which was understood to be the transfer of the
liability of the payment of tithes from the shoulders of the tenant to
the shoulders of the landlord. It was not unreasonable that the
Opposition should proclaim it their policy to wait and see what the
Tory ministers really proposed to do before assailing them with a
direct and general vote of want of confidence. Even, however, if the
Opposition had been inclined to linger before inviting a real trial of
strength, there was a feeling growing up all over the country which
seemed impatient of mere episodical encounters leading to nothing in
particular. The leaders of the Opposition had a very distinct policy
in their minds, and on March 30, 1835, it found its formal expression.

Lord John Russell moved a resolution which called upon the House to
resolve itself into a committee "in order to consider the present state
of the Church established in Ireland, with the view of applying any
surplus of revenues not required for the spiritual care of its members
to the general education of all classes of the people without
distinction of religious persuasion." Now here, it will be seen, {246}
was the battle-ground distinctly marked out on which the two political
parties must come, sooner or later, to a decisive struggle. About the
collection of tithes, about the imposition of tithes, about the class
of the community on whom the direct responsibility for the payment of
tithes ought to fall, there might possibly be a basis of agreement
found between Tories and Whigs. But when there arose a question as to
the appropriation of the Church revenues, there the old doctrines and
the new, the old Tories and the new Reformers, came into irreconcilable
antagonism. The creed of the Tories was that the revenues of the
Church belonged to the Church itself, and that if the Church had a
surplus of funds here or there for any one particular purpose that
surplus could be applied by it to some of its other purposes, but that
no legislature had any right to say to the Church, "You have more money
here than is needed for your own rights, and we have a right to take
part of it away from you and apply