t, and at least one
Catholic bishop lost no time in cursing 'these nefarious deistical
schools'; but some schools were established, and Peel has the merit of
being one of the earliest advocates of a general system of unsectarian
national education for Ireland, which many years after was
accomplished. His measures for the relief of distress appear to have
been skilful and judicious, supporting and stimulating, but not
superseding private benevolence.[32] For the rest, he relied chiefly
on Insurrection Acts strengthening the Executive and giving a greater
efficiency to the administration of justice, and on strong protective
legislation encouraging the corn and the manufactures of Ireland.

'I have always,' he wrote, 'been, and always shall be, as strong an
advocate for giving that preference to the productions of Ireland,
natural or artificial, which will best promote the industry of the
people, as I am for instructing the lower orders.'[33]

To the tithe system he would do nothing, and this is one of the fatal
blots on his reputation as a statesman. There was no single source of
crime, agitation, and disaffection in Ireland which was so prolific as
this, and there was no subject on which the wisest statesmen had been
more agreed than on the supreme importance of meeting this evil by a
judicious system of commutation. Pitt had clearly expressed his
opinion of the necessity of such a commutation to the Duke of Rutland
as early as 1786, and it was one of the measures which he intended to
have followed the Union. Grattan had brought schemes of commutation in
three successive years before the Irish Parliament. Lord Loughborough,
who was the chief cause of the failure of Catholic emancipation after
the Union, had himself drawn up a Tithe Commutation Bill. Lord
Redesdale, who represented the extreme Toryism of the ministry of
Addington, strongly urged the absolute necessity of speedy legislation
on the subject. The Duke of Bedford, in 1807, dwelt on the importance
of commuting tithes into a land-tax, and ultimately into land. Parnell
and Grattan had brought the subject before the Imperial Parliament in
1810, and it was again and again insisted on by the Whig writers, and
nowhere more strongly than in Sydney Smith's admirable letters to
Peter Plymley and in some of the pages of the 'Edinburgh Review.' But
nothing was done till the evil had become intolerable, and had brought
the country to a state of anarchy and demoralisation