held of a proctor, who held of a clergyman who did not reside. He pursued his calling in a parish where there was neither dean, rector, vicar, nor schoolmaster; often he was an officer of the revenue besides, and would arrange his demands for his own advantage, overcharging the tithes and pocketing the surplus, and compensating the tithe-payer by undercharging his taxes. Like the Roman usurers in the early days of the Republic, he took his payments in the form of interest-bearing bonds, and when the bonds fell due the peasants became his slaves and ploughed his soil and carried his crops for him with their own carts and horses, to escape execution.

The burden was the more cruel because the poor were his only victims. The wealthy Protestant grass farmers ought to have been the first to bear the expense of the Protestant Church. They paid nothing at all. The cost of the Establishment fell in the south exclusively on the poorest of the Catholic tenantry. The Munster cottier paid 77. a year for his cabin and an acre of potato ground. The landlord took his rent from him in labor, at 5d. or 6d. a day; the tithe farmer took from 128. to 20s. from him besides, and took in addition from the very peat which he dug from the bog a tithe called in mockery "smoke money."

These abominable extortions furnished a tempting opportunity to the apostles of anarchy. Patient themselves and naturally silent under suffering, the Irish peasants were ready instruments in the hands of scoundrels who played upon their real wrongs, to excite them to political insubordination. The Dublin and Belfast incendiaries were enraged at the threat of the suppression of the Volunteers, and created a division by kindling an agrarian insurrection in Munster.

After fifteen years of quiet the Whiteboys reappeared in the spring and summer of 1786.

The movement began in Kerry. The inhabitants of a couple of parishes met in a Catholic chapel, and took an oath to pay no more than a specified sum to the clergyman or his agent. They went, on successive Sundays, from chapel to chapel, swearing in the people everywhere, and binding them to obey at all times and occasions a phantom leader, Captain Right. The oath was generally taken with willingness; any one who dared to refuse was dragged from his bed at midnight; his ears were sawn off, and he was flung into a pit lined with thorns, or set naked on horseback on a thorn saddle.1 By these means Captain Right soon had all Munster at his obedience. His army was scattered everywhere, appearing in daylight as harmless peasants, in the night as so many fiends. His first order was to disarm the Protestants in the province. Midnight gangs appeared at every Protestant door, and with as much violence as might be necessary "thoroughly carried the order into execution." 2 The next step was to establish a system of finance. Regular contributions were levied to support Captain Right's government. The Whiteboy authority being thus well established, the war with the tithe proctors commenced. The sentence on them was as the measure of their guilt. If they had been definitely cruel they were condemned to die, and the sentence was promptly executed. If their offences had been only moderate they were "carded," that is to say they were stripped naked and tied with their faces down

1 "Speech of Mr. Fitzgibbon." Irish Debates, January 31, 1787. 2 "Speech of Mr. Brown, of the University, January 18, 1785."— Ibid.

wards, while a strong tom-cat was dragged up and down their backs by the tail.

The tithe proctor knew the danger of his profession when he entered it, and charged for the risk in his bill. But the vengeance did not rest in punishing the instrument of tyranny, and fell in its blind fury upon others who were wholly innocent. The curate had not injured the people whom the pluralist or absentee rector had hired at a servant's stipend. Of him the most eloquent declaimers on the wrongs of Ireland could find nothing to say but what was good. He had prayers in his church twice a day.1 He baptized the children, married the adults, visited the sick, and buried the dead. He was a scholar and a gentleman, saved perhaps by poverty from following the general road of worthlessness. Except for the poorer clergy the Church of Ireland must have perished of corruption before the century closed. So far as their means extended they had been distinguished for kindness and liberality. But they were the symbols of a tyrannical system; they were defenceless, they were at hand, and they were Protestant ministers, and this was enough for their condemnation. The landlords with peculiar baseness refused to exert themselves in their defence. "Men

of the purest and most inoffensive manners were torn from their beds at midnight. Their wives and children were driven naked out of doors, themselves rolled on dunghills, and hardly suffered to escape with life."2 Lord Luttrell said in Parliament that a friend of his riding one morning out of Car

ing prayer. He leaves company at six for evening prayer."

2 "Speech of Mr. Secretary Orde," March 29, 1786. — Irish Debates.

lingford overtook a clergyman who seemed in pain, with his head bound in a napkin. He asked if anything was the matter. "Did you not see, sir," said the poor wretch, "as you rode through the town two ears and a cheek nailed to a post? They were mine." 1

Throughout the south the churches were deserted. The clergy were flying from their glebe-houses to the cities, forced to leave their duties by Captain Right and his followers. Could an example have been made of the non-resident rectors, who were gathering admiring circles round them at the Bath tea-tables, the atrocity would have been relieved by the sense that justice was being done, however rudely. Irony could not have selected less appropriate victims than the curates and their families.

1 "Speech of Lord Luttrell.". Ibid.

SECTION II.

THE Constitution of '82 had been the opening of the box of Pandora. Every one who was starving expected to be filled, every one who had been wronged to have his wrongs redressed, every one who was robbing his neighbor to keep his spoils and escape punishment. Jack Cade's promises were moderate compared to what Irishmen of every degree were looking for as the fruit of that glorious victory. The descendants of the Irish chiefs, among the rest, had dreamt of a good day coming to them, and as the good day was slow in appearing they took the matter into their own hands.

In the winter of 1785-6 Mr. Roderick O'Connor, calling himself the representative of the old Kings of Connaught, entered forcibly on the lands of his ancestors in Roscommon. He established himself in a fastness in the midst of bog and mountain. He had a cannon at his door and a thousand men scattered within sound of it ready to assemble at its call. The peasants gathered about him with idolatrous devotion. Notices were served on the intruding landowners to be gone at their peril. Coupled with the reappearance of the Whiteboys, Mr. O'Connor's proceeding was a startling surprise, and Parliament met in January somewhat sobered after the orgies of the past session.

The English Cabinet had decided to make no im