ishment, but was, in
fact, entirely independent of that or any other constitutional movement.
It may seem inexplicable to political students of a later age that Irish
questions of secondary importance, and eminently capable of equitable
treatment, should have convulsed the whole island and disturbed the
whole course of imperial politics, during the reign of William IV. The
rebellion against tithes or "tithe-war," as it was called, had not the
semblance of justification in law or reason. Every tenant who took part
in it had inherited or acquired his farm, subject to payment of tithes,
and might have been charged a higher rent if he could have obtained it
tithe-free. The tithe was the property of the parson as much as the land
was the property of the landlord, and the wilful refusal of it was from
a legal point of view sheer robbery. On the other hand, the mode of
collection was extremely vexatious, perhaps involving the seizure of a
pig, a bag of meal, or a sack of potatoes; and a starving cottier,
paying fees to his own priest, was easily persuaded by demagogues that
it was an arbitrary tribute extorted by clerical tyrants of an alien
faith.

Thus it came to pass that the history of the Irish "tithe-war" exhibits
the Irish peasantry in their very worst moods, and it is stained with
atrocities never surpassed in later records of Irish agrarian
conspiracy. It is among the strange and sad anomalies of national
character that a people so kindly in their domestic relations, so little
prone to ordinary crime, and so amenable to better influences, should
have shown, in all ages, down to the very latest, a capacity for
dastardly inhumanity, under vindictive and gregarious impulses, only to
be matched by Spanish and Italian brigands among the races of modern
Europe. Yet so it is, and no "coercion" (so-called) ultimately enforced
by legal authority was comparable in severity with the coercion which
bloodthirsty miscreants ruthlessly applied to honest and peaceable
neighbours, only guilty of paying their lawful debts. It is not too much
to say that anarchy prevailed over a great part of Ireland, especially
of Leinster, during the years 1831 and 1832. The collection of tithes
became almost impossible. The tithe-proctors were tortured or murdered;
the few willing tithe-payers were cruelly maltreated or intimidated; the
police, unless mustered in large bodies, were held at bay; cattle were
driven, or, if seized and offered for sale,