"Lord John Russell, Lord Howick, and Mr. Sheil, while fully admitting that an establishment tends to promote religion and to preserve good order, contended that it ought not to be maintained where it fails to secure these objects, and that it must always fail when, as in Ireland, the members of the Established Church are only a minority of the nation, while the majority, constituting most of the poorer classes, are thrown upon the voluntary system for the support of their clergy. Concurring with Paley in his view of a Church Establishment--that it should be founded upon utility, that it should communicate religious knowledge to the masses of the people, that it should not be debased into a state engine or an instrument of political power--they demanded whether the Church of Ireland fulfilled these essential conditions of an establishment. They asked whether its immense revenues had been employed in preserving and extending the Protestant faith in Ireland? In the course of something more than a century it was stated that its revenues had increased sevenfold, and now amounted to £800,000 a year. Had its efficiency increased in the same proportion? Had it even succeeded in keeping its own small flock within the fold? On the contrary, they adduced statistics to show a lamentable falling off in their numbers. For example. Lord John Russell said, 'By Tighe's _History of Kilkenny_, it appears that the number of Protestant families in 1731 was 1055, but in 1800 they had been reduced to 941. The total number of Protestants at the former period was 5238, while the population of the county, which in 1800 was 108,000, in 1731 was only 42,108 souls. From Stuart's _History of Armagh_, we find that sixty years ago the Protestants in that country were as two to one; now they are as one to three. In 1733, the Roman Catholics in Kerry were twelve to one Protestant, and now the former are much more numerous than even that proportion. In Tullamore, in 1731, there were 64 Protestants to 613 Roman Catholics; but according to Mason's parochial survey, in 1818 the Protestants had diminished to only five, while the Roman Catholics had augmented to 2455. On the whole, from the best computation he had seen--and he believed it was not exaggerated one way or the other--the entire number of Protestants belonging to the Established Church in Ireland can hardly be stated higher than 750,000; and of those 400,000 are resident in the ecclesiastical province of Armagh.'"--pp. 153. Now, for the maintenance of this church of 700,000 out of a population of 7,000,000--this church of a tenth of the people--there were then and now are held in mortmain of the best lands of the kingdom, above 600,000 acres. We are told by the poet: "A time there was ere England's woes began When every rood of ground sustained its man."