The maintenance until thirty-eight years ago of the Established Church, which raised its mitred head in a country where its adherents formed one-eighth of the population, but where its funds were extorted from those who regarded its doctrines as heresy, was, I verily believe, the _fons et origo_ of the sectarian bitterness which still persists among Catholics, "Lui demander," wrote a French observer of the position of the Catholic Church in the days before 1870, "de s'associer a une telle entreprise lui parait une injure; lui forcer est une violence; la continuance de cette violence est une persecution." You would find it hard to make me believe that had England been the scene of a similar anomaly, with the _rôles_, of course, exchanged, the feelings towards the Catholic Church, even forty years after its disestablishment, would be the most cordial. The proposals of Pitt for the State payment of the Catholic priesthood were constantly revived and advocated throughout the century. Lord Clarendon's views, which have just been quoted, were a mere echo of the opinion expressed by Lord John Russell in favour of concurrent endowment in 1844, and there is a significant allusion on the part of Charles Greville fourteen years earlier to the feeling of that time, in which, after speaking about Irish disaffection, he shows the results which were expected from concurrent endowment by commenting unfavourably on the policy which the Government pursued "instead of depriving him (O'Connell) of half his influence by paying the priests and so getting them under the influence of the Government."[19] The whole question was considered merely in the abstract until the Fenian outburst of the sixties--as Mr. Gladstone freely admitted--opened men's eyes to this among the other serious problems of Irish government. It required all the violence of desperate men to call, attention to a condition of things in which the Church which was established numbered less than one-eighth of the inhabitants of the country among its adherents.