remember, I had myself corrected, of a speech on the Irish Tithe Bill with the Appropriation Clause:—[6]

The negative part of this passage I adopt, except the censure it implies upon Earl Russell and his friends; who, whether their actual propositions were defensible or not, had the "root of the matter" in their hearts, and were far ahead of me in their political forethought, and in their desire to hold up at least the banner of a generous and a hopeful policy towards Ireland.

In this manner I prove that, while I was bound by the propositions of my work, I was not singly but doubly bound. I was bound to defend the Irish Church, as long as it could be defended on the ground of its truth. But when the day arrived on which that ground was definitively abandoned, on which a policy was to be adopted by the Imperial Parliament such as to destroy this plea for the Irish Establishment, I was equally bound in such case to adopt no other: I had shown that justice would fail to warrant the mere support of the Church of the minority; I was held, therefore, not to construct out of rags and tatters, shreds and patches, a new and different case for maintaining it on the ground of favour, or, as it is termed, justice, to Protestants; and, if I had done anything of this kind, I should not have escaped the responsibility of inconsistency, but should simply have added a second and (as I think) a less excusable inconsistency to the first.

The day for the adoption of such a policy as I have described was not far distant.

Scarcely had my work issued from the press when I became aware that there was no party, no section of a party, no individual person probably in the House of Commons, who was prepared to act upon it. I found myself the last man on the sinking ship. Exclusive support to the established religion of the country, with a limited and local exception for Scotland under the Treaty of Union with that country, had been up to that time the actual rule of our policy; the instances to the contrary being of equivocal construction, and of infinitesimal amount. But the attempt to give this rule a vitality other than that of sufferance was an anachronism in time and in place. When I bid it live, it was just about to die. It was really a quickened and not a deadened conscience in the country, which insisted on enlarging the circle of State support, even while it tended to restrain the range of political interference in religion. The condition of our poor, of our criminals, of our military and naval services, and the backward state of popular education, forced on us a group of questions, before the moral pressure of which the old rules properly gave way. At and about the same period, new attempts to obtain grants of public money for the building of churches in England and Scotland, I am thankful to say, failed. The powerful Government of 1843 also failed to carry a measure of Factory Education, because of the preference it was thought to give to the Established Church. I believe the very first opinion I ever was called upon to give in Cabinet was an opinion in favour of the withdrawal of that measure.

In this state of facts and feelings, notwithstanding the strength of anti-Roman opinion, it was impossible that Ireland should not assert her share, and that a large one, to consideration in these critical matters. The forces, which were now at work, brought speedily to the front and to the top that question of Maynooth College, which I had always (rightly or wrongly) treated as a testing question for the foundations of the Irish Established Church; as, in point of principle, the Articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiæ.

In the course of the year 1844, when I was a member of the Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel, he made known to me his opinion that it was desirable to remodel and to increase the Grant to Maynooth. I was the youngest member of that Government, entirely bound up with it in policy, and warmly attached, by respect and even affection, to its head and to some of its leading members. Of association with what was termed ultra-Toryism in general politics I had never dreamed. I well knew that the words of Sir R. Peel were not merely tentative, but that, as it was right they should, they indicated a fixed intention. The choice before me, therefore, was, to support his measure, or to retire from his Government into a position of complete isolation, and what was more than this, subject to a grave and general imputation of political eccentricity. My retirement, I knew, could have no other warrant than this: that it would be a tribute to those laws which, as I have urged, must be upheld for the restraint of changes of opinion and conduct in public men. For I never entertained the idea of opposing the measure of Sir Robert Peel. I can scarcely be guilty of a breach of confidence when I mention that Lord Derby, to whom I had already been indebted for much personal kindness, was one of those colleagues who sought to dissuade me from resigning my office. He urged upon me that such an act must be followed by resistance to the measure of the Government, and that I should run the risk of being mixed with a fierce religious agitation. I replied that I must adhere to my purpose of retirement, but that I did not perceive the necessity of its being followed by resistance to the proposal. Overtures were, not unnaturally, made to me by some of those who resisted it; but