HC Deb 05 May 1824 vol 11 cc501-9
Mr. Hume

said, he had a petition to present of considerable importance. It related to the question of tithes, and was in every respect deserving the serious consideration of the House. Viewing all the consequences of the Irish tithe system, he could not help observing, that he was surprised at the extreme patience of the Irish people; for any man who reflected on its permanence and its pressure, must admit that the sum of suffering was even greater than what the Greeks had borne from their Turkish oppressors.

The following is a copy of the petition.

"The Petition of the Parishioners of the Parish of Blackrath, in the Diocese of Ossory, and County of Kilkenny:—

"Humbly sheweth—That in Ireland the tithes of every parish are valued by two tithe-proctors, who, instead of being respectable persons indifferently chosen, one by the parson and the other by the parish, are, in general, persons of the lowest description and worst characters, selected solely by the more wealthy and powerful of the two parties interested, whose wages they receive, and at whose pleasure they may be discharged. Your petitioners leave it to your honourable House to judge how far tithe-valuations, made by such sort of persons so circumstanced, ore likely to be fair and impartial, in a country where corruption is carried to a height which, in England, would be scarcely credible:

"That by law the clergy themselves are bound to defray all the expenses, and incur all the risks of saving in the field, drawing home, preparing for sale, and carrying to market, the tenth of the crops; but, in point of fact, they contrive to impose all those risks and expenses on the farmers, in consequence of which two legal tenths, instead of one, are exacted from the poorest people in Europe by the richest clergy in the world:

"That the tithe owners, instead of informing the tithe payers of the amount of tithes charged against each of them, immediately after the view, which always takes place before harvest, keep it a profound secret till the settlement, which generally takes place after new-year's day, and then the parsons, instead of charging their parishioners the actual prices which the new crops bore in the next market at the time of severance (as bound by law), charge them the highest prices which either new or old had brought in any market of the county, from the day of the view till the day of the settlement, contrary to every rule of tithing, and every principle of justice, and, after the settlement, procure them to pass their promissory notes for the sums so illegally and unjustly charged:

"That though, in point of law, each and every cultivator in a parish has a right, from time immemorial, to set out the tenth of his crops in kind, yet, in point of fact, not one clergyman in a hundred allows his parishioners the general exercise of that ancient and undoubted right. On the contrary, should even twenty or thirty persons in a parish, containing five-hundred or a thousand tithe-payers, attempt to pay him in kind, the tithe owner refuses to receive the tenths under some captious and frivolous pretext, and when they have rotted in the fields, commences a suit for the recovery of the amount in the Bishop's court; and, whatever may be the pretext so alleged for refusing the tithes, it almost invariably happens, that the clergyman who presides in that court in all such cases, decrees in favour of his brother clergyman who brings the action, by which means the impoverished landholder is obliged to pay the same tithes twice over—once in kind, and again in money. And these facts your petitioners are ready to prove by evidence at the bar of your honourable House; or (which they would prefer) on oath before commissioners; or in any other manner which your honourable House may think proper to appoint. Your petitioners respectfully submit to your honourable House, that when the cultivators of the soil are thus deprived of that right which constitutes their protection against tithe extortion, there remains no restraint, save a regard to prudence, to prevent the tithe owners, lay and ecclesiastical, from plundering the landholders at pleasure:

"That the consistorial courts, instead of remedying any of the abuses above stated, are themselves the great source of tithe grievances. It is only necessary to remind your honourable House, that in those courts the vicar-general, or his surrogate, a clergyman chosen, not by the Crown, but by the bishop, is, in tithe causes, at once judge and jury. How far such a person is likely to possess the necessary qualifications to fill properly the important office he undertakes, is sufficiently apparent. He is to decide on legal difficulties without having made law his proper study, and therefore cannot be a competent judge. He is to determine tithe causes in the very diocese where he is himself generally a tithe owner, and therefore cannot be a disinterested judge. In fact, so gross is the mal-administration of Irish justice in those tithe causes, that the peasantry of Ireland hold the court Christian in as much detestation as the scarcely less wretched people of Spain hold the Holy Inquisition. These tithe courts are, in fact, the great cause of tithe disturbances; and your petitioners submit to your honourable House whether some excuse is not to be allowed for a high spirited population, long remarked for their ardent love of equal and impartial justice, whether it be for or against themselves; if, instead of thus eternally submitting their unredressed wrongs to an appeal to law, they have sometimes sought to vindicate their violated rights by an appeal to arms.

"That this bad system is rendered still worse by rarely allowing any appeal in practice to a superior tribunal. It is true there exists an appeal in theory, but it is such an one as is a mere mockery of justice, an appeal, the costs of which are so enormously disproportioned to the sum in dispute, that no poor man could, and no rich man would, encounter the expense; more especially as it is only an appeal from one Irish ecclesiastical tribunal to another. Your honourable House may form some faint idea of the administration of justice in tithe causes from this single consideration, that the decision is in all cases left virtually without appeal, to the breast of a sole judge, at once interested and incompetent, who knows no control but his conscience, no law but his will:

"That any composition for tithes, however equitably intended, if founded on the system of extortion above described, cannot but be unfair and oppressive. But the tithe composition act of last session is objectionable in the highest degree, because it is at once unjust to the people and injurious to the government. It is unjust to the people for a double reason. First, because the annual incomes of the clergy at the commencement of the term of composition, are fixed at the amount of the respective averages of their annual receipts for the seven years, from 1815 to 1821, a period during which those reverend personages reduced not the rates of their tithes, even so much as one per cent, although a reduction of 300 per cent had in that interval taken place in the prices of tithable produce. And next, because the average price of wheat in the Dublin market (which is to regulate the future triennial increase or diminution of clerical income) is directed to be struck for these seven years, when the prices of grain had sunk nearly to the lowest, though the rates of tithes still continued fully to the highest; instead of the act directing the average income and average price to be fixed, as in justice and equity they ought, when tithe and grain were both at the highest, or both at the lowest. By this most inequitable provision, the average price of wheat affixed to every composition, is not much more than 30s. a barrel, a price which leaves every probability of a rise in favour of the clergyman, and scarcely any possibility of a fall in favour of the farmer. Whereas it should, according to the above equitable rule, be considerably more than 60s. a barrel, a price which would ensure, even at the end of the first three years, a reduction of tithes to their just and proper level. But the late tithe composition act is not less injurious to the government than unjust to the people. In fact, few laws can be found, even on the Irish Statute-book, so well calculated to unite all classes of the landed interest in one general confederacy against the established government in church and state. In the first place, the great proprietors must feel highly indignant that the parson should be allowed to make their rent a security for his tithe, and to claim, for his demand of a single year's standing, a precedence over their most ancient family settlements. In the next place, the extensive farmers must feel extremely incensed to be compelled, by the enormous increase of their tithes, to break down their large farms into small holdings, and instead of continuing to occupy their lands themselves at a moderate profit, to be obliged to let them to hordes of miserable tenants, in all probability at a ruinous future loss, in order to avoid, in the first instance, the certainty of a serious addition to their present ecclesiastical burthens. And lastly, the small tenants must become even more disaffected than they are at present, because this wide extended, and unexpected subdivision of lands will greatly and suddenly increase the population, and of course the poverty, of this egregiously misgoverned country. The consequence of all this your petitioners apprehend will be, that the whole confederated people of Ireland will make, at no distant day, as universal an effort for the relief of their agriculture, as they made at the time of the volunteers for the relief of their trade:

"That the church lands of Ireland in the hands of ecclesiastical corporations, sole and aggregate, amount to nearly one million and a half of English acres. These lands, which were originally some of the best, are now, by a long course of mismanagement, some of the worst in the kingdom, the occupying tenants being called on generally every three years, to pay all the little capital they can accumulate for renewal fines, instead of being allowed to expend it to their own benefit, and that of the community, on the improvement of their respective farms. Of those territorial domains of the church, far the greater part are bishops lands. These lands the bishops lease to their tenants, not as they ought to do, without renewal fines, at the full and improved value, for the benefit of the church, but at a gross undervalue on large renewal fines, to the public injury of the church, and the private gain of their own families. Of these renewal fines, each primate receives, on an average, about 200,000l. each.; of the three other archbishops, about 100,000l., and each of the eighteen bishops about 50,000l. If your honourable House calculate how much each succession of prelates must at that rate cost this impoverished kingdom for renewal fines, and if you add to this the immense annual revenues of the twenty-two prelacies, the enormous sums drained from the beggared people every year in the shape of tithes, the large parliamentary grants levied on the community at large for building churches, and other purposes, which the clergy themselves should, in honesty, and justice, and decency, pay for from their first-fruits; and the considerable sums wrung from the wretchedness of the peasantry for parochial church rates, you may easily comprehend how the church in this country makes bankrupt the state, and why the exactions of the Protestant clergy destroy amongst us the Protestant religion.

"Your petitioners beg leave respectfully to represent to your honourable House, that if the territorial revenues of the Irish hierarchy, instead of being improperly diverted to the enrichment of the families of particular churchmen, were honestly managed for the general emolument of the church; and if the Irish episcopacy, instead of being kept up to an establishment sufficient for a population of ten millions of Protestants, were reduced to the number necessary for half a million members of the established religion, the ample rents of these extensive church lands would form not only a sufficient fund, but a fund much more than sufficient to maintain the reduced number of six or seven prelates, and the full number of 1,275 beneficed clergymen in a proper and becoming style of christian competence. Were this desirable and necessary arrangement adopted, our oppressed and beggared peasantry might then be relieved entirely from the intolerable grievance of tithes; a grievance, if not the sole, at least the principal cause, of all that distress, disturbance, disaffection, and insurrectionary horror, which now renders Ireland a source of constant expense, as well as of incessant terror to England.

"Your petitioners therefore implore your honourable House in the first place to repeal the tithe composition act of last session; an act which, professing to lighten the heavy ecclesiastical yoke under which the people of Ireland groan, doubles its weight, and rivets it on their necks for ever.

"In the next place, your petitioners supplicate your honourable House, that the abuses of the tithe system be promptly and effectually reformed; that the two tithe valuators be appointed indifferently, one by the parson, and the other by the parish; that, as soon as the proctors shall have valued any person's tithes, they be obliged to give him a field ticket copied from their Held book, specifying the number of acres of tithable produce, the number of barrels or other measures in common use, of such produce valued to the acre; the prices charged both by the acre and by the barrel, and the total amount of the year's tithe; that, in all cases where tithes shall be set out in kind by the one party, and refused by the other, the tithe owner be obliged at the time to state in writing the reason of his refusal, and the tithe payer be authorised, in cases where the tithes so set out and refused shall not exceed the yearly value of 10l., to bring his action of trespass and damage in the Civil Bill court, at the same moderate costs as in other cases of Civil Bill process, instead of being compelled, as at present, to resort for redress to the superior courts of justice at costs so enormous as to amount to an absolute prohibition of justice to the Irish peasant; that it be lawful for the Civil Bill court, in all tithe cases that come before it, whether brought on promissory notes, or on monitions, to hear evidence as to the value of the tithes sued for, before it decrees for the amount, any statute to the contrary now in force notwithstanding; and that in all cases for subtraction of tithe, where the yearly value of the tithes exceeds not 5l., the jurisdiction be transferred from the Consistorial court to the Civil Bill court, with the same right of appeal, and in the same cheap terms as in other civil bill cases; or at least, if a clerical tithe owner is to be suffered, contrary to the plainest principles of justice, to continue to try tithe cases, that the tithe payer be allowed a cheap appeal from him to the judge of assize, or some other lay judge, not chosen by the church, nor personally interested in tithe property.

"And lastly, your petitioners conjure your honourable House, that after the demise of the present incumbents, whose life properties in their benefices your petitioners religiously regard as sacred and inviolable, their successors be paid entirely, from the ample revenues of the church domains, and the people be thus relieved gradually and completely from the oppressive and intolerable burthen of tithes; a relief which England is alike bound to grant to Ireland in gratitude and in prudence—in gratitude, because during the late war, when Europe and America were both leagued against her, Ireland supplied her with nearly one hundred millions of money, with abundance of soldiers for her armies, of sailors for her fleets, and of provisions for her population, at a time when she could not possibly have any supply from any other quarter, and by those ample and well-timed succours enabled her, after a long and desperate struggle, to triumph over the formidable power and mortal hostility of prance:—in prudence, because Ireland, which now contains only between seven and eight millions of people, will, in the course of 80 years more, probably contain a population of between ten and twelve millions; a population equally hardy and intrepid, so inured to privation, that they would enjoy the coarsest ration as a rare luxury, and so prone to war, that they actually delight in fighting as an exhilarating amusement. During all that period, tithe extortions and tithe disturbances must both continue to advance with rapid and equal pace. New White Boy acts, new Riot acts, and new Insurrection acts must be passed, and barbarous outrages be punished by still more barbarous, but under the present system, necessary laws. Such an expensive military establishment must be maintained to keep in subjection that numerous and discontented population, as will render the possession of the country a burthen instead of a benefit. And your petitioners greatly fear, that if the crying grievance of tithes be not abolished before the people shall have increased in knowledge and in strength, Ireland can scarcely, by all the power of government, be retained as a part of the empire, even in time of peace; and that in time of war, she will without risk, and almost without effort, separate herself from England for ever."

Ordered to lie on the table.