t had England been the scene of a similar
anomaly, with the _roles_, of course, exchanged, the feelings towards
the Catholic Church, even forty years after its disestablishment, would
be the most cordial. The proposals of Pitt for the State payment of
the Catholic priesthood were constantly revived and advocated throughout
the century. Lord Clarendon's views, which have just been quoted, were a
mere echo of the opinion expressed by Lord John Russell in favour of
concurrent endowment in 1844, and there is a significant allusion on the
part of Charles Greville fourteen years earlier to the feeling of that
time, in which, after speaking about Irish disaffection, he shows the
results which were expected from concurrent endowment by commenting
unfavourably on the policy which the Government pursued "instead of
depriving him (O'Connell) of half his influence by paying the priests
and so getting them under the influence of the Government."[19]

The whole question was considered merely in the abstract until the
Fenian outburst of the sixties--as Mr. Gladstone freely admitted--opened
men's eyes to this among the other serious problems of Irish government.
It required all the violence of desperate men to call, attention to a
condition of things in which the Church which was established numbered
less than one-eighth of the inhabitants of the country among its
adherents.

The part of the country in which the greatest proportion of Episcopalian
Protestants was to be found was Ulster, and there they were only 20 per
cent. of the people, while in Munster and Connacht they were only 5 and
4 per cent. respectively. In 199 out of 2,428 parishes in Ireland there
was not a single member of the Established Church. The net revenue of
the Church was L600,000, and of this two archbishops and ten bishops
received one-tenth. The mode of solving the inequitable state of affairs
which produced least resistance lay in the direction of concurrent
endowment. Earl Russell suggested the endowment of Catholics and
Presbyterians and the reduction of Episcopalian revenues to one-eighth
of their existing amount. To the Presbyterians his plan would have
entailed a gain, in so far as the Regium Donum would have been
increased, but the opposition to it of the Catholics, in spite of the
fact that levelling up rather than planing down appealed not only to
Russell but to Grey and Disraeli, resulted in its abandonment, and the
question of disestablishment became