Ireland had not improved during the last twelve months; resistance to the payment of tithes had become open and systematic, and the question of the Repeal of the Union was openly advocated. Notices were scattered all over the country bidding the people to refrain from paying tithes, and threatening the police, should they interfere, with a similar fate to their brethren at Knocktopher, which has already been described. Says the _Annual Register_-- "Nor were these merely empty denunciations. The house and the barn-yard of the tithepayer were reduced to ashes; his cattle were houghed, or scattered all over the country; or, as happened in the County of Carlow, hunted over precipices. There was no mode of destroying property which ingenuity could invent, or reckless daring perpetrate, but was called into exercise. Scarcely a week elapsed which did not announce the cold-blooded murder of a proctor, or a process server, or a constable, or of some poor countryman who had thought himself bound to obey the law, and to pay his debts. "An archdeacon in the neighbourhood of Cashel was in treaty with his parishioners for a commutation of his tithes. They could not agree on the yearly sum which he ought to receive. They surrounded him in sight of his own house, in broad daylight, and beat his head to pieces with stones. Several persons were ploughing in the field in which he was murdered, but either would not or dared not interfere. Whoever connected himself, in any manner of way, with the collection of tithe, had not one single hour's security for his property or his life. In the beginning of February the Irish Government found it necessary to have recourse to the "Peace Preservation Act," and proclaim certain baronies in the County of Tipperary to be in a state of disturbance.