by Fox, who pertinently asked
why the minister did not use his majority to accomplish the end he
professed to desire. It was lost only by four votes. The rest of the
session was largely taken up by the affairs of Ireland.

There, as we have already seen, religious animosity strengthened the
party of rebellion. Its leaders also took advantage of agrarian and
other grievances to allure the peasantry. The catholic peasants were
little moved by the questions which weighed with their more educated
neighbours and with the dwellers in towns. They were not enamoured of
the republican sentiments which appealed to the Ulster presbyterians,
and did not care a straw about parliamentary reform for its own sake,
nor for catholic emancipation. Their motives were more personal. They
were poor and oppressed. The national parliament, though it refused to
grant political reforms, had done much to improve the condition of the
country by subsidies for promoting manufactures, fisheries, and canals,
and by bounties on exported corn. The financial position of Ireland was
bettered, but the lot of the peasantry grew worse. Corn bounties and the
high prices of war time caused a rise in the value of land. Holdings
were subdivided, and, as the agricultural population was large, were
eagerly taken at high rents. The tenants could not make a living,
especially as they were ignorant and generally thriftless. The chief
cause of their discontent was the system of tithe which pressed heavily
on the small cultivators. They believed that a reformed parliament would
rid them of that intolerable burden. Finding that reform was withheld,
they readily listened to men who bade them look for relief to France,
where tithe had been abolished. High rents, exacted by the agents of
absentee landlords or by middle-men, who rented large tracts of land and
sublet them in small holdings, were another though lesser grievance from
which they hoped to be delivered by revolution. Sentiment urged them in
the same direction. Proud and sensitive they resented the dominance of
an alien race; they held the wrongs of their forefathers in remembrance,
and looked back with mournful longing to the age, invested by their
poetic imagination with glory and happiness, when Ireland was yet
unconquered. The United Irishmen told them that a fresh conquest would
be attempted, that the Orangemen, encouraged by government, designed to
rob them of their land and destroy them. They looked to Fran