The Government took upon itself the collection of the arrears of tithes for that one year.  It was a maxim with Lord Stanley that the people should be made to respect the law; that they should not be allowed to trample upon it with impunity.  The odious task thus assumed, produced a state of unparalleled excitement.  The people were driven to frenzy, instead of being frightened by the chief secretary becoming tithe-collector-general, and the army being employed in its collection.  They knew that the king’s speech had recommended the settlement of the tithe question.  They had heard of the evidence of Bishop Doyle and other champions, exposing what they believed to be the iniquity of the tithe system.  They had seen the condemnation of it in the testimony of the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, who declared his conviction that it could not be collected except at the point of the bayonet, and by keeping up a chronic war between the Government and the Roman Catholic people.  They had been told that parliamentary committees had recommended the complete extinction of tithes, and their commutation into a rent-charge.  Their own leaders had everywhere resolved:—­

’That it was a glaring wrong to compel an impoverished Catholic people to support in pampered luxury the richest clergy in the world—­a clergy from whom, the Catholics do not experience even the return of common gratitude—­a clergy who, in times past, opposed to the last the political freedom of the Irish people, and at the present day are opposed to reform and a liberal scheme of education for their countrymen.  The ministers of the God of charity should not, by misapplication of all the tithes to their own private uses, thus deprive the poor of their patrimony; nor should ministers of peace adhere with such desperate tenacity to a system fraught with dissension, hatred, and ill-will.’  The first proceeding of the Government to recover the tithes, under the act of June 1, was therefore the signal for general war.  Bonfires blazed upon the hills, the rallying sounds of horns were heard along the valleys, and the mustering tread of thousands upon the roads, hurrying to the scene of a seizure or an auction.  It was a bloody campaign; there was considerable loss of life, and the Church and the Government thus became more obnoxious to the people than ever.  Lord Stanley being the commander-in-chief on one side, and Mr. O’Connell on the other, the contest was embittered by their personal antipathies.  It was found that the amount of the arrears for the year 1831 was 104,285 l., and that the whole amount which the Government was able to levy, after putting forth its strength in every possible way, was 12,000 l., the cost of collection being 15,000 l., so the Government was not able to raise as much money as would pay the expenses of the campaign.  This was how Lord Stanley illustrated his favourite sentiment that the people should be made to respect the law.  But the Liberal party among the Protestants fully sympathised with the anti-tithe recusants.