SECOND READING. ADJOURNED DEBATE. (Hansard, 19 May 1882)

§ MR. SEXTON

said, it became his duty to oppose this Bill being now read a second time. To any man who had a brain to think and a heart to feel it must be matter for serious consideration and sad reflection that at the end of 700 years of British supremacy over Ireland and at the end of more than 80 years of undivided Parliamentary rule the Government found itself yet in the shameful position of being obliged to resort to coercion and the suspension of liberty in order to compel the Irish people to obey its laws. Here were two small countries situated close together, and shut away by the ocean from the rest of the world, and 1097 yet such was the incomparable incongruity between the races, or such was the unhappy inaptitude of the Government of Ireland, that at the present day they were as little able as Henry II. was to reduce the Irish people to obedience and order by the ways of justice and of law. The code of the present Government of Ireland appeared to have two articles. In the pursuit of a factitious symmetry they had thought it necessary that these articles must run side by side. One article was repression, the other was conciliation. So far as he had been able to discover in the history of English rule in Ireland, she had always, except at the earliest periods, depended upon two articles. At the earliest period she depended on one, and it was brute force, pure and simple. The next development was a policy compounded in proportions nearly equal of force and fraud; and it would now occur to everyone listening to him, no matter what were his political opinions, that that combination described the manner in which the Act was passed which handed over to that Assembly the Parliamentary destinies of Ireland. The next development was the one before them—a policy compounded of force and conciliation; and he never could cease to regret that the right hon. Gentleman the present Head of the Government, when he came into power, had not the courage to face the Irish people with one article—a policy of conciliation alone. He, in a moment unwise for himself, unwise for his Party, unwise for Liberal rule, accepted the dictation of his political opponents, and abased himself before the demands of those who sought his destruction, and whose best hope was that they might induce him to forge the weapons which they should use against the liberties of the Irish people. If the right hon. Gentleman did not perceive it now, if he would not perceive it before the close of his career, which he (Mr. Sexton) hoped might be long prolonged to the honour of himself and to the good of the country, some other statesman must perceive before long that the policy of the English Parliament for the Irish nation must consist of one article only—that it must be a policy of what that Assembly termed conciliation, but which he preferred to term justice. The day of that policy was coming, perhaps it was hastened by the hideous and fatal mistakes of the present moment; but that 1098 the day of that policy had not yet arrived they had sad and ample proof in the Bill before them. Why did the task devolve upon them of considering this unexampled Bill to-day? Was it immediately because, or in any sense because, of a widespread state of things in Ireland affecting the condition of the whole community? He denied that the fact was so. This Bill rested mainly upon one lamentable and deplorable act—the assassinations in the Phœnix Park. Would any man tell him that if these assassinations had not been committed they should be considering this Bill to-day? Hon. Gentlemen would bear in mind that the Government in express terms gave their assent to anticipations of the future, which placed remedial measures in the forefront of Irish legislation, and allowed the question of coercion to be contingent upon the experience of remedial legislation. Bearing this in mind, and shutting out of consideration the deplorable, unexampled, and horrible act in the Phœnix Park, would any hon. Member question his statement, that but for that tragedy this Bill would not now be before them? The policy of conciliation, so far as the right hon. Gentleman had developed it by the release of "suspects," had already borne fruit. The face of society had become comparatively peaceful; and all of them, Delegates in that House of the Irish people, and feeling a deep and fervent interest in that people's welfare, were then entitled to hope that ere the end of the Session had come near, and it became necessary to discuss the question of Coercion, it should be undeniably seen, even by hon. Gentlemen whose political prejudices led them to look upon coercion as the only sure weapon of Government, that nothing in the state of Ireland following upon the policy of release entitled the Government to resort to the musty and mediæval weapon of coercion. The assassinations in the Phœnix Park—a dark and desolate page in the history of his unfortunate country—were an act which no laws could have averted, which no sagacity could have foreseen—were an act for which the Irish people, even if they had not made before the world an unparalleled outburst of pity and rage, could never have been held responsible. So long as men were found ready to risk their lives either in the 1099 gratification of their passions or in the assertion of their principles, the most stringent and the most ingenious laws were brought to a standstill in their regard. And while these laws might possibly serve to punish, they certainly could not prevent. If it were true, as he believed, that this Bill rested upon that deplorable act, then never in the history of the civilized world had such a Bill, dealing with the lives, the liberties, the fortunes of a people, in a spirit of the most unrestricted despotism, been rested upon such a basis. He, of course, acknowledged that the storm of rage which swept over England—[Mr. GLADSTONE: No, no.]—well "rage" might not be the word; but he would say that the storm of passionate emotion which swept over England after the news of those dreadful assassinations made the position of the Government extremely difficult. He knew it was difficult for the Government, in presence of such an exhibition of national feeling—irrational though he thought it with regard to the Irish people—to avoid the appearance of activity in the direction of repression. He knew that while this feeling applied an impulse to the Government, it also offered them a temptation; but he thought that if one other influence had not been at work in the direction of this Bill, even the assassinations in the Phœnix Park would not have sufficed to produce it—and that one other influence was the man who had lately vacated the Office of Chief Secretary for Ireland. If he were to endeavour to compress into a phrase the secret of that right hon. Gentleman's disastrous part in public life, and of his unparalleled failure, he would say it arose from a passion strong and permanent in human nature—the passion of vanity. That right hon. Gentleman went to Ireland, believing in his power immediately to set everything right, believing that he should carry all before him. He found difficulties in his way. He had not the patience to encounter those difficulties with a calm and equable spirit. He fell in with tellers of untruth. They flattered him, and he fell into their hands. He did not acquaint himself directly with the opinions and wishes of the Irish people. His mind became deluded by the official class in Ireland, and he, in his turn, with a degree of self-consciousness, misled his Colleagues of the Cabinet. They perceived now more 1100 fully than he (Mr. Sexton) thought they should perceive at this early stage the truth of the representations which the Irish Members made a little time ago. When he said that the assassinations in the Phœnix Park alone would not have produced this Bill, his meaning was that they would not have induced the Government to introduce this measure if they had not been aided by the state of feeling produced by the forces of the right hon. Gentleman, by his irritating, causeless, meaningless application of the Coercion Act; by his misleading of his own Colleagues, by his evasive answers in the House, and by his delusive memoranda; by the art with which he so represented the facts of Irish political life as to convey erroneous impressions to the minds of the English people, and by a course of conduct in that House which so exasperated the relations between the House and the Irish Representatives as to have the effect of exasperating the relations between the Irish and English people. When the assassinations occurred in the Phœnix Park, to intensify that exasperation the ground had been prepared by the right hon. Gentleman for the seed of fresh coercion to be sown. He could not pass from the subject of the deplorable assassinations without saying how much he could wish—of what good augury it would be for Ireland and England, if public men—if statesmen—had accepted that catastrophe in the noble and heroic spirit of the bereaved lady from whom that tragedy took away "the light of life." If there was one gleam of comfort for the Irish people in this gloomy situation it was to be found in the fact, perhaps trivial, but certainly satisfactory, that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford, who had proved that he could neither conduct himself with discretion in Office nor with dignity out of it, no longer occupied a seat on the Front Treasury Benches, and that his talents were likely to shine from a back bench for the remainder of his Parliamentary days. Last year the Government procured a Bill which dispensed at one stroke with all the protection which the Irish people had of their liberty. It placed the liberty of any man in Ireland at the discretion of officials—there was no jury, there was no evidence, there was no Court. That Bill had been in operation for a little over a year. The 1101 Government had arrested under it about 1,000 men. It had been stated in express terms, over and over again, that the last Coercion Bill was intended for the prevention of crime. It was actively and laboriously used by the right hon. Member for Bradford. Yet under its operation, taking away, as it did, from the accused the jury, the witness, and the Court, crime had not decreased, it had developed and multiplied. This Bill did not propose to take away from the accused all the protection which law and custom offered him. Of the three securities which he had mentioned this Bill took away only the juror; and with what reason—seeing that the Bill of last year enabling the Chief Secretary for Ireland to arrest any ill-doers of his own motion failed to put an end to crime—the Government could persuade themselves that this Bill would have any effect in stopping crime when their Executive had lost the drastic powers they possessed under its predecessor, he could not understand. He would like to know how Lord Spencer, who would not have the same power as the right hon. Member for Bradford, and who could not dispense with the Court, the witness, and the jury, would be enabled to seize those evil-doers who had eluded the right hon. Gentleman? They were asked to trust Lord Spencer. He marvelled at the childish character of that suggestion. Perhaps, if coercion were entirely new, they might be inclined, just as they say in Ireland, "To oblige you." They might be inclined for once to trust him. He (Mr. Sexton) knew a considerable deal about Ireland, and all he knew about Lord Spencer was that he was considered a good horseman, and he was not aware of any further extraordinary claims he possessed upon the public confidence. When anybody asked him (Mr. Sexton) to trust Lord Spencer or any other man, either English or Irish, or any collection of men, with the liberties and the fortunes of his people, and the lives of men accused of crime, he would reply that despotic power would corrupt the best man that ever lived by its very down-drawing and corrupting influence, and if Lord Spencer were an archangel he would refuse to trust him with it. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford, whose frank and somewhat rough appearance of honesty was characteristic, when he 1102 first appeared at the Table of the House, spoke pathetically of his inexperience of Ireland, and asked them to trust him, and he really believed that some of them did trust him. [Mr. HEALY: Oh, no.] But when we saw that the Act confided to his care to put down crime was not used for that purpose, was not for a moment made effectual for that purpose; when we found it used deliberately to prevent the Representatives of the Irish people from so co-operating as most speedily, conclusively, and inexpensively to test the value of an Act of Parliament; when, spurred on by jealousy and fear, he turned all the weapons of that Act of Parliament against the Representatives of the people, and against men whose only crime was a sense of the public interest, how could we trust any man in the future? He would not trust any man, Lord or Commoner, with the powers proposed by the Act, no matter who administered it. He was interested last night to hear the new Chief Secretary for Ireland state that Government existed for personal and political liberty; but this Bill would bring political action in Ireland to an end and extinguish individual freedom. He listened with interest to that speech; but he was sorry to say that that interest, he would not say had vanished, but it had certainly diminished before that speech was over. It was an evil sign that the hon. Gentleman, whose ability and courage he admitted, appeared already, after a lapse of one short week, to be enamoured of the permanent officials of Dublin Castle who had been the ruin of so many Chief Secretaries before him. He had listened to the speech of the hon. Gentleman for some word of sympathy for the sufferings of the people—for some word of advice, or for some word of restraint of those owners of property who had so much power over the happiness of the people. He waited for some sign that the hon. Gentleman had a heart to feel as well as a brain to think; but, he was sorry to say, his speech was dry and cold, and that he went through his figures and his statistics of outrages and evictions in as unconcerned and unsympathetic a manner as if he had not left the Department of the Admiralty and was dealing with the tonnage or the capabilities of some of Her Majesty's ships. The hon. Gentleman gave them 1103 two sets of figures, and he marvelled what he meant to prove by the set of figures which had connection with outrage. He proved that in the years immediately preceding the Land Act of 1870 outrages rose in number, and that when the Peace Preservation Act was passed they decreased. He would, however, ask the Premier, who was concerned in the passage of both those measures, whether he had not attributed the decrease of outrage more to the Land Act than to the Peace Preservation Act? [Mr. T. P. O'CONNOR: He has said so several times.] And for the five years after the passage of the Act of 1870, before the chicanery of the landlords and their lawyers had minimized its value, outrages fell. Then came seasons of distress, and the outrages again increased, as was shown by the figures of the Chief Secretary for Ireland. But the most marvellous fact of all—the one naturally passed over without much emphasis by him—was that although outrages increased from 1876 to last year, the very greatest increase of all was during last year, when the Coercion Act was in force. What was the moral to be drawn from these figures? He believed it was a double one—that just laws, in the sense of remedy, which would convince the people that the law was their helper against wrongs and their friend against oppression, were the most powerful engines against outrage; while, on the other hand, the most fruitful and powerful stimulant to every kind of crime and outrage was coercion. He then gave them a second set of figures, in which there was a remarkable gulf. He gave the particulars of every sort of crime, giving the number committed and the number of verdicts found by juries; but he did not tell them in how many cases the police had made arrests, or how many criminals had been brought before the juries. He (Mr. Sexton) claimed for the jurors of Ireland as thorough and as honest a discharge of their duties as the jurors of any country. Why was it that the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Home Secretary, in his speech on the introduction of this Bill, did not offer them some figures—some facts, some statistics—worthy of a deliberative Assembly, to convince them that the juries had failed in their duty? Even Mr. Justice Fitzgerald, the most excel- 1104 lent Judge on the Irish Bench, complimented the juries in the South of Ireland recently; and it was noticeable that, after the last Winter Assizes, there was all through the British Press an acknowledgment and admission that the juries of Ireland had not laid themselves open to the reproaches levelled against them in former times. He had not heard that any fault was found with the conduct of the juries at the Spring Assizes, and if it was to be found, it had not been mentioned in this debate; and certainly, before taking so extraordinary, so grave a step as removing the right of trial by jury, that House ought to claim the most complete and exact proof that they had failed in their duty—and up to the present moment of such proof there was not a single vestige. If the House wished to know why crime was not punished in Ireland, he would tell them. The first reason was that agrarian crimes, like many crimes that were not agrarian, and that were not detected, were secret in their character; that they were committed stealthily and furtively in the dead of night, and in lonely places, without a warning and without a witness. Such crimes would defy the most expert police, and the most orderly community, to detect; and, apart altogether from agrarianism and any special movement, there were in Ireland every year several classes of ordinary crime—such as incendiary fires, arsons, and so forth—the perpetrators of which no police could discover, and in which no arrests or convictions could be obtained in Ireland, or in any other country, for the simple reason that they were secret and furtive in their nature. The second reason for non-detection was because they allowed laws to continue in Ireland which the people felt to be oppressive. The only way completely to put down outrage in any community was by making the people feel that the law was on their side. Of course, it was a great thing to attack the conscience of a people; but the great motive power was this—to attack their sense of self-interest. Self-interest was the dominant power in all the actions of man, as in the actions of political Parties; and if they, by making laws in the interest of the people, showed the people that the law was their protector and their helper, they would put a power in their hands which would follow them, where the Lord Lieu- 1105 tenant's warrant could not, everywhere, every day of their lives, and which would suppress outrage. They heard last night that the Preamble of this Bill had been proved. That was a large assertion. That Preamble was an extraordinary collection of assumptions and fallacies. With regard to the Bill itself, the back of it contained such an array, such a phalanx of legal talent, as he supposed was never seen before. It was said that in the multitude of counsellors there was wisdom; but it seemed to him that, in this case, in a multitude of lawyers there was confusion. He read in the second page that if an appellant established want of jurisdiction in the Special Commission Court, the Court of Criminal Appeal might quash the proceedings. A little further on in the Bill he found that any offence which any person was believed to have committed in any place should be deemed to have been committed within a jurisdiction of the Court. He knew very little about that; but probably the gentleman who drew the Bill understood it. To give another example. In the Preamble the word "crime" occurred. He turned to the defining section, and found that the expression "unlawful association" meant an association formed for the purpose of the commission of crime or aiding in the commission of crime, and "crime," for the purposes of this section, meant any offence against this Act. Thus, an unlawful association was an association for committing crime; crime was any offence against that Act; and under the Definition Clause a member of an unlawful association was guilty of an offence under that Act. It was a crime to be a member of an unlawful association; that was the substance of the definition. The Preamble said— Whereas by reason of the action of secret societies and combinations for illegal purposes in Ireland, the operation of the ordinary law has become insufficient for the repression and prevention of crime, and it is expedient to make further provision for that purpose,"&c. The House would observe the collocation of terms—"secret societies and combinations for illegal purposes." Of course, they were asked to trust Lord Spencer; but it appeared to him that anything more unrestricted than the power thus given to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland could not be imagined. A few words about the Preamble. They 1106 legislated last year against an open society, and the Executive put an end to the Land League; but he had missed any evidence of misconduct on the part of jurors. He had missed any evidence that secret societies were rife in Ireland, or so rife as to call for such a Bill as this. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Home Secretary smiled a smile, which he, no doubt, thought was worth a thousand arguments. If the Secretary of State had evidence of the existence of secret societies, he wanted to know what it was, considering that the House last year legislated against an open society, and rendered Constitutional agitation impossible; and the Government had their way, because, as that phantom Lord Lieutenant, Earl Cowper, said, the Government were determined to drive discontent under the surface—and here was the result. If the combinations for illegal purposes, against which this Act was directed, were open, what were they? The Land League did not exist, and it could not be an open association against which this Act was directed. What, then, was it? He was only acquainted with two associations existing in Ireland which had the slightest connection with the present movement—one of them was the Ladies' League, and the other the Political Prisoners' Aid Society. The Ladies' League was founded to protect from starvation and death by cold and exposure the victims of the laws which they still permitted to remain in the hands of the landlords. The Political Prisoners' Aid Society was founded for the purpose of providing, through the benevolence of the public, such food for the victims of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) as might protect them from injury to health and probable loss of life under the mild and benevolent form of detention which he had declared to be intended not for punishment, but for prevention. He wanted to know was the present Bill intended to operate against either of these societies? He maintained that their purpose was entirely non-political, that they were outside the sphere of legislative action of this kind; and before they trusted Lord Spencer they wanted simply to know what, in the mind of the Government, was the meaning and purpose of the Act. By the proposal to abolish trial 1107 by jury the Government had already placed themselves in a very embarrassing position. Three of the most eminent Judges told a Committee of the House of Lords last year that they were both unfit and unwilling to exercise functions of the kind which this Bill would impose upon them. The Irish Judges met yesterday in Dublin and agreed unanimously to a resolution that the carrying out of this proposal would injure the administration of the law in Ireland and impair the respect entertained for the Bench. So far as impairing the respect felt for the Bench was concerned, he did frankly say that the respect felt for the Bench by the mass of the people was a very uncertain quantity, and therefore it was rather difficult to determine to what extent it could be impaired. The question was, would the Government, against the will of the Judges, impose this function upon them? This was a Bill which arose out of murder, and by which they proposed to commit the trial for murder to three Judges. He told the House that if this Bill should be effective against anything, it would not be effective against murder. A tribunal of three Judges would not be an effective tribunal for the trial of that offence, because Judges were inextricably bound up in the traditions of the Profession; they could not divest themselves of their sense of the divided responsibility between the jury and the Judge; and if murder cases were brought before a tribunal of this kind he felt certain that the unanimous assent of the Judges required for a capital sentence would never be obtained, and that the Judges would never take upon themselves the novel and startling, the terrible responsibility which they proposed to cast upon them. It was proposed to cast upon them the responsibility of trying cases of treason or treason-felony; and he supposed this would also include the fanciful offence of treasonable practices, to which the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford, who was fond of a good wide clause, to leave plenty of room for the filling up of warrants, was so much attached. Why was this charge of treason-felony brought under the Act? Why was the trial of treason in Ireland to be taken out of the hands of juries? The Attorney General for Ireland was asked yesterday by the hon. Member for Wexford (Mr. Healy) to state to the House how many treason 1108 cases had been tried in Ireland for the last 10 years, and in how many cases the juries had disagreed. In recent years there had been no trials of treason in Ireland. There were trials of treason there in 1865 and 1867, when numbers of men were convicted and sentenced to death or penal servitude for life. The juries of Cork and Dublin convicted those men. The Government had never failed to procure convictions for treason in Ireland on bringing forward any personal evidence; and, in the name of common sense and reason, he asked the House what was the meaning of the monstrous and grotesque absurdity of confining cases of the extremest gravity to a tribunal of Judges? Where was the shadow of reason for doing that when it could not be alleged that any case of treason had come forward in recent years, and that juries refused to convict on sufficient evidence? It was a curious thing that to the Lord Chancellor, the only Judge who did not hold his office for life, who was the servant of the Administration, and who was removed at the pleasure of the Government, was intrusted the power of fixing the rota—that was to say, the selecting the three Judges who were to set the example by which the others should be guided. He objected to the Judges altogether. The Judges of Ireland were not like the Judges of England—they were a body of promoted politicians. They were a body of men, either landlords themselves or closely connected with landlords, whose prejudices and sympathies set them altogether on one side, and that the side of one small class as opposed to the great mass of the people. Many of the Irish Judges reached their present position through politics. Many of them reached the Treasury Benches by breaking their pledges to the people, and, as he said, they were promoted politicians. He might refer to the right hon. Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland, who was a very favourable type of the class. He had not been obliged to break any pledge in order to reach this House; but he was doing political service there, in his (Mr. Sexton's) opinion, against the interests of the Irish people. What was his conduct in the House? Why, there never was a more docile servant of the Administration. His expositions of the law were fearfully and wonderfully 1109 vague. If he did not find anything to suit him in the Statute Law, he fell hack upon the Common Law; and, as circumstances changed and varied from day to day, the right hon. and learned Gentleman evolved from his inner consciousness suitable laws accordingly. If such things were done in the green tree, what would be done in the dry? With what fairness could the lives and liberties of men be placed in the hands of Officials of that stamp? This was also a creative Act, because it brought into existence, for the first time, a number of brand new offences. Turning, however, to the question of "intimidation," which the Attorney General the other day said was an offence at Common Law, but which was entirely unknown to the Common Law, he was compelled to declare that if the definition of intimidation in this Act were carried out to the full limit it was intended or anything like it, political and public life—and an hon. Member suggested private life also—was at an end in Ireland. Any word calculated to make any person apprehensive of danger or injury to any member of his family or household might be construed as intimidation, and the unhappy person who had used it might be handed over to the Brothers Lloyd, the magisterial roughriders from Zululand and British Burmah, who acquired in those foreign parts among savage and semi-savage people that conception of the rights of civilized people and that sense of magisterial duty which recommended them to the favour of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford. What was the meaning of the struggle for reform in any country but simply this—that there were some classes in the country who held vested interests detrimental to the good of the people? But under the Intimidation Clause of this Bill what reform movement could be pursued in Ireland? What vested interest could be attacked or what abuse condemned? Not only did they strike through it at the ordinary political rights of the people, but at the most valuable rights of the people—the mutual rights of the Representatives of the people to take action with their constituents. If there was a General Election in Sligo to-morrow, if his seat was contested, what questions would he find most prominent in the minds of his constituents? Would it not be mat- 1110 ters relating to the Sub-Commissioners? Questions as to the necessity of a speedy development of the Purchase Clauses, of those having reference to the conduct of the Land Act, by putting upon the miserable bogs of wretched turf the price which the Sub-Commissioners had taken off the land? Suppose he denounced all these things, the cruelty of the landlords, the unrighteous rents, and criticized the unspeakable meanness of the landlords in putting on the turf what had been taken off the land. All this would be, according to the clause, putting the landlord, his family, and his property in fear and terror, and might also be construed into loss of business, or something of the kind. He stood upon the declaration that this clause would at once manacle and gag, and was intended to paralyze the Irish people, and to strike them dumb. Could the Government show that it would prevent nothing but illegal agitations? The clause made criticism a crime, and exposure of terrorism a felony. It made vested interests sacred, while efforts at reform would become treason. If the Government could show how it would work without putting an end to political life, and that under it their most cherished liberties would be sacred, let them do so. To descend to a smaller matter, it was provided on the same page of the Bill that an assault on a constable was to be an offence under the Act, whether it had relation to agrarianism or not. The person of a policeman was to be as sacred as that of a dervish in the East. The deed might be done in a drunken brawl. Nevertheless, the offender was to be at once hurried before officials like the military gentleman from Birmingham, whose word, to say the least of it, was as good as his oath. Or, perhaps, the unfortunate man might be taken before the military magistrate at Mayo, who delivered gunpowder speeches, and who had been remonstrated with by his superior officer. Those were the men who were to have the privilege of sentencing to six months' hard labour. [An hon. MEMBER: Without appeal.] This Bill denounced the man connected with an unlawful association as guilty of a crime, and the man who committed a crime as a member of an unlawful association. He should like to know whether the Prisoners' Aid Society and the Ladies' Land League 1111 would come within the definition of unlawful associations, the members of which were liable to very heavy penalties under the provisions of the measure? No fewer than seven general powers were given by this Bill, three of which would affect the person, and four the property of private individuals. One of those provisions rendered strangers liable to be arrested by the police, who, as a rule, were the greatest strangers in the district, being sent from the South to the North, and from the North to the South; and yet the strange police were empowered to arrest as strangers persons who were far better known in the locality than themselves. He would not further criticize the Bill, except to say that it was exceedingly strange and incongruous that, whereas the Bill gave the right of appeal from the decision of superior tribunals, there was no appeal given for the summary jurisdiction; so that a matter might be argued out with the greatest ability in a superior Court, and yet the decision be the subject of appeal. Was it intended that the Courts should sit in public or in private? The proceedings under the Act might be private. There was nothing in the Act to prevent it; but there was to be no appeal from the decisions of rash and inexperienced Resident Magistrates, who were for the most part either old soldiers or the broken-down scions of the aristocracy—men appointed, perhaps, for the reason given by Sidney Smith for the preferment of a clergyman—namely, because he was fit for nothing else. These men might sit in the daytime or at night, and in any place, and yet impose six months' hard labour, which, in the case of a delicate man, would mean a sentence of death; and yet there was to be no appeal. If there was to be an appeal for the higher tribunal, why not for those obscure tribunals? But the most dangerous part of the Bill was its retrospective character, and the restrictions it would place upon the Press. The Government were so entangled, it seemed to him, with their actions, that this measure was necessary to get them out of the mess. But the mere fact that the Act was to be retrospective showed that it might be used to gratify political revenge. The Bill would put an end to public and political life in Ireland, and he did not imagine that under it it would be possible for the Representatives of the people 1112 in the House to hold consultations together or with their constituents upon any public matter. He was not certain that the reasonable representation of the Irish people would much longer be possible in the House; and if they could not confer with those who sent them there or learn the opinions of their constituents, he was at a loss to understand what they would be there to do. They, however, would very speedily see by the administration of that Act whether it would still be possible for them to occupy their positions of standing between the Government and the people, and whether it would not be their duty and only course to steer out of the way from this desperate struggle which the Government were wilfully forcing on themselves. Let them and the people come face to face. He did not expect that this Bill, any more than those which had preceded it, would dim the spirit of the Irish people. Many measures of this sort had been tried centuries past; and however it might affect the Parliamentary course of the Irish people, that was only a small portion of the National cause. There were many ways of expressing the National cause, the National action; and he would state what was not a passionate or a futile hope, but what was a calm and intense fact, that a measure like this, conceived in obstinate prejudice and ignorance, and foredoomed ere it was passed to end in shameful failure, might delay the deliverance of Ireland, but would not impede it, and in the long run would make it more certain.