It was supposed that the Whiteboys had their meetings in Catholic chapels. But there is no ground for taxing the Catholic Church as a body with any share in the criminal part of the movement. The Catholic clergy of Ireland were then, as they are now, a peasant clergy, sympathizing with their class. They depended on that class for their stipends. Some of them their sympathy might betray into complicity, more or less active, with agrarian crime. More of them might be guilty of failure to exert their religious authority as ministers of the sacraments, the confessional, and death-bed absolution, on the side of law. But their record on the whole appears to have been as clear as, considering what persecution they had undergone, and that the law was their enemy as well as the enemy of the peasant, it was reasonable to expect. The mansion of an unpopular landlord became a besieged fortress. Absenteeism of course increased. To a rather later date belongs the story of an agent who, having complained to his absentee landlord that his life had been threatened, received the reply, "Tell the villains that they need not hope to intimidate me by shooting you." "I am well acquainted," said a statesman not oversensitive to popular wrongs, "with the Province of Munster, and I know that it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry of that province. I know that the unhappy tenantry are ground to powder by relentless landlords. I know that far from being able to give the clergy their just dues, they have not food and raiment for themselves; the landlord grasps the whole. Sorry I am to add that, unsatisfied with present extortion, some landlords have been so base as to instigate the insurgents to rob the clergy of their tithes, not in order to alleviate the distresses of the tenantry, but that they might add the clergy's share to the cruel rack-rents already paid. Sir, I fear it will require the utmost ability of Parliament to come to the root of these evils. The poor people of Munster live in a more abject state of poverty than human nature can be supposed able to bear. Their miseries are intolerable; but they do not originate with the clergy; nor can the legislature stand by and see them take the redress into their own hands. Nothing can be done for their benefit while the country remains in a state of anarchy." The miseries might not originate with the clergy, but the popular wrath did originate specially with the exactions of the tithe-proctor. Grattan proposed commutation. But then the tithe of pasture agistment, as it was called, could no longer have been evaded. That simple reform was put off for more than a generation, with the most calamitous results.