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12 th August . Defeat of the Irish Tithe BiU . —The Lords have been most felicitous this year , in the occasions which they have chosen for opposing themselves to the opinion and will of the popular House . They have played into the hands of their enemies most dexterously , though not exactly in the manner which the Ministerial prints ascribe to them .
It would be very absurd to aim at the abolition of the House of Lords , merely because ( as the phrase goes ) it is bad in the abstract—because it is not such an institution as a wise man would establish if he were framing a constitution for a new country- We have it , and such are the inconveniences of constitutional changes , that if we could get on passably well with it
we ought to keep it . But it is impossible , in an age of Movement , to get on with a legislative body which will never move except upon compulsion ; and as we knew that this would be the case with the House of Lords , we , from the first , felt that they would render it necessary to thrust them aside . With this conviction ,
then , we know not what other or better political boon we could have prayed for , than that they should so steer their course as to make the most offensive display before the nation of the animus which actuates them , with the least possible retardation of important measures . We know not by what other means they could have contrived to accumulate so great a heap of obloquy
on their own heads with so little harm to the country , as by throwing out the Jew Bill , the Universities' Admission Bill , and the Irish Tithe Bill . The first two measures would not 3 if passed , have effected one atom of practical good , while , being rejected , they involve the House which rejected them in the whole odium
of setting itself against civil equality and religious liberty ; and the loss of the Universities' Bill , by so immense a majority , throws the whole of the vast and powerful Dissenting body into the arms of the popular party . The rejection of the Irish Tithe Bill is a positive good ; but it has been rejected on grounds which place the Lords in direct hostility to the great principle to which the Ministers have newly been forced to commit themselves ; the
alienability of ecclesiastical property . We feel for the Irish clergy , whom this act of their pretended friends consigns to something like starvation . Most of them , however , are relations or hangers-on of the Aristocracy , and these must be supported by their families or their patrons . For the remainder , we trust that those who have doomed them to
indigence are prepared to subscribe liberally . In every other point of view we rejoice that the Bill , which gave away for ever to a class of the most useless , selfish , and unreeling drones in human shape who live and kill game on the surface of the earth , twofifths of the collective estate of the Irish nation called Tithe , has met the fate it deserved - This act of prodigality and folly will not , we trust , be repeated . The question will have altered its shape before the next
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662 Notes on tks News paper * .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1834, page 662, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2637/page/58/
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