repeal of the union as the only remedy for his country's ills. Drummond was equal to the situation. While engaged on the ordnance survey he had studied the Irish question on the spot. He was moved by the miseries of the people, touched by the injustice to which they were subjected, and pained by the evidence of misrule which everywhere met his eye. Ireland became to him a second fatherland, and he entered upon his labours full of zeal for the national welfare and determined to administer the law with even-handed justice. Drummond set out for Ireland on 18 July 1835. On 19 Nov. following he married, in England, Miss Kinnaird, the ward and adopted daughter of Richard (‘Conversation’) Sharp [q. v.], an accomplished, attractive, and intelligent woman, who entered into his labours with sympathy and zest. In December 1835 Drummond took up his residence at the under-secretary's lodge in the Phœnix Park, Dublin. His attention was first directed to the organisation of an effective police force. Prior to his time the police were an inefficient, partisan, and corrupt body. Catholics were practically excluded from the force, and public confidence in consequence withdrawn from it. ‘Order’ in Dublin was maintained by four hundred underpaid, worn-out, and drunken watchmen, while throughout the provinces the force formed rather a centre of disturbance than a security for peace. Under Drummond the four hundred Dublin watchmen were replaced by a thousand able and efficient constables, while that great constabulary force, now grown to ten thousand men, and composed chiefly of catholic peasants, was formed to justify the belief of Drummond that the peace could best be kept in Ireland by trusting Irishmen, when fairly treated, to keep it. Drummond's innovation startled many minds, but an experience of seventy years has proved the soundness of his judgment. Drummond found the local magistrates as untrustworthy as the old police. In his own language he ‘clipped their wings’ by practically placing over them stipendiaries who acted directly under his authority. These stipendiaries administered the law with great justice and won the confidence of the people, hitherto withheld from the petty session courts. The Orange Society was almost supreme in the land, keeping alive the bitter feeling of sectarian hate. In Drummond's time the old Orange Society was completely broken up. Orange lodges which existed in the army were disbanded, secret signs and pass-words, then in use, were discovered and prohibited; Orange processions were put down, Orange magnates reprimanded, and the organisation entirely stripped of the power for mischief and disturbance which it had so long possessed. The notorious faction fights, which were of constant occurrence in the south, met with treatment of equal vigour. It had been the practice to allow the faction fighters to settle their differences among themselves. Drummond reprimanded the police for their listlessness, urged them to vigorous action, and under pain of dismissal ordered the chiefs to prevent the coming together of the opposing factions. Finding that the holding of fairs was made the occasion of many of those faction fights, he suppressed numerous fairs where the business was insignificant but the disorder great. The tithe war was a great difficulty to Drummond. From 1830 to 1834 it had raged fiercely. Tithes were collected at the point of the bayonet, peasants were shot down and bayonetted by police, and police were stoned and pitchforked by peasants. Parliament had declared that the tithe system needed reform, but the church insisted that, pending reform, tithes should at all hazards be collected. Drummond set himself to keep the peace pending tithe reform. He refused to force six million catholics to pay tithes to the church of eight hundred thousand protestants while parliament was preparing to reform or abolish the tithe system. But he took precautions to protect from violence all who were engaged in exercising their legal rights. Police were no longer despatched as tithe collectors to shoot down peasants, but peasants were not allowed to assault or slay the agents of the law. The executive no longer appeared as the instrument of a class, but it did not degenerate into a weapon of the popular party. This impartiality was new to the people and won their hearts. Legal rights harshly exercised were no longer enforced, and the people, finding an executive bent on justice, and powerful to protect as well as punish, showed a disposition, hitherto unknown, to obey the law. The peace was kept until the Tithe Commutation Act of 1838 reformed the system, and relieved the peasantry from at least the direct payment of the obnoxious impost. The agrarian war also engaged Drummond's attention. In 1833 a strong ‘coercion’ act had been passed to put down agrarian disturbances, but it had so far failed that in 1834 the lord-lieutenant declared that ‘it was more safe to violate the law than obey it.’ Drummond understood the land question in all its bearings. He was far too sound an administrator not to be aware that, whatever might be the causes of disturbance, law and order should be upheld and outrages put down with a strong hand. Abandoning the old methods, he enforced the ordinary
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