Emigration. (Hansard, 21 July 1882)

HC Deb 21 July 1882 vol 272 cc1226-323 1226

§ (Power of guardians to borrow for emigration.)

§ From and after the passing of this Act, the board of guardians of any union in Ireland are authorised to borrow money for the purpose of defraying or assisting to defray the expenses of the emigration of poor persons resident within their union, or any electoral division thereof, in manner provided by "The Poor Law Amendment (Irelend) Act, 1849,"as amended by subsequent Acts, subject to the following modifications (that is to say):

(1.) The provisions of the said Act in relation to the repayment of the advance by annual instalments shall not apply;
(2.) The advances may be made by the Commissioners of Public Works out of any moneys granted to them for the purpose of loans in place of the Public Works Loans Commissioners;
(3.) Every such advance made by the Commissioners of Public Works shall bear interest at the rate of three and-a-half per centum per annum, or at such other rate as the Treasury may from time to time fix, in order to enable the advance to be made without loss to the Exchequer;
(4.) Every such advance made by the Commissioners of Public Works, and the interest thereon, shall be repaid within such period from the date of the advance, not being less than fifteen years nor more than thirty years, as the Treasury may from time to time fix;

§ For the purposes of this Act "The Poor Law Amendment (Ireland) Act, 1849,"means the Act of the Session of the twelfth and thirteenth years of the reign of Her present Majesty, chapter one hundred and four;

§ New Clause (Power of guardians to borrow for emigration,)—(Mr. Trevelyan,)—brought up, and read the first time.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause be read a second time."

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
said, he did not want to make any unfair remarks on 1227 Her Majesty's Government in reference to this matter. He thought the Committee generally, and the Irish Members in particular, had some reason to complain that this important subject should be postponed to a time when they bad no opportunity of giving it the full discussion it deserved. The difficulty they were placed in was this—they were most anxious the Bill should be passed into law, and that at the earliest moment possible; and he thought he could call on the hon. and learned Gentleman the Solicitor General for Ireland, and other right hon. and hon. Members sitting upon the Treasury Bench who were interested in the measure, to bear testimony that hon Members on the Opposition side below the Gangway had done all they could to accelerate the passage of the Bill through the House. However, the position they were in was this—a proposal of a most important character had been made to the House, and it was shown that a good deal of strong feeling existed with regard to it in Ireland. They were in this dilemma—either they had to delay the Bill, the passage of which they most earnestly desired; or they had to swallow wholesale the proposal on the subject of emigration made by the Government, without giving it that detailed criticism which they considered its importance demanded. [Interruption.] He must, at the outset, point out that any discussion of this clause would not be facilitated by the very earnest conversation that was going on on the Benches below the Gangway opposite. He wished, before he discussed the clause itself, to offer to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant his thanks for the very lucid and sympathetic manner in which he had introduced the clause. He (Mr. O'Connor) did not think that House had ever listened to a picture of the state of a particular part of Ireland drawn with greater skill, facility, ability, and sympathy than that drawn by the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Trevelyan) last night. He (Mr. O'Connor), in listening to the right hon. Gentleman's description, was very much struck with two facts—the picture drawn by the right hon. Gentleman, the accuracy of which Irish Members on those Benches thoroughly knew, suggested considerations on two points. The description was very graphic with regard to the condition of Conne- 1228 mara. The condition of that part of Ireland had been brought before the House over and over again last Session in the shape of Questions put to the Predecessor of the right hon. Gentleman, and the answers of the then Chief Secretary (Mr. W. E. Forster) had always been to the effect that the people in Connomara were rather better off than those in other parts of Ireland. Well, he (Mr. O'Connor) would ask the Committee to contrast the picture of the condition of Connemara drawn by the late Chief Secretary with the picture drawn by the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Trevelyan) last night. And the second remark he would make was this. He did not wish to enter into topics in regard to the old controversy generally introduced by the hon. Members for the County of Galway (Mr. Mitchell Henry) and the County of Cork (Mr. Shaw)—he would not go into these references to the old controversy, because he regarded them as the last dying statements and declarations of those hon. Members previous to their retirement from this House, perhaps to a more elevated sphere. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary acknowledged last night that the poor people living in Connemara would not be able to live oven if they had paid no rent whatever, and that threw some light on the question of the morality of the "no rent" manifesto which had been so much criticized by right hon. and hon. Members opposite. Dealing with the question of emigration, he confessed he had a qualified opinion upon the subject. When the proposal was made last year, he was one of those who gave it a very active opposition. He had opposed the Emigration Clause of the Land Act, and, in doing so, he was sorry to say, had exposed himself to some of the most thundering and lightning eloquence that even the Prime Minister was capable of on that matter. However, he was not ashamed to say that he had changed his opinion, and that he had done very largely in consequence of his visit to America, where he saw so many of his race prosperous and happy, and giving effective aid to the cause of Ireland by their dollars—giving aid that they never could have given if they had remained at home. He was sure that one of the effects of the emigration that this clause would encourage 1229 would be to increase the subscriptions of the Land League in America, and in that way to further the National cause. He did not know whether this was one of the results contemplated by the Government in making this proposal; but, whether or no, he must confess that his view with regard to emigration was slightly modified. He felt bound, however, to make this reservation—that no amount of emigration would permanently improve the condition of Ireland. The way to improve the condition of Ireland was not to send the people out of the country, but to improve the state of things under which they lived at home, because if emigration were to be a panacea for all the evils from which Ireland was suffering, the deportation which had taken place during the past 30 or 40 years should certainly have made Ireland one of the most prosperous countries on the earth. He would remark, therefore, that while he was in favour of emigration, he was only in favour of it under proper circumstances. His objection to the proposal of the Government was not that it encouraged emigration, but that it encouraged it under the most unfavourable conditions that the ingenuity of even the Treasury Bench could have devised. What did the proposals of the Government amount to? In the first place, several hon. Members, who were in favour of emigration, laid it down as a condition precedent to emigration, that people who emigrated should be sent out so that they would land in the United States in something like a proper and fit condition to commence the battle of life in their new home. The Party to which he (Mr. O'Connor) belonged, and, no doubt, other hon. and right hon. Members who did not sympathize with their views, would agree with hon. Members opposite in the opinion that emigration would be a curse, not only to Ireland, but to America also, if it was not such as would land the poor people in America in a position to start life under favourable conditions. But let them contrast that view with the proposal of the Government, which was that the maximum amount spent on each emigrant should be £5. He asked any man who had the least experience in emigration matters, whether such a sum as £5 could do more than barely land a man on the shores of America? Did the noble Lord the Secretary of State for 1230 India, last night, answer the objection by saying that although £5 was the maximum given by the Government, it might not be the maximum bestowed upon the emigrant, "because," said the noble Lord—at any rate, he (Mr. O'Connor) understood him to say so, and he did not wish at all to misrepresent him—"voluntary agency will come to the assistance of the Government, and will increase the £5 to a sum reasonably sufficient to place the emigrant in a proper position to begin life in the country of his adoption." In other words, the emigration was not to be under Government control and out of Government resources, but simply voluntary for the most part, with some small aid from the Government. He (Mr. O'Connor) ventured to say that that was not a proper form of emigration for the Government to propose. His second point was this. Hon. Members in all parts of the House agreed that the emigrant when he landed in America should be in a fit condition to begin life; and, with some experience of America, he (Mr. O'Connor) would say that it was quite a mistake to suppose that the streets of New York, Chicago, or San Francisco were paved with gold, any more than the streets of London were paved with gold. The struggle of life in America was certainly much easier than in England or Ireland, or in any other crowded country, but still that struggle was severe. He did not wish to draw too favourable a contrast between the two countries; but this he would say, that in many respects the life of the working man in America was not a bit better, but even worse, than in this country. When they landed a man with strong muscles on the shores of America, he had to fight his way in the battle of life. There was no prospect cut out for him, and that was a proposition which he thought would commend itself to all Members of the House, certainly to all those who were in any way familiar with the conditions of life in America. Knowing these facts, then, what had the Committee to say to the proposal of the Government? The proposal was that rules should be made for the proper emigration of these Irish peasantry. What did these rules amount to? They only amounted to this—that the Government were willing to take advantage of the voluntary agencies already established in Ireland 1231 for the purpose of carrying out the emigration. The Government reduced the matter simply to a small sum of money—they were going to spend £5 in getting each emigrant out of the country, and the rest was to be left to Mr. Tuke, and such like assistance. With regard to the fate and future of the emigrants in America, they were to trust to Mr. Tuke. The Government were abrogating its responsibility and its duty when it yielded up the greater part of this question—namely, the settlement of the emigration on the other side of the Atlantic—into private hands for settlement—when it handed over the most important part of the question to the voluntary agency of Mr. Tuke. It would, perhaps, be unbecoming on his part to make any observations, especially of a personal nature, with regard to Mr. Tuke. No doubt, that gentleman was inspired by the best of motives, and, so far as he (Mr. O'Connor) knew, he had done great service to the people of Ireland. But it seemed to him that it was asking too much of the Committee, and especially of hon. Members who sat on those Benches, that they should assent to the proposal of the Government, which was to put the fate of these emigrants almost completely into the hands of private individuals whose character they know very little of, and whoso fitness to discharge the functions imposed upon them was, to say the least of it, open to controversy. He objected to the emigration of peasantry from Ireland in order to become hodmen in America. He thought that the transferring of a tenant farmer from Connemara, oven under the severe conditions that surrounded that district, into a hodman in New York or Chicago was a very questionable favour; it was a transfer of a certainly very invidious character. His contention was, that the Government was not settling this question in a satisfactory manner if the result of their action was simply to transform the pauper of Connemara into the White slave of the United States. He certainly was bound to protest against any scheme of which that was the natural outcome. But, whilst he objected to that under any circumstances, he thought the Committee was especially bound to protest against it at the present time, because, as had been pointed out by the hon. Member for the County of Waterford (Mr. 1232 Blake) in the columns of The Times, the Government, in proposing this scheme, were proposing it in the face of a greater scheme. There was the scheme on the part of the Government of Canada, where so many Irish people were settled, and where so many had found happy homes, and where they had such influence that the Canadian Parliament, not very long ago, had passed a Resolution in favour of National self-government in Ireland, and which certainly met the views of most hon. Members from the Benches from which he was speaking. Canada was a country in which he should be willing to see the Irish people settle. Canada offered to settle the Irish people on conditions that would be favourable to them; but Canada had a right, and the United States had a right, or any other country to which the emigrants might be sent had a right, to say—"You must send your emigrants so that they will be a blessing to us, and not a curse. You must send them so that they will be a source of progress and improvement to our country rather than a burden upon our rates. "Canada took that view of the question, and said—"We will take these people under conditions that are most favourable to them and to us. We will give them a certain amount of land—they were farmers at home, and we will continue them farmers here. We will provide them means for the proper cultivation of their land, and they will find homes already made for them, where they will be able to live in comfort and plenty without being put to the necessity of wandering about the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and such large cities, and instead of their being handed over to the employers of labour in communication with Mr. Tuke. "Because that was what the proposal of the Government meant—to land the people in America in a destitute condition, where their only chance would be to obtain work under some large employer of labour. He (Mr. O'Connor) did not want to say a single word derogatory to Mr. Tuke; but he looked at the probabilities of the case, and he could see that, if all responsibility was left with Mr. Tuke for the settlement of these emigrants on the other side of the Atlantic, he could but make some arrangement with capitalists and others out in the United States to take those people off his hands and give 1233 them work. [An hon. MEMBER: Why do you object to that?] He would tell the hon. Member why he objected. He objected to the farmer from Connemara being made the White slave in America, especially in the face of the offer of the Canadian Government to place him where, instead of being a daily trudge, for which he was very little qualified by his previous training, they would make a farmer of him, placing him in possession of his own homestead in a prosperous country. He (Mr. O'Connor) objected to any contract for the supply of this labour to American capitalists for the reason that, under the conditions of these contracts, the emigrant, who was really helpless, might suffer very materially. These were the reasons which had induced Irish Members to think that the proposal of the Government was one of the most imperfect, and one of the crudest—he would not say one of the worst—that had ever been placed before the House. It had been the intention of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell)—whose absence from the House was owing to a family bereavement, which those who knew the hon. Member and his family deeply deplored—to have taken some action in this matter. He (Mr. O'Connor) could not accept a tentative scheme like this, and he intended to signify his entire dissent from it by calling for a division on the second reading.

§ MR. ARTHUR ARNOLD
said, he commended the speech of the hon. Member for the City of Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) to the most earnest attention of Her Majesty's Government. For the first time in his hearing the hon. Member, who was unquestionably a Representative of the peasantry of Ireland, and qualified to speak for them, had, if his ears had not deceived him, advocated the emigration of Irish people to America.

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
said, he did not wish to commit himself to that proposition. He should not be in favour of emigration from Ireland, if he thought there was any chance of the Government accepting the proposal of the Irish Party—namely, the proposal for migration from one part of Ireland, where there was a congested population, to another part where there was plenty of room.

§ MR. ARTHUR ARNOLD
said, that, though he was sorry to have to intro- 1234 duce a somewhat discordant note into a debate which had been generally harmonious, he wished to say a few words on this subject, as it was one upon which he held a somewhat strong opinion. Last year the only vote he gave against the Government was in opposition to the clause with reference to emigration, and he had congratulated himself, and those with whom he had been associated, that they had succeeded in reducing that clause to the dimensions which at length characterized it. He adopted that course because he was not prepared to give a vote in that House directly against all the economical principles to which he had endeavoured to devote himself. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) had said, again and again, that Her Majesty's Government, of which he was a Member, had disregarded the ordinary principles of political economy. He (Mr. Arnold) said, however, that, in his humble judgment, they had not disregarded the principles of political economy, except in this instance of the proposal for the emigration of the Irish people. In regard to the proposal before the Committee, the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland complained the other day that he had heard a succession of second-reading speeches. Well, Her Majesty's Government were to blame for them, because they had in this clause introduced so much new matter that it was necessary for the Committee to discuss it to a very large extent de novo. This Bill, when originally introduced into the House, had absolutely nothing about it of an eleemosynary character. Everyone who wished to oppose this measure as it was introduced, might do so on the claim that the measure had nothing about it of an eleemosynary character. The right hon. and learned Gentleman had been mistaken about political economy before. This proposal of Her Majesty's Government introduced for the first time, and in a perfectly concrete form, a proposal that was purely eleemosynary in its character The principle of the Bill, when first laid before the House, was this—that every tenant in Ireland should have access to the Land Court; that that should be granted to him so far as that House could induce it; and that was the object and the motive of the Arrears Bill. It was on that ground that he (Mr. Arnold) 1235 supported it. The right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister said, the other day, most emphatically on the clause moved by the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy Burghs (Sir George Campbell), that this was the primary and sole object of this measure he had introduced; and then he proceeded, in reference to the speech made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon, (Mr. Goschen), to speak in a tone of great admiration of the right hon. Gentleman's remarks in connection with sham loans. Well, there was no Member of that House who had greater confidence in the sincerity of Her Majesty's Government than he (Mr. Arnold) had. He had had something to do with Boards of Guardians, and when he heard this proposal he felt convinced that if it had not something in it of an unreal character, his experience had highly deceived him. The right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Trevelyan) spoke of the extreme poverty of certain districts in Ireland, and he had carried the whole Committee with him in his remarks with regard to the poverty which existed in many towns in Ireland. But the description the right hon. Gentleman had given of that poverty might be matched in many towns of England, and in many countries in Europe. What he (Mr. Arnold) contended was, not that his heart would not move in favour of emigration, but that if they began to give State money for those purposes, though they commenced with £100,000, there was no knowing when they would stop. It was pointed out by the right hon. and gallant Member opposite (Sir John Hay) that the emigrants would have to be provided with all necessaries and properly fitted out—that they should be provided with a new suit of clothes, and should have money in their pockets, and, in order to do that, the least estimate they could form of the expense——

§ SIR JOHN HAY
I really must point out to the hon. Member that I made no such statement as that which he attributes to me.

§ MR. ARTHUR ARNOLD
said, he must apologize to the right hon. and gallant Member. He had been referring to the hon. Member who sat near him (Sir John Hay)—namely, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Northcote), who had contended that the emigrants should be put in such a position that when they landed they should have some 1236 money in their pockets. The smallest estimate, under such conditions, the emigration would cost was £10 per head. By this £100,000, therefore, they would only be providing for the emigration of 10,000 people at the outside. The reason he would urge on Her Majesty's Government the desirability of considering the matter well before they embarked in State-aided emigration was one which he thought should always guide the Government in making a free grant of public money—namely, whether that to which the money was applied would recur. Hon. Members of that House denied that, and said that the purpose for which this money had been given, and was given, would recur. No one who heard the speech of the hon. Member could doubt for a moment that it would recur again and again. Hon. Members had intimated their satisfaction at the prospect that it would recur, and he (Mr. Arnold) would venture to predict that if this £100,000 was given—and he had so much respect for Her Majesty's Government that he should hesitate to oppose it if it were pressed—in another year £500,000 would be asked for, and the demand would still go on increasing for State-aid to emigration. He had recently read in The Times newspaper a statement as to one of the counties of Ireland, where no less than 350,000 acres of land had gone out of cultivation in 30 years; that was to say, it had been going out of tillage into poor pasture land, and from that county, in the space of a generation, the population had decreased by 70,000, and 9,000 houses had been razed to the ground. Well, that was a thing of no magnitude compared with what would be carried out under such a transaction as Her Majesty's Government now proposed; and he contended that when once they began to promote State-aided emigration, they were in danger of bringing about an absence of thrift and economy in agricultural proceedings. They might de-pond upon it that so long as they held out to people the possibility of their finding homes in another land, they would never use their best endeavours to improve their holdings, and they—the Government—would never be short of candidates for a bounty of that kind. That was one reason why he ventured humbly to tell the Committee that they 1237 were now entering' upon a serious denial of the principles of political economy; and he would ask the Government to reconsider their proposal, although he had no doubt that this clause would make the measure far more acceptable in "another place."

§ MR. CARPENTER GARNIER
said, he had been astonished to hear the arguments of the hon. Member for Sal-ford (Mr. Arthur Arnold), because he appeared to object to this clause on the ground that it was opposed to political economy, and took that objection after having swallowed the Arrears Clauses of the Bill. The hon. Member seemed to swallow the Arrears Question camel, and strain at the Emigration Clause gnat. He was glad the hon. Member for Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) had made a considerable advance on the position taken up by hon. Members below the Gangway from the position they occupied during this controversy last year. Though the Irish Party did not appear altogether to approve of the clause, the hon. Member for Galway had not given it such an uncompromising opposition as he (Mr. Carpenter Garnier) should have expected. He (Mr. Carpenter Garnier) wished, in a few words, to say that it was to him most refreshing to find at least one portion of this Bill to which he could give his cordial support. He had listened last night to the clear and able statement of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary with very great pleasure, and he regretted that the Government had not brought forward their clause earlier, and that they had not dealt with the subject on a somewhat broader principle, because he ventured to think that the sum they intended to appropriate to emigration—namely, £100,000, was totally inadequate. If they took the figures laid before them by Mr. Tuke with regard to the district of Clifton, in the West of Ireland, they would find that that gentleman estimated that at least one-fifth of the whole population should be emigrated. This gentleman estimated that one-sixth of the population in that part of Ireland could be emigrated with advantage, and the estimated expense of this emigration was £7 per head. It was estimated that 16,000 families, or 80,000 persons ought to be sent abroad; but oven taking the Government estimate of £5 per head, the emigration of 1238 80,000 people would cost £400,000. He trusted the Government would take this into consideration, and that they would be prepared to deal more liberally with the subject. He could not help thinking that if an attempt was made to deal with the Irish Question by emigration it was useless to deal with it in a piecemeal fashion. However, he had much pleasure in supporting the clause, and he would express a hope that the Government would see their way in the future to somewhat enlarge the proposal they were now making.

§ COLONEL NOLAN
said, that this was a subject in which his constituents would be much interested, and his constituents formed part of the people who had been referred to by Mr. Tuke. A great mistake had been made by several speakers, although not by the general run of Members, because he found that most of the speakers were well informed upon the subject. But a mistake had run through the whole of the speech of the hon. Member for Salford (Mr. Arnold), which was this—that the hon. Member had urged, on account of the exceptional state of certain Unions, the application of a general plan to the whole of Ireland. The Unions to which reference had been made were very populous. The districts were mountainous, so that the people were crowded into a small space along the shore. The mountains were thinly populated; but along the shore, 2,000 or 3,000 feet from the sea, the country was densely inhabited, many of the holdings, particularly on the high lands, being only two or three acres in extent. In many cases the holdings were so small that the tenants were never able to have a change of oats or rye. They were never able to change the crop from oats to grain, and the result was that when the potatoes failed, and when there would be a depression in the kelp trade—for one of the main sources of income of these poor people was the manufacture of kelp from sea-weed—the tenantry were reduced to the verge of starvation. With regard to kelp, this manufacture had greatly declined during the past few years. He did not know the reason for it; but, no doubt, it was not far to seek, the manufacture of the chemicals that were produced from kelp being in the hands of only two or three persons. No doubt, there was a trade secret connected with 1239 it; but the fact remained the same, that the kelp manufacture had declined very seriously since 1879 and 1880. The consequence had been that the people, always poor, had been suffering from an intensity of poverty, and there was no doubt that if the population was left in its present condition the wretchedness and misery from which they had been recently suffering would recur every 10 or l2 years. He might say, further, that in the Clifton district the people had never been able to avail themselves of the Seed Potatoes Act, and this was the first year in which the people would have had an opportunity of planting a crop of new seed potatoes. This failure of the Act to work in that district had been owing to some of the landlords having stated that the people were so poor that they could not avail themselves of the assistance of the Government in regard to seed potatoes. Well, England should never forget that if Irish industries had not been cleared out of the country, or if something had been done to revive them since they had been cleared out, these poor people would have been better able to support themselves; in fact, the country would have been better able to support a larger population than it was able to support its small number of inhabitants. He wished it to be understood that when he gave his vote in favour of the Government proposal, which he intended to do, he did not do it in view of the condition of the whole of Ireland, but that he did it because he could not conscientiously do anything to stop emigration in such places as the Clifton district. He was quite aware that something else must be done besides promoting emigration in these districts. He had gone over Connemara with Professor Baldwin, who had pointed out to him the precise spots where the people should be taken away from the sea-shore, and removed to other specified parts of Ireland. But if railways were constructed in that part of Ireland, and if the fisheries were properly opened up and developed, it might be possible for the population to support itself; but until something was done, it was clear that these people must be subject to periodical famines. It was not the occupiers of the large holdings who were the sufferers, but the class of tenant who might be described as hanging on—labourers without labour, if the expres- 1240 sion could be used—a class of people who were a drag upon the whole community, and could not by any possibility get employment at the present moment. It was a mistake to suppose that such people as these went from the West of Ireland to England and made money during the harvest season. As he had said, it was absolutely essential that something should be done for the relief of the West of Ireland, for its condition at the present moment was a scandal and a disgrace to any Government in power. Of course, the Irish Members themselves bad very little power or influence in the matter, and were unable to set the thing right; but unless something was done, the scandal and disgrace for the continued deplorable condition of these districts would lie at the door of Her Majesty's Government.

§ MR. W. EWART
said, he had orginally intended, as an Irish Member, to go somewhat into detail on this matter, to show the necessity for emigration. He had expected that the Government would have been opposed by the Irish Members below the Gangway; but it was a matter for congratulation to the Committee and to Ireland that they were all, on this occasion, pretty well united. ["No, no !"] Well, that was the case so far as he could gather—to the best of his belief, the opinions which had been expressed that night were all in favour of emigration. ["No, no!"] However, as he had said, it had been his original intention to go somewhat into detail upon the question; but, the speech delivered by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, last night, had been so excellent and so conclusive that it left very little for anyone else to say as to the necessity for emigration in Ireland. The speech of the right hon. Gentleman had been not only convincing as to the necessity for emigration, but as to its absolute urgency. Perhaps, however, the right hon. Gentleman had failed to bring before the Committee the full extent of the evil which rendered emigration so urgent in Ireland, for a study of the statistics on this question would show that there were at least 1,000,000 of people—tenants and their families—in Ireland, on farms that were totally inadequate to support them, and would be inadequate even though held without rent. These tenants struggled on during good sea- 1241 sons; but, whenever there was a succession of bad harvests, they succumbed, and became a prey to agitation and disturbance. Now, it appeared to him, in spite of the excellent character of the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, the proposals of the Government were most inadequate, though they showed a marked advance, since the beginning of the Session, in the views of the Government on this question. For, on the 16th of February the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister, in reply to the right hon. Gentleman formerly Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant (Mr. J. Lowther) was very severe indeed on the subject of emigration. He (Mr. Ewart) would read a few words from the right hon. Gentleman's speech. He had said— The right hon. Gentleman has another remedy for Irishmen who are now in Ireland. If they do not like it they may leave it, and their leaving it is the remedy he recommends to us. It is his panacea for every evil. He is so far from contemplating with regret the vast expatriation which terrible necessity brought on Ireland in former times that he is prepared to administer more and more of this nostrum to that country; and he says if you can get a sufficient number of Irish out of Ireland the country will be comfortable, peaceful, and happy."—[3 Hansard, cclxvi. 864.] It was most unfortunate that the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister should have been conspicuous by his absence, both last night and to-day. This was a subject of transcendent importance. They knew that the Chancellor of the Exchequer kept a tight hold on the National purse, and it was to be presumed that it was owing to the views of the right hon. Gentleman that such a small sum had been proposed by the Government in aid of emigration. He (Mr. Ewart) wished the right hon. Gentleman had heard the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary last night, and the speeches which had been delivered in the course of the debate to-day. The right hon. Gentleman, hearing these speeches, would, he believed, have found himself in the position of Benjamin Franklin, whilst listening to a popular preacher. He first determined not to give anything; then he relented, and made up his mind to give all his coppers; later on he resolved to give all his silver, then his gold, and eventually he ended by emptying his pockets of all their contents. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1242 the same way, would have extended his bounty from the miserable £100,000 he proposed to give, if he had heard all that had been said in the course of this debate. He (Mr. Ewart) was very much in favour of the scheme which had been unfolded by the hon. Member below the Gangway. Of course, he would take anything he could get; but he would much rather see a more extensive plan carried out—something in the nature of the colonization scheme which had been proposed; but he would not limit it to Canada or the United States. There were splendid agricultural territories in Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape, where Irishmen who were farmers could follow out the calling in which they had been trained. He thought the £5 proposal a very stingy one. It was not as though it were the fault of these poor people themselves that they had to leave the country. It was very much the fault of the system of sub-division which made them small farmers. He (Mr. Ewart) would not distribute the blame in this matter; but certainly the blame did not lie with the poor tenants, and it was only right, therefore, that these people should be generously dealt with. They should not be sent away in a niggardly spirit, but in such a way that they would have good reason to be grateful. He did not take the view of this matter entertained by the hon. Member for County Galway (Mr. Mitchell Henry)—namely, that State-aided emigration was against the true principles of political economy; but he was not in favour of a general emigration from Ireland—an emigration of labourers. The labourers should be left to the natural order of things; but he would give very liberal aid to the poor tenants in the matter of emigration. He did hope that whatever might happen in regard to this clause, that the Government would take a more extended view of the question. They had not seen the whole extent of the difficulty yet. By their recent legislation they had rendered landlords incapable of making improvements on their property, and that evil would increase. He would, therefore, impress on Her Majesty's Government the necessity of looking this question fairly in the face.

§ MR. MITCHELL HENRY
said, he welcomed the proposal made in this clause, because it was a step in the right direction; and, in his opinion, the 1243 moderate form of the clause was an additional recommendation rather than the reverse. The question was a very difficult and delicate one to deal with. No doubt there was a tendency on the part of many in Ireland, and of some hon. Members in that House, to raise a cry that there was a desire on the part of England to extirpate the Irish race. That cry had been raised in a manner which seemed to him very injudicious last year, and the result of raising it was to minimize the proposal of the Government, and to inflict an amount of physical suffering and injury on the unfortunate people—men, women, and children—in the West of Ireland especially, which no exertions now could relieve. But he welcomed the speech of the hon. Member for Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor), who was one of those who were amongst the loudest last year in declaiming against the cruelty of the desire said to be exhibited by English Members to turn the Irish race out of their country.

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
I never said anything of the kind.

§ MR. MITCHELL HENRY
asked whether the hon. Member wished to say that he had not sympathized with those who had spoken in that vein? He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) knew very well what the hon. Member's Colleagues had said, and he would ask him if he did not endorse their sentiments?

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
said, the hon. Member attributed to him certain words, and then seemed to take refuge in what other people had said. He (Mr. O'Connor) had not used the words the hon. Member attributed to him, or anything like them.

§ MR. MITCHELL HENRY
I thought the hon. Member belonged to a united Party. [Cries of" Withdraw !"] What am I to withdraw?

§ An hon. MEMBER: Withdraw the statement.

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
Yourself.

§ MR. MITCHELL HENRY
said, he believed the hon. Member for Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) had led the House to believe last year that he sympathized with the strong sentiments made by the united Party with which he acted. The hon. Member had been to America, and had learnt by experience, and was now not only in favour of emigration from Ireland, but in favour of emigra- 1244 tion from Ireland to Canada, where the Irish people would still be under the British Crown, which was a thing they were last year told was, above all things, to be avoided in the interest of these Irish tenants.

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
said, it would be a great deal better if the hon. Member would altogether avoid references to statements made by him (Mr. T. P. O'Connor), as he seemed utterly incapable of making such allusions without misrepresentation.

THE CHAIRMAN
I would point out to the hon. Member for the City of Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) that he will have an opportunity of making any explanation or any statement that he desires to make presently.

§ MR. MITCHELL HENRY
said, it would be an advantage if the hon. Member for the City of Galway would refrain from interrupting the flow of his (Mr. Mitchell Henry's) ideas. The hon. Member seemed to have changed his opinion; but there was an hon. Member below him (Mr. Arthur Arnold) who had not changed his view on the subject of emigration.

§ MR. ARTHUR ARNOLD
said, he was not opposed to voluntary emigration.

§ MR. MITCHELL HENRY
remarked that the hon. Member, however, was opposed to State-aided emigration such as was contained in this clause; and he had opposed it before. The hon. Member's conclusions were based upon what he called the infallible and the irrevocable logic of political economy; and that was exactly his (Mr. Mitchell Henry's) complaint. If the hon. Gentleman would learn, as other hon. Members had learnt, from practical experience, perhaps he would change his mind. With regard to emigration from the West of Ireland, he could only state that he rejoiced to find that the Government were determined to supplement, as it were, by private subscription the efforts of the Emigration Societies which had done so much good within the past few months in that part of Ireland by assisting some 12,000 or 13,000 persons, at a cost of little more than £10,000, he believed. If they multiplied the efforts of these Societies during the next 12 or 18 months by the amount that the Government proposed to advance for emigration, at the end of that period they would have emigrated a very consider- 1245 able number of persons. There was a very strong desire on the part of the Irish peasantry, particularly those who were taken into service, both male and female, after they had learnt their duty, to emigrate to America; and there were very few of them who, when they were assisted to emigrate, did not make most respectable and worthy servants and members of society. They fell into that condition that the hon. Member for the City of Gal way (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) considered pitiable—they fell amongst the capitalists of the large towns of the United States and Canada. They got excellent work and excellent wages, and were enabled to give very substantial assistance to their relatives and friends who remained at home. As a matter of fact, so far from the efforts of these capitalists being inimical to the Irish people, these large employers were the greatest friends of the Irish emigrants.

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
I did not say they were not.

§ MR. MITCHELL HENRY
said, that so far from these poor creatures going from Connemara out to these large employers as to enemies, they found these capitalists their greatest friends, because they gave them good employment and good wages, and the people were pro-foundedly grateful for their assistance. Then as to the motive for which the hon. Member for the City of Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) had said he desired this emigration. He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) had been greatly struck by that motive. The hon. Member had said he hoped people would largely emigrate, because, from what he had seen in America, they would send home funds to accumulate the sum in the possession, he presumed, of the Land League. Well, that was not his (Mr. Mitchell Henry's) motive for wishing to see emigration advanced; and in this consisted the vital difference between himself and the hon. Member opposite, and those with whom the hon. Member acted. He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) wished these people to be assisted to emigrate, where they were in a deplorable condition of poverty, and where they were starving, to other countries where they would be able to improve their social position, and live in comfort and plenty. He and his hon. Friends had no—[Mr. T. P. O'CONNOR: Sinister.]—yes, sinister—he had no sinister object 1246 in view. The hon. Member seemed to think that he (Mr. Mitchell Henry) was soon to disappear from that House; in fact, he was told that whenever there was an opportunity, and almost in every debate. He could only say, in reply, that "threatened men live long," and that he thought it quite probable that the hon. Member for the City of Galway would disappear from that House as a Representative quite as soon as he himself. As to the general subject of emigration, he would conclude by saying that whilst he thought this was an excellent effort in the right direction, he was convinced that it was not sufficient. The fear he had in all these proposals was this—that they were only nibbling at this great Irish difficulty. They had in Ireland a pauper Ireland—people who depended upon the prosperity of England for their existence. When trade was good, and everything else was good, these Irish peasantry came over to Lancashire or to Scotland, and earned sufficient wages to take them back home and enable them to live during the ensuing year. Unless something was done for these people in a short time, anyone could see that they would become nothing less than paupers; that with the failure of crops in Ireland there would be an actual period of quasi-famine, and that the parties who traded on the untold misery of the people in the West of Ireland would continue their endeavours to make them the means of bringing about changes in the laws of the country, He hoped the Government would not be content with the passing of the Coercion Act, nor with nibbling at this question of Emigration. Unless they consented to treat the West of Ireland as a Governor in India would treat a Province under his control which was subjected to periodical famines—that was to say, by instituting State works on a national basis, in order to afford employment to the people—they might depend upon it that, although to some extent they might relieve the dreadful shadow which was passing over the land, the thing which caused it would grow again, and those hovels from which the people were now driven out would be speedily refilled by others as miserable and destitute as their predecessors. He had spoken to hon. Gentlemen of every shade of opinion, and he found them almost all admitting the reality of what 1247 he stated, as well as the necessity of applying a remedy. But, somehow or other, when the proposal took a practical shape, some little difficulty, which he could not understand in the case of a large commercial country like England, made its appearance. It was always a difficulty which had for its basis the violation of the laws of political economy. Now, the real law of political economy bearing upon this case, as everyone knew, was that every man who was willing to work should find the law was adapted to his necessities, and that he should not be deprived by an act of the State of the opportunity of gaining his living. Now, he (Mr. Mitchell Henry) declared that the people in the West of Ireland were deprived of the means of gaining their living in consequence of the enormous increase in Imperial taxation which was taking place. That taxation had been nearly doubled, as far as Ireland was concerned, within the last 20 years, with the result that the money which might have fructified at home was brought to this country for maintaining in splendour the Imperial Institutions. He asked the Government to adopt a wide view of this question, and not to suppose they had solved the difficulty because they had now agreed to advance in the direction which had been pointed out by benevolent men in that House and in other places throughout the country, who had done something to assist an unfortunate and starving people.

§ MR. JUSTIN M'CARTHY
said, he had not been able to catch the whole of the speech of the hon. Member who had just spoken; but when the Committee was silent, it did not seem to him that the flow of the hon. Member's ideas went on very smoothly, inasmuch as they scorned to meet in their course many rocks and snags, and, so to speak, to get at last upon the sands. At least that was so when the hon. Member was replying to the imaginary speech of the hon. Member for Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor). With reference to the Question before the Committee, he (Mr. M'Carthy) was not in favour of stimulated or State-aided emigration; least of all was he in favour of it in Ireland, where it suggested to the people the idea of something like expatriation, and that, he said, constituted a strong objection to any State-aided system of emigration which the Government were 1248 bound to take into account. A healthy system of emigration would be spontaneous and made under favourable conditions; but those conditions could not be had, in his opinion, under the best-devised system of State emigration. For his own part, he considered the idea of migration as superior to that of emigration, and he thought that the Government should have exhausted every endeavour in that direction before they fell back on the other. The Government seemed to have over-population on the brain—the idea had over them the same influence as "Captain Moonlight" had over the hon. Member for Cork County (Mr. Shaw). But over-population was not the cause of the evils of Ireland, at least, at the present moment. With regard to the offer made by the Government, he was bound to say that he felt very considerable objection to the clause. He was unable to discover that any tangible or practical scheme was before the Committee at all; and the very clearness of the speech delivered by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, last night, showed that there was no Government scheme of any tangible kind whatever. They had a clause proposed which told them that the Government would advance a certain small sum of money per head to enable the Boards of Guardians in certain Unions to carry out some undefined plan of emigration. Nothing was known as to where the people were to be sent, or how they were to be cared for when they arrived at their destination. All that was known was, that they were to be swept in some way off the face of Ireland, and landed somewhere else, and it was for such a scheme that the Committee were asked to vote. He contended that the sum of £5 per head was quite inadequate for the purpose intended, and it was perfectly evident that if this was the whole sum to be subscribed, that the people had better stay at home. On the other hand, if it was meant that the Boards of Guardians were to supplement the grant by squeezing more money out of the ratepayers in the poorest districts of Ireland, he asked whether this was a proposal which would find approval in that House? The sum of £100,000, which the Government were willing to advance, would represent at £5 per head 20,000 persons to be taken off to the 1249 Western regions of America. This was to be for all time the means of relieving Irish distress. Why, the people emigrated under it would be no more than the equivalent of a single crop of evictions, and the moment they were gone others nearly or quite as poor would take their places, and the country would find that the heart of the question had not been touched in the slightest degree.

§ MR. WHITBREAD
said, hon. Members were incorrect in speaking of the plan now proposed by the Government as one intended to apply to the whole of Ireland. As he understood it, the Government only intended to assist in cases where the condition of the population was such that, without the grant, it was absolutely impossible for emigration to take place. He had endeavoured to arrive at the truth of the statement made by several hon. Members, that if a few emigrants wore removed from these overcrowded districts, their place would soon be taken by others in an equally destitute condition, and he was inclined to believe that this result would not follow, because the landlords had no inducement to allow the districts to become again overcrowded. He said it was better that some step which would afford permanent relief, such as would follow from the plan of emigration now proposed, should be taken with regard to these overcrowded districts, rather than that the money of the taxpayers should be doled out to the people from time to time in ineffectual attempts to relieve them at home. The hon. Member for Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor; had asked what claim or qualifications had Mr. Tuke to be employed in the distribution of the proposed fund, or in the working of the scheme of emigration? Mr. Tuke was a gentleman engaged in commercial pursuits. He was one of those men who happily were always to be found at work whenever there was human suffering to be relieved. He had been present in the hope of doing some good on many occasions of danger and suffering during the Franco-German War. He went over to Ireland last year, and the scenes he had witnessed in the Western part of the country were such as to excite his strongest feelings, and enlist in behalf of the people his strongest sympathies. Mr. Tuke sought no employment; it was at his own cost 1250 that he engaged in these tasks, and he (Mr. Whitbread) thanked God that at periods of distress like that which now existed in Ireland such people were to be found. The idea suggested by the hon. Member for Galway, that the emigrants ought not to become white slaves in the United States, was precisely that which dominated Mr. Tuke; and if there were any probability of its being realized, neither he nor those who worked with him would have touched the subject at all. His desire was first of all to assist those who were really anxious to go, and next that those who were sent across the Atlantic should find someone on arrival who would direct them to the field where their labour was required, so that they should not be left a prey to those who were always ready to seize upon the unfortunate emigrant. Mr. Tuke's advice was—"Select the strong and healthy, but, as far as possible, if you can. manage it, send the whole family." The choice of ultimate destination must be left, in a large measure, to the emigrant himself, and that would often be determined by the possibility of his joining friends. At one time the labour market in the United States was in some danger of being overstocked, and it also appeared that if an emigrant could be got out to Canada in good time to take advantage of the summer, it was the better place to go to; while the assistance rendered by the Canadian Government made emigration to Canada cheaper than to the United States. In conclusion, he wished to make one or two remarks on what had fallen from the hon. Member for Longford (Mr. M'Carthy). The hon. Member said he disapproved all Government plans of emigration, because they amounted, in the eyes of the people of Ireland, to expatriation. Now, he could not understand that as an argument against this proposal, because it was not five minutes later that the hon. Member complained that the scheme was insufficient. It seemed to him impossible to reconcile those two statements. The hon. Member then said he preferred migration to emigration. But did he mean that a tenant who was unable to get a living in Connemara should be migrated to another part of Ireland, even if he were perfectly willing to go to Canada or the United States of America? There were some parts of Ireland which no Land 1251 Act or Arrears Act could possibly touch. In such Unions as Belmullet and Newport, any measures of this kind that could be devised would be hampered by the chronic state of pauperism and starvation which existed there. These were the places whose condition the Government wore anxious to deal with at once, and with regard to them and the miserable people who inhabited thorn, he asked whether it was for the best—whether it was humane—to endeavour to prevent the passing of this clause?

§ MR. SEXTON
said, the scheme of the Government did not relate to Ireland as a whole; it fixed attention on certain spots and districts in the country where, according to the received view, there was an excessive population, and proceeded to remedy that condition of things by what, he ventured to say, was the worst remedy that could be applied to it. Emigration was a remedy, doubtless, but, he said, it was one which should not be tried until every other had failed; and, considering the relation between a Government and a people, and the obligations which lay upon civilized Governments, he thought he was justified in saying that the worst way in which a Government could deal with the people of a country was by sending them out of it. The hon. Gentleman who had just sat down had spoken, as he always did, in a moderate and rational manner, and had raised the point whether an Irishman might not be as much inclined to emigrate to America as to migrate from one part of Ireland to another. It must be apparent to anyone who for a moment considered the scope of natural feeling that people who loved their country would much rather remain there than be sent 1,000 leagues away from it. He thought it ought not to be beyond the skill of the Legislature to make such an arrangement as would remove or ease the congested districts, by sending a portion of the population to parts of Ireland where there was plenty of land and almost no population at all. There were millions of acres of land in Ireland to which the name of "waste" could not properly be applied, that were, nevertheless, quite useless; and if Parliament had in past years rendered these fit for profitable occupation, he ventured to say that the question of emigration, which now caused them trouble, would not have reached such a head. He thought 1252 Parliament should endeavour to make the land of Ireland valuable for the support of the people before they concerned themselves with proposals for sending the people out of the country. This question of emigration was one to which Ireland stood in a relation more peculiar than that occupied on the same question by any country in the world, for in the last 30 years 3,000,000 out of 8,000,000 of the population had been deported, a fact which he contended was without parallel in the civilized world. Practically, this had been forced emigration. British rule first crushed the industries of the country, and then allowed the land to remain under a system of laws which prevented the development of cultivation, and forbade the people to use the resources left in their hands as a moans of subsistence. Those laws were framed in the interest of a small body of men without regard to the interest of the people; and, therefore, he repeated that the emigration of the last 30 years was a forced emigration, the consequence of which was that wherever the people went they carried hatred to the British Government, and, he was sorry to add, hatred to the British race. It was impossible to approach this question without some amount of feeling, because it was associated with many painful recollections; but he was bound to admit that it had been approached on the previous evening by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant in the most considerate manner. The speech of the right hon. Gentleman was a frank examination of facts; and, so far as those facts were painful, he had shown a regard for natural feeling, and a sympathy for those who suffered, which it was only just to recognize. The right hon. Gentleman set forth plainly the facts which had produced the state of things that existed in the West of Ireland. He did not say that he had exhausted the facts or dwelt exhaustively on the consequences of rack-renting and territorial injustice; nevertheless, so far as it went, his inquiry was just and impartial, and he (Mr. Sexton) thanked him for it. Now, the proposals as to loans were so vague, the percentage of interest was so heavy, and the conditions of repayment so stringent, that he did not regard them as deserving of any serious criticism. He, therefore, turned to the proposal of gift. The Treasury would grant 1253 £100,000 to the Boards of Guardians of certain Unions in Ireland, which, sum was to be given at the rate of £5 a-head to the members of each family emigrated. Taking each family as consisting of five members, this would be £25 per family; and, practically speaking, that would mean that the Government plan contemplated the emigration of 4,000 families, who wore to be turned out of their homes and severed from their means of living under the operation of the Land Laws. It might be something more than a remarkable coincidence that about the same number of families had been evicted during the last two years. Now, if the expectation was to be able to get rid of those families who were an inconvenience to evicting landlords by the means proposed in this clause, he could tell Her Majesty's Government that their scheme was peculiarly unfortunate. He might mention that the Land Corporation had been formed for the purpose of stimulating emigration and ousting tenants from their homes. He regarded such a system as that as threatening peace and order and good government in Ireland; and he thought it most unfortunate that the Government should have come forward with a proposal which would lead people to believe that their scheme might be used to supplement and aid the scheme of Mr. Kavanagh's Company. The Government should have made the Arrears Bill applicable to the case of these evicted families by providing that on the payment of one year's rent they should go back to their farms; then, having replaced them in their homes free from the encumbrance of arrears and the debts which exhausted their credit, they should have adjusted the machinery of the Land Act so as to insure that the cases of these 4,000 families should be rapidly dealt with. Had the experiment been fully and persistently tried of endeavouring to enable these people to gain a living at home, then, if it had failed to accomplish its object, emigration resulting from natural and painless causes might have followed, and the people gone away without bearing any grudge against the Government and Parliament of this country. But, under the present scheme, which would appear to the people of Ireland one of forced emigration, he believed that the people would carry with them feelings of 1254 the same kind as those of the millions who had gone before them. The Government scheme amounted only to this—that every person who emigrated from the Unions specified would get a £5 note. Now, at that point he drew a line, and said that the Government ought not to take evicted and helpless people who had been driven into pauperism by the Land Laws, and put pressure upon their free will in order to drive them out of the country. It was said that the people were willing to go; but, from his own knowledge of Ireland, he was obliged to confess that he heard the statement with great surprise. Since he came down to the House that day there had been put into his hand a note from Mr. Trant, a gentleman who acted lately as agent for the Central News in the West of Ireland, to the effect that there was everywhere the greatest reluctance on the part of the people to emigrate; that the people of one of the most miserable districts said they would "die on the roadside first;" that the only persons willing to emigrate to America were those who had relatives there, and that these would not go unless money were given them to use at their own discretion; that Mr. Tuke's reports given to the country in The Nineteenth Century were gross exaggerations. Now, if the Government scheme were to be carried out, he contended that whole families ought to be emigrated together—that the capable portion of the family should not be sent to the New Country, and the incapable left in the Old Country; that care should be taken that persons who were attached to their religion should not be sent to places where they would be beyond the reach of its ministrations, and that persons who had been tenants in Ireland should not be asked to sink into the position of labourers in America. Further, he said that an assurance ought to be given that a home should be provided for the emigrants, and that there should be nothing wanting to their comfort on arrival. Such conditions as these, he said, were essential to any rational scheme of emigration. He would not hear one word said against Mr. Tuke, whose published record appeared to be very honourable to him, and who seemed to be a man endued with the active spirit of philanthropy. But he thought a staff of officials in the country to which the emigrants went should be deputed to 1255 see that they met with no harm on arrival; and, further, that hon. Members should be able to appeal, in case of need, to some responsible official in that House with regard to questions which might arise in connection with the proposed emigration scheme. It seemed to him to be a shirking of responsibility on the part of the Government when, in endeavouring to eke out the practical insufficiency of the scheme, they said they wore going to allow the small sum of £5 a-head to the people who emigrated. He did not know what plan the Government had in their minds; but it had certainly found no expression on the Notice Paper in any form or shape whatever; and, therefore, in view of the incompleteness of the proposal, he should be obliged to vote against the clause.

§ MR. TREVELYAN
admitted that this clause had been introduced rather late into the Bill; he allowed, also, that it might have been brought forward in response to pressure from private Members; but, as long as it was rightly done, he was indifferent as to the manner of doing it. The hon. Member for Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) said that if the struggle for life was severe in Ireland it was also severe in America; that the streets of Chicago were not paved with gold; and the hon. Member had begged the Government not to transform the poor of Ireland into the white slaves of the United States. But he would remind the Committee that in the parts of the United States to which these people would go, children 10 years old earned $2, and grown-up men $6 a-week. Now, these were not the wages of slaves; they were the wages on which men had begun who had risen to the highest positions in the United States. He could not altogether endorse the opinion that it was a descent in prosperity and comfort to leave a £4 holding in Ireland for such wages and such conditions as these. At the same time, he could perfectly sympathize with the feelings of the hon. Member that, however poor a holding might be in Ireland, it still had a position of independence which Irishmen were very unwilling their countrymen should abandon. On this point he wished to refer to an Amendment of the hon. Member for Sligo (Mr. Sexton), who had said that this was a crude and skeleton scheme. No scheme of emigration which had hitherto been 1256 placed on the Statute Book of this country had ever gone so far into detail as this scheme which the Government placed before the Committee last night. All previous schemes, whether they were in the form of the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1819 or of Clause 32 of the Land Act of last year, had only laid down the financial conditions. Now, the Government laid down the administrative conditions which it proposed in outline, and he would venture to say that everything that could be done by legislation for laying down a scheme for emigration had been done in this clause. The hon. Member for Galway (Mr. Mitchell Henry) said that all the Government did was to pay £5 a-head, and to trust for the rest of the emigration expenses to be provided by Mr. Tuke. The Government proposed to use the experience and the local knowledge of Mr. Tuke, and right glad they were that they should be able to do so; but they did not propose to confine themselves oven to Mr. Tuke. They proposed not only to use his experience and advice, but the experience and advice of the gentlemen who conducted many of their agencies. If there was one point which ought to be watched with great care and delicacy it was the emigration of women and children. Mr. Vere Foster had, during recent years, at his own cost, emigrated many Roman Catholic girls, and he had done it, to a large extent, through the agency of the Roman Catholic clergy at home and abroad. He did not want to take up the time of the Committee unnecessarily, and, therefore, he would not read Mr. Vere Foster's account of his own proceedings. The hon. Member for Sligo (Mr. Sexton) criticized what he (Mr. Trevelyan) said yesterday about the willingness of tenants to leave the country. The hon. Gentleman said that one of the first conditions that ought to be laid down was that any people emigrating should be willing to go. The Government in this matter did not take their opinions only from Mr. Tuke, and from reading of Mr. Vere Foster and his agents; but they took their opinion from their own official agents—the eyes and ears of the Government—and he (Mr. Trevelyan) had there evidence which he thought the hon. Member would pay some attention to. Mr. Vere Foster gave no less than 78 replies from the Catholic clergy in answer to inquiries 1257 which he made during the period of the past autumn, and he (Mr. Trevelyan) would give two or three lines from these replies. One clergyman said that he had made very careful inquiry about the girls emigrating, and he had to state that the accounts were good and that they were all doing well. The clergyman added that there were many in his parish desirous to emigrate, who were unable to do so, in consequence of not being able to provide the balance necessary in addition to Mr. Vere Foster's subscription of £2. Another Roman Catholic clergyman said he had no doubt many were anxious to emigrate if they had the means, and added— I shall be happy to forward their names, and co-operate in every way with your beneficent and patriotic purpose. [Mr. O'DONNELL: Name !] He had not got the names. In regard to the willingness of the people at home, and to the feeling which their relatives abroad had as to what was their interest, and as to what ought to be their wishes, another clergyman wrote to say— I know not any small farmer or workman here who has not near and dear friends in America; and these, in many instances, implore their poor relatives to join them. Now, there the Committee had another agency which the Government would be willing to consult, and if they approved of it, to a certain extent, employ. It was not only for the emigration of people for service and for purposes of labour that agencies had been set up. There were Catholic Colonies in Minnesota and Iowa, under the management of a Roman Catholic Bishop, where the greatest possible advantages were offered to Irishmen, and there was another Colony under the management of Mr. John Sweatman, in the State of Iowa, whore 80 acres of land wore offered at the very lowest prices. Now, the Government intended to use their own means of ascertaining the character and nature of the machinery which had hitherto been employed, and when they had ascertained its character they intended to use their own discretion as to the extent to which they could utilize that machinery, and the extent to which they could supplement it with other machinery. The hon. Member for Belfast (Mr. Ewart) wished the Government to take a more extensive view of this question, and 1258 he was glad that a criticism of that nature came from several quarters of the House, including the right hon. Member for North Hants (Mr. Sclater-Booth). The hon. Member for Galway (Mr. Mitchell Henry) and others had said that the Government were only nibbling with this matter. He (Mr. Trevelyan) thought, however, that they ought to avoid talking big, and not act big—they ought not to promote a scheme which looked grand in Parliament, but would not work. If they advanced large sums of public money, the experience of all must be that money would get itself spent in extravagance and jobbery which would discredit the cause. There was a great demand, no doubt, for labour in the United States. That demand, however, was not unlimited, and if anything could make this scheme fail, it was that they should glut the labour market in which they hoped that these poor people would secure a prosperous and happy place. He thought hon. Members underrated the amount of the Government grant. He said nothing of the loans, the conditions of which were attractive, and the amount of which was only limited by the money which could be lent with security and employed with genuine advantage; but the grant was £100,000. The experience of the Duke of Bedford's Association was that 1,260 people had been emigrated for £7,400, or about £6 5s. per head, and not only had they been emigrated, but they had not been left in the cities on the coast, but conveyed to Pittsburg and all sorts of places inland. He noticed that in one emigrant ship full of these people there were some 350 persons, and that nearly £500 in railway fares had been spent after they landed in America, which was an average of £ 1 5s. It was quite true that, perhaps, these earlier emigrants might be emigrated on a cheaper scale than the later ones, and that there was something in private enterprize. The Local Government Board, anxious to be on the safe side, had estimated, in giving their advice on this matter, that the cost of emigration would be £8 per head. Now, the Government grant was not everything. There was the portion of the loan which the Unions might be induced to make—there was the portion of the money which the people might give themselves, and there was the chance of 1259 getting something from private philanthropy—in fact, it might be safely calculated that, at least, for every £3 the Government gave, £1 would be given from outside. That would make £133,000, which would emigrate and place in a comfortable position 17,000 people—17,000 people was, roughly speaking, about 15 per cent of the people of the five Unions of which he had spoken; and he ventured to say that that, instead of being a mere nibble, would be a large bite. The hon. Member for Salford (Mr. Arnold) told them that they were flying in the face of political economy. He said that the present Bill had nothing of a very eleemosynary character. He (Mr. Trevelyan) would take the hon. Member's words as gospel, and he would say that they asked only the 20th part of what they were spending, not in an eleemosynary manner, but certainly out of philanthropy, to help the poor tenants to tide over the consequences of bad seasons—ho would say that they proposed to spend that 20th part out of philanthropy, to enable those poor tenants to find a happier homo than they had hitherto enjoyed in Ireland on another shore. He would allow that this was a new principle. The hon. Member told them they were, for the first time, establishing the principle of State aid for emigration. The Poor Law Amendment Bill allowed the Guardians to supplement the funds for individual emigration out of the rates; and he (Mr. Trevelyan), standing at that Table, would never allow that the rates wore anything but public money. The precedent had already been set, and he must say that Parliament had done well to extend it. The hon. Member for Salford had talked a great deal about political economy, and he (Mr. Trevelyan) thought he could quote against the hon. Member the words of one of the most eminent political economists—Mr. John Stuart Mill. If there was one principle which ran through John Stuart Mill's great two-volume book on political economy, and which they found repeated in every corner and chapter of that book, it was that when they were endeavouring to attain the great object of raising the standard of comfort of the people, or class of people, they might effect that object even if they had to take very strong and very arbitrary measures, for when once the standard of comfort was 1260 raised the people would never of their own choice return to a lower one. They would work; they would increase their self-respect; they would increase their self-control; they would find out the best means of investing their labour; they would do everything which it was the object of political economy to induce people to do. The Government, in their great desire to raise the standard of comfort in certain parts of the country—parts of the country in which the people had to struggle under circumstances which had been described in such touching terms by the hon. and gallant Member for Gal way (Colonel Nolan)—asked the Committee to adopt a measure which was not only a salutary measure, but a very strange and novel measure, and one which he (Mr. Trevelyan) thought would do a very great deal to attain the object of raising the standard of comfort of the people, which an eminent political economist put forward as the aim of political economy. He earnestly hoped the Committee would assist the Government in this object.

§ MR. W. H. SMITH
said, it was very refreshing to those who sat on the Conservative side of the House to be able to give an unqualified support to any proposal of the Government in connection with this Bill. This was the only proposition made by the Government in this Bill which had the cordial and entire support of himself and his hon. Colleagues; and the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, in the statement which he just now made, was fully justified in assorting that a proposal which was good in itself did not require to be excused on any ground, either that it was made late, or at a period when it was not quite expected. The hon. Member for Salford (Mr. Arnold) had remarked on the dangerous character of this proposal. There was one thing which was very much more dangerous than this proposal, and that was the existence of a helpless population in that part of Ireland with which it was now proposed to deal. If the hon. Gentleman (Mr. Arnold) and those who objected to this proposal had only sought to acquaint themselves with the facts of the case, their objection would have been entirely overcome by the strong necessity of doing something to afford 1261 relief to those wretched people. What was this proposal? It was an attempt to raise a number of people who were—he would not say through any fault of their own—in a position of absolute and abject pauperism. They could not move from the place in which they found themselves; they could not go in search of employment, because they had not the means to move, and employment was debarred from them; there was no prospect of any return of employment, or of any increase of the employment of the people. Was it to be said that the State was to be held back by considerations which certainly were fit and proper to be applied to the condition of anyone who could help himself? Was it to be said that the State was to be held back from giving this kind of relief, which, according to experience and knowledge, according to facts which were beyond contradiction, had enabled persons who had been in this condition to earn for themselves a decent and reputable livelihood—to change, in fact, their condition from one of pauperism to one of independence? What the Government proposed in this clause was to put it in the power of a number of persons who could not now earn their own livelihood to do so. If they were compelled to remain where they were, the course which was pursued last year must be pursued again this year. That was to say, the Government must come to the assistance of Unions in which destitute persons were found, and subsidize, out of the Imperial funds, the rates, which were insufficient at present to keep those people alive. There could be no doubt whatever that the duty of Parliament was to endeavour by every means in their power to relieve these people from the destitute condition in which they were now placed. He had heard statements made that migration to the different parts of Ireland would answer the purpose; he had heard statements made that the reclamation of waste land should be attempted in Ireland. There was a provision in the Land Act of last year for assisting persons who would undertake the reclamation of waste land; but he had not heard of a single gentleman who was connected with Ireland, who understood Ireland and who possessed money, who had applied for any grant whatever from the Imperial Exchequer in order to assist 1262 him to reclaim land and find employment for the people. The hon. Gentleman the Member for Sligo (Mr. Sexton) had asserted that this reclamation ought to be at once set about. He believed the hon. Member was connected with an Association which had had large funds at its disposal, which funds, certain hon. Members were pleased to say, had been subscribed for the benefit of the people of Ireland. Had those funds been applied in any way whatever for the finding of employment for the people of Ireland? Had the gentlemen to whom the dispensing of those funds had been entrusted attempted to make use of the funds as the capital of a Company, having for its object the reclamation of waste land, and the settlement in Ireland of people who could not otherwise be settled? The answer was that not a single farthing had been applied to that purpose, and there was no probability of any part of the Land League funds being applied to that purpose in the future. Reference had been made to an Association which was connected with the name of Mr. Tuke. He did not understand that the Government was in the slightest degree bound to avail itself of the services of Mr. Tuke; but if Mr. Tuke and his Association could render good service to the Government in this matter, he (Mr. W. H. Smith) was sure they would be only too glad to do so. Mr. Tuke had shown, by his devotion to the cause of humanity in all parts of the world, that his one object in view was the benefit of his fellow creatures. The members of the Association who had helped Mr. Tuke in his good work had been glad to render such assistance as they could in order to make his exertions more complete and more successful. It was said that this work ought to be undertaken and carried out by officials. Now, he thought that hon. Gentlemen who argued that officials could carry out this work could not understand the difficulty, the intelligence—he made no reflections upon officials—the care which was required in order to secure that emigration should be a success, and not a failure. An official would obey his orders and work out his instructions; but it was scarcely possible for an official to show the sympathy and interest and exercise the discretion which had been exercised by Mr. Tuke and those who had worked with him in, first 1263 of all, making the selection of the qualified emigrants, in dissuading or rejecting those who were unqualified, and in finding suitable employment for the emigrants upon their arrival abroad. Another objection had been made that this was not a sufficiently eleemosynary scheme. If anything could more certainly ensure disaster instead of success, it would be a great scheme for organized emigration. Societies were not formed by simply transferring one body of men from one country in several shiploads, and putting them down hap-hazard in the new land. They must endeavour, as completely as they could, to find out that an emigrant would drop into the hole for which he was suited; and to do that a regular system of investigation was necessary. To put a man in the backwoods, amongst thousands of others, and leave him there, would expose him, in all probability, to great suffering and great misfortune. Emigration, to be a success, must be conducted with the greatest possible care and interest and sympathy for the individual; it must regard the individual, and not the community. It must be carried on, not by great shiploads at a time, but by sending as many as they could possibly find employment for on the other side of the Atlantic, or, it might be, in Australia or New Zealand. There was a great danger of temporarily glutting the market, and considerations like this had been carefully attended to by those who had been engaged in a voluntary way in promoting the relief of the overcrowded districts in Ireland, and he was sure the Government would do well to endeavour to secure similar results. There was another point to which he wished especially to call the attention of the Committee, and that was that no one had been compelled, and that no one ought to be compelled, to quit his country. The inducements which were held out of comfort and of employment were quite sufficient to secure any number of emigrants from the distressed parts of Ireland; and although there had been statements made that evicted people in some parts of Ireland were not willing to emigrate, he was sure the balance of evidence pointed to distinctly opposite conclusions. They were most desirous to go in considerable numbers, if only the means were offered. There was another point which he desired to notice. An objection had been made 1264 that the whole cost of individual emigration was not to be covered by the grant by Parliament. It would be a very unwholesome condition of things if Parliament, were to find the whole cost of emigration. If they did it might be then said that the object of the Imperial Parliament was to depopulate a great part of Ireland. If only three-fifths of the cost were provided by Parliament, and the other two-fifths by those who wore interested in the well-being of the community, such a charge could not be laid at the door of Parliament. He did not know that it was necessary for him to say anything more; but he must say this—that he regarded the proposal as one which would tend greatly to the happiness and the security of the country. He believed that those who were left behind would be as much benefited as those who were sent away. It must be borne in mind that if, as the right hon. Gentleman said, 17 percent of the people in the distressed Unions in Ireland were sent away, those who remained must be largely benefited. He did not believe that people would be found coming forward to take the wretched holdings which the others had left; but he believed that those holdings would be added to the other holdings, so that a man who had hitherto only a holding valued at £4 a year would now have the chance of occupying a holding valued at double the amount. In that case those who remained behind must have a much better chance of maintaining their families and living a reputable life. Whatever might be the result of the effort about to be made to improve the condition of the people who could not possibly help themselves, he thought Parliament was bound to give it a fair trial, and give it that trial at once. Yesterday the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) recommended that the whole scheme should be postponed until next year, when a more complete and satisfactory one might be adopted. If Parliament waited for the next emigration season a whole year would be lost, during which people would be suffering in Ireland, whereas they would have an opportunity of earning a decent livelihood elsewhere. There was another argument in favour of proceeding at once, and that was that, at the present moment, there was a great demand for labour in America and Canada. No one 1265 could tell whether that would last for the next two or three years, and therefore it was of the highest importance that those people should be settled as soon as they could, so that they would have the advantage of earning high wages now, and have the opportunity of saving money and putting it by for a rainy day. For these and other considerations he trusted the Committee would accept the Government proposal.

§ COLONEL COLTHURST
said, that objection had been taken to the present scheme on account of the insufficiency of the Money Vote—£100,000. He thought this objection would be to a certain extent tenable, except for the argument of the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. North-cote), who had pointed out that no emigration could take place this year, and that they were only paving the way now, and if arrangements were made it would be perfectly practicable to come to Parliament for a larger sum next year. Then it had been said there was no provision in this Bill for the emigrants on their arrival abroad. He thought there was a defect in that, and he would shortly indicate it, and he hoped afterwards to move an Amendment on the subject. In this clause it was provided that the Treasury might authorize the Commissioners of Public Works to make grants to Boards of Guardians for emigration purposes. He saw no reason why the grant should be confined to Boards of Guardians—for instance, the Commissioners of Public Works should be capable of treating with the Canadian Government or the charitable associations in the United States, and other associations formed for the very purpose of receiving emigrants on their arrival, and giving them farms on easy terms, and providing them with the means of cultivating the farms. Charitable associations under the guidance of Catholic Bishops in Canada were in possession of large tracts of territory, and all they wanted was that people should go out, and that there should be a certain sum of money granted to assist the people to go out there. He hoped the Government would not allow their measure to be dwarfed by an omission of this kind, and, later on, he should propose that grants should be made to other bodies than Boards of Guardians. He was afraid that grants by Boards of Guardians in Ireland would be made on a very limited scale. It 1266 must be remembered that the motive power which would induce Boards of Guardians in England to come forward and help on an emigration scheme did not exist in Ireland. There was no outdoor relief in Ireland; there was no power to give it, and the question was not a question of either supporting people or emigrating them. By emigration, Boards of Guardians in Ireland would render themselves liable to a very heavy rate, and therefore they would not enter upon the work. Poor people in Ireland had no alternative but to go into the workhouse, and there was an insurmountable horror to do this; in fact, thousands would sooner die in the roads than go to the union-house. That must be taken into consideration in any emigration scheme, and the hearty cooperation of the Guardians must not be expected. He noticed that the rate for emigration was to be levied on electoral divisions. He thought this was undesirable. In one electoral division there might be 60 or 100 families. They would suppose, for the purposes of argument, that one-fifth were to be emigrated; the remainder were poor people, and it must be easily seen by the Committee that they would be required to pay a very heavy rate for the emigration of the one-fifth. Any difficulty in this direction would be easily surmounted by the Government consenting to substitute "Union" for "electoral division."

§ MR. O'DONNELL
said, that Her Majesty's Government, in this clause, had sprung a surprise upon the Committee, which was, at the same time, a surrender to the Party of eviction, and the betrayal of the Irish Party. He by no means desired to utter a single word in depreciation of the amiable tone in which the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant dealt with Irish questions from the point of view which he was appointed to occupy; but while he fully-recognized, he might almost say, the humane tone in which the Chief Secretary dealt with this matter, he was unable to see any essential difference between the proposal for Government emigration brought forward by the right hon. Gentleman and the proposal brought forward last year by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster). There had been a change in tone, but there had been no change in fact. If the voice was 1267 the voice of Jacob, the hands were still the hands of Esau; and, for his (Mr. O'Donnells) part, he preferred that Esau's voice should go with his hand. The right hon. Gentleman said he could quote the testimony of 60 or 70 Irish Catholic clergymen who were in favour of the emigration scheme of the Government. He (Mr. O'Donnell) sincerely hoped that those 60 or 70 Irish Catholic clergymen would constitute the first batch of emigrants, and he sincerely hoped they would be emigrated as far as possible from the shores of the land which they were unworthy to inhabit. There had been, to his mind, a systematic attempt on the part of the supporters of the Government proposal to misrepresent the speeches of the hon. Members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, because the Members of that Party who had spoken had declared that they considered that the Government proposal of emigration was just about the very worst possible scheme of emigration that could be proposed. The Ministerial supporters and the Conservatives, in passing this measure of Irish expatriation, at once presumed to draw the conclusion that the Irish Party were in favour of emigration. There was no Member of the Irish Parliamentary Party either in favour of emigration in general, or in favour of this scheme of Government emigration in particular; and he believed that the votes of the Irish Party would prove on this occasion that the attempts of the supporters of the Government measure to distort isolated sentences from the speeches of Irish Members would totally fail and be totally confounded. His hon. Friend the Member for Galway (Mr. T. P. O'Connor), who had spoken on this question, had been accused of being in favour of emigration. What his hon. Friend the Member for Galway stated was, that if there was to be emigration, he would prefer that Irish farmers should be expatriated to Canada rather than be made white slaves in New York and neighbourhood. The only attempt to answer the most rational and most convincing argument of his hon. Friend was the marvellous argument of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Westminster (Mr. W. II. Smith), who reminded the Committee that just at present wages were extraordinarily high and tempting in the United States, and that, there- 1268 fore, the House of Commons had better make haste and send out these Irish farmers while the present condition of things lasted. He (Mr. O'Donnell) supposed that when the British Parliament had got rid of thousands of Irish farmers they cared little whether they sank or swam. He listened with attention to the eulogiums made upon Mr. Tuke for his efforts in the West of Ireland, especially to the eulogium passed upon that gentleman by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Bedford (Mr. Whitbread). He (Mr. O'Donnell) was quite sure that Mr. Tuke was a most estimable man. A philanthropist always sought an opportunity of doing good to his kind, and no doubt Mr. Tuke was a person who, according to his lights, was doing what he thought best in the cause of humanity in the West of Ireland; but he (Mr. O'Donnell) confessed most frankly, and he spoke as a Galway man, and as one who had spent his childhood and youth in that district, and who knew the district well, he sincerely wished that Mr. Tuke would seek a vent for his philanthropy and energy in some other direction. Mr. Tuke had most undoubtedly done evil and not good, though he intended to do good and not evil. He had helped the work of eviction, and he had encouraged the Crowbar Brigade. He (Mr. O'Donnell) sincerely wished that instead of removing the last obstacle which in many cases prevented eviction in Connemara, Mr. Tuke would induce his charitable English friends to join with him in devoting their contributions to some other object—such, for instance, as attenuating the injuries caused by the bombardment by the English Fleet of Alexandria. He was authorized to speak on behalf of Galway men—he was authorized to speak on behalf of his near relatives in that district; and he could quote from the leading newspaper of the West of Ireland—a moderate journal published in the county of Galway—a most emphatic condemnation of Mr. Tuke's well-meant proceedings. The Galway Vindicator pointed out, only the other day, that it would be wiser philanthropy to assist the poor peasants in Ireland in their own country than to send them abroad. This emigration was at the best a doubtful experiment, as there was room enough in Connemara for quadruple its present population, if its waste lands were reclaimed and its 1269 mineral wealth and resources properly developed. It was not true statesmanship to depopulate a country. Earnest efforts should be made to develop its industrial resources, to make the people prosperous and contented at home. And no one who had a real acquaintance with the industrial resources of the West of Ireland could doubt that this could be done. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary had referred to a number of anonymous letters from Catholic clergymen in favour of emigration. The right hon. Gentleman was unable to give the names, and he (Mr. O'Donnell) believed that the vast majority of these clergymen would be sincerely happy to find that he had not been able to do so. He wondered whether the right hon. Gentleman's attention had been called to a letter concerning Mr. Tuke's scheme of philanthropy which had been addressed to the editor of The Galway Vindicator by the Rev. Father Malony. This reverend gentleman admitted that many of the districts in Ireland were vastly overcrowded; but, after pointing out that there were hundreds of thousands of acres of reclaimable land in Ireland, he gave a list of holdings in the occupation of single men. Some of those holdings consisted of hundreds and even thousands of acres. Might not the Government buy up those lands, divide them into 10 or 20-acre plots, and place upon them the present poor people in Ireland, instead of by a scheme of expatriation, such as was now proposed, to swell the tide of hate against English misgovernment? He called upon the Irish people by every means in their power to oppose the working of this clause, which clause was war upon the Irish people, and which was a part of Messrs. Kavanagh and Company's scheme for expatriation and introducing settlers from other lands. The Chief Secretary, in his speech yesterday, told the Committee that it would be cheaper to emigrate the Irish people than to keep them for a single year in the Unions of Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman, in his most humanitarian tone, and with all the tenderest feelings of his heart, reminded the Committee that the Treasury was only asked, under this clause, to give £5 per head, whereas the cost to the public of keeping paupers was from £8 to £10 per year. It was a piece of pure short-sighted economy 1270 that was at the bottom of the Government proposal. He was quite sure that any Irish Member who in the slightest degree represented his constituents—and there were Irish Members who might at one time have done so, but who had long ceased to do so—would oppose the Government in this matter. Every attempt of the Government to carry out their proposal would be resisted by the united determination and the stubborn patriotism of the Irish race, in spite of the Coercion Act, and in spite of the Government's tyrannical Code. There was a most marked absence in all the speeches of English Members—Members who, like the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Whitbread), were trying to understand Ireland without ever having lived there—of the statement of hard facts such as he had laid before the Committee on the present occasion. In a day or two Her Majesty's Government would be asking the taxpayers of this country to spend millions of money in the destruction of human life. How slow they were to ask the taxpayers of this country to spend millions of money upon the salvation of human life in Ireland. The smallest proposal to entrench on the Consolidated Fund, even to guarantee against the result of calamitous seasons, was strongly opposed by both sides of the House; but there would be very little of that opposition, he supposed, when the proposal was made for the means of destroying human life in Egypt. There could be no better investment, if, instead of going on with this miserable Emigration Clause, the Government would carry out their promise of last year and devote money to the reclamation of waste lands in Ireland. In this matter the Government might rely upon the support of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Westminster (Mr. W. H. Smith), who himself had concocted a scheme for the establishment of a peasant proprietary. He (Mr. O'Donnell) did not ask the Government to go half as far as the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Westminster did. He simply asked them, instead of proceeding with this clause, to buy some of the lands in the West of Ireland, divide them into 10 and 20-acre lots, and thus promote the prosperity and contentment of the country. He was obliged to refer to a couple of arguments advanced by Members who were 1271 elected to represent Irish ideas, but who now supported the Government. It was now suggested that Irish people should be sent to Catholic Colonies; but, although there were Catholic Colonies in the United States, they were altogether too small for the purpose of dealing with the mass of Catholic misery already seething in the cities of the United States. All that the organizations of Irish Catholics in the United States could do for years to come would be too little to deal with the mass of Irish misery which was the result of British misgovernment and former forced emigration from Ireland. He did not think it necessary to deal seriously with the arguments of the hon. Member who legally represented the County of Galway (Mr. Mitchell Henry). That Gentleman certainly did his best to contribute materials for the judgment of the House; but his arguments were not very convincing. He stated from his own knowledge, in face of the general declarations of Irish Representatives that the Irish people had no love for emigration, that all his own serving-men and women were ready to leave the wages and cheer of Kylemore Castle to emigrate to the United States. Such an argument was not very weighty. No doubt the hon. Member who legally represented the County of Galway contributed to that House all the information that he could derive from such particulars as he had obtained by lately observing the opinion of his countrymen. He (Mr. O'Donnell) believed that, with the exception of his own domestics, the hon. Member had not addressed a respectable crowd of Irish people during the last two years, and he was convinced that if the hon. Member wore to address a crowd of 2,000 people in Galway he would not find one hand held up in favour of Government emigration. The Government would, no doubt, persevere with this clause; but the execution of it did not exactly depend upon the Government. There were stronger powers in existence than the Government; but they insisted on this clause, in spite of the repugnance of the Irish people and the protests of the Irish Party, as a useless sop to that landlord party who might modulate and deform out of recognition the Arrears Bill in "another place." But whatever might be the effect of this concession to coer- 1272 cion and eviction, it was certain that the proposal was condemned and opposed by every Irish Representative who hoped to represent his constituency after the next General Election.

§ SIR JOSEPH M'KENNA
said, he had great doubt about the inclusion of an emigration scheme in this Bill being at all desirable; but he must say that there was a very strong feeling in Ireland amongst the agricultural people in favour of emigration. There wore, to his knowledge, a great number of people desirous to emigrate in Ireland at the present moment, but he did not know of any in favour of migration; and, although he regarded that proceeding favourably, he never could induce people to move from one county to another to suit either their interests or his own. He hoped, if there was any emigration scheme now carried out on a large scale, some of the clergy would leave with the people, and he wished to see no other emigration. He thought it was a pity that this clause was introduced. A Committee ought to discuss the question of emigration on its own merits, with a view to providing far more elaborate machinery than this clause, and far better checks than this Act could provide. He should be glad if the Government could see their way to dropping this clause; but he was bound to admit that there were some priests, and a large number of honest, decent people in Ireland, who were anxious to try their fortunes in Canada, or America, or New Zealand, if they got the chance. He believed that there was a scarcity of labour in Ireland rather than too much of it; but he did not think the wages in Ireland were such as the people could be content with. The farmers, however, could not pay higher wages, and the people were anxious to emigrate. He had induced agents of the Now Zealand Government to take out one or two families on favourable terms, and from that moment to this he had been deluged with applications to do the same for others, and it had required all the eloquence he could command to induce them to stay at home. He believed that that feeling existed to a much larger extent than the funds proposed under this Bill could meet; but he should, on the whole, be better pleased to see the clause left out.

1273

§ MR. BLAKE
said, he wished to know what had become of the magnificent offer of the Government of Canada? What was the plan before the Committee? The Government proposed to give £5 if the Boards of Guardians would give as much; and they thought that a certain number of benevolent individuals, with Mr. Tuke at their head, would provide the rest of the money required to emigrate the people; but having emigrated the people as individuals or families, it was no part of the Government plan to place them on land as owners, and it was manifestly the intention that they should devote themselves to labouring for others. He agreed that there would be many people who would be sent out who would be unfit to be put on farms at once; but there were a great number who could be advantageously placed on farms for themselves. He must again refer to the offer of the Canadian Government, and he begged to draw the attention of the Committee to the nature of that proposal. It was that if the British Government sent out emigrants and aided them in some other matters on their arrival the Canadian Government would give them 160 acres of suitable land each, with the right to 160 acres more at the current price of the day. They proposed that previous to their arrival 10 acres should be ceded to the emigrants, homesteads prepared for them, and that they should be maintained until they could make their first harvest and contribute to their own support. Another condition was that whatever was advanced by the Imperial Government should be paid back, so that in the end the Imperial Government would lose nothing at all. What would be the whole expense of emigrating a family of a father, mother, and three children? The cost of placing them on the site of their future operations would be £40, and another £40 would be required to prepare a homestead and support them until their first harvest could place them in a position of independence. That was something like £15 a-head. Why had that scheme fallen through? The Chief Secretary would probably say because the Canadian Government refused to perform their part in the matter; but he was in a position to say that the offer of the Canadian Government remained the same. He was glad to see there had been a change of 1274 opinion with regard to Canada—Manitoba and the North-West. When he addressed the House last year he was fresh from the North-West territory, and he then represented that the climate was not of the character which some of his Friends appeared to think; and the best proof of the advantages the climate offered to the emigrant was the fact that lately, at a large speculation for the purchase of land belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company, the whole of the land had been bought up by speculators from the United States at a high price. He would have become a purchaser himself, so certain was he that the value of the land would increase; but he wanted to hold himself free from the suggestion that, in advocating emigration, he was doing so for his own interest. The 160 acres held out by the Canadian Government was almost side by side with the land of the Hudson Bay Company, which had brought in so large a number of speculators. The offer of the Canadian Government remained good, but the Imperial Government were unwilling to advance £15 a-head, which would enable the people to emigrate, if they were willing to do so, far better than the present scheme of the Government. He earnestly appealed to his hon. Friends beside him, and to hon. Members generally, to insist on hearing from the Government why something had not been done to send people to Manitoba and the North-West by means of this magnificent offer made by the Canadian Government. No part of this present scheme provided any land for the emigrants; they were to be sent out on the Government contributing a quota of the expense and the Unions giving the other quota, and then they were to be handed over to Mr. Tuke. Mr. Tuke deserved the highest commendation and respect; but in an important matter of this kind he certainly thought that 20,000 people ought not to be handed over to one individual, and that the Government ought to state what they proposed with regard to those people on their arrival in America. On a former occasion, when the question of emigration was discussed, the whole feeling of the Irish Members was in favour of America; but at that time this offer of the Canadian Government was not before them. It was before them now, and he urged them to give it their careful attention. The 1275 people of Ireland would rather become farmers than hewers of wood and drawers of water.

§ MR. A. M'ARTHUR
said, the subject of emigration was one in which he had taken a great interest for many years, and one about which he professed to know something. He was very glad to hear the hon. and gallant Member for Galway (Colonel Nolan) state that he had altered his views, and to find that the hon. Member for Galway City (Mr. T. P. O'Connor), who was formerly one of the strongest opponents of emigration, had also changed his view as the result of his experience in America; but while that hon. Member was in favour of emigration, he was in favour of it in a form which would be practically impossible. It was said that the people must have money in their pockets, but it was utterly impossible for any Government to undertake to do that. He had never heard of a single instance of a man going to any of the Colonies who had not succeeded, except by his own fault; in other words, if the man was steady and industrious he was sure to succeed. He had met hundreds and thousands of them who had formerly been steeped in poverty in Ireland, but who had gone out to Canada, Australia, and other Colonies, and were now not only in comfort, but prosperous. The reclamation of waste land in Ireland had not been attempted, because the reclamation would cost more than the value of the land, and why hon. Members opposite opposed emigration he could not understand. He could understand their opposing enforced emigration; but there was nothing of that in this proposal, and it was a mystery to him why they should oppose a gift offered by the Government. The Government simply offered £5 a-head to those disposed to emigrate; that was a free gift, and it would enable the people to pass from poverty to richness, and make a home for themselves in a new and happy country. He believed there were a great many people in Ireland who were anxious to get away, and he did not think hon. Members who opposed the scheme fully understood that. The proposal was a very admirable one, and if Irish Members defeated it they would seriously regret their action. Just after the Irish Famine, he returned from Australia, and when he found £7,000,000 granted to save the 1276 people, his first feeling was that that step was a mistake. Those people ought to have been sent out to Canada or other Colonies; but they had been kept at homo and pauperized. If the same principle was adopted in this case the consequences would be more serious. Emigration was the only remedy for the condition of the Irish people, and he heartily hoped it would succeed. He wished the Government could see their way to make a larger allowance.

§ MR. M'COAN
said, he had listened to the observations of the hon. Member for Dungarvan (Mr. O'Donnell), and it was possible after that speech that anything he might say might expose him to misunderstanding, but at that risk he intended to vote for this clause; for, if he had wanted an argument, he should have found it in the speech of the hon. Member for Sligo (Mr. Sexton), who reminded the Committee that as the outcome of the evictions of the last two years there wore thousands of families in the streets and slums living as best they could. The hon. Member also reminded the Committee that the proposal of the Government was to provide the means of emigrating 4,000 families to better homes with a prosperous future, and if there had been no argument beyond that it would have decided him to vote for this clause. It was idle to talk of emigration on a grander scale, and of the reclamation of waste land. Where would the people be while the land was being reclaimed? Dead or worse; and he thought when the Government offered £100,000 which would be at once available for the alleviation of this distress, it was a poor Irish patriot who turned against such a proposal. He had never given a vote against his conscience; and if this vote were to entail all the consequences with which he had been threatened he should vote for the clause.

§ MR. DALY
said, this was a question upon which he could not vote without explaining his action. First of all, he did not believe that this was in any sense a wholesale emigration scheme, neither did he believe it was in any way expatriation. He recognized as an essential fact that on the coast of Ireland there had been living, and were now living, a number of families who had for years and years led a miserable famished life to whom this scheme would be a great 1277 advantage. But while he said that he was not disposed to vote for the clause as it was introduced by the Bill. First of all, he considered that the sum per head was ridiculously inadequate; and, secondly, he considered that there were no details of the scheme given which would lead him to expect that the scheme was one that would be fairly satisfactory in its results. The Chief Secretary said this was only an outline, and if he was to vote on a question of such importance as this he wanted that outline filled in. He wanted to know where the emigrants were to be planted, and what they were to do when they landed? He was the last man in the world to ask that his countrymen should be spoon-fed, or to say that an Irishman had not the power to put himself right as well as any other man; but here there were a number of people steeped in misery who, by reason of past British misgovernment, had not the energy to right themselves. He, therefore, could not vote for the scheme of this clause, which simply meant the deportation of a lot of people in misery in Ireland to misery in America or Canada. The hon. Member (Mr. Blake) had called attention to a scheme proposed two years ago by the Government of Canada, and he himself had within the last quarter of an hour received an assurance that the promoters of that plan were willing to adhere to and fulfil it. He wished the Government to realize for a moment that it was not the desire of the great bulk of the Irish Representatives to have a wholesale or general emigration; but they accepted the fact that there were about 17,000 of Irish people to whom it would be a great charity and an act of positive justice to be enabled to emigrate. The hon. Member for Waterford (Mr. Blake) estimated the cost of emigrating a family of five people at about £75 or £80; of that amount £35 or £40 was wanted for the appropriation of land. Those figures were the estimate of the Canadian Government. Another feature which might interest political economists was that the pecuniary aid was, according to this proposal, to be given by the Imperial Government in the form of an advance. That plan he thought eminently worthy of the attention of the Executive. He had the greatest possible respect for the antecedents and the present position of 1278 Mr. Tuke; but he should decline to commit his countrymen to any one individual, no matter how magnificently he might give assistance. The persons intrusted with the conduct of this scheme ought to be persons responsible to Parliament, whom the Representatives of Ireland could call to account for any mistakes that might occur. The Government had before them a cut-and-dried plan by which, if they took it up wholly or in part, the people would not be thrown either in America or Canada without any possible means of subsistence; and he joined with the hon. Member for Waterford in urging this plan upon the attention of the Government.

§ MR. LEAMY
said, he had not spoken on the Arrears Bill, nor did he wish to delay it by a single moment; but he was very much surprised this morning to find that the Arrears Bill was not only an Arrears Bill, but an Emigration Bill. He was amongst those who opposed the Emigration Clause in the Land Act of last year, and he was just as much opposed to this clause. The right hon. Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) and the Chief Secretary, and the hon. Member for Carnarvonshire (Mr. Rathbone), had each favoured this scheme; but had admitted that there were not too many people in Ireland at this moment. If that was so, how could the Government expect any Irishman to support a scheme for sending the people away? There would be an argument for this scheme if it could be said that the population was excessive; but no such argument was advanced. It was said that certain districts were over-populated, and that, of course, was the fact. The Chief Secretary last night had referred to certain Unions, and had pointed out the low valuation in those Unions. The right hon. Gentleman took Galway and Mayo; but why did he not state the valuation per head in Meath County? That would have provided a startling contrast, for, although there were overcrowded districts in Mayo and Galway, there were in other counties means capable of supporting half the people of Mayo, Galway, or Donegal. There was one other remarkable thing about this discussion—on no single occasion had anything been heard of the British taxpayer, yet, when the Arrears Bill was introduced and discussed, reference was made over 1279 and over again to the burden which would fall on the British taxpayer, although, as a matter of fact, to meet the arrears in Ireland not a single penny would come from the British taxpayer; every penny would come from the Irish Fund. But although the British taxpayer could only be touched in the event of that Fund failing, hon. Members had protested on behalf of the British taxpayer. But the moment money was to be provided to get rid of the Irish people nothing was heard of the British taxpayer. Hon. Members were perfectly willing to spend the money of the British taxpayer to destroy the liberties or to emigrate the Irish people. In 30 years 3,000,000 of people had gone away from Ireland. Had not enough gone? When the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford admitted that enough had gone, and that there were not too many people in Ireland, ought not the Irish Representatives to resist a further drain? The Government had been asked, before sending people away from Ireland, to take other means of finding them occupation in their own country; and when they found a great many of the people of Ireland were poor, although the population was not excessive, the Government brought forward a scheme, not for remedying their poverty, but for emigrating them. If this were the case of England, the Government would say there was not a man too many in England, and they must develop English resources for the benefit of the people. That would be an ambitious project. But when the amount of money spent on police and military in Ireland for the last 30 years, and in assisting landlords to evict tenants, was considered, it would be seen that an amount had been spent which would have developed the resources of the country, and it would have been unnecessary to get rid of these people living in congested districts. If the promoters of the clause could say there were too many people in Ireland, however much he might be inclined to question that statement, he might have regarded that as some solid ground of argument; but it was admitted that there were not too many, and the only difficulty was that in some districts the population was too dense, while in others it was too sparse. Under these circumstances, it could not be ex- 1280 pected that the Irish Members could support this scheme. He did not care how many Catholic clergymen in Ireland were in favour of emigration. There were hundreds of Irish people in America who never saw a priest from one year to other; and he hoped the clergymen who recommended emigration would take the advice of his hon. Friend (Sir Joseph M'Kenna) and go themselves.

§ MR. BIGGAR
said, he was struck by the great anxiety exhibited by Englishmen to depopulate Ireland. During the last 30 or 35 years the population had fallen from 8,000,000 to 5,000,000. It was one of the boasts of France that the people, although they had greater comfort than the people of England, increased slowly, while the English increased rapidly. The hon. Gentleman who made a comparison between the two countries forgot that that argument dealt with frightful force against mis-government in Ireland. Even if there was reason to suppose that the Irish people desired to emigrate, this scheme was one which could not be agreed to. A proposal to give £5 a-head to persons disposed to take advantage of this Bill was one whose practical effect would be this—the only people who would apply and would get assistance would be those who could really emigrate at their own expense, and the result would be that the very class whom it might be desired to emigrate—namely, those who were in poverty—would be left. The people who did not deserve the grant would get it, and the class who it was alleged were entitled to assistance under this Bill would not get any assistance at all. It was idle to talk of assistance in the way of subscriptions, or in the way of a grant from the Poor Law Guardians, in order to assist emigration. A thoroughly worthless set of people would get assistance, and no bonâ fide result would accrue to the class for which this clause was intended, and there would be a repetition of what had occurred under all emigration schemes—namely, that the class who would emigrate would be adventurers—the strong and the healthy could very well make a living in their own country—while the sickly and the weak and the non- adventurers would stay at home, and thus continue to be a source of difficulty. If emigration was to take place at all, no money should be given 1281 except to those who were actually paupers, and charge able on the rates; and then, if there was a sufficient amount given, there would be some opportunity for those whom it was desired to benefit to make an improvement in their position.

§ Question put.

§ The Committee divided:—Ayes 3S5; Noes 20: Majority 335.—(Div. List, No. 288.)

§ And it being ten minutes before Seven of the clock, the Chairman left the Chair to report Progress; Committee to sit again this day.

§ The House suspended its Sitting at Seven of the clock.

§ The House resumed its Sitting at Nine of the clock.

§ MR. T. P. O'CONNOR
said, the discussion which had taken place on the principle of the clause that day was so complete and exhaustive that he did not intend to trouble the Committee with more than a few words on the Amendment of which he had given Notice in respect of the first of these Emigration Clauses. He asked the Committee to add to that clause words which would have the effect of restricting its operation to a period of one year. He proposed to insert words that would make the clause run thus— From and after the passing of this Act during the period of one year the Board of Guardians of any union in Ireland, and so forth; and his reason for moving this Amendment was that Irish Members on those Benches wished to make the proposal of the Government purely experimental. They wished the scheme of the Government to be fairly tried; but they regarded it as an experiment, and it was only on the ground that it was an experiment on a large scale that they could abstain from acts of hostility towards it. He did not know what the intentions of the Government were with regard to the period during which the clause was to operate; but, from the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary and other hon. Gentlemen on the opposite side of the House, he presumed that the scheme was of an experimental character, and that therefore he should be falling in 1282 with the views of the Government in proposing his Amendment.

§ Amendment proposed to the New Clause, line 1, after the word "Act," to insert the words "during the period of one year."—[Mr. T. P. O'Connor.)

§ Question proposed, "That those words be there inserted."

§ MR. TREVELYAN
acknowledged that the hon. Member for Galway had stated his views with a brevity which quite bore out his declaration made earlier in the day that he had no wish to delay the Bill. He should be correspondingly brief in stating the views of the Government. Her Majesty's Government did not consider this to be an experimental proposal in the sense explained by the hon. Member; so far from that, they regarded it as the most elaborate and complete scheme of emigration which had ever been embodied in a Bill laid before the House of Commons. The two measures referred to in the clause—"The Poor Law Amendment (Ireland) Act, 1849," and the Emigration Clause in "The Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881"—were by no means so elaborate or complete as this proposal. In the opinion of the Government, there was no system, under which public funds were lent or expended, and under which public services were performed, that was so thoroughly understood, and whose conditions were so well known, as the system of emigration, and especially of emigration from Ireland. With regard to the proposed Amendment, the Government felt that it would be extremely dangerous to limit the expenditure of this £100,000 to one year, and that the restriction suggested could not be advantageously adopted. They were satisfied that the details of the scheme were healthy and sound, and they would be glad to take the opinion of the Committee upon the subject of the hon. Member's proposal if he thought it necessary to give them an opportunity of doing so.

§ Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

§ Clause agreed to, and added to the Bill.

§ New Clause:—

§ (Orders for payment of loans may he made by Local Government Board.)

§ "If at any time the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland certify that any sum remains 1283 due to them from the Board of Guardians of any union on account of any loan or advance made under this Act, and is then payable to the Commissioners, the Local Government Board shall, by order under their seal, require the Guardians of the Union to pay the sum so certified, and shall send copies of such order to the Board of Guardians and to the treasurer of the Union; and thereupon the treasurer of the Union shall, out of any money then in his hands to the credit of the Guardians, or if such money is insufficient for the purpose, then out of all moneys subsequently received by him on account of the Guardians, pay over the amount mentioned in the order to the Commissioners of Public Works. The Guardians of the Union shall debit the several electoral divisions with such proportions of that sum as may be payable by such electoral divisions respectively,"—(Mr. Trevelyan,)

§ —brought up, and read the first time.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause be read a second time."

§ Motion agreed to.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause be added to the Bill."

§ COLONEL COLTHURST
said, he looked upon the system of rating proposed in this clause as an evil one. At the present time Union rating obtained in Ireland for everything except outdoor relief, and he was quite unable to see why the rating under this clause should be upon the electoral divisions. He begged to move an Amendment, the adoption of which would prevent the introduction of what he regarded as a bad system.

§ Amendment proposed, In line 12, after the word "several," leave out to the word "with," in order to insert"Unions."—(Colonel Colthurst.)

§ Question proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Clause."

§ MR. HEALY
said, he was not in favour of either Union or electoral district rating. He believed in national rating in matters of this kind. While the argument in the abstract was in favour of the proposal of the hon. and gallant Member for Cork County, he did not think that practically it mattered much which of the two former systems was adopted, because he believed under either of them landlords who had treated their tenants harshly would come in for a considerable portion of the mulct for taking those tenants elsewhere.

1284

MR. MACARTNEY
said, he hoped the Government would adhere to the clause as it stood. This was not a Poor Law Bill, and a Poor Law rating ought not to be inserted in it.

§ MR. O'SHAUGHNESSY
pointed out that all electoral division ratings had in process of time become Union ratings. If this matter were to be treated de novo emigration rates would be made Union rates. He ventured to say there were strong reasons for making it a Union rating instead of an electoral division rating, among others that the persons who represented the electoral divisions would probably oppose the scheme, and very likely be successful in their endeavours to prevent any money being spent under the clause. Indeed, the Committee might be assured that any attempt to raise money for emigration would be opposed by the members of the electoral division; whereas, if the cost were spread over the whole Union, the opposition would neither be so violent nor so concentrated. It should be borne in mind with regard to Ireland that while the Union rate was administered liberally, the electoral division rates were always administered in a niggardly manner, and very often to the destruction of the plan which the Legislature had in view. For these reasons, and for the purpose of giving the clause fair play, he trusted the Government would allow the rate to be made a Union rate.

§ MR. O'KELLY
said, he thought the facts of the case were opposed to the arguments of the hon. Member who had just sat down. He believed that if a Union rating were adopted every representative on the Board would be opposed to the clause being put into operation. Hon. Members would know that the opposition to divisional rating would come from one or two persons directly interested, and these men would be voted down by the large majority of the Guardians; but if the rating were spread over the whole Union, he said there was very little doubt that the plan would be completely unworkable, because the men who were not interested in getting rid of these people would unquestionably vote against it at the Board meetings of the Guardians. Therefore, if the Government wished to see the clause work well, they should hold to their proposal in its present form.

1285

§ MR. BIGGAR
said, he thought that this scheme of emigration ought to be paid for by the district from which the persons who emigrated had been driven. The argument of the hon. Member for Limerick (Mr. O'Shaughnessy) appeared to him to be untenable and entirely outside the question. Every member of the Union would vote against the scheme, well knowing that a large portion of the cost would fall upon himself.

§ Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

§ Motion made, and Question, "That the Clause be added to the Bill," put, and agreed to.

§ New Clause:—

§ (Grants in aid of Emigration.)

§ "The Treasury may from time to time authorize the Commissioners of Public Works to make, subject to the regulations of the Treasury, grants to the Board of Guardians of any union for emigration purposes.

§ "The moneys so granted shall he applied by the Board of Guardians, in accordance with the said regulations for the same purposes as moneys borrowed by them under the provisions of this Act.

§ The sums granted by the Commissioners of Public Works shall not exceed one hundred thousand pounds in the whole, and the sums granted to any Board of Guardians shall not exceed five pounds to each person for whose emigration provision is made by such Board of Guardians out of moneys levied or borrowed by them, or otherwise at their disposal, for emigration purposes.

§ "Such grants shall only be made to the Boards of Guardians of the unions mentioned in the Second Schedule to this Act, and of such other unions as may from time to time be settled by the Local Government Board, with the consent of the Lord Lieutenant: Provided that such unions are situate wholly or in part in some county specified in the Schedule to the public notice issued by the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland on the twenty-second day of November, one thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine, that is to say, the Counties of Donegal, Clare, Cork (West Biding), Kerry, Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, and Sligo.

§ "Each grant shall only be made on the recommendation of the Lord Lieutenant, stating that the Lord Lieutenant is satisfied that the Guardians of the Union are unable, without unduly burdening the ratepayers, to make adequate provision, by borrowing under the powers conferred upon them by this Act, or otherwise, for the emigration purposes of the union, and that proper arrangements have been made for securing the satisfactory emigration of such persons.

§ "The money required for the purpose of grants under this section shall be paid by the Land Commission to the Commissioners of Public Works, and shall be part of the liabilities of the Land Commission, and be a charge 1286 primarily upon the Irish Church Temporalities Fund, and, subject thereto, on the Consolidated Fund, in such manner as may be provided by Parliament,"—(Mr. Trevelyan,)

§ —brought up, and read the first time.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause be read a second time."

§ Motion agreed to.

§ Amendment proposed, In line 3, after the word "union," to insert the words "or such other body or persons as the Lord Lieutenant may approve."—(Colonel Colthurst.)

§ Question proposed, "That those words be there inserted."

§ MR. HEALY
suggested that the best way of carrying out the view of the hon. and gallant Member opposite was to make the scheme workable under the Emigration Clause of the Act of last year. He believed that clause of last year gave the Commissioners power to enter into agreements with any person or persons having authority to contract on behalf of "any State or Colony or public body or public Company," with whose constitution and security the Land Commission might be satisfied. He thought that if the two clauses were made to read as one clause, any power under the one being exercisable under the other, the object which the hon. and gallant Member had in view would be best attained.

§ MR. TREVELYAN
said, he was glad to think there was a desire to enlarge the clause in this direction. He had recently considered the question very carefully, and, on the whole, had come to the conclusion that to adopt the words of Clause 30 of the Land Act would be too wide for the present purposes. The proper way to meet the case would be to give the Lord Lieutenant larger discretion, and he would be inclined to alter the rules which came afterwards to meet the Amendment which he would now propose. The Government would be willing to accept the words of the hon. and gallant Gentleman (Colonel Colthurst), "or such other body of persons as the Lord Lieutenant may approve, "inserting" and on such terms," after the word "persons." That would give the Lord Lieutenant the requisite latitude which would be required in order to secure the satisfactory operation of the clause.

1287

§ Amendment proposed to the proposed Amendment, to insert after the word "persons," the words "and on such terms."—(Mr. Trevelyan.)

§ Question, "That those words be inserted in the proposed Amendment," put, and agreed to.

§ Question, "That the words, as amended, be there inserted," put, and agreed to.

§ THE ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR IRELAND (Mr. W. M. JOHNSON)
said, there wore two consequential Amendments necessary upon the adoption of the last Amendment. The next paragraph now ran— The moneys so granted shall be applied by the Board of Guardians in accordance with the said regulations for the same purposes as moneys borrowed by them under the provisions of this Act. He would move the omission of the words "by the Board of Guardians," and "by them."

§ Question, "That those words be omitted," put, and agreed to.

§ THE ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR IRELAND (Mr. W. M. JOHNSON)
proposed to omit from the next paragraph the words "to any Board of Guardians," and "by such Board of Guardians."

§ Question, "That those words be omitted," put, and agreed to.

§ MR. HEALY moved to leave out "five pounds" and insert "ten pounds." Personally, he had offered no opposition to this clause in Committee, because he considered that the British Government, having made Ireland a very miserable place, ought to do something to give some of the people in the country a chance of escaping from their misery. He, however, thought that £5 per head was an utterly inadequate sum to advance for the purposes of emigration; £5 would not pay a man's passage across the Atlantic, much less bring him from the place he resided in the country to the port of embarkation. Was an emigrant to remain in New York or the seaport at which he arrived; was he to be tumbled down like a bale of merchandize? If the Government had the welfare of these unfortunate people at heart they would do something more than give them the mere price of their 1288 passage on board ship. The interests of the Government and of the landlords alone were considered in this clause. The clause sought to ease the landlords and the Government of the pressure of a certain number of hungry mouths in a district, altogether without reference to the future fortune of those individuals. He admitted there were certain parts of Galway and Mayo which were congested—where there were more people than the soil could maintain. To get rid of the surplus population, the British Government now proposed to advance £5 per head. The Committee had not to look to the interest of the British Government and the Irish landlord, but they had to consider the future happiness and fortune of Her Majesty's subjects. He would like to see the Chief Secretary for Ireland setting out to America with £5 in his pocket; he was afraid that the right hon. Gentleman would not have a very extensive dressing case; £5 would not purchase a man's ticket to America; and, therefore, if the people were to be induced to leave the country, £10 was a sufficiently small sum. Take the case of a mother of a family, who was, perhaps, desirous of following her husband. She might have children of two or three years of age, who would not be allowed to travel free. On account of the smallness of the grant, this unfortunate person would be prevented from reaching her husband or her friends on the other side of the Atlantic. He supposed the word "person" meant an adult person? ["No!"] Still his objection would remain—namely, that £5 was wholly insufficient; £10 was not too much to advance for the purpose; and, therefore, he would move to leave out "five pounds," and insert "ten pounds."

§ Amendment proposed, in line 9, to leave out the word "five," in order to insert the word"ten."—(Mr. Healy.)

§ Question proposed, "That the word 'five' stand part of the Clause."

§ MR. RATHBONE
said, the object of the Government appeared to him to be a wise one; it was to induce others to engage in the work. Supposing it cost £7 or £9 to emigrate an adult person, £5 was to be provided by the Government, and the remaining sum was to be found either by the Guardians or from 1289 private sources. He quite agreed with the hon. Member (Mr. Healy) that it would be unwise to attempt emigration on so small a sum as £5; but he agreed in the proposal of the Government to limit the State grant to £5. The remaining amount would be found by someone or other.

MR. MACARTNEY
understood that the sum granted for the purposes of emigration would be first controlled by the Board of Guardians and afterwards by the Local Government Board and the Treasury. If that were the case, he did not see any danger in extending the amount of the Government grant. £5 was totally insufficient with which to emigrate anybody; it was not, as had been said, sufficient to pay the passage in the emigrant ship. Many of the emigrants had to travel long distances to the port of embarkation, and it was a very necessary thing that emigrants should not disembark as paupers. He approved of the proposal of the hon. Member for Wexford (Mr. Healy).

§ COLONEL COLTHURST
said, he thought it would be advisable that the Board of Works should have power to advance as much as £10. It was very necessary that the first of the emigrants should be emigrated comfortably. The success and comfort of the first batch would tend to induce others to avail themselves of this clause.

§ MR. GIBSON
said, it was a serious thing to attempt to interfere to any substantial extent with a financial operation proposed by the Government, because they might put the whole plan of the Government out of gear by interfering with the figure selected. He would have been satisfied if a higher figure had been selected. He, however, considered £10 might be an unreasonably large grant. He did not think it would be right to give the Board of Guardians a chance of making money out of such a transaction, and £10 would be a sum out of which they could make money. He believed that if £10 per head was advanced the Guardians could possibly keep a couple of pounds in their pockets out of the transaction. He would be glad if some figures were arrived at that would, however, pay a very great part of the expenses of emigration. £5 might be too low. He would be glad if something more were given subject to the limitation that the bulk 1290 should be given as a grant, something always being left to be made up by local effort. It was not well for a people that they should think they could get all they asked. Some room should be left for individual exertions; whether £5, £ 6, or £7 was given, he would always like, if feasible, to stop short of the whole sum required. He was not prepared to vote for such a great change as that proposed by the hon. Member for Wexford (Mr. Healy); but he would be pleased if the Government would intimate that they were prepared to increase the grant of £5.

§ MR. CROPPER
said, he was convinced private charity would go a long way to swell the Government grant, where no money could be raised by the emigrant himself. If public bodies and private donors were allowed to form the idea that all the cost of emigration would be defrayed by the State, very little would be given in other quarters. On the other hand, if it were made known that there was scope for private benevolence or for family assistance, he believed the gifts would be large. Everyone knew how much money had been sent from America for the purposes of emigration. He was surprised the other day to hear from a large shipowner that two-thirds of the tickets of a number of emigrants were sent from America, in addition to other money. He hoped the Government would adhere to their proposal of a grant of £5 per head.

§ MR. T. C. BARING
said, the hon. Gentleman (Mr. Cropper) had alluded to the very large amount of money which might be expected from private charity. In regard to that matter, he would like to refer the hon. Gentleman to an hon. Gentleman who sat near him (Mr. Rathbone). The hon. Member for Carnarvonshire, who had taken a very great interest in the emigration conducted by Mr. Take, had told the Committee how very ineffectual private charity had been so far. Emigration on a large scale could not be conducted with private contributions. He should be bound to vote, if there was a division, against the grant of £5, because Mr. Tuke's emigration, which was conducted on the most careful system, averaged between £6 10s. and £7 per head. If the Government saw their way to increase the grant to £7 or £7 10s., the Committee would have no 1291 reason to complain. Bather than have the grant £5, he would be inclined to go for the larger sum—£10—on the ground alleged by the hon. and gallant Member for County Cork (Colonel Colthurst). If there was to be emigration at all, it was eminently desirable that it should be successful. It was not advisable that persons who had been sent abroad should be able to write to their friends, telling them how uncomfortable they had been. If the Committee had no choice between £5 and £10, he should vote for the £10; but he would prefer that the grant should be £7 10s.

§ MR. RATHBONE
said, the emigration Mr. Tuke had conducted cost £6 5s. Though he admitted, if the Association had had more money at their disposal, they would have been able to have conducted the emigration more satisfactorily; he believed that with £7 per head they could have done the thing handsomely.

§ MR. HEALY
asked where the emigrants were sent to?

§ MR. RATHBONE
said, some were sent to the agricultural districts, and some to the manufacturing districts; in fact, they were sent wherever labour suitable for the families could be found. If Mr. Tuke's Association had had the assistance now offered by the Government, they could have emigrated, instead of 1,300, 5,000 or 6,000. He agreed with other hon. Gentlemen that it was most desirable that emigration should be carefully and well carried out; but he thought it would be admitted that it was not always by those who had most money that things were best done. If the Government were to give anything like £10, there would be a vast amount of jobbery, and the probability was that the emigrants would be worse off than if the fund was kept within moderate bounds. He did not at all wish to stop the liberality of the Government; but he would repeat that unless they evoked local interest and local aid emigration would not succeed.

§ MR. R. N. FOWLER
said, he thought that when emigrants arrived in a foreign land they should have at least £1 or £1 10s. in their pockets; and, therefore, he agreed with his hon. Friend (Mr. Baring) that £8 would be a more suitable grant for the Government to make than £5.

1292

§ COLONEL NOLAN
said, they were now discussing the case of only five Unions in Ireland. The observations of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), were totally unwarranted as regarded the character of the Poor Law Guardians of Ireland. The right hon. and learned Gentleman wished to throw a very large responsibility on the Guardians. He (Colonel Nolan) was acquainted with the circumstances of the Clifden Union. Many of the Guardians had to ride 30 miles to the Union-house, and, of course, they did not care to travel that distance very often. The effect of the clause would be that its administration would be left to five or six people who lived in the neighbourhood of the meeting-house, and the consequence would be that the whole scheme would fail. In the Clifden Union alone, in 1848 and 1819, between 5,000 and 10,000 people were starved to death because there were no people to administer the charity sent over to them, and he believed a similar state of things prevailed in other Unions. It was now proposed to throw the whole work of a big scheme upon a small body of men. He strongly objected to the principle laid down by the right hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. Gibson)—namely, that the scheme must be supplemented by local effort. The scheme must either be worked on Imperial principles—worked by some body in Dublin—or left to the charitable associations. The most sensible thing would be to omit £5, and insert £7. If the Government did that the scheme would be well done; but if they left it to the Boards of Guardians it would be badly done, while by the charitable associations it might be well done or ill done.

§ MR. THOMAS COLLINS
hoped the Government would not make the allowance £7. This was a grant in aid, and it was not desirable to give the whole amount required; therefore, he hoped the Government would adhere to their resolution.

§ MR. GREGORY
said, the hon. and gallant Member for Galway (Colonel Nolan) had really hit the difficulty, and that was that in working the Government scheme the Boards of Guardians would have to rely on extraneous assistance. The provision would not be self-acting, and the £5 could not be relied 1293 upon to provide the passage under these circumstances. He thought the Government would do well to consider whether they could not make their scheme sufficiently elastic to cover the emigration without relying upon foreign assistance by granting £7. That would not affect the total grant in any way; it would merely affect its distribution. The grant would remain at £100,000; but in order to make the scheme work it was absolutely necessary that there should be such powers of distribution as would render the grant sufficient without extraneous assistance.

§ MR. T. D. SULLIVAN
wished to know what the Government were going to do if they were disappointed with regard to voluntary assistance? He did not believe people in general would come to the assistance of the Government in this matter, the general idea being that when the Government put their hand to such a project they ought to be able to carry it through without assistance. He did not wish to facilitate the working of this provision at all; but he feared that if the Government did not get this additional money for the proper emigration of people they would then endeavour to emigrate the people on their own wretched £5. If this assistance did not come from the general public and the Boards of Guardians, what would the Government do then? Would they endeavour to emigrate the people on their wretched £5, and cast them like rubbish on the shores of America?

§ MR. TREVELYAN
I should require to hear a strong instance before I could feel justified in departing from the careful and matured scheme laid before us by the Local Government Board for Ireland. I say careful and matured scheme because, although this clause has recently appeared on the Paper, I know that the Local Government Board for Ireland have had the matter on their minds for a long time. The question is, whether this is to be a grant in aid to assist emigration, or whether it is to be a grant for the purpose of carrying out emigration. The object of the Government is not to deport the population of Ireland, but to encourage and render possible emigration from over-populated and suffering districts. It appears that if you assent to the principle that it is Government emigration solely, if you 1294 are to have a figure very nearly approaching what will cover the expense of transferring and supporting emigrants, you had better have a figure which will ensure that this expense shall be absolutely covered. In the opinion of the Government, to do that would be in the end demoralizing. You may be sure the districts never got into the state in which these districts are without someone being responsible for it. If you take Ireland round as a whole, you may judge that a very much smaller sum than £5 will encourage a great deal of emigration, for during the last 25 years hard-earned money of the ratepayers has been given in absolute aid of emigration by the Guardians themselves, and they have discovered in the course of those years that for £60,000 they could emigrate 18,000 people at a rate of £3 or £4 per head. If that is the amount of money which, taking Ireland as a whole, will induce people to emigrate, you may be pretty sure that there is no district in Ireland in which, if the choice is placed before the district whether it shall be depopulated of its supernumerary population with a grant of £5 a-head, or whether it shall retain those people, the choice will be to emigrate with the assistance offered. To give £10 would be altogether preposterous. £6 10s. or so is the average figure which covered the expense of emigration, which has been successfully carried out by an association of gentlemen, to whose exertions we have made frequent reference, and the Local Government Board themselves voted £8 as the outside figure which emigration, on a general scale, would require. This expression "per head" does not apply only to adults, but to the younger members of a family; and the association referred to calculated the expenses of an emigrated family at £40. Under these circumstances, the Government intend to stick to the figure of £5. Whatever the maximum is that is named, you may be sure that wherever a grant is given the maximum will have to be given. In regard to the Boards of Guardians, I rested the opinion of the Government very much on the great degree to which the rates will be swollen in the ensuing winter; and I showed that the expense of emigrating a person would be equal to that of maintaining him at the expense of the parish during the whole year. Under such pressure as that, we feel 1295 quite satisfied that the Guardians will meet the Government part-way; and it is needless to say that, unless they do meet the Government to this extent, the Government will not feel justified in giving money in aid of rates in any other shape but emigration. Under these circumstances, and as it is necessary, first, that the country should not be demoralized by too large a grant; and, next, that this grant, which is, after all, a very novel step for Parliament to take, should go as far as possible, the Government intend to stick to their figure.

§ MR. DALY
said, the Amendment proposed "not exceeding£10;" the amount would not necessarily reach £10. Under this Bill the Lord Lieutenant and the Local Government Board would have control over the emigration, and the amount of money advanced would depend entirely on their judgment. The Government calculated that 18,000 people could be exported for £60,000. There was no more melancholy recollection in the minds of the Irish people than the emigration which took place some years ago. He recollected the emigration from the city of Cork. With the means under the control of the Lord Lieutenant, assisted by the Boards of Guardians and Medical Inspectors of the Unions, and every facility for obtaining the most perfect information as to the exact cases of the people, he did think the Government ought to accept this Amendment. There was another feature in connection with this matter—there were some Gentlemen who wanted to take the minimum of £5; but they acknowledged that it was not sufficient. In plain words, they proposed to trust to Providence for the remainder; and he could only say that, without any disrespect to Providence, Providence heretofore had not been very kind to the emigrants. Any man with experience of Poor Law Guardians in Ireland would know that where the money had to come from the farmers' pockets it would be provided; but a good deal of the intent and meaning of this clause would fall to the ground if it depended upon supplementary aid from the Boards of Guardians. In the scheme for educating the children of Ireland the Boards of Guardians had ignored their duty, and persistently refused to give supplementary aid to national teaching. There was a great deal of truth in what tad been put forward by the hon. Mem- 1296 ber in regard to this scheme. If there was to be a scheme for emigration, it should be made acceptable to the country. The emigrants should be sent out under the control of the Local Government Board, made fairly comfortable, and provided, on their arrival in another country, with as much money in their pockets as would enable them to look about them.

§ MR. W. E. FORSTER
said, the hon. Member who had just spoken with much practical knowledge seemed to be afraid that if the small sum of £5 was taken the result would be that an attempt would be made to emigrate people solely on the £5. He himself should not support the Government at all if he had no confidence that the Lord Lieutenant would take care that there should be no emigration, with which the Government had anything to do, until he had obtained reasonable security that there would be provision that emigrants, when they arrived on the other side, should find employment; and he did not think that by narrowing the grant down to £5 any great risk was run. If the emigration was to be conducted with recklessness, power had better not be given to the Lord Lieutenant at all. Then the question was whether they should take £5, or £10, or some other sum. The Committee which Mr. Tuke formed had conducted emigration for something less than £7 a-head; and for that sum, not only was the passage provided, but the people were conducted to places where employment was found. He agreed with his right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary that on a large scale of emigration everything should be done by the Government. Mr. Tuke was no doubt able to make way with friends in America; but that could not be expected with regard to a large scheme. On the other hand, great saving might be expected in the actual cost of passage if a large number were taken. He imagined that the Local Government Board were not far off in their calculation that £8 would be as much as was necessary. Then came the question of the Government finding the whole money or not. He doubted whether it would succeed if it was purely a matter of the Government finding the whole money. It was not a mere question of money; there must be some voluntary or local help in the matter—some interest outside the Government— 1297 otherwise the emigration would be a job all over Ireland. The great check to the scheme being made a job would be that there was some local interest outside the Government. His experience was that, however much they might try to do the whole thing with official agency, they would be enormously helped by having some representation of voluntary bodies by their side who were interested in seeing that the work was well done. There was another reason. He thought the ratepayers ought not to be acquitted of all share in this matter; it ought to be brought rather strongly upon them, because it was a great boon to them that persons whom they would be obliged to support in the workhouses should be emigrated. Owners of property ought not to be relieved where the cost would fall heavily upon them, especially in those cases in which there were so many holdings under £5 upon which they paid the whole rates. It would be a great advantage to be freed from some of their expenses. He would rather they were not acquitted of all share in this matter; and he thought the scheme was more likely to succeed if the principle was adopted of the Government giving at the start two-thirds, at least, of the whole cost, and left the other third to be found elsewhere. It was not merely the Guardians who would find that; there were voluntary associations and individuals to be looked to, and it was much better that they should find the balance required. He would assist emigration in every way; be would consult the wishes of the individuals themselves, and ascertain what they thought. Everybody knew how liberal their relatives on the other side of the Atlantic were; and, though they might not be able to do much this year, he believed if these poor people knew that for £5 they would be able to go to America, their relatives would send money to them, and whenever that was done the scheme would be successful. If their friends sent money over to them it was tolerably certain that they were making arrangements at the same time by which the emigration would succeed. This was just one of those cases in which success was much more likely to be obtained by a grant in aid of a local effort than by the whole sum being given. He believed this experiment was likely to be successful; it was, after all, an. experiment, and he be- 1298 lieved it would be much better done on the principle of £5 than £10.

§ MR. HEALY
scarcely thought the right hon. Gentleman had read the whole clause when he said that the Lord Lieutenant would not give assistance unless other persons came forward, because the clause provided that the Lord Lieutenant was only to give £5 where the Guardians were unable to make any provision for emigration by borrowing. If so, the right hon. Gentleman's argument fell to the ground, because what then would become of his statement that the landlord and taxpayers should pay, seeing that the clause would never come into operation unless the Lord Lieutenant was satisfied that the Guardians were unable to borrow? The right hon. Gentleman also said the Lord Lieutenant would see that certain things were done. He was amazed at the multiplicity of the duties which the Lord Lieutenant had to discharge. He was to be the father of his people. Was the Lord Lieutenant neither to eat, nor drink, nor sleep? Was he to devote the whole of his time to looking after the wishes of the people? The Lord Lieutenant would perform his duties as all Lord Lieutenants had, in the most perfunctory fashion, and would simply sign warrants for sending these people to America, just as the right hon. Member for Bradford signed warrants for sending people to Kilmainham Gaol. This statement about the Lord Lieutenant was a little too thin. It made little matter to the British taxpayer what happened in this case. He proposed £10 because he found that in the Canadian scheme, if a man had £5, he would be able to get 160 acres of land on the other side; so that if the Government were so anxious for the welfare of the Irish people they could ensure the emigrants obtaining land whenever they went to Canada. If the Government had the future welfare of the Irish people at heart, why did they not adopt some such scheme as this? He should have thought it would have been better to have loyal men in Canada than dynamite agents in Pittsburg and New York. The present proposal would simply create Land Leaguers on the other side of the Atlantic, who would hate the Government equally well in Ireland or New York; and they would simply be encouraging additional agitation by sending out the Irish people under 1299 the present proposal. Those people would know under what circumstances they were emigrated, and they would blame the British Government for the conditions under which they were sent out, and they would be surrounded by inflammable materials in the shape of fellow - countrymen who held similar views. But if they sent a man to Canada he would be still under the Union Jack, and he would have 160 acres of land; and they were told that when they made a man a peasant proprietor they made him a Conservative. If the British Government were anxious for the well-being of these people he did not see why they should refuse to increase the amount for emigration in each case to £10. He did not see why they should refuse this, although he was, of course, certain they would, as he was perfectly well aware that it was impossible to get anything out of them but bullets and buckshot. The Government were lavish enough when it was a question of oppressing the Irish people—they were ready enough to put £180,000 on the taxes for police; but when they were asked to advance the material interests of the people nobody was more penurious, and they would not give more than £100,000 towards emigration, and this in spite of the fact that England made a very good thing out of Ireland. England robbed her of £2,000,000 a-year, and all she got back for it was the money which was spent in the country on the police and the soldiery. The Irish people did not get any benefit from English rule; and, that being so, when the Government were carrying out what was supposed to be such a philanthropic measure, why were they so mean about it? Why did they get so close and penurious? The Government must not suppose that these things were not taken note of in Ireland. They were taken note of, and they were taken to heart very much; and instead of doing any good by their emigration scheme, in his opinion they would only be emigrating their enemies to the place where they would have a fulcrum. These people could not work against the Government in Ireland, because they were disarmed, and the Government had their police about them; but when they were sent away to New York, or Pittsburg, or some other United States city, they joined O'Donovan Rossa's organization, 1300 or some other advanced political association, and became a part of those potent evils against which such frequent protests had been made. The Government were only postponing the evil day. There was a cancer in the West of Ireland, but the Government were creating a still greater one in America. These men they would be sending out to America would only be the pickets and drill-sergeants of future agitation.

§ MR. LONG
said, that, even if it had not been for the speech of the hon. Member who had just sat down, he should have voted for a larger sum than £5; but he felt he could not possibly go into the Lobby voting for a larger sum than £5 without giving his reasons for doing so. He did so because he could not believe that a scheme of emigration could be carried out successfully for so small a sum as £5, and because he believed it was no use legislating on a subject of such vast importance to the people of Ireland unless they did it in such a way as to make it successful. He ventured to think it would be better for the Committee to vote for the larger sum, even if they wore exceeding the amount necessary, than to vote for a small sum, at the risk of failure, in the expectation of obtaining local aid. He had had some experience in emigration matters, and he knew the difficulty of raising money for the purpose even amongst rich people. The right hon. Gentleman the late Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant said that the great reason for voting for the small sum was that they would be able to do more with it than they would be able to do with the larger sum. But he (Mr. Long) thought they had much better follow the advice of the late First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. W. H. Smith), and emigrate a less number in a successful way, rather than a large number with a chance of failure. He should rather have thought that £7 per head, which was the amount suggested by the hon. Member for Carnarvonshire (Mr. Rathbone)—who had had considerable experience in this matter—would have been a sufficient sum, still leaving a margin to the local authority to improve the position of the emigrants when they arrived at their new homes. He should have thought that £5 would have been too small a sum, and would imperil the position of the emigrants when they arrived out.

1301

§ MR. W. M. TORRENS
said, they had, in the first place, to consider economy in the Exchequer; but beyond this there were several other considerations. He had had the honour to be a Member of a Commission of Inquiry which sat some years ago to consider the condition of the West of Ireland, and he had acted on that Commission under a man whom hon. Gentlemen on the Front Opposition Bench could hardly disown—namely, the late Archbishop of Dublin (Dr. Whateley)—a political economist—although, perhaps, being a political economist was now-a-days no recommendation to a man. Dr. Whateley, however, besides being a political economist, was a great scholar and a Christian priest. The Archbishop, with regard to the incidence of taxation for the relief of the poor in the West of Ireland, it having been suggested that the burden should be placed upon the Unions and the electoral divisions which most required relief, had said to him, in his own idiomatic way—"Why, this is nothing less than offering a hungry dog a nip of his own tail;" and that saying, after a lapse of many years, still remained pungent and pointed. The very property which it was thought should be most burdened was that which was least able to bear the burden. If emigration was worth talking about and legislating for, it should be dealt with altogether nationally, and it ought not to be left to the most distressed localities to supply the means. Then the Government should bear in mind that there was another party to this transaction—that there was another thing to be considered—namely, the feeling of the community to whom it was proposed to send this pauperized population. The day would come, and that at no distant date, when both in the Colonies and in America there would be resistance to our throwing our waste labour upon them. Such a course was unworthy of a great nation like Great Britain—it was both injurious and impolitic. What ought to be done with these emigrants was to put something in their pockets, besides paying their passage money, to enable them to live for at least a year. [Laughter.] Hon. Members might laugh—this might seem very ridiculous to those who had never known what it was to want. If they were to send their surplus labour to the United States they must do so with unblinded eyes as to the consequences. He would 1302 not advert to the political consequences, because they had been dwelt on by the hon. Member (Mr. Healy) with the frankness that was characteristic of him. If he (Mr. Torrens) did so it would be said that it came from another spirit; but his contention was that they had no right, from the point of view of humanity and policy, to saddle a friendly State with the burden of supporting persons they were not aware would be able to provide for themselves in a short time. He agreed with the right hon. Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen) that it was better to provide for the emigration of a few respectably, than of a large number, and run the risk of having the reproach cast on them of sending out their surplus population to be a burden to other States.

§ Question put.

§ The Committee divided:—Ayes 230; Noes 58: Majority 172.—(Div. List, No. 289.)

§ MR. TREVELYAN
said, he wished to strike out all the words from the words "for whose" down to the word "purposes," in line 12, inclusive, so that the paragraph would conclude with the word "person."

§ Amendment proposed, to leave out all the words after the word "person," in line 10, to the end of the paragraph.—(Mr. Trevelyan.)

§ Amendment agreed to.

§ MR. TREVELYAN
said, he had another consequential Amendment in line 13—namely, to leave out "to the Boards of Guardians," and insert "for the benefit."

§ Amendment proposed, to leave out the words "to the Boards of Guardians," in line 13, and insert "for the benefit."—(Mr. Trevelyan.)

§ Amendment agreed to.

§ Amendment proposed, after the word "Unions," in line 14, to insert the words "or electoral divisions."—(Colonel Nolan.)

§ Amendment agreed to.

§ Clause, as amended, agreed to, and added to the Bill.

§ MR. GREGORY
said, the new clause he had to propose was perfectly voluntary in its character. Its object was to 1303 provide that when an arrangement had been made by which a tenant who was unable to pay his antecedent arrears agreed to give up his holding to the landlord, the landlord, in consideration of that, should forgive him his arrears, and the one year's rent to which the landlord was entitled under the Bill should be paid for the purpose of the emigration of such tenant. There wore two classes of small tenants in Ireland, the one having a little money, and being in consequence able to maintain them-"selves on their small holdings, the other having nothing but their small holdings to rely upon. This latter class, which it was proposed to relieve from their arrears, he said, would really be in no better position afterwards, if they remained on their holdings, than they were in at that moment. To these persons, therefore, emigration would, no doubt, be a great boon, and it was for the purpose of assisting them that he proposed the clause of which he had given Notice. It had been said that emigration, under the circumstances indicated, might be carried out by an arrangement between the landlord and tenant without reference to this Bill. He admitted that; but then the voluntary arrangement pre-supposed that the money should be paid in the first instance to the landlord, and he thought it would be much easier to intercept this than to recover it for the purpose intended when once it had been paid. On these grounds, he ventured to hope the clause would commend itself to the Committee.

§ New Clause:—

§ (Provision for Emigration.)

§ "When any tenant who is unable to pay his antecedent arrears shall have effected an arrangement with his landlord for the surrender of his holding, in consideration of a release from such arrears, with or without any further or other consideration, and with a view to his emigration, the Land Commission may make an order for the application of the money which would otherwise be payable to or for the benefit of such landlord to or for the purposes of the emigration of such tenant,"—{Mr. Gregory,)

§ —brought up, and read the first time.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause be road a second time."

§ MR. BIGGAR
said, he hoped the Government would not agree to this clause. A scheme was before the Com- 1304 mittee for which the Government were responsible, and he regarded the proposal of the hon. Member for East Sussex as tending to complicate the Government plan. He thought it more desirable to facilitate the progress of the Bill than to spend time in the discussion of these new proposals with regard to emigration.

§ MR. RATHBONE
said, it was not his intention to move the Amendment to the proposal of the hon. Member for East Sussex (Mr. Gregory) of which he had given Notice.

CAPTAIN AYLMER
said, he thought the hon. Member for Cavan (Mr. Biggar) had treated the Amendment before the Committee in a very extraordinary manner in asking that it should not be considered. In his opinion, the Amendment of his hon. Friend would do more for the cause of emigration in Ireland than the clause of the Government. They were told that the tenants were so attached to their wretched holdings that it was almost impossible to get them to leave them, notwithstanding that they could get no living out of them, however small the rents might be. Now, it was evident that the time when a tenant would be most likely to accept money for the purpose of emigrating was when he was brought face to face with his position, and that would be when he found he could not pay the one year's rent required of him under the Bill, and when, in consequence, there was nothing but eviction before him. It was then that, under the clause proposed by his hon. Friend, the Land Commissioners would say to him—"If, instead of forcing your landlord to evict you, you will make terms with him, and give up your holding, we will give you the amount of one year's rent, and the landlord will probably give you something more in order to assist you to emigrate." It appeared to him that opposition to this Amendment was inconsistent, because it was equivalent to saying that, while the tenant in arrear should be assisted who could find one year's rent, no assistance should be given to the tenant who could find no money at all. For these reasons, he hoped the Government would accept the clause proposed by his hon. Friend.

§ MR. TREVELYAN
said, if this Amendment had stood alone as the only proposal with regard to emigration before the Committee, it would undoubtedly 1305 have been discussed with considerable interest. But the Committee had now been engaged for the greater part of two days in discussing a rather comprehensive scheme for emigration, which scheme had become part of the Bill. He pointed out that the emigration proposal of the Government was quite a distinct matter from the proposal to keep the tenant in his holding by the payment of his arrears; but the Amendment of the hon. Member for East Sussex mixed these two things together, and, to a certain extent, confused them in a manner which the Government regarded as highly inconvenient. Again, it appeared to him that the Amendment did not enter sufficiently into detail. How was the money to be paid over for the purpose of emigration; who was to be responsible for seeing that it was applied to that purpose? The Amendment undoubtedly represented the good will and intentions of the hon. Gentleman opposite, and he was bound to acknowledge that it was highly honourable to him to propose a method of furthering emigration which would have come within the scope of the Bill; but, the Government scheme having now been adopted, he trusted he would not feel it necessary to press the matter to a division.

§ MR. J. LOWTHER
said, he differed from the right hon. Gentleman as to the opinion he had expressed, that the hon. Member for East Sussex had mixed up the question of arrears with the question of emigration. But even if he had mixed the two questions together, he was bound to say that his hon. Friend would have been only a copyist in so doing, since the admixture of these two undoubtedly distinct questions had been initiated by Her Majesty's Government, by the introduction of these emigration proposals into a measure professing to deal exclusively with the question of arrears. The charge, however, could not be justly brought against his hon. Friend. He hoped the Government would reconsider the apparently hostile attitude which they had assumed towards the Amendment, because it was certainly in the public interest that any money which had to be paid by the taxpayer or from the Irish Church Fund, which was under the custody of Parliament, should be expended in a manner that would most conduce to the public advantage

1306

§ MR. GREGORY
thought the right hon. Gentleman had scarcely met the point of his Amendment. However, after what had been said, he supposed he must consign it to the limbo of good intentions, and ask permission to withdraw.

§ Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

§ New Clause:—

§ (Exemption in respect of public charges upon arrears of rent extinguished.)

§ "Any person otherwise liable to pay any tithe rent-charge, quit-rent, county cess, or poor rate which shall have accrued or been assessed upon any land in respect of which any arrears of rent shall be released and extinguished, and shall not be covered by the payments provided in respect of arrears of rent by this Act, shall be exempt from the payment of such tithe rent-charge, quit-rent, county cess, or poor rate for the period for which such arrears shall be released or extinguished; and, where any such rent-charge, quit-rent, county cess, or poor rate shall have been paid by such person, he shall be entitled to recover the same from the authority to whom such payment shall have been made,"—(Mr. Gregory,)

§ —brought up, and read the first time.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause be read a second time."

§ Motion agreed to.

§ Amendment proposed, in lines 1, 5, and 7, after the word "rent-charge," to insert the words "income tax."—[Dr. Lyons.]

§ Amendment agreed to.

§ Clause, as amended, agreed to, and added to the Bill.

§ Amendment proposed, In Clause 15, page 8, line between "same" and "every," insert "the collector shall be paid by the Land Commission such remuneration not exceeding one shilling in the pound of his collection as the Land Commission with the consent of the Treasury may determine, and the Clerk of the Union may be paid such remuneration (if any) as the Land Commission may with the like consent determine."—(Mr. Solicitor General for Ireland.)

§ Amendment agreed to.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the following Schedule be added to the Bill:"—

Second Schedule.
Unions.
Belmullet	Clifden
Newport	Oughterard
Swinford

—(Mr. Trevelyan,)

1307

§ Question put, and agreed to.

§ Question, "That the Bill, as amended, be reported to the House," put, and agreed to.

§ Question, "That the Chairman do now leave the Chair," put, and agreed to.

MR. GLADSTONE
I think it is the general wish of the House that we should now proceed to read this Bill a third time. In making that Motion, Sir——

§ MR. SPEAKER
The first Question to be put is, "That the Report be now considered."

§ Question put, and agreed to.

MR. GLADSTONE
In making the Motion that this Bill be now read the third time, I believe I need not detain the House for more than, perhaps, five minutes. I believe we are all of opinion that the points in this Bill have been thoroughly sifted, and indeed exhausted, by repeated discussions, and there are only two matters on which I will make so much as a single remark. This I do mainly in the interest of the future. The first of these is that this Bill is capable of being regarded in more lights than one, and that it is most important for the interest of the future that it should be regarded in its true light. It may be regarded as a Bill passed for the relief of distress; it may be regarded as a Bill for the prevention of evictions; and it may be regarded finally—and this I conceive to be the true character of the Bill, and it certainly has been the determining motive with the Government in proposing it—it may be regarded as a means of enabling a large portion of the poorest of the Irish peasantry to obtain, if they see cause, access to the Land Court. With respect to the first of these—namely, the relief of distress, it will hardly be said that that will be a justifying motive for the Bill. In fact, it is clear it could not be a justifying motive for the Bill, and if it were to be recognized as a justifying motive, the precedent would be one of very great danger. With respect to the prevention of eviction, and removing a cause of temptation to evict, that undoubtedly is a grave and serious cause. It is also one rather special to the present time, and it is one which, I think, may fairly be considered as ope- 1308 rating, to a certain extent, on the minds of the Government and of the House in passing this Bill. I wish to record on the part of the Government—and I hope I may say on the part of the House—that the main cause for passing this Bill is in order to open a way for the poorest portion of the tenantry of Ireland to those adjustments of rent which have been found in many cases to be necessary, even in regard to the less needy part of the tenantry, and which are essentially connected with the policy of this legislation for the pacification and contentment of Ireland. I wish this to be recorded, not only because it is true, but because it is most important this should be borne in mind, lest the example of a public grant given for the relief of individuals in their difficulty should be treated as a precedent in cases where the determining motives which I have described do not apply. I do not feel I am now speaking in the interest of the Bill, or of the Government, but in a common and public interest, because I think it must be the desire of all, whatever view we take of this particular measure—-whether we are opposed to it, or whether we are convinced of its necessity for the well-being of Ireland—it must be our earnest desire that in the interest of Ireland, as well as of the country at large, it should not unduly, and without warrant, be made a precedent for the future in circumstances that are not paralleled. The only other remark I wish to make is this—and I cannot help thinking it is one which ought to weigh upon the minds of Members of this House. This Bill has been largely criticized and steadily opposed, and the Government have never denied that any such measure is essentially open to serious criticism. We have never for a moment kept back the fact that in our view, as well as in the view of others, the objections to such a measure are very grave; but we have urged that the reasons in its favour are so much more grave as greatly to outweigh the objections. I do not wish to dilate on that point, but what I do wish to point out is this—that even among those who have opposed the Bill few indeed have alleged that it is not necessary for Parliament to pass a measure for the liquidation of arrears. That admission I will not say has been universal, but it has been general. I should find it very difficult 1309 to refer to any speaker holding a prominent position in this House who has gone the length of maintaining the broad assertion that we could, either in policy or in justice, go on without proposing some effective measure for the settlement of this question. Well, now, if that be so, what is my own proposition—and I think I may say my own? It is this—that there is no serious plan for the settlement of arrears before the House upon any basis excepting that which is embodied in the Bill of the Government. It is quite true that some Gentlemen of great weight, and having a great title to authority, and who, sitting on our own side of the House, have given us valuable support in measures relating to Ireland, have proposed a much larger scheme than ours for dealing with arrears—a scheme which, if it had been adopted, would have made the gift to the tenantry not less extensive than that which we propose to give, and would, at the same time, have made a loan to the tenants of Ireland of another sum still larger, and which would, in fact, have had a much larger operation than hon. Members contemplate. I think the opinion of the House has been made clear that a measure of that scale could not be adopted. I have carefully watched the speeches which have been delivered from the opposite side of the House on this subject, and I do not think that a single speaker has committed himself to the proposition that a measure purporting to advance probably £6,000,000 of public money—namely, £2,000,000 in the shape of gift, and £4,000,000 in the shape of loan—for the settlement of these arrears was a measure which Parliament would be justified in adopting. So far as these declarations go, hon. Gentlemen opposite have carefully abstained from committing themselves to what I may call a gigantic proposition of that character. They have spoken in general terms of the basis of loan as preferable to the basis of gift; but they have never pointed out any plan which they have in their minds, and upon which they proposed to found the settlement of the question. They have had before them a Bill which mapped out a plan, and I believe it is generally admitted a not impracticable plan of settlement. They have taken objection, and expressed preference in the abstract for a different 1310 basis for the measure; but they have placed no such measure or given the outline of any such measure before the House. I am not making these observations as a charge, but as a matter of fact—as an important portion of the facts of the present situation. You have before you the grave and admitted necessity for proceeding with some measure adequate to the necessities of the case, and, practically, you have before you no rival or competing plan. That there is a necessity for dealing with the question I think no Gentleman has felt himself allowed by his understanding or his conscience to deny. That being the case, I cannot help expressing the respectful hope that this House will, by a decisive majority, recognize the great necessity of offering to Ireland this great and important boon.

§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read the third time."—(Mr. Gladstone.)

§ SIR HERBERT MAXWELL
said, he rose to move that the Bill be read a third time that day two months. He felt justified in doing so by the unusual character of the measure. He did not underrate the inconvenience that would arise if opposition was offered to every measure that was considered by that House at every stage; but there was involved in this Bill so sharp a departure from those principles upon which the wealth and prosperity of this country had been built up, and by which its social and commercial integrity had been secured, that he was justified in asking the House even at the eleventh hour to reject the Bill. It had been said the Conservative Party were always ready to vote for coercion, and always opposed to remedial measures. He himself only gave one vote in support of the Prevention of Crime Bill, and that was a vote in favour of the Amendment extending the Alien Act to England. So far as he personally was concerned, therefore, he was not open to the charge which was made against his Party generally. He would endeavour to compress his remarks in the smallest compass; if he had had an opportunity of rising to move the rejection of the Bill at this stage at an earlier hour of the day, he would have felt justified in entering into some detail as to the reasons which induced him to object to the Bill. His 1311 objection to the Bill was fourfold. He objected to its origin; he objected to its provisions; he objected to the arguments by which it had been supported; and he objected to its probable effects upon Ireland. With regard to its origin, he had only to ask hon. Members to carry back their minds to the occasion when the hon. Member for New Ross (Mr. Redmond) rose in his place to move his Bill dealing with the question of arrears. On that occasion the House were bewildered and amazed to find the Prime Minister accepting the principle, and even the details, of the measure. Hon. Members did not know then what they knew now; they did not know then that the principle of the settlement of the arrears of the tenants of Ireland by gift formed a clause in the "Treaty of Kilmainham," second only in importance to the release of certain "suspects" in Kilmainham. They did not know then what they knew now—that it was the first step in the new policy in the government of Ireland—that policy which had resulted in the resignation or assassination of those to whom the immediate government of that country was committed. But they knew it now; they knew where this Bill had its origin. They knew it had its origin in that part of the House where other practices had had their origin—practices which had gone far to lower that House, in the estimation of the people of this country, to the level of a village debating society or of a meeting of the shareholders of a bubble Company. However they regarded this Bill, and however it might be supported on the plea of necessity, they could not forget its origin. If he might travesty the words of one of Ireland's most accomplished poets, he would say— You may twist, you may alter this Act as you will, The taint of the Land League will hang round it still. He had said he objected to the Bill, in the second place, on account of its provisions. The provisions of the Bill had been so fully gone into in Committee that he would not allude to them further now. He would simply say that, although the Prime Minister had alluded to this Act as an Act in relief of charity, he (Sir Herbert Maxwell) did not consider it an Act of charity to Ireland. If he were to look for a parallel to the 1312 action of the Government in promoting this measure, he should call to the minds of hon. Members the parable of the unjust steward. Did not the unjust steward go about amongst his lord's debtors and say—"How much owest thou?" Was there not an unjust steward on the Treasury Bench who had been going about in Ireland and saying—"How much owest thou?" and who, when the tenants answered—"Two or three years' rent,"said—"Take thy bill and write one year's rent—write one year's rent, and we will pay it for you?" And where was the unjust steward to get the funds to pay that year's rent? Was it not out of the pockets of the English and Scotch farmers, who had suffered far more hardly and far more heavily during the last three or four years than the Irish farmers had suffered, because an element had entered into their sufferings and their losses with which the Irish farmers had not had to compete—they had not had to compete with American imports. ["Oh, oh!"] Hon. Members said "Oh, oh!" but he would like to know how tenants holding 5 or 10 acres of land were affected by the importation of any amount of food from America? It was not men of that class who were affected by foreign competition; it was the men—the farmers—of this country, whom the Government were now asking to put their hands in their pockets to meet the obligations of the Irish tenants. Thirdly, he objected to this Bill on the ground of the arguments by which it had been supported. He called them arguments, but, indeed, they were hardly worthy of that name. Certainly they did not commend themselves as arguments to him, or to many of those who sat around him. There was only one whose cogency they could at all admit, and that was that of "necessity" which had been most prominently put forward by the Prime Minister. But, who was responsible for that necessity? He denied that that necessity existed. The hon. Member for New Ross (Mr. Redmond) and those who sat near him were the only persons who were convinced of it. They were told that they should be apprehensive of evil consequences if this Bill were not passed. He quite believed it; but he believed evil consequences would ensue whether the Bill was passed or not. If it was not passed, the evil consequences would be immediate; if it was passed, 1313 they would only be deferred. But the responsibility rested not with those who rejected the measure, if it wore rejected—and he still hoped it would meet with such opposition or such alteration that it would fail in some of the consequences which he anticipated—the responsibility was not with those who rejected the measure, but with those who created its necessity. If a person introduced a match into a powder-magazine, the responsibility for the explosion rested with those who stored the powder or with those who had introduced the match. Lastly, his objection to the Bill was grounded-upon what he believed would be its effects upon Ireland. He denied that the payment of this bribe would have any effect upon the pacification of Ireland. Was there a man of common sense either in that House or out of it, who knew the Irish character, who believed that the people of Ireland would be content with what was contained in this Bill? What security was there against a further accumulation of arrears; and when arrears were accumulated, what was to prevent the tenants from looking to the same source from whence they derived relief now? He did not wish to detain the House further at that hour of the night. He supposed the Bill would pass through all its stages in that House, and he supposed that another step would be taken in that policy which he believed was swiftly and surely rendering Constitutional government in Ireland an impossibility. The loyal Members of that House, and the loyal people in this Empire, had grave cause of misgiving when they saw right hon. Gentlemen on the Treasury Bench ready to accept from the hands of those whom they themselves had denounced as instigators and aiders and abettors of crime in Ireland a Bill such as that, and to press it forward with all that vast power with which they had been invested by the people of this country for very different purposes.

§ Amendment proposed, to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day two months."—[Sir Herbert Maxwell.]

§ Question proposed, "That the word 'now' stand part of the Question."

§ LORD ELCHO
assured the House that he would only stand between it and a division for a few minutes, and on that ac- 1314 count he claimed the indulgence of hon. Members while he ventured to give utterance to a few sentences. He desired to enter his protest against a measure of this character and of this importance, containing as it did principles so novel, being by agreement between both sides of the House passed through the three stages in the course of one evening. He had abstained from taking part in the discussion in Committee; indeed, this was the first time, although he felt very strongly in the matter, on which he had ventured to open his mouth this Session on Irish questions. He had abstained from speaking, because they had had so much discussion upon Irish questions that it was hopeless to endeavour to advance any new arguments, and because speech was powerless against the measures of the Government in the face of the ready following which obeyed the teaching of the Government, whether that teaching was consonant with Liberal principles or not. Knowing and feeling that speech was only useful for Obstruction, and that argument was utterly unavailing, he would not, that evening, have ventured to trouble the House wore it not for the speech to which they had just listened from the Prime Minister. Speaking of the character of this Bill, the right hon. Gentleman said—"Call it, if you like, a Bill for relieving distress; you may call it a Bill for preventing eviction; but it is not a Bill for relieving distress, it is not a Bill for the prevention of eviction, but it is a Bill mainly to enable poor tenants to go into the Land Court." And, feeling the weakness of his own case, the Prime Minister admitted that, if it wore a Bill for the relief of distress or for preventing evictions, it would be a most dangerous precedent. It was because they had been taught to look upon the Bill as one for relieving distress and for preventing evictions that he (Lord Elcho) regarded it not only with distrust, but as one of the most dangerous measures ever presented to Parliament. His hon. Friend who moved the rejection of the Bill explained what the payment of arrears meant. It meant, he said, that the hard-gained earnings of the loyal and law-abiding people of this country, of the English and Scotch workmen, were to be taken to pay the debts of those who some people thought were well able to meet their obligations; and 1315 that was to be done when it was known the harvests in Ireland in the last two years had been infinitely better than those in England and Scotland. Money was to be taken from those who could less afford it than the Irish farmers towards whose debts it was to go. That was a dangerous precedent; the right hon. Gentleman admitted it was so, and he hoped it would not be taken advantage of. He (Lord Elcho) was one of those benighted individuals who believed that principles were eternal, and that a Minister, however powerful, however willing his following was, could not say to a principle—"Thus far shalt thou go, and no further." For anyone to think he could confine a principle to Ireland, or to England, or to Scotland, or to any particular description of property, was nothing but the most extraordinary short-sightedness, or the most extraordinary belief in his own powers that could be imagined. Was there any sane man in the House who hoard him who did not believe it, that if it suited the purpose of any persons in this country to agitate in favour of the payment of the rent of the poor people in this country the matter would not be brought forward in Parliament? He ventured to think, further, that there was more ground for paying the house-rent of the poor people in the crowded streets and alleys within a few minutes' walk of that House than there was for paying the debts which the Irish farmers had for so long studiously refused to pay. One word on the question of eviction. They were told this Bill was not brought in for the purpose of preventing eviction. He was under the impression that that was one of its main objects. Had they not hoard in these debates how the Irish landlords had been abused for what was called harassing the Government by evictions and other means of securing their just debts; and had not the Chief Secretary complained, in querulous tones, of the landlords of Ireland being unpatriotic and cruel? Naturally it was supposed that these terms referred to the action of the landlords towards their tenants. But it was subsequently explained that this querulous complaint had not referred to their conduct to their tenants, but to their conduct in regard to the Government. It was complained that they harassed the Government, and that implied that the 1316 Government were very much opposed to eviction, and that, by evicting, the landlords acted unpatriotically and cruelly. When the Land Bill was passed the Government thought they had clone everything they could and ought to do for the benefit of the Irish tenants, and they then intended to leave Irish landlords to settle with their tenants, and to exact their rents, or whatever was due. What, then, was the reproach of the Prime Minister? He reproached the Irish landlords for not backing up the Government, and taking the law into their own hands, and endeavouring, by what means the law had left them, to get what was due to them. He was under the impression that it was the Prime Minister who complained; but, at any rate, language was used by a Minister to the effect that the fault of the landlords was that they had not backed up the Government by endeavouring to get their arrears of rent, or, at least, that portion of their rents to which they were still entitled after the Land Act had taken their property from them. In corroboration of that view, he wished to state that he knew it as a positive fact that, whatever might be the views now advanced by the Chief Secretary in that House in the month of June, the policy of the Irish Government in the month of January, or thereabouts, was that the landlords should ask the Government to help them systematically in evicting their tenants. But the landlords declined to come to the Government for assistance, and why? Because they said if they did that, and the Government supported them, and their acts became unpopular, they would then be thrown over. That being the language spoken in January, a Bill upon this very question was passed in June; and that, he thought, ought to throw some light on the way in which affairs were managed in Ireland, and in this country. It would show the people what kind of statesmanship it was which governed Ireland, and by which the people of England were still so much deluded.

§ SIR R. ASSHETON CROSS
said, he thought the noble Lord who had just spoken had put his case before the House as clearly as it could possibly be put, and he had no wish at that moment to detain the House by any lengthened speech, or to enter into any arguments on the matter. The time for argument 1317 was already passed, because the arguments already brought before the House were, in his opinion, conclusive, although the Government, by their numbers, had set them aside. The Prime Minister had that night made two admissions which it was necessary to take note of. The first admission was that this Bill contained principles which needed the gravest possible consideration at the hands of the House, and had not had more consideration than the gravity of the principles involved really required; and the Party with whom he (Sir E. Assheton Cross) acted would have neglected a solemn duty if they had not brought forward arguments to show that, in their opinion, these principles were wrong. The second admission he regarded as of more importance, because the Prime Minister had gone out of his way to make it the special opinion of the House that the principles involved in the Bill were not to be made a precedent for future legislation. That showed how the Prime Minister must feel the danger of adopting these principles. No one could doubt, and no one felt that doubt more than the Prime Minister, that there was a great danger which, in late years, the country had been subject to in eases of this kind. If a Bill was once passed in which sound principles were interfered with, they could not tell where legislation would lead them; and the Prime Minister had made an observation which would never be forgotten—namely, that when an Act of Parliament contained a germ it was likely to develop in future legislation into a great many Acts as the result of the false step originally taken. The Prime Minister had given the House a warning that this Bill contained principles which were not to be followed, except in circumstances such as the present. Then the Prime Minister said that no other plan had been suggested by any Member of that House. No other plan could be proposed when the principle upon which any measure was founded was so bad and vicious as in this case. It was for the Government to produce another plan, and not for other Members of the House to do so. He objected to this Bill, because, in its origin, the Government thought it right to procure submission to the law by concession to agitation. He objected to it because he believed it was wrong in principle, and also because 1318 he believed it would be demoralizing to the people whom they hoped to assist. It would be demoralizing to the Irish nation. If it had been a voluntary Bill, by which the people might by agreement take advantage of certain things, he should not have objected so strongly; but by the compulsory measure now proposed a principle was introduced which would involve bad legislation in the future; and, therefore, he hoped the House, even at the last moment, would enter a protest against the Bill, and he should be very thankful if only they rejected it.

§ MR. JUSTIN M'CARTHY
said, he was not anxious to aid in passing this Bill at all; but he was anxious to shelve it as soon as possible. He agreed with the right hon. Gentleman that the time for argument was passed, although he should not follow the right hon. Gentleman's example and immediately argue against the Bill. The Bill had been discussed, and he could not regard seriously the proposal to move its third reading this day two months. What he wanted to refer to was the action taken in regard to this measure, and the hopes entertained for its future success. The Irish Members had done their best to assist in passing this measure, although they objected to it on many points, and especially with regard to emigration. Upon that clause they had offered their views; but they had interposed no objection to the settlement of the question. If some parts of the Bill fell short of what they had a right to expect, there were other parts which were unsatisfactory, and might be a source of future danger; but, having expressed their views, they recognized the necessities of the case; they saw that the Government must be looked to not to do what they would be quite willing to do, but to do what was in their power under the circumstances; and they were, therefore, glad to assist the Government in passing this measure. They had one hope—that when the Bill passed from that House it might come back no more. It had yet to go through a certain ordeal, the result of which might be its return to this House less strong and less effective than it was on leaving. He wanted to impress on the Government the fact that the Irish Members accepted this Bill as the minimum which, in the present condition of things, would be of the slightest use to meet the difficulties 1319 of the Irish distress; and he would urge the Government most earnestly if, by any chance, the Bill was mutilated and weakened in "another place," to stand by the principle of their Bill as it now stood. Fatal consequences had resulted from the mutilation of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which were the foundation and origin of all the evils that had arisen; and the Government, remembering that, must not allow an irresponsible and unrepresentative Body to mar this measure, which, after so much patience, they had passed with so much success.

§ VISCOUNT GALWAY
said, he wished it to be clearly known that the taxpayers of this country were to be called upon to pay their share of £2,000,000, not to relieve distress in Ireland, and not to facilitate emigration, but simply to aid the Government in carrying out their Bill of last Session.

§ COLONEL MAKINS
wished to ask the Government with what face they could request the House to deal with corrupt practices when they themselves had passed a Bill which involved a gigantic piece of corruption and enormous bribe? Money required for bribery was generally provided by those who would benefit by it, and in this case the Government were drawing money from the hard-pressed taxpayer of this country in order that they might make a bargain with the ex-Government of Kilmainham. He thought they should look at home before they passed a Bill of this sort. [Murmurs.] He could quite understand the impatience of hon. Members opposite, for they did not like the Bill to be designated by its proper name; and he was quite sure that, sooner or later, the country would see the true meaning of the Bill, and its effect would recoil upon the Government. Sooner or later they would have to ask for another amount of money for the purpose of fulfilling their bargain, and to maintain that law and order which this bribe would fail to secure.

§ Question put.

§ The House divided:—Ayes 28S; Noes 177: Majority 106.

1323

AYES.
Acland, C. T. D.	Allen, W. S.
Acland, Sir T. D.	Amory, Sir J. H.
Agnew, W.	Anderson, G.
Allen, H. G.	Armitage, B.

1320

Armitstead, G.	Dickson, T. A.
Arnold, A.	Dilke, Sir C. W.
Asher, A.	Dodson, rt. hon. J. G.
Ashley, hon. E. M.	Duckham, T.
Baldwin, E.	Duff, R. W.
Balfour, Sir G.	Dundas, hon. J. C.
Balfour, J. B.	Earp, T.
Balfour, J. S.	Ebrington, Viscount
Baring, Viscount	Edwards, H.
Barnes, A.	Edwards, P.
Barran, J.	Elliot, hon. A. R. D.
Bass, Sir A.	Errington, G.
Bellingham, A. H.	Evans, T. W.
Biddulph, M	Fairbairn, Sir A.
Biggar, J. G.	Farquharson, Dr. R.
Blake, J. A.	Fawcett, rt. hon. H.
Blennerhassett, R. P.	Fay, C. J.
Bolton, J. C.	Ferguson, R.
Borlase, W. C.	Ffolkes, Sir W. H. B.
Brand, H. R.	Findlater, W.
Brassey, H. A.	Firth, J. F. B.
Brassey, Sir T.	Fitzmaurice, Lord E.
Brett, R. B.	Foljambe, C. G. S.
Bright, rt. hon. J.	Foljambe, F. J. S.
Bright, J. (Manchester)	Forster, Sir C.
Broadhurst, H.	Forster, rt. hon. W. E.
Brogden, A.	Fowler, H. H.
Brooks, M.	Fowler, W.
Bruce, rt. hon. Lord C.	Fry, L.
Bruce, hon. R. P.	Fry, T.
Bryce, J.	Gill, H. J.
Buchanan, T. R.	Givan, J.
Burt, T.	Gladstone, rt. hn. W. E.
Buszard, M. C.	Gladstone, H. J.
Butt, G. P.	Gladstone, W. H.
Byrne, G. M.	Gordon, Lord D.
Caine, W. S.	Gourley, E. T.
Campbell, Lord C.	Gower, hon. E. F. L.
Campbell, Sir G.	Grafton, F. W.
Campbell, R. F. F.	Grant, A.
Campbell-Bannerman, H.	Grant, D.
	Grant, Sir G. M.
Carbutt, E. H.	Grenfell, W. H.
Causton, R. K.	Gurdon, R. T.
Cavendish, Lord E.	Hamilton, J. G. C.
Chamberlain, rt. hn. J.	Harcourt, rt. hon. Sir W. G. V. V.
Chambers, Sir T.
Cheetham, J. F.	Hardcastle, J. A.
Childers, rt. hn. H. C. E.	Hartington, Marq. of
Clarke, J. C.	Hastings, G. W.
Clifford, C. C.	Hayter, Sir A. D.
Cohen, A.	Healy, T. M.
Collings, J.	Henderson, F.
Collins, E.	Heneage, E.
Colman, J. J.	Henry, M.
Colthurst, Col. D. La T.	Herschell, Sir F.
Corbet, W. J.	Hibbert, J. T.
Corbett, J.	Hill, T. R.
Cotes, C. C.	Holden, I.
Courtauld, G.	Hollond, J. R.
Courtney, L. H.	Holms, J.
Cowper, hon. H. F.	Hopwood, C. H.
Craig, W. Y.	Howard, E. S.
Creyke, R.	Howard, G. J.
Cropper, J.	Illingworth, A.
Cross, J. K.	Inderwick, F. A.
Crum, A.	James, Sir H.
Cunliffe, Sir R. A.	James, W. H.
Currie, Sir D.	Jardine, R.
Daly, J.	Jenkins, D. J.
Davey, H.	Jenkins, Sir J. J.
Davies, D.	Johnson, E.
Davies, W.	Johnson, rt. hon. W. M.

1321

Jones-Parry, L.	Peddie, J. D.
Kingscote, Col. R. N. F.	Pender, J.
Kinnear, J.	Pennington, F.
Labouchere, H.	Playfair, rt. hon. L.
Laing, S.	Porter, A. M.
Lawrence, Sir J. C.	Portman, hn. W. H. B.
Lawrence, W.	Pugh, L. P.
Lawson, Sir W.	Pulley, J.
Lea, T.	Ralli, P.
Leahy, J.	Ramsden, Sir J.
Leake, R.	Rathbone, W.
Leatham, E. A.	Reid, R. T.
Lee, H.	Rendel, S.
Leeman, J. J.	Richard, H.
Lefevre, rt. hn. G. J. S.	Richardson, J. N.
Leigh, hon. G. H. C.	Richardson, T.
Lloyd, M.	Roberts, J.
Lymington, Viscount	Rogers, J. E. T.
Lyons, R. D.	Russell, Lord A.
M'Arthur, A.	Russell, G. W. E.
M'Arthur, W.	Samuelson, B.
M'Carthy, J.	Samuelson, H.
M'Coan, J. C.	Seely, C. (Nottingham)
Macfarlane, D. H.	Sheil, E.
M 'Intyre, Æneas J.	Sheridan, H. B.
M'Kenna, Sir J. N.	Shield, H.
Mackie, R. B.	Simon, Serjeant J.
Mackintosh, C. F.	Sinclair, Sir J. G. T.
M 'Lagan, P.	Slagg, J.
M 'Laren, C. B. B.	Smith, E.
Macliver, P. S.	Smithwick, J. F.
M'Minnies, J. G.	Smyth, P. J.
Magniac, C.	Spencer, hon. C. R.
Mappin, F. T.	Stanley, hon. E. L.
Marjoribanks, E.	Stanton, W. J.
Martin, R. B.	Stevenson, J. C.
Marum, E. M.	Stewart, J.
Mason, H.	Sullivan, T. D.
Milbank, Sir F. A.	Summers, W.
Molloy, B. C.	Synan, E. J.
Monk, C. J.	Talbot, C. R. M.
Moore, A.	Taylor, P. A.
Moreton, Lord	Tennant, C.
Morgan, rt. hon. G. O.	Thomasson, J. P.
Morley, A.	Torrens, W. T. M'C.
Morley, S.	Trevelyan, rt. hn. G.O.
Mundella, rt. hon. A. J.	Vivian, A. P.
Nelson, I.	Vivian, Sir H. H.
Nicholson, W.	Walter, J.
Noel, E.	Waugh, E.
Nolan, Colonel J. P.	Webster, J.
O' Beirne, Major F.	Wedderburn, Sir D.
O'Brien, Sir P.	Whitbread, S.
O'Connor, A.	Whitworth, B.
O'Connor, T. P.	Williams, S. C. E.
O'Donnell, F. H.	Williamson, S.
O' Donoghue, The	Willis, W.
O' Gorman Mahon, Col. The	Wills, W. H.
	Willyams, E. W. B.
O' Kelly, J.	Wilson, C. H.
O' Shea, W. H.	Wilson, I.
Otway, Sir A.	Wilson, Sir M.
Paget, T. T.	Wodehouse, E. R.
Palmer, G.	Woodall, W.
Palmer, J. H.
Parker, C. S.	TELLERS.
Pease, A.	Grosvenor, Lord R.
Pease, Sir J. W.	Kensington, Lord

NOES.
Allsopp, C.	Aylmer, J. E. F.
Amherst, W. A. T.	Bailey, Sir J. R.

1322

Balfour, A. J.	Grey, A. H. G.
Baring, T. C.	Halsey, T. F.
Barttelot, Sir W. B.	Hamilton, Lord C. J.
Bateson, Sir T.	Hamilton, right hon. Lord G.
Beach, rt. hn. Sir M. H.
Beach, W. W. B.	Harvey, Sir R. B.
Bective, Earl of	Hay, rt. hon. Admiral Sir J. C. D.
Bentinck, rt. hn. G. C.
Beresford, G. De la P.	Herbert, hon. S.
Biddell, W.	Hicks, E.
Blackburne, Col. J. I.	Hildyard, T. B. T.
Bourke, rt. hon. R.	Hill, Lord A. W.
Brise, Colonel R.	Hill, A. S.
Broadley, W. H. H.	Holland, Sir H. T.
Brodrick, hon. W. St. J. F.	Home, Lt.- Col. D. M.
	Hope, rt. hn. A. J. B. B.
Brooke, Lord	Jackson, W. L.
Bruce, Sir H. H.	Johnstone, Sir F.
Brymer, W. E.	Kennard, Col. E. H.
Bulwer, J. R.	Kennaway, Sir J. H,
Burnaby, General E. S.	Knight, F. W.
Buxton, Sir R. J.	Knightley, Sir R.
Cameron, D.	Lawrence, Sir T.
Campbell, J. A.	Lechmere, Sir E. A. H.
Chaplin, H.	Legh, W. J.
Clarke, E.	Leigh, R.
Clive, Col. hon. G. W.	Leighton, S.
Cole, Viscount	Lennox, Lord H. G.
Collins, T.	Levett, T. J.
Coope, O. E.	Lewisham, Viscount
Cotton, W. J. R.	Loder, R.
Cross, rt. hon. Sir R. A.	Long, W. H.
Cubitt, rt. hon. G.	Lopes, Sir M.
Dalrymple, C.	Lowther, rt. hon. J.
Davenport, H. T.	Lowther, hon. W.
Davenport, W. B.	Macartney, J. W. E.
Dawnay, Col. hon. L. P.	M'Garel-Hogg, Sir J.
Dawnay, hon. G. C.	Mac Iver, D.
De Worms, Baron H.	Makins, Colonel W. T.
Digby, Col. hon. E. T.	March, Earl of
Dixon-Hartland, F. D.	Master, T. W. C.
Donaldson-Hudson, C.	Maxwell, Sir H. E.
Douglas, A. Akers-	Miles, Sir P. J. W.
Dyke, rt. hn. Sir W. H.	Mills,. Sir C. H.
Ecroyd, W. F.	Monckton, F.
Egerton, hon. W.	Morgan, hon. F.
Elcho, Lord	Moss, R.
Elliot, Sir G.	Mulholland, J.
Emlyn, Viscount	Murray, C. J.
Ennis, Sir J.	Newdegate, C. N.
Estcourt, G. S.	Newport, Viscount
Ewing, A. O.	Nicholson, W. N.
Feilden, Maj.-Gen.R.J.	Noel, rt. hon. G. J.
Fellowes, W. H.	North, Colonel J. S.
Fenwick-Bisset, M.	Northcote, rt. hon. Sir S. H.
Filmer, Sir E.
Finch, G. H.	Northcote, H. S.
Fitzpatrick, hn. B. E. B.	Onslow, D.
Fletcher, Sir H.	Paget, R. H.
Folkestone, Viscount	Patrick, R. W. Cochran-
Forester, C. T. W.
Fort, R.	Pell, A.
Foster, W. H.	Pemberton, E. L.
Fowler, R. N.	Percy, Lord A.
Fremantle, hon. T. F.	Phipps, C. N. P.
Galway, Viscount	Phipps, P.
Gardner, R. Richardson-	Plunket, rt. hon. D. R.
	Price, Captain G. E.
Garnier, J. C.	Puleston, J. H.
Gibson, rt. hon. E.	Rankin, J.
Giffard, Sir H. S.	Rendlesham, Lord
Gorst, J. E.	Ridley, Sir M. W.
Grantham, W.	Ritchie, C. T.

1323

Rolls, J. A.	Thomson, H.
Ross, A. H.	Thornhill, T.
Ross, C. C.	Thynne, Lord H. F.
Round, J.	Tollemache, H. J.
Salt, T.	Tollemache, hn. W. E.
Schreiber, C.	Tottenham, A. L.
Selater-Booth, rt. hn. G.	Walrond, Col. W. H.
Scott, Lord H.	Warburton, P. E.
Scott, M. D.	Warton, C. N.
Selwin-Ibbetson, Sir H. J.	Whitley, E.
	Wilmot, Sir H.
Severne, J. E.	Wolff, Sir H. D.
Smith, rt. hon. W. H.	Wortley, C. B. Stuart-
Stanhope, hon. E.	Wroughlon, P.
Stanley, rt. hn. Col. F.	Yorke, J. R.
Stanley, E. J.
Sykes, C.	TELLERS.
Talbot, J. G.	Crichton, Viscount
Taylor, rt. hon. Col. T. E.	Winn, R.

Bill read the third time, and passed.

§ Main Question put, and agreed to.