In a statement previously made to the Bishop of London, the Irish primate earnestly solicited his correspondent to use his influence to prevent the Irish landlords from passing a law to strip the established clergy of their rights with respect to the tithe of agistment.  They had entered into a general combination, and formed a stock purse to resist the payment of tithe, except by the poor tenants who tilled the soil, a remarkable contrast to the zeal of the landlords of our own time in defending church property against ‘spoliation’ by the imperial legislature, and to the liberality with which many of them are now contributing to the Sustentation Fund.  How shall we account for the change?  Is it that the landlords of the present day are more righteous than their grandfathers?  Or is it that the same principle of self-interest which led the proprietors of past times to grind the tenantry and rob the Church, now operates in forms more consistent with piety and humanity, and by its subtle influence illustrates the maxim of the poet—­

  Self-love and social is the same.

However that may be, the primate contented himself in this letter with a defence of the Church, in which he admitted matters of real grievance, merely alluding to other grievances, ’such as raising the rents unreasonably, the oppression by justices of the peace, seneschals, and other officers in the country.’

From the pictures of the times he presents we should not be surprised at his statement to the Duke of Newcastle, that the people who went to America made great complaints of the oppressions they suffered, and said that those oppressions were one reason of their going.  When he went on his visitation, in 1726, he ’met all the roads full of whole families that had left their homes to beg abroad,’ having consumed their stock of potatoes two months before the usual time.  During the previous year many hundreds had perished of famine.  What was the cause of this misery, this desolating process going on over the plains of Ulster?  The archbishop accounts for it by stating that many persons had let large tracts of land, from 3,000 to 4,000 acres, which were stocked with cattle, and had no other inhabitants on their land than so many cottiers as were necessary to look after their sheep and black cattle, ’so that, in some of the finest counties, in many places there is neither house nor cornfield to be seen in ten or fifteen miles’ travelling, and daily in some counties many gentlemen, as their leases fall into their hands, tie up their tenants from tillage; and this is one of the main causes why so many venture to go into foreign service at the hazard of their lives if taken, because they cannot get land to till at home.’