The Sun.
London, England, 1838-12-29 00:00:00

firing of stacks would be the inevitable result. The Corn-
law Repeal party now said they wanted free trade, be-
cause the labourers in that country could not compete with
foreign labour, which was therefore underselling them both
iu their own country and abroad. That was true ; but
would any man tell him that if the repeal of the Corn-laws
was carried to-morrow, the Government would not exert
its power to turn all the advantages derivable from it into
its own coffers, as well as they had turned all the beneOts
and advantages derived from every other improvement that
had taken place ?—(Hear, hear.) He (Mr. O'Connor)
was for the repeal of theCorn-laws—(Cheers)—but as
Mr. Cobbett had said, Peel's Bill should never have passed
without some accompanying measure. If that had been
done, the Bill would have been beneficial, but without them
it was a destructive measure. He admitted that the Corn-
laws would be a great step to acquire, but they could .not
do so and at the same time advocate Universal Suffrage.
He admitted that, if the landlords joined them, they would
be strong indeed, but they had never joined the people for
any good purpose, but merely to promote their own ends...
—(Hear, hear.) If the Corn-laws were repealed, the.
Church, that upas tree, that plague "pot of society, would
then be assailed, and the landlors would be obliged to fall
into the ranks of the people, and beat it and the money-
mongers down as fast as they could. They were aware-
,hat a Bill had been passed for England by which the pro-
terty of the parson was stiperior to that of the landlord

himself, and the tithe now levied was according to the in-
creased value the land had received by the protection of
the Corn-laws. The landlord paid the tithe upon 15,000/,
and if the Corn-laws were repealed, he would still have to
pay it upon the same sum. If he were called upon to do
that, he would at once refer to their meetings, and say that
the Radicals had denounced the Church, and must there-
fore be very sensible fellows, and he would at once enrol
himself among them. They would then say, " the Govern-
ment has always spoken of the national debt as a branch of
the national faith. They have also spoken of the Corn-
laws as a branch of the national faith with the landlords.
Now, you have broken faith with us, and we see no neces-
sity for State parsons, which we abominate, nor for legisla-
ting Bishops ; and we shall have an investigation into the
national debt. As for the Church, I shall in future pay not
money but to the altar at which I worship."—(Great cheer-
ing.) It might be said that that was mere assertion, but he
would prove it by analogy. In 1735, the Irish House of
Commons being Protestant, passed a resolution tantamount
to the law called the Tithe Adjustment Bill, by which all
grass lands were exonerated from the payment of tithes.
The Protestant landlord, with his 4,000 acres of grass
land, paid nothing, while the poor Catholic widow who cul-
tivated her acre of potatoes on the other side of the fence,
was obliged to pay a guinea for tithes.—(Shame, shame.)
The rich landlord thus went and worshipped at the expense
of the poor Catholic widow.--(Shame, shame.) From
that period up to 1823, nearly a century, the landlords
persecuted their tenantry who refused to pay tithes. As
magistrates they convicted them—as yeomanry officers they
shot them—as jurymen they hung them—and as citizens
they transported them ; but in 1823 Mr. Goulburn, being
Chancellor of the Exchequer, found that the system was
throwing Ireland out of cultivation, and lessening the secu-
rity of his pet Church, and introduced the acreable as•
sessment, by which the grass land paid its fair proportion.
That was not done because Goulburn felt for the poor oc-
cupier, but because he was anxious to support the over-
grown Church, which was already overpaid in various ways,
by land that did not belong to it, and tithe it never should
have possessed, to the amount of 1,500,000/.; the result
was that the landlords, magistrates, and grand jurymen,
were the first to take the chair at the anti-tithe
meetings ; and the same party, in the House of
Commons, said that the English people must wonder
that the Irish people had so long submitted to that state of
things. Why did the Protestant landlords join the people ?
Not to abolish the Church and the parsons, but to put the
tithes into their own pockets. He remembered the plan of
a Scotchman for tranquillizing Ireland—" Whenever there
is a riot in a district, I would hang the magistrate and
parson, and you would hear no more about it."—(Great
laughter.) The object of the landlords in joining the Irish
people was to make them a footstool to come into power.
He would tell them that by perseverance, and by being
manfully united, they could bid the parsons, the landlords,
the Tories, the Whigs, and the sham Radicals defiance.
If they abandoned their strolls, hold under the hope of
obtaining the support of either of these parties, they
would fall as a matter of course. Already they
had the whole of Wales with them—they had
delegates from every town and county in South Wales,
and among them was a Magistrate from the county of
Monmouth (Mr. Frost), of Newport, who was elected to
serve as a delegate. Their next step would be to secure
the co-operation of the most brave, the most grateful, the
most industrious, and the most insulted people on the face
of the earth, the Irish.—(Cheers.) If they once esta-
blished that union, then there would be an end to the do-
minion of the tyrants and the money-mongers. He
' was a Protestant, but his family and himself had made
more sacrifices to destroy the power of the Protestant
Church in Ireland, and establish perfect and Cotire
equality than any other man. Nay, he went so far as to say,,
that if there were to be a National Church, that ought to bye
the Catholic Church. He contended that with per-
fect civil equality there should be no religious disability;
but at present such was not the case. They wanted
the people of Ireland with them, but they must agitate that
country in a different manner from England. The latter
was a manufacturing., and the former an agricultural country,
and although he had been listening to speeches in the House
of Commons since the Reform Bill, and although he had heard
the Minister rising in his place and talking about the
importation of spices, and nutmegs, and cinnamon,.
and oranges, and lemons, and grapes, until he had thought
he was eating plum-pudding; and although night after night
he heard discussions about free trade, during the three years
he had been in the House of Commons, he had only heard
one speech on the subject of Irish agriculture, and that was
from Mr. Abercromby, the Speaker of the House of Commons,
when opposing the court-martial clause of the Irish Coercion
Bill; and he (Mr. O'Connor) had said that if there were ten
men in the House who possessed as much knowledge of the
subject, and as much zeal, Ireland would yet be a happy coun-
try. Protestant sm was not in the Court as in the pulpit, or
in the jury-box—it was the power and dominion of the land-
lords and the landed proprietors, and the influence that gave
them in the representation, which gave Protestants the ascen-
dancy. Whit signified sixty or seventy Members in the Im-
perial Parliament to a local bully-landlord of straw could
break a tenant of steel, and every tyrant of a village would stilt
continue to oppress his tenant. He (Mr. O'Connor) had
put three motions ou the books of the House of Commons,
with' a view of applying the industry of the people to the
cultivation of the land. One was a sweeping poor-law
measure ; another was the right to leases for ever at:a corn-
rent, and in all cases were the ratings were too dear, that the
question should go to a Jury; and another was the removal
of all Magistrates being clergymen from the Commission of
the Peace. He observed that there was now a cry for free-
trade, but no man could be a political economist on agricultural
matters unless he understood practically how to farm—unless
he saw the errors of the present system and could point out a
bettor one. _-(Cheers.) These men asked the people to go
to Poland, Sweden, Sicily, and other places fur land, but be
(Mr. O'Connor) would tell the people that if the labour of
the country was beneficially applied there was more land in
England, Ireland, and Scotland than would furnish enough to
enable all parties to live, and to make it a great exporting
country into the bargain.—(Loud cheers.) Why did that not
take place? Because the law of primogeniture, the law of
entail, and the law of settlement prevented it—because the
landlords annexed a condition to the taking of land, restrain-
ing it from its most valuable operation, and preventing
the tenant from cultivating it as he pleased.—( Hear.) When
they heard of this outcry about the Corn.laws, must
they not suppose that there was a kind of single-stick play be-
tween the money-mongers and the landlords. The moment
the :price of corn was reduced, a fall in wages would take
place. Every tax upon the land was a restriction to its proper
cultivation. The tithes interfered with it as well as the malt-
tax. Then there was the Poor-law rate, the hop-tax, the
police rate, the church cess, and the comity rate. All these
were interferences with the proper cultivation of the land, but
none with the landlords' title to let. If they had Universal
Suffrage, the landlords would be compelled to let their lands
in such proportions as would best suit the exigencies of the
State, and the interests of the people. They were living
under laws enacted by a Parliament which had committed
suicide in 1832, under laws arising out of the old feudal sys-
tem ; but what they wanted was manufacturing laws to
govern the new state of society that had arisen, and to rea-
der machinery the working man's holiday instead of the work-
ing man's curse.—(Great cheering.) Under the present
system the people were deprived of what was their own inhe-
ritance, and it hadi locked up a great proportion of the treasure
of the country. If a farmer under the present system held
one hundred acres, with his wife and five children, and
four or five labourers, that would support twelve persons ;
but if it was divided into two farms, of fifty acres
each, then it would support two families, with a propor-
tionate number of labourers, which would be twelve more than
upon a farm of too acres. Let them but divide that again
into five farms of twenty acres each, and that would give five
families of seven each, or thirty-five persons, with labourers in
proportion. If these were each divided into farms of ten acres,
they would amply support seventy persons instead of twelve
upon the 100 acres, badly cultivated.—(Hear, hear.) He
(Mr. O'Connor), was inclined to carry it still further, and
divide it into farms of five acres, and the other would have 140
persons living better, and paying their rent better than under
the present law of primogeniture. He contended then, that
Universal Suffrage would have accomplished that for them. Mr.
Spring Rice in replying to Mr. O'Connell on the :question
of the repeal of the union, discovered an important fact, that
it required more houses for eight millions of people in 1834,
than for
b-ecausr 3A- millions
there in 1800 ; " therefore," says Mr. Spring
Rice,e are more houses now the union must
have prospered; and because there are more ships to carry
over the produce of eight millions, than was required to cons
vey the produce of 3i- millions; and because a greater duty is
returned from the,'" I. Rip V„,, ..:though I
have slept 34 years, seeing now inure ships and more houses
—(never mind the inhabitants)—say that the country must be
prosperous."—( Great laughter.) He gave no credit for 34 years