TWO:During this year Great Britain held that position which properly belonged to her, and which showed how unassailable she was whilst employed in self-defence. Her fleets covering the Channel, and at the same time plying in the most distant regions for that money which for years had been wasted on helpless and ungrateful Continental nations, were calculated to make her invincible on the ocean. So far from permitting Buonaparte to set foot on her coasts, she continually insulted his. She entered the ports and roadsteads of Havre, St. Valery, and other places, and brought away ships and gunboats; she attacked Dieppe, and destroyed its batteries; she bombarded Granville, and demolished its pier, under the eyes of some of Napoleon's[491] most distinguished officers. Her fleet amounted to nearly six hundred vessels of different kinds, and she began rapidly to recapture the colonies which she had so tamely, and without compensation, surrendered at the strange Peace of Amiens. St. Lucia was retaken by Commodore Hood and General Grinfield on the 22nd of June. In one day, the 30th of June, were retaken Tobago, in the West Indies, and St. Pierre and Miquelon, on the coast of Newfoundland. Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice were soon after reconquered, and Guadeloupe was invested, and destined to fall into our hands ere long.
TWO:The Irish peasantry very soon learnt that whatever Emancipation had done or might do for barristers and other persons qualified to hold situations under Government, from which Roman Catholics had previously been almost entirely excluded, it had done nothing to remove or even to mitigate their practical grievances. They found that the rackrents of their holdings were not reduced; that the tax-collector went round as usual, and did not abate his demands; that the tithe-proctor did not fail in his visits, and that, in default of payment, he seized upon the cow or the pig, the pot or the blanket. Through the machinery of the Catholic Association, and the other associations which O'Connell had established, they became readers of newspapers. They had read that a single tithe-proctor had on one occasion processed 1,100 persons for tithes, nearly all of the lower order of farmers or peasants, the expense of each process being about eight shillings. It would be scarcely possible to devise any mode of levying an impost more exasperating, which came home to the bosoms of men with more irritating, humiliating, and maddening power, and which violated more recklessly men's natural sense of justice. If a plan were invented for the purpose of driving men into insurrection, nothing could be more effectual than the tithe-proctor system. Besides, it tended directly to the impoverishment of the country, retarding agricultural improvement and limiting production. If a man kept all his land in pasture, he escaped the impost; but the moment he tilled it, he was subjected to a tax of ten per cent, on the gross produce. The valuation being made by the tithe-proctora man whose interest it was to defraud both the tenant and the parson,the consequence was that the gentry and the large farmers, to a great extent, evaded the tax, and left the small occupiers to bear nearly the whole burden; they even avoided mowing their meadows in some cases, because then they should pay tithe for the hay.DANIEL O'CONNELL. (After the Portrait by Sir David Wilkie.)
