even at the bayonet's point, to attend the {214} services conducted by a Protestant pastor. Only a few years after this time the great statesman who was afterwards to obtain from Parliament the disestablishment of the Irish Church was arguing, in his earliest published work, that the fewer the Protestants in Ireland the greater was the necessity for the State to be lavish of its money with the object of converting the outer population of Ireland to the established religion. Mr. Ward, in his speech, set himself to make it clear to the House of Commons that the collection of tithes in Ireland was, at that time, the principal cause of the disturbance and disaffection which brought so much calamity on the unhappy island, and prevented any possibility of its becoming a loyal part of the British dominions. He showed by facts and figures that the opposition to the collection of tithes was not any longer confined to the Catholic population alone, but had spread among the Protestants of dissenting denominations, and was showing itself in the North of Ireland, as well as in the provinces of the South and the West and the Midlands. He pointed to the fact that it was found necessary to maintain in Ireland, for the purpose of collecting the tithes, an army larger than that which England needed for the maintenance of her Indian Empire, and that, nevertheless, it was found impossible to collect the tithes in Ireland, and that the Government could suggest nothing better than a project for the payment of the tithes out of the pockets of the national taxpayer. Mr. Ward made it clear to the House of Commons that the revenues of the State Church in Ireland were not distributed with anything like a view to the fair and equal remuneration of its clergy. In numbers of cases the clergy of the higher ranks had enormous incomes, quite out of all proportion to any duties they were even supposed to perform, while the clergymen who actually did the work were, as a general rule, screwed down to a pitiful rate of payment which hardly kept soul and body together. Twenty pounds a year was not an uncommon stipend among the curates who did the hard work, while an annual revenue of sixty pounds was regarded as something like opulence. Where the curate received his thirty {215} or forty pounds a year or less, the incumbent usually had his two thousand a year, and in many instances much more. As we said before, the incumbent deriving a rich revenue from his office was often habitually an absentee, who left the whole of his work to be performed, as best it might be done, by the curate, half starving on a miserable pittance. Mr. Ward made out a case which must have produced some impression on any Parliamentary assembly, and could hardly fail to find attentive listeners and ready sympathy among the members of the first reformed House of Commons. [Sidenote: 1834--George Grote]