I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained
freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken
off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its
folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself
justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British
neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, nor
any want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights by
peaceable and legal means."

The tithe system, unutterably odious and full of all injustice, had
prepared the way for this expression of feeling on the part of the
people. Ireland had never, in any period of her history, bowed her neck
peaceably to the ecclesiastical yoke. From the Canon of Cashel, prepared
by English deputies in the twelfth century, decreeing for the first time
that tithes should be paid in Ireland, down to the present moment, the
Church in her borders has relied solely upon the strong arm of the law,
and literally reaped its tithes with the sword. The decree of the Dublin
Synod, under Archbishop Comyn, in 1185, could only be enforced within the
pale of the English settlement. The attempts of Henry VIII. also failed.
Without the pale all endeavors to collect tithes were met by stern
opposition. And although from the time of William III. the tithe system
has been established in Ireland, yet at no period has it been regarded
otherwise than as a system of legalized robbery by seven eighths of the
people. An examination of this system cannot fail to excite our wonder,
not that it has been thus regarded, but that it has been so long endured
by any people on the face of the earth, least of all by Irishmen. Tithes
to the amount of L1,000,000 are annually wrung from impoverished Ireland,
in support of a clergy who can only number about one sixteenth of her
population as their hearers; and wrung, too, in an undue proportion, from
the Catholic counties. [See Dr. Doyle's Evidence before Hon. E. G.