Stanley.] In the southern and middle counties, almost entirely inhabited
by the Catholic peasantry, every thing they possess is subject to the
tithe: the cow is seized in the hovel, the potato in the barrel, the coat
even on the poor man's back. [Speech of T. Reynolds, Esq., at an anti-
tithe meeting.] The revenues of five of the dignitaries of the Irish
Church Establishment are as follows: the Primacy L140,000; Derry
L120,000; Kilmore L100,000; Clogher L100,000; Waterford L70,000. Compare
these enormous sums with that paid by Scotland for the maintenance of the
Church, namely L270,000. Yet that Church has 2,000,000 souls under its
care, while that of Ireland has not above 500,000. Nor are these
princely livings expended in Ireland by their possessors. The bishoprics
of Cloyne and Meath have been long held by absentees,--by men who know no
more of their flocks than the non-resident owner of a West India
plantation did of the miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thankless
labor were annually transmitted to him. Out of 1289 benefited clergymen
in Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending in
Bath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, the
wealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter by
the bayonets of the military. Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm of
Grattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompous
priesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of false
zeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the true
religion, to their flocks oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, to
their king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar,--they stand on
the altar as a stepping-stone to the throne, glorying in the ear of
princes, whom they poison with crooked principles and heated advice; a
faction against their king when they are not his slaves,--ever the dirt
under his feet or a poniard to his heart."

For the evils of absenteeism, the non-residence of the wealthy