No wonder that, Lord Melbourne, in coming into office thirty-five years after the Union, should have found Ireland still a centre of disaffection and disturbance. III The Melbourne Ministry was kept in office from 1835 to 1841 by the Irish Vote. O’Connell made a compact—the historic Lichfield House compact—with Ministers. It came to this: They were to introduce remedial measures for Ireland, and he was, meanwhile, to suspend the demand for repeal of the Union. He said to the Irish people: “I am trying an experiment, I want to see if an English Parliament can do justice to Ireland. I do not think it can, but I mean to give the present Government a chance, and see what they can do. And I will suspend the demand for repeal to give them a fair trial.” What came of that “fair trial” we shall now see. The tithe question was the question of the hour. A tithe war had been raging, between 1830 and 1835, distracting the country, and forcing the attention of Parliament to Irish affairs. On March 20th, 1835, the Government of Sir Robert Peel took up the question, and Sir Henry Hardinge, the English Chief Secretary in Ireland, moved a resolution to convert tithes into a rent charge at 75 per cent. of the tithe. O’Connell, in dealing with Hardinge’s resolution, said that no measure relating to tithes would be satisfactory which did not contain a clause appropriating the surplus revenues of the established church to purposes of general utility. Subsequently (on April 7th), Lord John Russell moved: “That it is the opinion of this House that no measure upon the subject of tithes in Ireland can lead to a satisfactory adjustment which does not embody the principle of appropriation.” This resolution was carried by a majority of twenty-seven. Whereupon the Government of Sir Robert Peel resigned, and Lord Melbourne became Prime Minister, with Lord John Russell as leader of the House of Commons. What was the upshot of the Parliamentary struggle, lasting for three years, over the tithe question? Simply this. In 1838 an Act was passed, converting tithe into a rent charge of 75 per cent. of the tithe, and containing no appropriation clause. Peel had proposed a Bill of the very same kind in 1835. Russell objected to it, insisting on the necessity of an appropriation clause, and proposing the conversion of tithes into a rent charge of 68% of the tithe. Successful (by the Irish vote) in the Commons, but defeated in the Lords, he ultimately abandoned his conversion scheme, flung the appropriation clause to the winds, and passed what was really Peel’s measure of 1835. Of course tithes were not abolished. The payment of them was, in the first instance, transferred from the tenants to the landlords, then the landlords added the tithes to the rent, so that the unfortunate tenants were still mulcted in one way, if not in the other.