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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, could find no purchasers; and the protestant clergy, who had acted on the whole with great forbearance, were reduced to extremities of privations.
His "little houldin'," as he unostentatiously called some five hundred acres of bog, mountain, and sheep-walk, lay in a remote part of the county, the roads were nearly impassable for several miles in that direction, land was of little value; the agent was a timid man, with a large family; of three tithe-proctors who had penetrated into the forbidden territory, two laboured under a dyspepsia for life, not being able to digest parchment and sealing-wax, for they usually dined on their own writs; and the third gave five pounds out of his pocket, to a large, fresh-looking man, with brown whiskers and beard, that concealed him two nights in a hay-loft, to escape the vengeance of the people, which act of philanthropy should never be forgotten, if some ill-natured people were not bold enough to say the kind individual in question was no other man than
Peter Robinson in 1824, was the most extensive, and came more immediately under my own observation. I have understood that some most obnoxious and dangerous characters were shipped off in this expedition no doubt to the great comfort of landlords, agents, and tithe-proctors. The Government behaved very liberally to these settlers.
Two or three clergymen were murdered, several tithe-proctors or collectors of tithe were beaten nearly to death; and to such a pitch did the opposition rise, that at length it became impossible to find any one hardy and intrepid, or, in other words, mad enough, to collect tithe, unless under the protection either of the military or police.
The ingenious devices of Stanley and Littleton for solving the insoluble Irish tithe question had proved almost abortive; the government officials employed to collect tithe were almost as powerless to do so as the old tithe-proctors, and a new proposal to convert tithe into a land tax was naturally ridiculed by O'Connell as delusive.
Let there be an order of council to preserve all the parsons, agents, tithe-proctors, and landlords till June; let there be no more shooting in Tipperary for the rest of the season; let us “burke” Father Mathew, and endeavour to make our heads for the approaching festivities; and what between the new poor-law and the tariff, I think we shall be by that time in as picturesque a state of poverty as the most critical stickler for nationality would desire.
It was hemmed in on every side by the obstinate unyielding pressure of selfish interests: the interest of the Established Church against the Presbyterians; the interest of the Protestant laity, or tithe-payers, against the clergy; the bold unscrupulous interest of a landlords' Parliament against the occupier of the soil; which, together with the grievance of the system of tithe-proctors, established in Ireland through the Whiteboys the fatal alliance between resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong under the name of giving support to public tranquillity.
The result, however, of this state of things is that, actually, in the colonies of Australia the grievances appear worse, the "wrongs" more galling, and the "rights" less regarded, than even in England itself; and judging from the crabbed tone of discontent prevailing in most of the colonial newspapers, the people who live in a land almost free from taxes, and quite exempt from tithes and poor-rates, can without much difficulty conjure up complaints of taxation and oppression not less piercing than those which are to be heard in a kingdom where taxgatherers, tithe-proctors, and aristocrats, still exist.
His "little houldin'," as he unostentatiously called some five hundred acres of bog, mountain, and sheep-walk, lay in a remote part of the county, the roads were nearly impassable for several miles in that direction, land was of little value; the agent was a timid man, with a large family; of three tithe-proctors who had penetrated into the forbidden territory, two laboured under a dyspepsia for life, not being able to digest parchment and sealing-wax, for they usually dined on their own writs; and the third gave five pounds out of his pocket, to a large, fresh-looking man, with brown whiskers and beard, that concealed him two nights in a hay-loft, to escape the vengeance of the people, which act of philanthropy should never be forgotten, if some ill-natured people were not bold enough to say the kind individual in question was no other man than
Priest's nieces, but sure he's in heaven, And his failins is nothin' to me. And we still might get on without doctors, If they'd let the ould Island alone; And if purple-men, priests, and tithe-proctors Were crammed down the great gun of Athlone.
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