830}

Emancipation having thus been gained, Mr. Peel brought in a bill for
the disfranchisement of the Irish forty-shilling freeholders, and for
raising the qualification to ten pounds. This was part and parcel of the
general measure, and it met with no serious opposition even in Ireland.
The very Whigs supported it, hostile as it was to popular rights and
destructive of vested political franchises, as an essential part of a
whole; the other and better part of which they were unwilling to
lose. Mr. Brougham said, he consented to it as the price, the almost
extravagant price, of the inestimable good which would result from
emancipation; and it was described by Sir James Mackintosh as one of
those tough morsels which he had scarcely been able to swallow. It was
opposed by Mr. Huskisson and others as a measure uncalled for by any
necessity, and not fitted to gain that object which alone was held out
as justifying it. It was absurd, it was said, to allege as a pretext for
it, the influence and conduct of the Catholic priesthood; for all who
knew anything of that influence, knew that it was chiefly felt when it
ran with the current of popular feeling; and that it was even exercised
with a view to maintain submission to the laws. If the forty-shilling
freeholders had been corrupt, like those of Penryn, their
disfranchisement might be defended; but the only offence of the persons
against whom this bill was directed, had been that they exercised their
privilege honestly and independently, according to the dictates of their
own consciences. In reply to this, Mr. Peel mentioned an instance of the
power of the priests as having occurred at the Clare election. At the
commencement of that election a landlord of the county had promised his
interest to Mr. V. Fitzgerald. The landlord had a voter on his estate
who was under great personal obligations to him; and previous to the
commencement of the contest, he said to this voter, "I shall vote for
Mr. Fitzgerald; I suppose you mean to do the same." The man declared his
determination to imitate the example of his patron; but as the struggle
drew nearer, a degree of excitement was produced to which it was only
necessary to allude: and the freeholder did not escape its effects. He
came to his landlord with sixty pounds in his hands, and addressed him
thus:--"I have saved this sum while your tenant, and upon your property.
I cannot redeem the promise which I gave you. There, take the sixty