§ MR. REARDENsaid, he wished to ask the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, Whether it be true, as reported in some American and English Papers that the Rev. Mr. M'Mahon. now confined in a Canadian Prison, has been flogged for the offence of receiving a few copies of a news-paper that had been forwarded to him?
§ MR. ADDERLEYsaid, in reply, that since he had seen the question, on the Notice Paper, upon which it had appeared that day for the first time, he had caused all the American Papers in the Colonial Office to be searched, and the only allusion to anything approaching the report referred to by the hon. Member was in the Toronto Weekly Leader, in which he found it stated that one of the prisoners in the provincial Penitentiary had been discovered with a copy of the Irish American, a Fenian newspaper, and had been punished for refusing to divulge the source from which it had come. That was the only foundation for the report. The Rev. Mr. M'Mahon. was a Fenian priest who had been let off being hanged, and was confined in one of the Canadian prisons, and he (Mr. Adderley) could find no foundation whatever for such a report as that, to which the hon. Gentleman had alluded. As the hon. Gentleman, however, had given some currency to the report by putting his Question on the Notice Paper, it was only right that he should take some means of verifying the statement, if that could be done, because it was not proper that the Notice Paper of that House 1699 should be made the vehicle of circulation for reports of that description.
§ MR. REARDENsaid, that his only object in putting the question was to obtain a contradiction, because such a report if uncontradicted would have a moat pernicious effect. He was very glad, therefore, that the right hon. Gentleman had so emphatically denied the truth of the Report.