dence which experience has proved. to be necessary to stable prosperity. portance inferior only to your legislative functions; and your influence and example will greatly conduce to the maintenance of tranquillity, the encouragement of industry, and the confirmation of those moral and religious habits and principles, which are essential to the well-being of every com My Lords and Gentlemen, "The advanced period of the year, and the length of time during which you have been engaged in public affairs, must render you desirous of returning to your respective counties. You will there resume those duties which are in immunity." CHAP. IX. IRELAND. Exchequer Proceedings for Tithes-Municipal Reformand the Peers-Formation of the General National AssociationResolutions regarding Tithes-Tithe Affray-Poor Laws-UPPER CANADA.-Opening of the Session-Proceedings and Demands of the House of Assembly-Disputes between the Governor and his Council-Resignation of the Council-Addresses of the House of Assembly-The Supplies Stopped-Prorogation and DissolutionDefeat of the Reformers-New Session-LoWER CANADA.-Demands of the French Party-Proceedings of the Governor-Address of the House of Assembly to the King-Refusal to Vote the Civil List-Prorogation-New Session-Answer to the Address of the House of Assembly-The House insists on its Demands, and refuses the Civil List-Prorogation-JAMAICA.-Police Bill—Act in Aid— Message of the Governor, voted a Breach of Privilege by the House of Assembly-Prorogation-New Session-The House of Assembly adhere to the Question of Privilege-Prorogation-New SessionBreach of Privilege Admitted-Address of the House of Assembly to the King-Change of Governors. A LTHOUGH the royal speech at the close of the session announced that tranquillity prevailed, and crimes had diminished in Ireland, that part of the empire presented no picture of political tranquillity, except in so far as a country is tranquil, which is not in open rebellion. The agitators were again at their work, forming their societies and combinations, abusing the ignorance of uneducated multitudes, and arming, if not the hands, at least all the angry passions of one class against another. A new ingredient, moreover, was now added to the hell-broth; the question of municipal corporations threatened to take the place of the abolition of tithes. During the present year, in fact, the condition of the clergy in regard to their tithes, had greatly improved. At the end of 1835, a lay association had been formed in Ireland to enable the clergy to enforce their rights by such means as the law afforded. A legal process of the court of exchequer was thus put into operation, far more stringent than the open force which hitherto had been the only means, generally the unsuccessful means, and sometimes the unhappy means of enforcing payment. The great obstacle opposed to the clergy using legal remedies, lay in the difficulty, which had gradually become an impossibility of serving the process on the debtor. Without service there could be no decree; and the probable fate of the officer who should attempt to serve or to distrain was, that he would be murdered, or, at all events, prevented by brute violence from performing his duty. To lend him the aid of a military force, or even of the police, was called a waging of war against poor and honest men. The constable or soldier, who had been compelled to use force to protect his own life in defending and enforcing the law, was hunted down as a monster and a murderer; while the criminal, who had suffered injury in setting at defiance the law of the land, and the rights of others, and who had engaged in the contest with the deliberate purpose of effecting his crime even by shedding blood, was consoled and bewailed as a martyred saint. Crime and virtue had changed their denominations in Ireland. The virtuous and tranquil citizen was he who trampled the law under foot; the man, who did his best to maintain it, was the unpardonable criminal. The necessities of the existing government unfortunately drove them into the arms of the professors of this new code of civil and moral duty. The papists of Ireland were resolved to abolish tithes by law, if they could; till they could accomplish this purpose, they were determined to abolish them practically, contrary to law; without the aid of the popish party, the whig ministers could not retain office; therefore it was thought proper to withhold all assistance of the civil or military power from clergymen seeking recovery of their tithes. In other words, the force, which existed to maintain the law, was directed not to interfere to prevent its daily and hourly violation. It was under this system that the Irish clergy had become, as it were, outlaws, possessed, indeed, of rights which all men acknowledge, but which the brute force of the popish population was allowed to prohibit them from exercising. In the beginning of the year, however, a power was brought into operation, which, being a power of the law itself, was found to the dismay of the agitators, to be stronger than the mandates of their allies in the cabinet. The clergyman filed his bill for an account of his tithes in the court of exchequer. On affidavit, that process could not be served with any regard to the personal safety of those engaged in it, a substitution of service was granted, by which it was ordered to be held sufficient service that notices had been posted up in some place specified in the deliverance of the court, and written notices sent by post. The defendants were then subject to the jurisdiction of the court of exchequer. If they did not enter an appearance, or when the decree was made for payment, and was not obeyed, the plaintiff had the aid of the process of the Court of Exchequer; and that process issued, not in the form of a warrant to distrain property which it was dangerous to attack, and which nobody would purchase, but in the form of a writ of rebellion to arrest the person, and lodge the debtor in the jail of the court, till he had obeyed the judgment. The effect of the proceeding depended on the execution of this writ; and as it was the writ of a superior court, all sheriffs, magistrates, and officers of the police or constabulary force, were bound to assist in its execution, under the penalty of being themselves committed. The officers of the law, however, continuing to act under the instructions of their superiors, refused their assistance, and the question was thus raised, whether the executive government had power to suspend the writs of a superior court. The archdeacon of Killaloe having adopted proceedings in the exchequer against certain tithe defaulters, a writ of rebellion issued. A chief constable of the police force was applied to for his assistance in executing the writ; he refused, and his refusal was approved of by the inspector of the constabulary force in the province of Munster, who again, acted under the directions of the Irish government. The court of exchequer immediately granted an attachment against these officers, stating that if they could shift the blame upon another, the court would grant an attachment against that person whoever he might be. The judges of the court of exchequer, and the law which they were administering, were forthwith assailed with unmeasured abuse, in the House of Commons, by O'Connell and his associates. These men, who again and again had called for contributions from their countrymen, to defend parties who might be prosecuted for tithes, had the audacity to denounce the Lay Association as an illegal body, because it lent pecuniary aid to clergymen adopting legal proceedings. They main vengeance, tained that the writ of rebellion was a process obsolete in Ireland, and abolished in England, in both of which points they were told they were wrong in their law. They inveighed against the oppression of a plaintiff visiting a tithe debtor with the costs of an equity suit in exchequer, to recover a few pounds, or even a few shillings; forgetting that the tithe debtor and his friends had made the adoption of this remedy unavoidable by rendering all others unavailing. They attacked the integrity of the judges, accusing them of having revived this process not for the ends of justice, but for purposes of and of having pronounced their judgments from purely political considerations. Even the attorneygeneral for Ireland, while he admitted that the process existed, considered its present exercise objectionable as a precedent; yet of all judgments, that assuredly would be the most political by which a court, from considerations connected with the politics of the day, would refuse to exercise, at the request of a suitor, a power conferred upon it for the purpose of protecting the rights of all suitors. The venom, indeed, which was vented against the law and the judges on this occasion, was the plainest proof that it was with the effects of this jurisdiction that the agitators quarrelled. Here was a mode of enforcing tithe, efficacious in itself, agreeable to law, and free from the dangers and collisions with which they themselves had surrounded the more usual remedies of distress and sale, and the processes which had to precede or accompany them: but it was precisely these characters which rendered it most intolerable in their eyes. Their object being, not that tithe should be exacted in such a manner as would prevent tumultuous assemblages, physical resistance, and the probability of bloodshed, but that no power should exist capable of compelling payment by any means whatever, a process, which recovered the debt both effectually and quietly, was the very last to which they could be reconciled. They would infinitely have preferred mortal combats between the peasantry on the one hand, and process-servers or tithe-proctors and their assistants on the other, to the tranquil execution of the writ of rebellion, which, compelling the officers of the law to maintain the supremacy of the law, at once transferred the person of the recusant debtor to the marshalsea in Dublin. To try the question of law, the case of the archdeacon of Killaloe was carried by appeal to the House of Lords. When it came on for hearing, on the 11th August, a few days before the close of the session, the lord chancellor stated, that as it was a case which appeared to turn on some purely legal questions, and the interpretation of acts of parliament, it would be desirable that the house should have the assistance of the judges. As the attendance of any considerable number of the judges could not be obtained at that season of the year, the hearing of the cause was adjourned till the next session. In the meantime the jurisdiction of the court of exchequer was called into constant exercise, and was generally successful. Even debtors, who allowed proceedings to go so far as arrest under the writ of rebellion, paid their tithes and costs after a short imprisonment; a much greater number, when they once were convinced that such a power was in operation, made payment before extreme measures had been adopted; and a third class, who had been kept back from discharging their debts only by the intimidation which was directed equally against those who paid, and those who received, tithes, were furnished with a reason for doing what they had always been willing to do. Some of the more distinguished anti-tithe agitators themselves found it necessary to submit; for a court of equity possessed remedies in regard to the property of defendants, besides the power which it might exercise over their persons. A decree for two years tithe having been given against Mr. Sheil, that learned gentleman, while he admitted the debt to be due, refused to pay it upon the pretext, that to do so would cost him his seat for the county of Tipperary. But although parliamentary privilege protected his person, it did not reach his property; and the court of exchequer made a conditional order for the appointment of a receiver, in order to draw out of the rents of his estate the arrears of tithe. Mr. Otway Cave, his colleague in the representation of Tipperary, likewise found it necessary to make payment; and Tipperary was precisely the county in which the collection of tithe had been considered most hopeless. The clergy were thus placed in a better situation than they had found themselves in for the last three or four years; but these proceedings likewise shewed how extensively the conspiracy had spread, and how completely physical resistance to the law had be |