Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/23

 shall advert when I arrive at the political part of this letter. At present I confine myself to the question of material progress.

I will here record, therefore, that in 1838 a bill for the commutation of tithes in Ireland passed both Houses of Parliament. By this Act the landlords were made the creditors of the tithe payers, and the debtors of the tithe owners, receiving 25 per cent, for the risk and trouble of collection.

The tithe war has since ceased; the evils deplored by Mr. Grattan have disappeared; the landlord collects his rents, including the tithe rent-charge, without a conflict, and the clergyman has no longer the odious task of enforcing small payments by police and military aid.

There existed another impost, of small amount but of a peculiarly vexatious nature. This was the church cess a tax applicable to the vestments, the bread and wine, and the maintenance of the buildings used for Protestant worship. Constant contests arose on the subject of this odious impost. It was happily altogether abolished by the Church Temporalities Act, introduced by the present Lord Derby.

There was another evil intimately connected with the poverty of Irish tenants, and the bad cultivation of Irish farms. This was the deeply encumbered state of Irish landed property. Landlord after landlord, of the kind so well described by Miss Edgeworth in 'Castle Rackrent,' had drunk oceans of claret, entertained with reckless hospitality, mortgaged their estates within a few pounds of the whole