CLASS III.

HC Deb 23 August 1889 vol 340 cc266-357

1. £57,271, to complete the sum for the Supreme Court of Judicature in Ireland.

MR. T. M. HEALY

Two months ago the Solicitor General for Ireland made a promise to furnish information and papers with respect to the position of Mr. Edward Murphy, who is in receipt of £1,000 a year, and whose appointment we believe to be illegal. As yet I have not seen the papers.

MR. MADDEN

This salary does not appear in the Votes. Mr. Murphy is paid, I believe, out of the fees. But I will at once obtain for the hon. and learned Member all the information I can.

MR. T.M. HEALY

If the salary is not included in this Vote, but will come on next year, I will not press the matter further. When will the Papers be presented?

MR. MADDEN

As soon as possible.

Vote agreed to.

2. £98,624, to complete the sum for the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

MR. MURPHY (Dublin, St.Patrick's)

I have to complain of the late period of the Session at which this Vote is brought forward, and also of the excessive cost of the Dublin police, which is just twice as large as that of the police in English towns of a population as great or as greater than that of Dublin. In the English towns the Corporations have absolute control over their respective police forces, whereas in Dublin the Corporation has no control whatever over its police. I hope that some relief will be given to Dublin in respect of this matter. The total cost of the Dublin Metropolitan Police is about £150,000, and one-third of it is borne by the ratepayers, whereas in Belfast and Cork and other towns the charge falls upon the Imperial Exchequer. In Manchester, which has a population of 374,000, the total cost of the police amounts to only £77,773, or very little more than one-half of the cost of the police in Dublin. In the case of English towns the Treasury pays one-half of the cost of the police, but in the case of Dublin the Treasury pays two-thirds of the cost. Notwithstanding this fact Manchester, with a population of 30,000 more than Dublin, only pays £36,000 a year for police, while Dublin pays £50,000. In Birmingham the population is 400,000, 50,000 more than that in Dublin. The total cost of the police in Birmingham is only £49,387, and the net cost to the inhabitants of the city only £22,800 or considerably less than one-half of the cost to the inhabitants of Dublin of their police. The population of Leeds is 309,000; the gross cost of the police £37,000, net cost to the inhabitants £17,200. I do not desire to detain the Committee, but I must call attention to the fact that in each of these English cities the Local Authorities have absolute control of the Police Force, while in Dublin the Local Authorities, although they pay so much, have no control over the police. Again, the rate payable on the rateable property in Dublin in respect of the police is fixed by Act of Parliament at 8d. in the £1. I find that in no town in Great Britain, with the exception of Blackburn, where there was last year excessive rating owing to certain rioting, is the rate so high. In the Metropolitan Police district the rate amounts to 4–88d. in the £1; in Manchester to 3¾d. in the £ 1; and in some towns it is as low as 2d. in the £1. I find a still more startling difference when comparing the cost of the police per inhabited house. In Dublin the rate amounts to £3 10s. per house, in Manchester to £8, and in Birmingham to 12s. 1d. It costs seven times as much to police the inhabited houses of Dublin as of Leeds. In Dublin, too, the carriage tax yields £5,600 per annuum. £8 per annum is charged upon every tramcar as against £2 charged in London. The scale of carriage licenses is fixed by the Act of 1854, but I maintain that a charge of £8 upon a job carriage is very excessive indeed. In addition I should like to direct attention to the totally unnecessary and most offensive regulation in relation to the licensing of job carriges—namely, the obligation to attach a huge plate to the harness denoting the character of the carriage. There is no such rule in operation anywhere else as far as I know. Possibly it is some inducement to people to hire a job carriage if it is not labelled a job carriage. Anyhow, the restriction is quite unnecessary, and the Commissioners of Police would be well advised in abolishing it. It appears that the Commissioners of Police have ample power to reduce the scale of licenses in Dublin, and having regard to the enormous difference between the Dublin scale and that which prevails in London. I hope the Treasury will assent to the reduction of the scale to a rational level. I know that relief cannot well be given in respect to the police without legislation. The subject is crying out for legislation, and I hope the Government will see their way to provide the very necessary relief.

MR. SEXTON (Belfast, W.)

The practical suggestions made by my hon. Friend are such as deserve prompt attention at the hands of the Irish Administration. I agree with my hon. Friend that the Dublin Metropolitan Police is comparatively well managed. I do not believe the members of that Force are promoted by reason of the way they attack the public, but I am inclined to think the reasonable disposition which animates that Force is due in great measure to the fact that the Police Magistrates in Dublin are independent of the Government. Elsewhere Magistrates are dependent upon the Government, but in Dublin, as the right hon. Gentleman well knows, a Magistrate made a rule extremely unpalatable to the Government, namely, that a prisoner under the Crimes Act should be treated as a first-class misdemeanant. The observations of my hon. Friend, while I agree with them, lead me to regret that we have not in other parts of Ireland a magistracy as independent as the magistracy of Dublin. Of course I must add that the value of an independent magistracy is greatly governed by the circumstances of the fitness of the original selection. Now, there is a matter which cries urgently for reform. It has occupied more than once the attention of the Municipal Council of Dublin. By reason of the tax of 8d. in the £1 to which my learned Friend has referred, Dublin has been prevented from endeavouring to carry out a main drainage scheme which might bring about a decrease in the mortality of the city, We never can carry out a scheme of that kind unless we get some relief of taxation. It is very much to be deplored that the Police Force in Dublin costs from two to four times as much as that in the great cities of England. Why should the Police Force in Dublin cost so much? The community in Dublin is as orderly as any to be found in any of the great cities of the world. I think the police themselves will testify to that fact. What, then, is the reason that the relative cost of the Police Force is so great? I can find no reason except that the citizens of Dublin have not the power that the citizens of other places have—the power to determine the extent and cost of the local Police Force. I apprehend that the whole of this 8d. in £1 might be saved and devoted to some more urgent purpose. We have also to surrender a sum amounting to £20,000 a year, payable into the civic purse in relief of local expenditure. I wish to tell the right hon. Gentleman from what I have lately heard on the subject, my opinion is that there is a great and growing disposition to resist the continuance of the system. There was last year a tendency on the part of the Corporation to proceed to an extreme as other Corporations have done, a proceeding which, constituted as my mind is on such matters, I for one should extremely regret to see rendered unavoidable. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, as he is generally believed to be on the verge of some proposal as to local government in Ireland, whether he could not offer us now, or, if that is not possible, at an early date next year, an indication of what his intention with regard to the Dublin Metropolitan Police will be. We are now contributing £50,000 a year towards the maintenance of the police, but have no power of control and no means of exercising influ- ence upon them or effectively criticising their action such as are exercised by the Watch Committees of boroughs in the United Kingdom. At the present time, whenever the Corporation require the services of a constable for any special purpose for a year, a week, or a day, they have to apply to Dublin Castle for permission to employ a member of the Force, and they have to pay for his services as though we had not contributed a penny towards the maintenance of the Force. I ask is that a system which any body of intelligent persons, who consider they have any right to freedom, are likely to submit to much longer? The citizens of Dublin have some self-respect, and I do not think they are likely to continue submissive to a system which would be scorned by any Municipality in Scotland or England. The feeling now prevailing is one likely to develop into a widespread refusal to pay rates. And if the Corporation should be driven to that point, even though a Judge might fill up a presentment and forward it to the proper quarter, the people would refuse to pay. As I say, I should be unwilling to push things to such a pass; therefore, I trust that in any scheme for Irish Local Government the right hon. Gentleman may prepare the citizens of Dublin will be allowed to have some share in regulating the cost of the police and in controlling the Force.

THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. A. J. BALFOUR,) Manchester, E.

I have noticed with satisfaction that both the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Gentleman opposite have spoken with approval of the management of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and I can only say that I accept with pleasure the testimony which the right hon. Gentleman has given as to the efficiency of the Force. The right hon. Gentleman's criticism applied partly to the cost of the Force and partly to the authority which regulates it. It is true that in a large number of English and Scotch towns the ordinary practice is for the State to pay half the cost and for the locality to control the police, but there is one exception very pertinent to the case of Dublin, and that is the case of the Metropolis. Here, also, the locality pays half, but the control is entirely an Imperial control, and all the grievance—if grievance there be—which is ex- pressed by the citizens of Dublin, of whom the right hon. Gentleman is the mouthpiece, might be brought forward with equal force by the people of London. But there is this difference between the case of the Metropolis of England and that of Dublin, that whilst in London the locality pays half the total cost of the Force, in Dublin the contribution of the locality, I believe, is not much more than one-fourth.

MR. SEXTON

About one-third.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

So that relatively to the total cost of the police the position of the ratepayers in the English Metropolis is far less favourable than that of the ratepayers in the Irish Metropolis. I am informed that the area which is protected by the Dublin Metropolitan Police is larger in proportion to the population than is usual in similar cases in England or Scotland. The cost of the police is consequently greater. Another cause of the comparatively large cost of the Dublin Police is the great discrepancy between the rateable and the actual value of property in Dublin. The proportion is smaller than in, say, Manchester or Leeds.

MR. SEXTON

It depends upon the quarter of the city.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

There may be differences no doubt; but this accounts in part for the apparent discrepancy between the wealth of the community and the tax they have to pay for the police protection. But there is a third matter very material to this question of comparison of cost between Dublin and English towns. I must also point out that the Dublin Police enjoy the advantages of a much larger superannuation charge than is assigned to the English Police, and in my judgment the Dublin system is the better of the two, because in order to obtain a really efficient Police Force they must be treated liberally in the matter of superannuation. If all these circumstances are taken into account I think it will be found that the discrepancy on which the right hon. Gentleman has commented between the cost of the police in Dublin and elsewhere is not so great as it appears. Then the Government are urged to make some alteration in the amount of the carriage tax. It is heavy in Dublin, and no doubt the charge on tramcars is larger in Dublin than in other cities about which I have been able to obtain information, but it will be evident to hon. Members that it would be impossible for any reduction to be made in the taxation of Dublin tramcars, unless a corresponding reduction were made in the taxation of other descriptions of vehicles. Although it is not improbable that the Treasury may find difficulties in making an alteration in the taxation in this respect, I will undertake that the Government will give the matter their consideration before next Session. The right hon. Gentleman may rest assured that the cost of the Dublin Metropolitan Police will not escape the attention of Her Majesty's Government, and that if they can do anything to alleviate local burdens in this respect they will be most happy to take the necessary steps to carry out that object.

MR. MURPHY

I would point out that the reduction of the carriage tax is a matter in the discretion of the Dublin Commissioners of Police under the Act of Parliament. I mentioned the tram-cars as an illustration of the heavy tax, the charge being £8 per car in Dublin, whereas it is only £2 per car in London. They do not pay it as tram cars but as stage carriages; and every stage carriage, though only used for jobbing purposes and sent out occasionally, has to pay the same amount. As to the comparisons drawn by the right hon. Gentleman on the question of the police, I did not myself go so fully into that part of the case as I might have done. I did not wish to weary the House, but I would point out that in the town of Leeds, which is of about the same area as Dublin, the cost of the police per acre is £1 12s. 7¼d., whilst in Dublin it is £6 16s. 0d. That will show that the Dublin Police expenses are not consequent upon the extent of the area. There is an enormous excess in the cost of the police in Dublin as compared with that in every other large city.

MR. SEXTON

The right hon. Gentleman has not touched on the question of Local Government in Ireland. I presume he has been busy for some time past with that question, and I would ask him if he has at all considered the question of the control of the police in relation to it. I would ask him if he is disposed to consider the propriety of placing the Dublin Metropolitan Police so far as its finance is concerned in the position in which it would have been placed by the general regulations which were proposed in the Bill brought in for the purpose of associating with the Commissioners of Police certain representatives of the ratepayers, Watch Committees or otherwise?

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I think it would be premature to discuss the provisions of the scheme, and the right hon. Gentleman can hardly ask me to give a pledge as to the method we will adopt in dealing with the matter.

MR. T. M. HEALY

Sir, a good feeling prevails with regard to the Dublin Police, and the reason is that Mr. Halloran does not order them to baton the people. If an Irish Member happens to be released from prison and arrives at a railway station, Mr. Halloran does not order the police to bludgeon the people. It is remarkable how quiet a crowd is when properly handled, and the police are so well managed that they and the people get on very well together. The case is altogether different in the country. There the police draw their batons, and they are officered in a way which produces this bloodletting and bloodthirstiness. On one occasion the police had to draw their batons in Dublin, but they did not follow the people up, and dodge them round corners, and hit every head as it came up. The officers of the Dublin police have risen from the ranks, and may have come from among the people, and since they have got rid of the horse soldiers things have gone better in Dublin. Now when you ask, a constable in Dublin tells you the way civilly. The Dublin Metropolitan Police are a respectable body of men. When they have come into collision with the people, it has been in consequence of the bad policy of the right hon. Gentleman.

MR. FLYNN (Cork, N.)

In speaking of the general principle of local control of the police, the right hon. Gentleman defended one anomaly by citing London, where there has never been a separate civic authority until the establishing of the London County Council. The right hon. Gentleman forgets that, if there is one question which is more strongly advocated than another, it is that the Metropolitan Police shall be brought under the control of the representatives of the citizens and ratepayers. There can be very little doubt that in due time that reform will be effected. Therefore the right hon. Gentleman's argument against the local control of the Dublin Police breaks down on the very first examination. I endorse what has been said by the hon. and learned Gentleman with regard to the demeanour of the Dublin Police when brought in contact with the people; and the right hon. Gentleman ought not to be above taking to heart the lesson afforded by the contrast between the relations of the Dublin Police to the people and the relations of the country police to the people.

Vote agreed to.

3. Motion made, and Question proposed, That a sum, not exceeding £91,065, be granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1890, for the Expenses of the General Prisons Board in Ireland, and of the Prisons under their control; and of the Rogistration of Habitual Criminals.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE (Bradford)

Mr. Courtney, we shall, on the earliest opportunity next Session, join issue with the Government with the object of reversing their policy in reference to the treatment of political offenders in Ireland—a policy which is contrary to the practice of every other country, which is against the better precedents of this country, and which is dishonourable to the name of this country. But I propose to dwell mainly on the new Prison Rules promulgated by the Chief Secretary at the beginning of the Session to show the effect of those rules and to refer to the treatment of political offenders and of common criminals. The subject was raised early in the Session upon the Second Reading of a Bill providing that prisoners under the Crimes Act should be treated as first-class misdemeanants. The country's attention had been recently aroused by Mr. O'Brien's refusal to wear prison clothes—a resistance which, in my opinion, was noble and patriotic. The Chief Secretary and the Prime Minister spoke in the same strain of that action—Lord Salisbury referring to it as the tragic nudity. When the discussion on the second reading of the Bill came on the Government found it necessary to make concessions. There were indications that Members of their own side were dissatisfied and that even the Cabinet were not unanimous. It is a remarkable fact that during the past two or three years no Member of the Cabinet other than the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Secretary and the Prime Minister has spoken on the subject of prison treatment. The President of the Board of Trade, who is an authority on Irish matters, has been silent; and although he is a responsible Member of the Party, I cannot doubt for my part that it is a policy which in the main does not meet with his approval. It appears to me that the key to the policy of the Chief Secretary is to be found in the speech which he delivered to the Liberal Unionists of Dublin that he would not permit Mr. W. O'Brien to ruin his constitution for the purpose of injuring the Government. The Chief Secretary's object has been to maintain just that degree of severity and indignity in the Prison Rules which is compatible with the safety of the Government. He has determined to jettison just so much of the Prison Rules as is necessary to save the rest of his valuable cargo of coercion. The three points on which he has determined to yield are prison dress, clipping the hair, and the exercise of the prisoners with ordinary criminals. In refusing to recognise any distinction between political offenders and ordinary criminals the right hon. Gentleman has been compelled to introduce a totally new principle into his Prison Rules, and to make a distinction between wealthy prisoners and poor prisoners. Such a principle is utterly subversive of prison discipline. There are eleven points of difference which distinguish the treatment of criminals from that of first-class misdemeanants. Three of them are matters of indignity—prison dress, clipping the hair, and exercising with other criminals. The other eight are matters of severity and hardship—the plank-bed, prison fare, deprivation of occupation for the mind, deprivation of the visits of friends, deprivation of correspondence, and a few other matters of the same kind. The right hon. Gentleman has dealt with the three points, involving indignity, but he has left all the other points untouched. I believe that the deprivation of mental employment inflicts far greater pain than hard labour. I am convinced that no educated man can stand that treatment long without in- jury to both his health and mind. I have always held, compared with these inflictions, that the insistence upon the wearing of prison clothing was a comparatively unimportant matter, though, where the enforcement of it was intended to emphasise the contention that there is no distinction between political and ordinary offenders, I think it was right to resist, and the hon. Member for Cork took the proper course. With the exception of the three points on which the Chief Secretary has made concessions, the treatment of political offenders remains the same substantially as that of ordinary criminals. I have always protested against a distinction being made between Irish Members of this House and other persons convicted under the Crimes Act, and I believe Irish Members are themselves of that view. And I further maintain as a sound principle that there should be no distinction between the rich and the poor. But now that distinction is being introduced for the first time into Irish prisons by the Chief Secretary. I can best illustrate the effect of the new rules by a case which occurred recently. Four persons were incarcerated in Derry Gaol for soma of the most serious frauds that mercantile men can be guilty of. They had effected a number of insurances on inebriates, and then plied them with temptations to drink so as to hasten their end that they might get the insurance money. These prisoners were asked whether they would wear their own garments; and I find in a newspaper in the North of Ireland a record by one of the prisoners of his experiences under these new rules. Here is a passage from the letter of this Belfast forger:— When the new rule was applied to us in Derry Gaol we were individually interrogated by an official as to whether we preferred to wear our own clothes or the prison clothes, and whether or not we desired to wear our beards and hair long. When one comes to think of it it seems surprising that it should have been left for so many years to the sagacious Mr. Balfour to concede these desirable items of prison rules. It is impossible to describe the sensation of degradation which a man of my position feels on being mutilated of beard and moustache and dressed in prison garb. … The very fact of one's being allowed to wear one's own clothing necessarily gives the feeling, that, though among gaol birds, he is not of them; and on the other hand, it must and will produce a feeling of respectful deference on the part of the warders, which was almost impossible under the old system. I can scarcely imagine that the Chief Secretary appreciates the compliment to his sagacity paid by this Belfast forger. These forgers were not called upon to exercise with the other criminals, but, strange to say, Father Stephens and Mr. Kelly, who were also relieved from taking exercise with the ordinary criminals, were compelled to take exercise with the Belfast forgers. They objected, and they were deprived for some days of their exercise. An interesting statement of the effect of these new rules is to be found in Mr. Joyce's evidence given before Lord Aberdare's Committee. It is to this effect:— In one prison I went to quite recently a prisoner, who had committed a serious crime under the ordinary law, applied to have his own clothes left to him. He was allowed to wear them, and he appeared in a knickerbocker suit. He was put to exercise with other prisoners, and it was the occasion of remarks being made, as the prisoners talking and pointing to it entailed several of them being punished. Let me quote another case illustrating the effect of the new rules. At Tullamore Gaol five persons were incarcerated under the Coercion Act, three being Members of Parliament. Under the new rules they are relieved from the obligation of taking exercise with other criminals, and they were allowed to take exercise together. But on this becoming known in Dublin Castle, orders were sent by the Prisons Board that these gentlemen were not to take exercise together but separately, and in absolute silence. I ask the Chief Secretary whether that met with his approval? I do not propose to deal at length with the case of Mr. Conybeare. I will leave that to my hon. Friend (Mr. M'Arthur). Mr. Conybeare was convicted and sentenced as a first-class misdemeanant, while the hon. Member for South Armagh, for exactly the same offence, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment as a common criminal. The reason for the distinction does not appear. Assuming Mr. Conybeare was rightly convicted—in my opinion, he was unjustly convicted—then it would be just that he should be treated as a first-class misdemeanant. But it would appear that his treatment as a first-class misdemeanant has been made as serious as possible. He was put into a common criminal's cell. In English gaols first-class misdemeanants are allowed comfortable rooms, which on some occasions they are allowed to furnish. I am told that Mr. Conybeare can only receive one visitor a day for a quarter of an hour. In England a first-class misdemeanant may really bold a levée of friends. In the well-known case of Colonel Baker two rooms were allowed the prisoner, Mr. Stead edited his paper in gaol, and Mr. Yates was allowed to have his friends and continue his literary labours. I ask the Chief Secretary whether he approves of these restrictions which have been placed upon the treatment of first-class misdemeanants in Ireland under the new rules. I am told that in Derry Gaol there is no suitable room where Mr. Conybeare could be confined as a first-class misdemeanant, and, therefore, it was necessary to put him into an ordinary cell. If that is the case, no doubt that is the place where he has contracted the loathsome disease from which he is suffering. Why was Mr. Conybeare not released at once, and why did not the Chief Secretary at once direct an inquiry into the circumstances? I should have thought after this evidence of the condition of Derry Gaol, that he would have at once released Mr. Conybeare in order that he might receive professional treatment outside. That would have been the generous course, if the Chief Secretary can be expected to act generously with regard to prisoners convicted under the Coercion Act. It was the impression of the House, and certainly of the country, that Lord Aberdare's Committee ought to inquire into the whole question of the treatment of political prisoners. So far as I can recollect, there was to be no limitation. Lord Aberdare seemed greatly surprised when he found the Instruction expressly limited to the two questions of prison dress and clipping the hair. Thus limited the inquiry has proved almost a farce. A better Chairman than Lord Aberdare could not have been selected, and I am sure every one regrets the severe illness from which he is suffering. I do not say anything against the constitution of the Committee. My conviction is that if Lord Aberdare had been allowed to inquire and report upon the subject, he would have recommended that prisoners under the Coercion Act of 1887 should be treated as political prisoners. Now the Committee, as it was, practically condemned root and branch all the new regulations, and they unanimously reported against the extension of the rules to England. In the evidence given before that Committee there was an overwhelming weight of authority against the introduction of the new principle of making a distinction between the rich and the poor prisoners. Sir Edward Ducaine, who gave evidence on the subject, said the new rule which would lead to the Creation of a class who affect a superiority over the rest would have a very bad influence over the prisoners and over the warders. The present system of administration would be impossible if there were a mixed body of prisoners of whom some should be in prison dress and others in private clothes. The Governor of Mountjoy Prison, in Ireland, said:— The new rule would have a bad effect on warders, and influence them, and especially new officers, when they see that some persons are dealt with differently from others, to treat them differently also, and not to be strict in enforcing the rules. The Committee were evidently placed in a position of great difficulty by their limited instructions. They did not like to recommend the repeal of the new rule because that would have been to restore the prison garb to political offenders; but, they recommended that it should not be applied to persons guilty of serious crimes, and it is clear that they did not intend to include among serious crimes political offences, breaches against the Vaccination Laws, and matters of that kind. They recommended that persons convicted of offences of that kind should be imprisoned in separate prisons. The Committee also condemned in the most emphatic manner the treatment of the hon. Member for Kerry. I myself regard his treatment as illegal under the existing rules. I ask the Chief Secretary what course he is going to take with regard to the officers who were responsible for the treatment of the hon. Member for Kerry? It seems to me that the Chief Secretary stands condemned by his own Committee of a very hasty adoption of an unsound principle, namely, a distinction for the first time between the rich and poor in gaol. On the other hand, these new rules are wholly insufficient to meet the demands of those who have urged that the treatment of political prisoners should be different from that of ordinary criminals. The political prisoners continue, as before, subject to all the severities of the gaol. I have no doubt that the Chief Secretary will hold that these matters are not worthy of much consideration and attention. But I may remind him that some of the greatest men who have sat in this House have protested against the treatment of political prisoners after the fashion of the present day—the plank bed and the deprivation of reading and writing. Lord Brougham, O'Connell, Joseph Hume, and a great many others have protested against persons convicted of political offences being treated in this manner. I will only quote one precedent, that of the late notorious Richard Pigott, who in the year 1868 was convicted in respect of a series of articles in the paper which he edited and which were of a most treasonable character. Mr. Richard Pigott was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Objection was raised to his treatment in this House, and the then Chief Secretary, Lord Mayo, who was an Irishman, and therefore amenable to Irish opinion, directed that Richard Pigott should be treated as a first-class misdemeanant. Lord Mayo said— I have taken on myself as an officer of the Government, and on my own authority, to authorise a very large departure from the rules of the Prison Board. In that respect I have, perhaps, assumed an authority which did not altogether belong to me. I felt so strongly that the Regulation Orders of the Prison Board were not intended for the treatment of persons convicted of this class of offence that I felt it my duty to authorise a departure from the rules. In doing so I believe I only fulfilled my duty. Lord Mayo dealt in the same manner with another case, that of the hon. Member for South Belfast (Mr. Johnstone), who was convicted of attending an illegal meeting, and who was sent to prison as a common criminal. He was offered his release if he would undertake not to attend any other illegal meeting. He very nobly held that he would compromise others if he accepted the condition, and he elected to go, and went to prison. Lord Mayo directed that he should be treated as a first-class misdemeanant. But it appeared that he was not allowed to receive his friends except in the presence of a warder, but Lord Mayo directed that in future he should receive his friends without the presence of warders. I could bring forward a number of other cases of the treatment of persons convicted of political offences. There is one point on which I should like to make an appeal to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary. It is on a subject with which I have already dealt to some extent—namely, the deprivation of materials for reading and writing. The right hon. Gentleman is himself, to some extent I believe, a literary man, and I think he must appreciate what it must be for literary men to be shut up for long weeks and months without any means of occupying the mind by reading or writing. I would ask him whether this ever occurs to the right hon. Gentleman when he looks upon the blanks among his opponents on the Benches opposite and recollects that most of them are literary men? Does it ever occur to the right hon. Gentleman what mental torture it must be to such men to be kept for weeks and months without the means of reading and writing? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware how many great literary works have been written in gaol by political prisoners? I believe I am right in saying that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his History of England in gaol, that Bunyan wrote a great part of his Pilgrim's Progress, and Mirabeau most of his works in gaol. There are also many other works which were written in gaol by men in the position of political prisoners. On this point alone I would suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that he should make a new regulation. For my part, I have never been able to think of this matter without a burning sense of humiliation and shame. I know I am only a phlegmatic Englishman, infected with much of the pococurantism of London society and political lobbies. If I feel strongly on this subject, what must be the feelings of hot-blooded young Irishmen in every part of the world? I would ask is it wise, is it statesmanlike, to rouse the passions and indignation of a whole generation of Irishmen in every part of the world? I commend this matter to the consideration of the Government. In conclusion, I have to ask the Chief Secretary what he proposes to do respecting Lord Aberdare's Report. Does he, in the teeth of the Report of this Committee of his own appointing, intend to maintain the unsound principle of class distinction between rich and poor in the Irish gaols? Are we to have the scandal of Members of this House and numerous other persons convicted of purely political offences being treated any longer as common criminals in the Irish gaols—men whose motives are as pure and honourable as those of the right hon. Gentleman himself. [Ironical Home Rule laughter.] I have never doubted for a moment that the motives of the right hon. Gentleman are honourable and pure. I would appeal to him not to refrain from doing what is right by an obstinate regard for his own past declarations. It is too often the duty of a statesman to have to make concessions. I can only say that for my part I shall welcome, applaud, and rejoice in any change of policy in this respect, and, provided it be carried out in a generous spirit and without unreasonable reservation, I shall be the last to taunt the Chief Secretary or his Government for any change of opinion. I can assure him that his prison policy has done, and is doing, more than any act of the Government to alienate vast numbers of people from the cause which the right hon. Gentleman has at heart, and that it is viewed by large numbers of people, including Members of his own Party, with disgust and shame and as dishonouring the good fame of this country in the eyes of the civilised world.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

There is much in what has fallen from the right hon. Gentleman on which upon another occasion I should have been tempted to dilate in a controversial spirit, but I will try to confine myself on the present occasion to the barest survey of the arguments which the right hon. Gentleman has presented to the Committee, and will omit all reference to the case of the hon. Member for Camborne, to which it is proposed to refer at a later period of the Debate. The great bulk of the speech of the right hon. Gentleman related to the general theory of prison treatment in Ireland, and criticism on the action which the present Government has taken with regard to the recent alteration in the Irish prison rules. The right hon. Gentleman must not be surprised at there being some divergence in the con- clusions at which we have arrived, because the premisses from which we start are absolutely different. The right hon. Gentleman appears to think I ought to agree with him that all prisoners under the Crimes Act are political prisoners in the same sense that General Boulanger would be if he went over to France, or any person tried for treasonable writings would be in this country. Now, I entirely traverse that contention of the right hon. Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman has taken great pains to amass precedents, but I think it would have been worth all the quotations in the world if the right hon. Gentleman had devoted his mind to the real problem before him. The right hon. Gentleman lays it down that Members of this House convicted under the Crimes Act, let us say for encouraging tenants to break the law, are political offenders, and also that these gentlemen desire to draw no distinction between themselves and any other prisoner convicted under the Crimes Act. The right hon. Gentleman is therefore of opinion that a tenant who, in obedience to this illegal conspiracy, barricades his house and resists the police and pours boiling water on the bailiffs is guilty of a political offence. [Mr. SHAW LEFEVRE indicated dissent.] The right hon. Gentleman did not say that; but what I complain of is that the right hon. Gentleman does not see to what his premisses lead him. The right hon. Gentleman lays it down that this was the action of politicians, and that those who follow those politicians ought to be treated in the same way. The inevitable conclusion, the conclusion from which the right hon. Gentleman cannot possibly escape, is that those persons who knock in the ribs of policemen and pour boiling water on bailiffs should be treated——

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE

I have never contended that persons who use force against the police or pour boiling water should be treated as political offenders.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I have never stated that the right hon. Gentleman said it; but my contention is that if the right hon. Gentleman knew how to argue from his own premisses, he would have to point that out. The right hon. Gentleman has laid it down that one must judge of the guilt of an action by the motive. The right hon. Gentleman and hon. Members opposite below the Gangway say that those tenants who forcibly resist eviction are acting from the noblest of all motives, the defence of their homes. Therefore, I presume, they should be treated in the most lenient manner as political prisoners and first-class misdemeanants. The right hon. Gentleman has not said that, but he will show greater ingenuity than he has displayed in his speech if he is able to get up and show any flaw in this reasoning. Hon. Members below the Gangway who think that they ought to be treated as first-class misdemeanants must think that those whom they try to persuade to follow a particular course of illegal action should not be treated with less leniency than they claim for themselves.

MR SHAW LEFEVEE

May I point out to the right hon. Gentleman that a vast number of persons convicted under the Crimes Act have done nothing worse than attend some political meeting or publish a newspaper? I have not attempted to draw the line.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

If the right hon. Gentleman had attempted to draw the line, he would have seen how utterly futile is the position he has taken up. My point is that it is absolutely impossible to draw the line between the two classes of offenders. Just let the Committee note the inference which we must draw from the interruption of the right hon. Gentleman. If a Member of this House recommends boycotting, or tells tenants to defend their houses, and is convicted in consequence, according to the right hon. Gentleman he is not a political prisoner.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE

I did not say that.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I will not suggest that the right hon. Gentleman should interrupt me again, because I do not think the Committee has received much instruction from his last interruption; but I think he will admit I have now supplied him with some grounds for thinking that before coming down to this House again and recommending, on his responsibility as an ex-Minister of the Crown, that a particular kind of distinction should be drawn between different classes of prisoners, he had better take a little more trouble to study the points on which he pronounces so glibly. The right hon. Gentleman complains of the course taken by the Government with regard to certain relaxations of the rules applying to prison dress. He says the Government nave abolished that which is degrading in punishment and left that which is disagreeable. Well, that is precisely what we intended to do. I have long been of opinion that to heap degradation and indignities on prisoners is not the proper way of punishing them. In my judgment, the example which I have set in Ireland would undoubtedly be followed in England if it once became clear that any large number of prisoners here did feel the present prison dress to be "a degradation and an indignity," to use the words of the right hon. Gentleman. I maintain that the whole theory of attempting to punish by inflicting indignity is utterly wrong. As a matter of fact, until the hon. Member for North-East Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien) first resisted the prison dress, it was not usual to regard it as degrading and insulting. But as soon as one finds that punishment beyond that which a Court of Law intends to inflict is inflicted by one's prison rules, it is time to consider how far those rules ought to be modified. The right hon. Gentleman has complained that I have drawn a distinction between rich and poor. I deny it altogether. If I have drawn any distinction at all, it has been between cleanliness and uncleanliness. But the old rule did draw a distinction between rich and poor. It has never been contested that to the poor the prison dress is not an affront, but a privilege; it was originally given to poor prisoners as a benefit. On the hardened criminal it certainly does not inflict any degradation, but it does do so on just the class of prisoners who are not hardened criminals. By the old rule, therefore, a distinction is drawn between the rich and the poor in favour of the latter. Then the right hon. Gentleman was very angry because these prison regulations that inflict inconvenience upon prisoners have not been modified. Well, I did not propose to modify them. The right hon. Gentleman complains that prisoners are deprived of the company of their friends and of books and papers, and argues that such deprivation inflicts upon them injuries which may affect both mind and body. Well, Sir, if that is a reason for altering the regulations, it is a reason for altering them not in favour of Crimes Act prisoners only, but in favour of all prisoners. Does the right hon. Gentleman mean to recommend that a rule which destroys, as he says, both the mind and body of men should be relaxed for one set of prisoners, but remain applicable to all others? I admit that if it did destroy mind and body it ought not to be kept in force against Crimes Act prisoners. But neither ought it to be kept in force against any prisoner. I cannot understand this humanity by halves, this charity which directs its gaze exclusively upon one particular section of the criminal class. I fear I must unwillingly come to the conclusion that a good deal of politics is mixed up with the philanthropy of the right hon. Gentleman.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE

I did not deal with common criminals. I own there is a great deal to be said for relaxation with regard to them.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

It is very unfortunate, but the right hon. Gentleman's interruptions show that he never understands the argument I am addressing to him. Ho told us that this particular kind of imprisonment was injurious to the bodies and the minds of prisoners. Why is it injurious to the bodies and minds of only one class of prisoners? I do not think it is necessary for me to say anything else in answer to the general attack of the right hon. Gentleman. Imprisonment is intended to be disagreeable, although the fact is sometimes forgotten. The whole object of imprisonment is that it should be disagreeable. A punishment is useless if it is not deterrent, and it cannot be deterrent if it is made thoroughly agreeable to the person on whom it is inflicted. Therefore, in my judgment, prison discipline should be disagreeable. I quite agree that its character should not be such as to render it likely that it would inflict any permanent injury upon a prisoner; but there is not the slightest person for believing that Irish prison treatment is likely to inflict such injury upon those subjected to it. I have, on the contrary, come to the conclusion that if Irish prison treatment differs at all from English prison treatment, it differs in the direction of leniency only.

MR. W. M'ARTHUR (Cornwall, Mid, St. Austell)

I do not intend to enter upon the whole field of prison treatment. I wish to call attention to the case of my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne (Mr. Conybeare), now in Derry Gaol, and in doing so I should like to acknowledge very gratefully the personal courtesy which the Chief Secretary has extended to me at one or two interviews. If the right hon. Gentleman will allow me, without impertinence, to make a suggestion to him, I would say that if he could display inside this House as much courtesy to hon. Members as he displays outside, business would often be greatly facilitated. The hon. Member for Camborne has, I fear, been often held up as a mark for obloquy by the Party opposite; but hon. Gentlemen must recollect that my hon. Friend is not an utter outcast. He is, after all, a Member of this House and the Representative of a very large constituency, and in many parts of the West of England there is an extraordinary sentiment of personal devotion to him. The case of the hon. Member is extremely hard, for his punishment is quite disproportionate to the offence committed by him, and now even exceeds in severity the sentence of the Court that convicted him. Of course, I say nothing of the offence committed by the hon. Member for Camborne nor of the sentence which was passed upon him for that offence. That has nothing to do with the subject we are considering to-night. I will only say that, in my opinion, and in that of many thousands of people in this country, Mr. Conybeare, whatever may have been the technical or legal offence which he committed, has not been guilty of any moral offence whatever, and certainly no offence worthy of being visited by such severe treatment as has been meted out to him in Derry Gaol. Mr. Conybeare has been sent to gaol as a first class misdemeanant, and I ask the Chief Secretary whether there is any adequate or proper provision in Derry Gaol for persons sentenced in that way. The accommodation given to Mr. Conybeare is exactly such accommodation as is accorded to every other prisoner not sentenced as a first-class misdemeanant. Mr. Conybeare has been suffering repeatedly from cold and rheumatism brought on, probably, by the condition of the gaol and by the condition of the cell in which he is confined. For days and days together the Member for Camborne has been deprived of exercise in gaol because the Prisons Board have refused to put up any shelter to enable prisoners to take exercise, especially in wet weather. Seeing that there are gaols in which these shelters exist, it is a most monstrous shame and a perfect scandal that prisoners sentenced as first-class misdemeanants, Members of this House, sentenced for what we regard as quasi-political offences, should be sent to a gaol in which none of these provisions exist. Mr. Conybeare, too, has been denied the opportunity of contributing to a technical journal an article which he has written on a technical subject—on Mining Royalties—a subject totally unconnected with Irish politics or English politics. There may be a rule of the Prisons Board that political prisoners should be denied the opportunity of writing on political subjects, but there can be no earthly sense in declining to permit a prisoner who is allowed to write letters to his friends to send articles to journals written on subjects which have not the remotest connection with politics or with the cause of his imprisonment. Mr. Conybeare has also been hardly treated, in regard to the visitors whom he is allowed to see. Mr. Conybeare has been allowed to receive one visitor a day for about a quarter of an hour. These visitors are received in a sort of outhouse, where they have to await the arrival of the hon. Member. The visitor is placed at one end of the apartment and the hon. Member at the other, and a warder is present during the interview, so that for all practical purposes the privilege which the law allows a first-class misdemeanant of seeing his friends in his cell is taken away from the hon. Member for Camborne by the absurd precautions which the Prisons Board have thought fit to surround the privilege with. All these things are bad enough. But I now come to a matter which I confess I mention with the greatest possible reluctance. Last Friday I received information that my hon. Colleague was suffering from a particularly disgusting and loathsome form of disease contracted in Derry Gaol, and I asked the Chief Secretary a question upon the subject. When I mention the name of the disease, which I shall only do once, I am quite sure hon. Members opposite, as well as hon. Gentlemen around me, will feel it was utterly impossible for me to remain silent with that information in my possession, and they will agree with me that I was bound the other night to go so far even as to incur the censure of the Chair in the endeavour to bring to the knowledge of the House and the country the state in which the hon. Member for Camborne is kept by the General Prisons Board in Ireland. The doctor of Derry Gaol reports that the hon. Member for Camborne is suffering from the frightful disease called crab lice, which is probably of all diseases the most loathsome, disgusting, and degrading, and is never found except under circumstances and conditions of life in which I sincerely hope no Member of this House will ever find himself. The prison doctor reports that the disease from which the hon. Member is suffering must have been contracted in Derry Gaol.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

No.

A Nationalist Member

Where, then?

MR. M'ARTHUR

I ask the right hon. Gentleman to explain his hypothesis as to where Mr. Conybeare contracted the disease. The doctor reports that my hon. Friend has this complaint. My hon. Friend has been in Derry Gaol for nearly two months, denied all contact with the outside world, except through the medium of the friends whom he sees at a distance for a quarter of au hour, once every 24 hours. The doctor has told the hon. Member that there is no doubt that this disease was contracted in gaol, and that he cannot give Mr. Conybeare any security or guarantee that there will be no recurrence of the complaint until he can ascertain its origin and find out where it is he has contracted it. It is utterly impossible that the ailment could have been contracted by my hon. Friend outside the walls of Derry Gaol. The doctor and dozens of people have seen the hon. Member during the last two months, and it is only last Friday that symptoms of this horrible complaint manifested themselves upon him. Before my hon. Friend went to Ireland he was carefully examined by his own doctor, by the hon. Member for Ilkeston (Sir W. Foster) and by the hon. Member for Dublin (Dr. Kenny). We have the opinion of all these gentlemen that there was nothing the matter with the hon. Gentleman when he entered the prison at Derry. Two months afterwards these symptoms began to appear, and I understand that the extraordinary suggestion is made that the complaint may have been communicated through the linen and other articles washed outside the walls of Derry Gaol. If that is going to be the right hon. Gentleman's reply, I could only say that a more extraordinary explanation was never put before the House. Mr. Conybeare's laundry work is entrusted to the care of the proprietor of one of the largest hotels in the City of Londonderry. It seems to me perfectly ridiculous and trifling with the gravity of the matter to suggest that the disease could have been communicated to my hon. Friend in that manner. I am bound to say also that the doctor of Derry Gaol has told my hon. Friend that he did not see how the disease could have been communicated to him from outside the walls of the prison. There are only three possible sources of contagion. First of all, the offices of the gaol. Then, it is possible the contagion may have reached my hon. Friend through the water which is supplied every day for his bath in the prison. In the third place, it is possible that the hon. Member may have contracted the disease in the chapel by contact with some of the other prisoners. Mr. Conybeare is not in any way privileged in chapel. He would not wish to be so, but associates himself on terms of perfect equality with all the other prisoners. Has inquiry been made into the state of the cell, and as to what prisoner occupied the cell previous to Mr. Conybears? Further, has an honest attempt been made to trace the source of this terrible malady? The Member for Camborne has not asked the right hon. Gentleman to release him. He makes no appeal to the right hon. Gentleman for pity or consideration; but he does ask what I believe would be given without hesitation to any prisoner in an English gaol attacked by this horrible disease under similar circumstances—namely, that he may be transferred to some other gaol where he may be certain that this abominable affliction will not happen again. Is there any earthly reason why this should not be done? The right hon. Gentleman's purpose is served so long as the Member for Camborne cannot make speeches in this House and go about the country denouncing his policy. Mr Conybeare has been confined for two months in an ordinary cell in a gaol which he represents is in a filthy condition. He is suffering from a rheumatic affection and from a loathsome and disgusting disease, and I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he will not at once order that the Member for Camborne should be removed from Derry Gaol to one where he may serve the rest of his sentence under decent and cleanly conditions? In the name of the constituents of my hon. Friend I should like to ask the Chief Secretary further, whether, seeing what Mr. Conybeare has passed through since he has been in gaol, seeing that he has suffered more than the right hon. Gentleman could have imagined that he would suffer, and taking into consideration the fact that these illnesses have come upon the hon. Member when he is in a gaol for which the Chief Secretary is responsible, he will not give instructions for the release of Mr. Conybeare? It is not upon the suggestion of the hon. Member that I make this appeal. The only request I have to make from Mr. Conybeare is that he should be removed to another gaol. I cannot see any reason against that course, and I am willing to believe the right hon. Gentleman does not wish to inflict physical torture as well as confinement upon his prisoners. I hope that in that chivalrous spirit which was attributed to him by the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton (Mr. H. Fowler) he will ameliorate the condition of the Member for Camborne, and justify what seems to us the somewhat extravagant laudation which has been bestowed upon him by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Wolverhampton.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Perhaps it is as well I should reply at once to the various questions which have been put to me by the hon. Member. I have nothing to complain of in the tone of the hon. Gentleman's speech. One phrase, I think, he has made use of unadvisedly, but that I will not comment upon. The first criticism of the hon. Member relates to the cell in which the hon. Member for Camborne (Mr. Conybeare) was placed, and he appears to be under the impression it is the habitual practice to provide special cells for first-class misdemeanants. That is not the case. I believe there are some few prisons in which there are special cells for that class of offender, but it is not the usual custom, and in the great majority of English prisons there is no attempt made to keep up the different kinds of accommodation. But in any case, the cell which the hon. Member for Camborne occupies is better than the ordinary run, as it has a wooden floor, and is as to light, ventilation, and prospect a far better cell than any other in the prison. The next point is that the hon. Member is suffering from rheumatism and from deprivation of exercise owing to there being no shed in the prison yard. I believe it is not medically correct to say that the hon. Member suffers from rheumatism, but that he has got slight lumbago. He has declined to be treated by the doctor for that ailment, either in or out of hospital, and either by external or internal remedies. With regard to the exercise, it is perfectly true that during part of the period of the hon. Member's imprisonment the weather has been wet, and that prisoners have suffered the same deprivation as other subjects of Her Majesty, and cannot take outdoor exercise without a certain amount of inconvenience. In some prisons there are sheds. I believe that in one prison in Belfast there is a shed of that kind, but that in England there is no prison at all where there is any shed of the kind, and the Prisons Board have seen grave objections to placing a shed in any prison yard except where the structural conditions of the yard make it convenient to put up such a shed. If a shed is put up in a prison not specially constructed for it the amount of space is unduly circumscribed. If a lean-to is made it facilitates the escape of prisoners, and if a shed is put up in the centre of the yard the ventilation of the lower cells is probably interfered with. I am, therefore, not prepared to be a party to urging the Prisons Board in Ireland to do what the English Prisons Board have never thought of doing. The hon. Member criticised the conduct of the Prisons Board in refusing to allow an article written by the hon. Member for Camborne to be sent to a scientific periodical. I believe that in doing so the Prisons Board acted according to the rule which governs such matters both in England and Ireland. I believe that neither in England or Ireland are prisoners allowed to write to the newspapers.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE

Are they not allowed to edit newspapers?

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I believe they are not allowed. [Cries of "Oh, oh!"] I can only say what I believe to be the ordinary rule.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE

I undertake to say that my statement is correct: that Mr. Stead was allowed to edit the Pall Mall Gazette when he was in prison, and Mr. Yates was allowed to edit The World when he was in prison.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

The right hon. Gentleman referred to Mr. Stead. I believe that first-class misdemeanants are allowed to carry on their ordinary avocations; but I think it will not be asserted that the ordinary avocation of the hon. Member for Camborne is that of writing articles for scientific journals. I now come to the last part of the case raised by the hon. Gentleman opposite—namely, that relating to the skin affection from which the hon. Member for Camborne has suffered. I am glad to think that, so far as I have heard, the hon. Member is now cured. The point is whether that affection is due to the uncleanly condition of the prison or not. The hon. Gentleman has asked who was the previous occupant of the cell. I believe—I do not speak with absolute confidence—that Father M'Fadden was the previous occupant of the cell [A laugh, and Cries of "Shame."] I am merely replying to the hon. Gentleman.

MR. T. P. O'CONNOR (Liverpool, Scotland)

We object to the indecent laughter of Ambrose.

MR. SEXTON

He played for it.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

At all events, the previous occupants of the cell were first-class misdemeanants.

MR. AMBROSE (Middlesex, Harrow)

I beg to say, Mr. Courtney, that the imputation upon me is utterly unfounded.

THE CHAIRMAN

Order, order!

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

The previous occupants of the cell were, I believe, first-class misdemeanants. The most scrupulous inquiry has been made, and no trace of the origin of the affection has been discovered, nor is it thought that any prisoner in that gaol is now suffering, or ever has suffered, from the same malady. The question, therefore, arises, was there any difference in the treatment of the hon. Member for Camborne which could suggest a special origin for the malady? The reason that the hypothesis of the washing has been brought forward is that the Member for Camborne alone has his bedding and linen washed outside the prison. Apart from making any sort of imputation against the keeper of the hotel where the washing is done, it is a conceivable, although not at all a probable, hypothesis that the disease may have been brought in in the bedding or linen washed outside the prison. The most scrupulous examination has not shown any other possible origin for it, and therefore we must rest content with the hypothesis I have suggested to the House. I do not think the medical examination has much bearing one way or the other. The hon. Gentleman went on to say—"Do you not think that the Member for Camborne has a right to be transferred to another prison where he cannot suffer from a recurrence of the malady." With the general proposition laid down by the hon. Member I entirely agree, and if I thought there was the slightest chance of the repetition of the calamity which has occurred to the hon. Member for Camborne I would not hesitate for 24 hours to order his removal to another prison; but I would point out that the examination which has been made does not disclose any ground for believing that the gaol is defective in point of cleanliness or sanitary arrangements. On the hypothesis that the disease was caught in the chapel of the prison, there will be no better security against risk in any other prison. I do not, however, think that any fears on the subject need be entertained. If the origin of the disease should be clearly traced, that will be a matter for consideration; or if it is found that the apprehension of a recurrence of it seriously affects the health of the hon. Member for Camborne, if it is likely to prey upon his mind, then I would certainly waive the consideration that I individually do not think the hon. Member runs any risk in Derry Gaol, and the Prisons Board would undoubtedly direct his removal to another prison. I am glad the hon. Gentleman has not dwelt upon the supposed insanitary condition of Derry Gaol, and therefore no reply on that head is so far called for. I do not think there need be any fear that the hon. Member for Camborne will suffer from the general conditions of the prison; indeed, as a matter of fact, his weight has gone up since he has been in prison; and according to the Reports of the medical officer of the gaol his general health appears to be entirely satisfactory.

MR. W. M'ARTHUR

The right hon. Gentleman has intimated that if the fear of a recurrence of the disease is felt to press on the mind of the hon. Member for Camborne then the right hon. Gentleman will take steps for the removal of the prisoner; and I can assure him that the fear of the recurrence of this loathsome disease does press on the mind of the hon. Member, as it would press upon the mind of any decent man under such circumstances. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to imagine the feelings of a man sitting in the cell where he contracted the disease, with all the surroundings connected with the disease, with nobody able to tell him how the disease was contracted, all he knows being that he did not bring it in with him. I think the right hon. Gentleman will see that it is impossible for a man to prevent his mind from dwelling upon the subject, and to banish the constant fear of the return of the symptoms. I would urge upon the right hon. Gentleman to go a step further, and order the transfer to be made at once, if indeed he does not see his way to a release of the prisoner, which I am sure would not be an unpopular thing to do.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I presume the hon. Member speaks on the authority of private letters from the hon. Member for Camborne when he states that the idea that he might again catch the disease is preying on his mind. Of course, that is the point on which I said, if I were satisfied, I would take care that the hon. Member should be removed, and taking the statement of the hon. Member as evidence on the point I will not go back from what I said just now.

MR. P. J. O'BRIEN (Tipperary, N.)

I wish to call attention to the case of Mr. J. Powell, now in Limerick Gaol, as one of extreme urgency. According to information I have received within the last hour Mr. Powell's health is in such a condition that immediate action is necessary. Mr. Powell has been three times committed to prison, and I endeavoured to point out a few days ago that the effect of his imprisonment has been that he has lost the sight of one eye. I am aware that I might be precluded by the Rules of Order from bringing all the circumstances attending the conviction of this gentleman before the Committee, and I will only refer to his prison treatment. Mr. Powell is undergoing a sentence of three months' imprisonment, in default of giving bail for good behaviour, in respect to something that appeared in his newspaper. At the trial the Crown failed to connect Mr. Powell directly with the publication in his paper, because at the time it appeared Mr. Powell was away from all duties connected with the paper suffering from ill-health, he having just been released from another term of imprisonment, and he was practically not responsible for what appeared in the paper. When I have read the telegram I have just received, I do not know that I have much further to say. The telegram comes from Mr. Sheil, who is acting as editor, and is as follows:—"Powell has congestion of the lungs, and is in the hospital spitting blood." Now I will only further ask a plain and pertinent question of the Chief Secretary. Does he mean that the sentence of three months' imprisonment passed upon Mr. Powell should be really a sentence of death? I very much fear that even the immediate release of the prisoner will not save his life. Does the right hon. Gentleman mean that the sentence passed for no crime whatever should carry the death penalty?

MR. BROADHURST (Nottingham, W.)

I regret to intervene in what seems to be a new phase of the discussion, but I did not think that the case of Mr. Conybeare was disposed of. The right hon. Gentleman has been good enough to say that he will willingly order the removal of the hon. Member to another prison, but many of us feel that after what has taken place, after the imprisonment he has now undergone, and the miseries he has suffered in the prison where he now is, the occasion is fitting for ordering Mr. Conybeare to be released altogether. I am sure that such a release would not be opposed in any part of the House, and I am sure it would meet with approval in the country generally, and would be particularly pleasing to the hon. Member's constituents. I think the Chief Secretary might very fairly see his way to take advantage of the opportunity and direct the release of the prisoner.

MR. T. P. O'CONNOR (Liverpool, Scotland)

A somewhat more important question is raised in reference to Derry Gaol than even the unmerited sufferings and the mental torture inflicted upon the hon. Member for Camborne—namely, the sanitary condition of the gaol. The right hon. Gentleman is correct in saying that the hon. Member for St. Austell did not raise this point, but the right hon. Gentleman must not be surprised that we intend to raise this question very seriously when we have the facts before us that two strong men went into the gaol and died of typhoid within a day or two of their release. I am speaking of the Falcarragh prisoners. As a matter of fact an inquest is being held, and I do not know that the right hon. Gentleman can predict the result, though he may be able to get the verdict of the jury quashed. There is strong evidence to show that these unfortunate men have been victims of the insanitary condition of Derry Gaol. In addition it is known that three prisoners recently released from the gaol are seriously ill. Under these circumstances many of us think that the proper course is not only to remove the hon. Member for Camborne, but every other prisoner from the gaol to some other place of confinement, the sanitary condition of which cannot be called in question. Of course the right hon. Gentleman is able to look on the tortures inflicted upon prisoners with a very optimistic view, and hear of these sufferings with considerable equanimity. I do not think the right hon. Gentleman was very happy in his reference to the state of things in English prisons. The Chief Secretary began by stating that editors were not permitted in English prisons to practise their profession or edit their newspapers. Now, I visited Mr. Stead during his imprisonment and I found him not confined to one cell, but having two cells for his convenience. I do not know why he should have been confined at all, for what he did was in the interest of the public. But Mr. Stead on the occasion subjected me to a long interview and within a few days the substance of it appeared in the Pall Matt Gazette.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

The hon. Member appears to have taken my observations in the opposite sense to that in which I made them. What I stated was, that the existing rules permitted first-class misdemeanants to exercise their ordinary trade or avocation, and, therefore, editors were allowed to send communications to the Press. That is not the ordinary avocation of the hon. Member for Camborne, and, therefore, he was not allowed to send these communications.

MR. T. P. O'CONNOR

I perfectly understood what the right hon. Gentleman said, and it was not what he says now. He began with the broad and distinct statement that in England editors were not allowed to edit their newspapers from prison, and then in consequence of an interruption from my right hon. Friend, he corrected that statement, and now he wants to bundle together the original statement and subsequent correction. But the right hon. Gentleman has not even yet escaped from the dilemma in which he placed himself. He says that editors are allowed to edit their papers as their ordinary avocation. The right hon. Gentleman has imprisoned editors in Ireland; but have they been allowed to edit their newspapers in prison? The hon. Member for the College Division of Dublin was not allowed to edit the two newspapers in which he was interested when he was sent to Tullamore Gaol, nor, indeed, although he was a first-class misdemeanant, was he allowed to see those newspapers. Yet the right hon. Gentleman declares that in comparison between England and Ireland the rules in Ireland differ on the side of leniency. I should like to know whether the Chief Secretary for Ireland would permit my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien), in case his paid Magistrates and servants should subject the hon. Member to another term of imprisonment, to edit his paper during his confinement. Mr. Powell is now in prison. Has he been allowed to follow his avocation and edit his newspaper? My hon. Friend has just called attention to this case, and it appears that the health of the prisoner has been ruined by his confinement. I would advise hon. Gentlemen opposite not to draw too strictly the line of division between political and other offenders. By and by it may affect the proceedings of the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for North Armagh (Colonel Saunderson) whose speeches, as we think, led to not and disorder, in which the streets of Belfast ran with blood. The hon. Member for South Belfast (Mr. Johnston), whom I respect for his sincerity though I think he Lb fanatically mistaken in his opinions, suffered a term of imprisonment, was he treated as an ordinary offender? The difference of treatment beween the political offender and the ordinary offender is recognised by every civilised mind except those of the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues, and in every civilised country. I do not know that I even except Russia. In the days of the Third Napoleon, and when the Paris Press was daily filled with diatribes attacking the Imperial rule and dynasty, M. Rochefort and his associates were recognised as political offenders. In his characteristic manner the right hon. Gentleman endeavours to meet our arguments by declaring that distinctions cannot be made between offenders who commit acts of violence and offenders who by their speeches incite the people to those acts. But I say this is a dishonest style of argument. My hon. Friends have been sent to prison and subjected to the treatment of ordinary criminals for speeches such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Clare, in which the people were urged to shun outrage and violence as they would shun poison. Will the right hon. Gentleman undertake to treat as political offenders all those whom he imprisons for speeches that do not contain incitements to disorder? The adoption of the Plan of Campaign does not mean the commission of acts of violence, and the Plan of Campaign has effected a peaceful settlement on many estates without a blow being struck. The right hon. Gentleman professes surprise at the objection raised to the wearing of the prison dress, and says that the use of the dress is not for purposes of degradation, but as a matter of fact this question of dress is one of the most ancient in regard to prison treatment of political offenders. So long ago as 1848 John Mitchell objected to the wearing of it, and Lord Aberdare's Commission laid it down that it was a degradation which political prisoners ought to be spared. How would the right hon. Gentleman himself like to wear it should the whirligig of politics bring round the time when the democratic feeling of the people give them the opportunity of dealing with their political opponents. The right hon. Gentleman accuses the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford of being humanitarian by halves. Such language comes ill from the Minister under whose administration John Mandeville was done to death. The right hon. Gentleman says that imprisonment is not meant to be agreeable. By way of justifying the treatment to which he submits prisoners under the Coercion Act, says that imprisonment is meant to be disagreeable, and would not be deterrent if it were made "thoroughly agreeable." But that is no reason why it should be made a species of torture by means of solitary confinement for 22 hours out of every 24 hours. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford spoke of the Chief Secretary as a literary man, and in so doing I am afraid he was somewhat too complimentary to the right hon. Gentleman's amateurish literary accomplishments. I do not know what claim the right hon. Gentleman has to the title, and I certainly trust that my craft will never be discredited by counting the right hon. Gentleman among its professors. No doubt the right hon. Gentleman is a writer and reader of books, and I would ask him to put it to himself whether we should overlook the fact that imprisonment without the opportunity of reading or writing must be to a man like Mr. O'Brien, or to any person who is accustomed to reading and writing, far more trying than to any ordinary hod-man who never opens a book. I confess that my indignation and disgust of the right hon. Gentleman are such that I do not dare to use here the language which I have applied to him, and shall continue to apply to him, outside this House. What does this treatment of his amount to? As I have said, it amounts to torture. A man who would deprive a political enemy accustomed to literary pursuits of materials for reading and writing, and leave him for 22 hours out of the 24 with nothing but his own brooding fancy to dwell on, is guilty of just as brutal an anachronism as the man who nowadays would hold that hanging is the only adequate punishment for sheep stealing. The right hon. Gentleman may sit there and smile and sneer, but all these things will be brought up against him by-and-by. They have sunk deep down into the hearts of the people both in England and Ireland. If there ever had been a chance—which I am glad to think there never has been—of the opinion of Ireland wavering in its loyalty to the principles of nationalism and self government that chance the Chief Secretary has effectually destroyed. He has stimulated a thousand-fold by his policy of brutality in prison treatment the nationalistic aspirations of the people; in fact, in the course he has taken I am not sure that he has not done more to advance our cause than our own most potent advocacy. I have never addressed a meeting either of Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Irishmen at which the bare mention of the right hon. Gentleman's conduct in regard to the prison treatment of his political prisoners has not provoked a manifestation of disgust, which, if he could have witnessed it, would, I think, have given some cause for alarm even to his strained self-conceit. When the history of the right hon. Gentleman's administration comes to be written many acts will be pointed out which will show to the full the sorrow which the misguided views of one man can inflict upon a whole country, and I am sure that when this painful chapter of Irish history passes away—and the only thing which stands between it and its final disappearance is the General Election—the right hon. Gentleman himself will look back with disgust at the mean and disreputable part he has played in torturing his political opponents.

MR. BRADLAUGH (Northampton)

I have not, so far, intruded in any of the three Debates we have had on Irish subjects this week, but one or two things have been said by the Chief Secretary for Ireland this evening which, I think, call for some expression of opinion from English Members. I quite agree that it is difficult, especially in one in a high position in the Government, to regard as political offenders those whom he feels it his duty to order to be prosecuted and whom it is his responsibility to retain in custody. But I think the judgment of the country only goes one way in this matter. I doubt very much, even if you had a large audience of Conservative working men, whether the bulk of them would not determine that every one of the prisoners who have been prosecuted and who have been put in gaol under the Crimes Act fairly fall within the category of political prisoners; and I would remind the right hon. Gentleman that when he puts it that the treatment of first-class misdemeanants in this country has not been a treatment entirely different from that awarded to other prisoners—when he puts it that first-class misdemeanants, certainly until 1878, had not the opportunity of getting furniture in their cells, of being waited on, of having superior kinds of food, and almost unlimited visiting—he is greatly in error. I can only assume that those who have advised him on these matters have utterly misled him.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I am not quite sure that I apprehend the exact scope of the hon. Member's observations, but I think he must have misunderstood me. What I said in that part of my speech to which he is referring was that in English prisons there are no special cells for first-class misdemeanants. I never said whether they could or could not take in their own furniture. I spoke of the actual fabric of the cells as being not specially different from those of the other prisoners.

MR. BRADLAUGH

There was, no doubt, about the year 1878 some alteration made in the treatment of first-class misdemeanants. But nearly all the old prisons have special rooms which are allotted to first-class misdemeanants, and these are still entitled to many concessions and advantages. I am sure that what I state is the fact, for I have had occasion over and over again to make inquiry into the matter. No doubt some of these old prisons have disappeared during the past 10 years, and the disposition to afford special privileges to first-class misdemeanants I has diminished. It is clear that some of the persons imprisoned under the Crimes Act, including Members of Parliament, have been entitled to indulgences in prison which they have not received. The right hon. Gentleman disagrees with me, and I am exceedingly loth that there should be a clashing of fact between him and myself. I agree that in a strife of this kind, where feelings are so much excited, language is used on the one side and the other calculated to provoke a great deal of irritability, and to make those who are in authority strain their powers; but any one in the position of the right hon. Gentleman, in a country which boasts of taking the lead in liberty and civilisation, is bound to exercise his authority with acme approach to tenderness, and the English people believe that the right hon. Gentleman has not done that. They think that he has failed in his duty in this respect in regard to men who are his political equals, and who have committed offences which were not offences until the right hon. Gentleman made them so. Again, the right hon. Gentleman disagrees with me, but here I use the language of Judges of his own Courts in Ireland, who have declared that new offences are created under the Crimes Act. And now for a moment I will endeavour to defend the phrase, "political prisoner," which has been so much used in this Debate. It is true it is difficult to draw a distinction in the case of political and social reforms, and say that a certain portion of the advocacy is political and a part not political. In the case of Mazzini and Garibaldi the Government treated them as criminals; but the more enlightened public opinion of the world regarded them as political prisoners. So it will be with the Irish Members of Parliament whom the Chief Secretary is sending to prison. The right hon. Gentleman says he can make no difference between Members of Parliament and private individuals. That is all very well; but it may well be borne in mind that the Member of Parliament has been elected to represent his constituents and speak on their behalf, and his words may well be left to be tried by the public opinion of the time. The right hon. Gentleman thinks that he and his Party are strong enough to strike down the movement which he condemns, and other Chief Secretaries have thought so before him. The right hon. Gentleman can create crime and drive men into hostility to the law, but he cannot break a nation. The continuance of the right hon. Gentleman's policy will only provoke more bitterness, for he cannot expect Irishmen to be drawn towards him by the imprisonment of those whom they trust. It would be well if the right hon. Gentleman could realise that that which he deems his strength—the constant employment of the police in upholding the law—is really his weakness.

MR. T. HARRINGTON (Dublin, Harbour)

I did not intend, some days ago, to speak at all on this Prisons Vote; but after the speech which has just been made by the hon. Member for North Tipperary, who has made several attempts to draw the attention of the House to the case of Mr. Powell, it would ill become me who happened to be a fellow prisoner of his in Tullamore Gaol not to exercise the ordinary courtesies of humanity and endeavour to draw the attention of the Government to the case of a Member who is now being done to death for a paltry political offence. Mr. Powell is now undergoing his third imprisonment under the Crimes Act. He has lost the sight of one eye, and the sight of the other eye is declared to be in danger. Mr. Powell is a newspaper proprietor, and after his second release he sought to recruit his health by change of air, leaving his paper in other hands. Controversial letters between two correspondents as to whether a certain specific act was a case of land-grabbing were inserted in the paper without comment; and for this the absent Mr. Powell was convicted again. The hon. Member for North Tipperary has just received a telegram, "To Mr. P. J. O'Brien. Powell has conjestion of the lungs and is spitting blood. Ask a question." "Ask a question," says the telegram. Questions on this and other subjects have been asked over and over again, and either no answer or only insults have been returned. I have seen Mr. Powell in prison on two occasions, and I am sure that a more inoffensive man does not exist. With regard to the vile and brutal treatment which has been offered to him at the instigation of the Chief Secretary, I will tell the right hon. Gentleman now, as I told him when the Coercion Act was passing, that thongh he has caused me to be imprisoned I will do the same things again as those for which I was prosecuted, in the same places, and will defy him to do his worst. We do not ask for leniency, hut for bare justice. The acts of brutality and barbarity perpetrated by prison officials would not be thought of were it not known by the officials that they are dealing with political prisoners. The condition of Derry Gaol has been referred to this evening. The hon. Member for Camborne has the advantage of careful watching by Members of this House who take an interest in him. I will, however, draw attention to the state of the gaol in the interests of the more obscure persons who may be imprisoned in it. Dr. O'Farrell says in his Report— The cells are not so large as in many other prisons. The female cells are all hoarded, but the majority of the male cells are flagged, and there is no separate provision for first-class misdemeanants. Surely the right hon. Gentleman ought to have known the class of gaol to which he was sending Mr. Conybeare. I will refer the right hon. Gentleman to my own case by way of parallel. I had been only three days in Tralee Gaol when, because there were not boarded cells there for all the male prisoners, I was transferred to a gaol where the cells were flagged. In regard to the persons who have suffered death in that fatal trap, Derry Gaol, I would remark that it is the duty of the prison doctor, if he believes that imprisonment is endangering the life of a criminal, to make an immediate representation to the Lord Lieutenant that the prisoner may be discharged. If the laws of ordinary human feeling prevailed in Ireland in official circles, that feeling would never tolerate this, that a man sent for a few months or weeks to prison for a paltry offence should be allowed through the brutality of the prison doctor to be done to death. It is the duty of the prison doctor, if he really believes the treatment a prisoner is undergoing under a short sentence of imprisonment is endangering the life of that prisoner to make immediate representation, in Ireland to the Lord Lieutenant, in England to the Home Secre- tary, so that the prisoner may be discharged, because the law recognises that you ought not to inflict a sentence of death under a nominal sentence of a few months' imprisonment. The Chief Secretary made a very slight reference, and I thought he was very guarded in doing so, to the evidence taken before Lord Aberdare's Commission. When the statistics of crime were being prepared by the Government which preceded this, they included them under three heads, offences against the person, against property, and against the public peace. Now, I venture to insist that the instincts of humanity in every country, and under any Government, make a distinction between the treatment of offences against persons and property, and offences against the public peace. Private individuals are supposed to be far less able to protect themselves, and the presumption is that offences against the public peace are more or less in the nature of political offences, and are, by general assent, treated as less heinous offences. If this distinction were made in regard to Irish committals it would be found that all the persons committed in Ireland whose treatment is now in question would come under the class of offenders against the public peace, and where there is what I may call an epidemic of offences against the public peace, every reasonable man who reads history and studies the actions of men must acknowledge there must be something radically wrong, some deep cause of irritation at work to produce this epidemic. The community recognising that, says that though punishment must be awarded to the offenders, that punishment must be distinct in degree from that inflicted on criminals who, from mere sordid motives, commit offences against the persons and property of individuals. I must say in regard to the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford, in treating the recommendations made by Lord Aberdare's Commission, that there was much with which I could not agree. I do not quite agree with him that this is a question as between the rich and the poor, and I am sorry that he was led away by what I may call the clap-trap arguments of prison officials. Officials under any conditions will always give their evidence against anything that will impose additional trouble on themselves. The Chief Secretary off en talks of the equality of treatment of prisoners in England and Ireland. I have had the advantage of experience of treatment in both, and I saw in prison here some 1,500 prisoners; none of whom had their beards clipped or their moustaches taken off, although I, having the misfortune to be an Irish representative, was subjected to this indignity in my own country. Another instance of inequality is in the facilities allowed for reading. In England the ordinary burglar or pickpocket can have an exchange of books from the prison library almost when he likes; in Ireland a man must be in prison for two months before he can have a book at all, and then he must wait six weeks for a change, and after that for a month. From my experience of prison libraries there is nothing in them of such a dangerous and revolutionary character that you might not throw open the whole library at once to a man who has time to read the whole. It is a disgraceful, discreditable incident in Irish prison administration that when you have in your prisons, rightly or wrongly, a class of men who presumably are in the habit of reading when outside, that you do not by a simple minute from Dublin Castle let these men have facilities for reading whenever that does not interfere with their work. You might restrict the class of literature, restrict the books to those of a non-contentious character, and eliminate everything that might lead to political excitement, but it is a stigma that attaches particularly to the present Administration that while they have within their prison walls men, many of whom get their living from communing with books, and who, generally speaking, are all in the habit of reading, that they should deny these men access to such books as the prison library contains. The Chief Secretary talks about equal treatment to those guilty of such offences as breaking a policeman's ribs and so on, and those who incite to such offences, but let us face facts, let us go over the committals made by his Magistrates, and from what classes do we find his prisoners are drawn? Among them there are many priests, Members of Parliament, Members of Town Councils, and others who occupy public positions, and it may be said that these have some opportunity of having their cases brought before the public, but there are many men from the middle classes, shopkeepers, farmers, and others who have been sent to prison charged with some paltry offence that brings them within the meshes of the Coercion Act, or of the Statute of Edward. More pitiful is the case of these men, many of them having reached middle life and with grey hairs, many of them as venerable in appearance as the First Lord of the Treasury, and who, innocent of crime and without knowledge of the restraints of prison discipline, are subjected to the treatment of criminals, and who, unable to evade the vigilant eye of the warder as the practised burglar or ordinary pickpocket can, are subjected to additional punishment for breaches of prison discipline they unwillingly commit. I say it is cruel and disgraceful to subject these men to ordinary criminal discipline. From time to time in newspapers and in Debate here we raise the question of the treatment of leading men of the Nationalist cause, but meanwhile think of the hundreds, I may say thousands of men, who have silently suffered or who are silently suffering in Irish prisons, as well trained, and whose instincts are as far from being criminal as are those of the men whose cases we discuss from time to time, and of ourselves who discuss them.

MR. FLYNN

I think all impartial men outside the heat of political controversy must agree that no reproach stains more deeply the administration of Irish prisons by the Chief Secretary than the treatment of prisoners under the Criminal Law and Procedure Act for the past two years. The right hon. Gentleman with an ingenuity we all admire, but with which we are getting a little surfeited, entirely blinked the real issue before the Committee. First, let me repudiate as warmly as I can the idea that in urging differential treatment of prisoners under the Act I have mentioned, Irish Members are actuated by any selfish or personal considerations. Our arguments are as much addressed to the case of the humblest man who has committed a technical breach of the law, and is guiltless of any moral offence, as to the case of any Member of this House or public man that has been cited. I have long ceased to expect from the right hon. Gentleman any generous thought or sentiment towards his political opponents; but I think we might have been spared the introduction of this embittered spirit into prison administration. I assert that ordinary criminals pass through their term of imprisonment in many cases with relatively and absolutely less suffering than prisoners under the Coercion Act. The right hon. Gentleman obscures the question entirely when he talks of assaults on the police, of breaking a policeman's ribs. I confess I have never heard of the case—the vast majority of the prisoners from within my constituency are confined for offences that did not exist before the passing of the Act, and are offences that have geographical limitations. A large majority of the prisoners from my constituency are tradesmen, shopkeepers, farmers, and members of the working classes, who have gone to prison simply for the offence of attending an ordinary meeting of the National League in a suppressed district, at which a perfectly harmless resolution was passed as utterly devoid of any moral offence as can be conceived. Some 20 persons assembled after mass in the room where the League meetings were held, and passed a resolution of thanks to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Mid Lothian and the democracy of England for their efforts in favour of the Irish National cause. This was the only business transacted, and for this men have been sentenced to terms of from three to six months' imprisonment with hard labour. I say that such a thing is monstrous. I say if ever there was a case for exceptional treatment it was in this case of men guiltless of the slightest moral offence. The Chief Secretary says he cannot understand "humanity by halves." No; but we can understand brutality by whole. The right hon. Gentleman says prison treatment was never intended to be anything but disagreeable, and in that we agree. But is not detention disagreeable to men innocent of moral offence, and need you add torture to the punishment? To these shopkeepers of Kanturk association with ordinary criminals for exercise and confinement in cells six feet by five, is either vacuity of mind or treatment equal to physical torture, and worse than whipping would be. Only men who have undergone this treatment can realise what it is. The Chief Secretary should have been very slow to touch on the question of prison doctors. I am reluctant to make charges, and do not do so heedlessly; but is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the change that has come over the system of medical inspection since the Coercion Act was passed? Is he aware that prison doctors are required to enter every morning in a book, with fear and trepidation, dreading a reprimand from the General Prisons Board, every instance of the slightest indulgence in the treatment of a prisoner? I have no doubt that the unfortunate man M'Gee, discharged in a dying condition, was not released earlier, as he would have been had the doctor intervened as a doctor should, knowing the condition of the prisoner, because of the instructions and restrictions of the General Prisons Board. That is so in the majority of the cases in Ireland. Many prison doctors have served a considerable time under the Prisons Board, in a short time they will become entitled to pensions, and therefore they cannot afford to fall out with the Prisons Board. The right hon. Gentleman operates on the Board, and the Board in turn operates on these Medical Officers, and the best illustration of the system is that of a man playing on the ivory notes of a piano and evoking melody from the instrument. A short time ago a Circular was issued to the Medical Officers of Irish prisons requiring them to report to the office in Dublin Castle of the Prisons Board every amelioration of treatment extended to any prison. Such a Circular was never heard of before, and its intention was nothing more nor less than to intimidate the doctors. I say that these things are discreditable to the right hon. Gentleman. Indeed, the meanness and cruelty of the Prisons Board administration will be remembered after the Mitchelstown murders and other brutalities of the Irish police have been forgotten, and they will be numbered among the deepest and darkest stains that have characterised any political administration.

MR. HANDEL COSSHAM (Bristol, E.)

I have been intensely moved by the revelations we have had the last night or two as to the position of things in Ireland. I feel deeply—more deeply than I can well express in words—what is passing in Ireland to-day, because while our Irish friends are suffering greatly we are being degraded. The policy of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary is not only causing a great deal of unnecessary suffering, but it is causing a great deal of unnecessary degradation in England; and it is because I wish to wash my hands from the degradation of the right hon. Gentleman's policy that I beg to say a word or two. I was greatly shocked by the statement of the hon. Member for Monaghan (Mr. P. O'Brien) as to the treatment he received some time ago in Ireland. I do not think anyone could listen to that statement without feeling ashamed that a Member of this House should be subjected to the outrage which the hon. Member, with such modesty and with such beautiful and touching eloquence, detailed yesterday. Now, first of all, I think that failure is written upon the Chief Secretary's policy.

THE CHAIRMAN

The hon. Member must direct his observations to the present Vote.

MR. HANDEL COSSHAM

I was coming to that. If the right hon. Gentleman thinks his policy of imprisoning the Irish Members and the Irish people for the class of crimes for which the Crimes Act was created is going to succeed he is greatly mistaken. Failure, I say, is written all over his policy. He may fill the prisons again and again; he may put this country to double expense; and yet he will have failure written upon his policy. I think there is another word written upon his policy. [The CHAIRMAN: Order, order!] This prison system, Mr. Courtney, never has converted a country—[The CHAIRMAN: Order, order!]—never has spread——

THE CHAIRMAN

The hon. Gentleman must address himself to the administration of the prisons. The question before the Committee is not that of the Chief Secretary's policy.

MR. HANDEL COSSHAM

I quite recognise that. It is because I believe that the prison policy of the right hon. Gentleman is both a failure—[The CHAIRMAN: Order, order!] Then I will not pursue that point. It is because I believe the country is being put to enormous expense to carry out this sys- tern that I ask you to listen to me for a minute or two. I do not think we are quite responsible for the prison policy which the right hon. Gentleman is carrying out. I do not think the electors of this country have ever given their assent to it. They have never been appealed to——

THE CHAIRMAN

Order, order! I must direct the hon. Member's attention to the question. It is not a general question of policy, but of the administration and organisation of the prisons in Ireland.

MR. HANDEL COSSHAM

Quite so, Mr. Courtney; but allow me to say that the prison system is part of the right hon. Gentleman's policy, and it is to that part of his policy I am trying to address myself to. It is because I think the prison policy of the right hon. Gentleman is tyrannical and costly that I am here to protest against it. The present system of government is costly and cruel. All government that is opposed to the will of the people must be costly and cruel, and the prison system of the right hon. Gentleman appears to me——

THE CHAIRMAN

Order, order! Unless the hon. Member deals specifically with the Vote I shall require him to resume his seat. His generalities do not touch the Vote in any degree.

MR. HANDEL COSSHAM

I will come to the Vote. If the policy of the right hon. Gentleman means that the prisons are to be filled with my Irish friends, the Representatives of the Irish people, it is a policy which we English Members ought to resent, and which I do resent. I have noticed in the past that all this prison treatment of men in connection with great principles has failed. Those who imprisoned John Bunyan, no doubt, believed they were degrading him; but I think that John Bunyan stands higher in the estimation of the people than the men who imprisoned him. And I venture to think the men the right hon. Gentleman is imprisoning stand higher in the estimation of the people than the Chief Secretary, because the names of the men being imprisoned are associated with a struggle for the liberty of the people, and no imprisonment they may suffer will ever degrade them, because the people believe they are suffering in a righteous cause. Therefore, I think I am justified in saying that this system is a failure, and that it will not last very long. Anything that tends to make the people think lightly of the administration of law we ought to set ourselves against. I believe the Chief Secretary is bringing law and order into contempt. [The CHAIRMAN: Order, order!] If you imprison men for doing what they think is in the interest of the country, I say you bring law and order into contempt. I sympathise with our Irish friends in connection with the sufferings they are now enduring. I believe those sufferings will not last long. Some 12 months ago I had the misfortune, or the good fortune, to pay a visit to Londonderry Gaol, for the purpose of seeing a remarkable man inside that prison—Father M'Fadden. The interview made me feel he was a man that any country might be proud of. When I shook hands with him I felt it was an honour to do so. One has not a feeling of that sort when he comes across a criminal. I think the imprisonment of my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne (Mr. Conybeare) is a thing we ought to resent, and I hope the country will resent it. I venture to assert that the imprisonment of an English or an Irish Member costs the Government 100,000 supporters in the country.

MR. BLANE (Armagh, S.)

In 1888 I happened to be imprisoned in Derry Gaol. The allegation made on behalf of the prison officials is that the hon. Member for Camborne contracted the loathsome disease from which he has suffered through the washing of his linen outside the gaol. This very disease was prevalent when I was there. In the part of the gaol I was in two men suffered from it. One of them was very badly affected by it. I remember the man taking off his coat, rolling up his shirt sleeve, and showing me the disease on his arm. I was afraid of being attacked by it, and I was astonished when the prison doctor did not order the man to hospital, and have him isolated from the rest of the prisoners. The man was not a single hour in hospital. I have noticed time after time that prisoners in Derry Gaol have been afflicted with disease, and yet the prison doctor, Sir William Miller, would not send the sufferers to hospital. Is not such a state of things monstrous in the extreme? Sir William Miller is the Mayor of Derry, and Chairman of the Orange and Conservative Party in the City of Derry. We can well understand, therefore, he has no fine feelings towards the hon. Member for Camborne. The Irish prison officials do not carry into official life their professions outside. Frequently I have seen many prisoners paraded in the prison yards who ought certainly to have been ordered to hospital. They were not ordered to hospital, and the reason is not hard to find. The fewer men there are in hospital, the fewer times the doctor has to attend; he will not be called up at unseasonable hours if he can possibly avoid it. The prison warders are inferior officials to the Medical Officer, and they know that Sir William Miller does not want men in hospital. I have seen warders beating and throttling prisoners, and can bring witnesses to bear out my statement. There is not the slightest use in making complaints to the Visiting Committee of the gaol. The Chairman of the Committee or Board was formerly a Member of this House—Sir Hervey Bruce, the rejected of the district of Coleraine. He now acts as a sort of visiting official of Londonderry Prison, and he it is who intervenes in every single item of prison discipline. It was he who deprived the hon. Member for Camborne of newspapers for six days, and subjected him to several other annoyances. I suppose he thought he would please the Chief Secretary thereby. I hold that the treatment of prisoners in Londonderry Gaol is savage and brutal. In my opinion, the money now voted for the Medical Officer of this gaol is entirely thrown away. The closets at Londonderry Prison are in such a horrible state that I cannot describe to the Committee, in such a state as is sure to bring about typhoid or other fever. I drew the attention of Sir William Miller to their bad state, and asked him to use his influence to have them repaired. The doors of the closets were in several cases broken down. Some slight attempt was made to remedy the evils, but in such a clumsy manner that there was really no improvement, and even this was only brought about by an amount of circumlocution and filling up and passing of papers as would have sufficed for settling the designs for a new building. It is manifest to me, as it must be to anyone who knows the interior of Londonderry Prison, that the hon. Member for Camborne contracted his disease within the prison. The hon. Member was confined in the ward occupied by short-term prisoners, who, from their life and surroundings, are subject to certain diseases. I am certain that the hon. Member has fallen a victim to the indifference of the prison doctors about the separation of prisoners by putting those who are suffering from disease in the hospital. When I was in the prison I remember often seeing a fine-looking man taking exercise; I never spoke to him, but one day in passing three or four other prisoners, one of them said, "So-and-so is dead." I was astonished, because I thought he had been very suddenly cut off, and the prisoner went on to say that he had that morning helped to put the corpse into the coffin. He was one of the Donegal prisoners committed at the same time as myself. He was ill, and was not taken into the hospital but left to be in his cell. He was not removed to the hospital until he was in a dying state. Prisoners are not put into the hospital until they are past hope of recovery, and they are released, as was the case recently, in an almost dying state. This is a great scandal, that men under a short term of imprisonment really receive sentence of death. I do not hesitate to say that the hon. Member for Camborne is in danger of his life. I know from my experience that it is almost impossible for prisoners detained in Londonderry Prison to keep their health, and I now when disease breaks out how little hope there is of recovery during their term of imprisonment. The Chief Secretary says that the rate of sickness within the prison is less than it is outside; but though the sickness is estimated from the prisoners in the hospital, sick prisoners are by an abominable system of cruelty kept in the stoneyard breaking stones when they ought to be in hospital. If an inquiry were instituted I could bring scores of witnesses to testify to this system of cruelty. Londonderry Prison has the reputation of being a safe holdfast for political prisoners, and the Government are ready to accept anything that is said by the officials there, and it is supposed that whatever faults are committed the Prisons Board never go astray. I have seen prisoners in a weak state of health provoked into a struggle with a strong warder, when the warder considered a man was shamming. I remember one Sunday morning on leaving chapel at the entrance to one of the stoneyards a warder rushed over to a man—I believe it was this man. who subsequently died—and throttled him, asking him would he repeat what he had said? The man made no resistance, and I could not understand the conduct of the warder; but I afterwards learned that it was the habit of warders to assault prisoners and provoke them to resistance, and then they were dealt with under the rules of 1887, they were brought up before Sir Hervey Bruce, and sentenced for a further term of imprisonment for assault. The Act of 1887 provides that a prisoner shall be brought outside the prison and tried for such an offence. I found, in the case I have mentioned, that the prisoner had been making some complaint of his treatment. Every complaint must be made through the Local Prisons Board; no complaint can be made to the General Prisons Board. Before a letter can go out it must go through the hands of the Governor; and time after time the result has been, to my knowledge, that the prisoner making the complaint has been put upon short allowance, or confined in a dark cell, on the evidence of a warder that he has violated some trifling rule of discipline. The treatment in Londonderry Prison is monstrous, cruel, and barbarous to ordinary prisoners, and those who are sick, or labouring under the effects of disease, are not separated from ordinary prisoners. The medical officer avoids sending prisoners into the hospital, simply because he does not want the trouble of them. I am not given to make complaints on my own account. I have never formulated any complaint of my own treatment in Londonderry Prison, and I do not intend to do so. What I am saying is on behalf of the hon. Member for Camborne and other prisoners there. It is monstrous that the hon. Member should be kept in that prison, and in the casual ward too, where disease is liable to be communicated in a thousand different ways. The constant succession of short-term prisoners brings in diseases from outside to a much greater extent than by the long-term prisoners. The hon. Member is treated worse than the ordinary prisoners. I know the cell in which he is confined, it is rounded like a railway arch, and it is very cold. It is not remarkable that the hon. Member should suffer from rheumatism, and I do not wonder that he has no faith in Sir William Miller's treatment; I should have no confidence in his treatment. Scores of times have I seen Sir Hervey Bruce introduce his Tory friends into a sort of balcony overlooking the prison yard in order that they might have the amusement of seeing a Nationalist Member of Parliament undergoing his sentence among prisoners of all kinds. I do not think it shows a feeling we have a right to expect in a man occupying the position of Sir Hervey Bruce, that he should thus add bitterness to the sufferings of a political opponent. I felt it keenly, but I could make no complaint, for the only means of complaint was through the man from whose cruelty I suffered. I was but a humble Member of Parliament, and my position did not differ much from that of other unfortunates who suffered with me. In my opinion, the most guilty men, the men on whom the responsibility for this disgraceful system rests, are outside the walls of the prison—men like Sir Hervey Bruce and Sir William Miller, men with handles to their names. These are far more guilty than the officials in subordinate positions. But I will occupy no more time; there are men who can discuss this Vote with far more ability than I can; but I thought my experience might throw some light on the system of which we complain. I only wish to express my horror of the treatment to which prisoners are subjected in Londonderry Prison, especially the sick prisoners. The things I have spoken of I can vouch for, and they call for instant remedy.

MR. SEXTON

This Debate is the fitting close and sequence to our survey of the wretched system of misgovernment in Ireland. Upon the Vote for Police we have heard how the Government treat Irishmen while they are outside the walls of a prison, breaking their heads and battering down their homes; on the Legal Vote we have been informed on ample evidence how Irishmen, disagreeable to the Government, are sent to prison, some- times on little evidence and sometimes on none, sometimes on the verdict of a packed jury, but usually by the paid servants of the Crown; and now, on the Prisons Vote, we find how, when the Government have triumphed over their opponents so far as to get them into prison, they become the victims of a system of indignities, violence, and privations, to the breaking down of the health of the strongest men and even to the destruction of life. The Committee have just listened to a speech full of the testimony of knowledge, and this House, the mother of Parliaments, the progenitor of freedom, is now among all the Legislatures of the world in this peculiar and I think this shameful position, that when it comes to discuss the question of prison treatment, of prison indignities, of prison tortures, it has on its own benches an abundance of witnesses, men who are in their own persons the victims of the Government as well as the representatives of the people, men who have suffered by the law as well as assisted in making it. It is to be regretted, though it is perhaps only another evidence of the callous and sinister spirit of the present Administration, that the Chief Secretary has not taken the trouble to be present to listen to the speech of my hon. Friend. To what a story have we listened! The Medical Commissioner of the Irish Prisons Board has declared in his Report that there is nothing to find fault with, either in the sanitary condition or the official management of this prison, but we have the testimony of one who knows it——

An hon. MEMBER: From six months' investigation.

MR. SEXTON

You may look on it as the evidence of a prisoner, but I suppose you must believe the statement of a Member. Why this Derry Prison appears to be a lazar house as well as a place of torture. The story to which we have listened is something like what I have read in the pages of Charles Reade; it brings to the mind some of the horrors described in Never too late to Mend, but until now I did not think that such a story could be told of this enlightened age, even under a Unionist Government. The right hon. Gentleman, in dealing with the case of the hon. Member for Camborne, according to his unfortunate and settled habit, replied to the charges made against his subordinates by scattering the most offensive suggestions, but I will not refer to them—they are so gratuitously offensive that it is humiliating to repeat them. Why did the right hon. Gentleman, with careful deliberation, bring in the name of Father M'Fadden?

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I had been asked who had been the last occupant of the cell, and I replied that the cell had been occupied by first-class misdemeanants, and that I believed that Father M'Fadden, the only name in my recollection, had been in it recently.

MR. SEXTON

The right hon. Gentleman must have been fully aware when he made that statement that months elapsed between the cell being vacated by Father M'Fadden and the incarceration in it of the hon. Member for Camborne. The right hon. Gentleman might have provided himself with abortive information or have been silent, as he is ready enough to be on many occasions; but though he was obliged to start with the statement that he had no knowledge, yet his knowledge was good enough to carry him as far as this offensive suggestion, uttered in such a manner as to draw forth the shameful laughter and base applause of hon. Gentlemen behind him. If the right hon. Gentleman had listened to my hon. Friend he would have found that there is not the remotest ground for the suggestion with which he tried to deceive the Committee as to the communication of the disease. My hon. Friend has testified that disease is prevalent in the prison, and that the place is nothing short of a pest-house. It is obvious that if the right hon. Gentleman had made the most ordinary inquiry which common humanity demanded he would have seen it was not a place to which a Parliamentary Colleague should be sent. It was not necessary to make an insinuation that might deprive a tradesman in the city of the means of living in order to account for the contraction of this loathsome disease I can only say of the hon. Member for Camborne that he has been victimised by the right hon. Gentleman and his subordinates, that the special grievance from which he suffers is almost beyond Debate. Racked with lumbago and rheumatism, and then subjected to the humiliating tortures of this infection as the h3n. Member has been, and imprisoned as he is under a sentence that Judges have condemned, in such circumstances the least that any of the right hon. Gentleman's predecessors in office would have done would have been to welcome the opportunity to order the immediate release of his unfortunate Parliamentary Colleague. The right hon. Gentleman has not done that, he has attempted to dismiss the case with a few wretched quibbles and sneers [Cries of"No."] The hon. Member for Dover appears to think that the right hon. Gentleman should not utter any quibbles and sneers except such as are written for him, but he may be allowed a less limited measure of independence. We have heard that this prison is a pest-house where the medical officer neglects his duties and where the infliction of violence is a settled habit of the place. I missed from the right hon. Gentleman's speech the usual declaration of victory he used to be in the habit of making. It was formerly his habit to justify his action by the deterrent effect of his punishment. He has had an unchecked run of two years with his Coercion Act, he has exhausted all the resources of his Act, men's healths have been permanently broken down and even their lives have been lost; but I ask the right hon. Gentleman does he think his proceedings have been so far successful in a deterrent result, when no lowest Irishman will humble himself to escape three months or six months' imprisonment by giving bail for good behaviour? My thoughts go back to a certain interview that occurred in a country house in Wiltshire in the autumn of 1887, just after the passing of the Crimes Act. It rests on the word of honour of a blameless and stainless English gentleman. The witness in the case for the prosecution is Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, and the evidence for the defence is that of the Chief Secretary for Ireland. On the morrow of the passing of the Coercion Act, on the day when his protégé Colonel Turner was batoning the people at Ennis, the Chief Secretary told Mr. Blunt that in the administration of the Coercion Act he would "have none of Forster's nonsense," adding, Our prisoners will be differently treated; their punishment will be severe; it will be so severe that if they have any sort of bad health they will not be able to stand it.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

If the hon. Gentleman professes to be quoting my words, I give the most absolute and unqualified contradiction to the statement.

MR. SEXTON

I presume that, notwithstanding my high opinion of the word of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, if I controverted that point blank declaration of the right hon. Gentleman by any further argument on this immediate point I should not be in order. Therefore, I will only say that if the right hon. Gentleman had been a party to such an interview with Mr. Wilfrid Blunt he could not have more accurately forecast the course of action which he has pursued than if he had used the words I have quoted—except with this qualification that he ought not to have said that "if they have any sort of bad health they will not be able to stand it," but "whatever kind of bad health they have they will not be able to stand it." I will not at this moment pursue the general theme, because I think I cannot more usefully employ the time you, Sir, have allowed me than in discussing for a little the theme started by my hon. Friend who last addressed the Committee, and in endeavouring to fix the attention of the Committee to some of the tragic facts in connection with the prison of Derry. The Medical Commissioner of the Prisons Board has written a Report on Derry Gaol, in which he describes how the sewage of the town falls into the tidal river, and how at high tide the gaseous contents of the sewers are driven into the high part of the town where the prison stands. I am driven to the conclusion that the subject merits a more careful and searching examination than could have been given to it by Dr. O'Farrell or any ordinary prison official. To my mind it certainly deserves the attention of a specialist. Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that in this very quarter of Derry, on the eminence crowned by the prison, there has been more than once an epidemic of typhoid? It has been pointed out that prisoners have seldom died in this prison. There is an easy way of escaping such a difficulty. If when a prisoner is about to die, as in a case which has recently occurred, you turn him outside the gate, you need have very few deaths in the prison. I wish to submit the cases of five persons who have been prisoners in Derry Gaol. One was Rose Trainor, who was convicted of going back to the shelter from which she had been evicted, and who left the prison to die of typhoid fever, which, according to the medical certificate, must have been contracted in gaol. John Cannon, one of the Falcar-ragh prisoners, is lying ill of fever caught in the gaol. Concerning these cases questions have failed to elicit any information from the Government. I feel that some information ought to be given to us in to-night's Debate in reference to these cases. I come now to three cases of which a great deal has been heard. The first is the case of Charles Diver. He was committed to prison in February last. He went into the prison hospital on the 10th of March, and remained there till the 14th. Diver told the prison doctor that some months before his arrest the wheels of a cart had passed over his stomach and left him subject to a painful disease. There is appended to the Report of Dr. O'Farrell a table of releases from Derry Prison in the course of the last three years, and I find that the prison doctor has been in the habit of releasing ordinary criminals upon very inconsiderable grounds. For instance, a gentleman who was convicted of an attempted rape was released on the ground of debility. Another person, well worthy of the sympathetic attention of an enlightened Government, was imprisoned for an attempt to have carnal knowledge of a girl of 15, and was released on the grounds of old age and debility. I should have thought that when an untried prisoner was able to tell the prison doctor that a cart wheel had passed over his stomach and left him subject to a painful internal affection, his release, at any rate pending his trial, would have followed. No, Sir. He left the hospital on the 14th of March. He was put in hospital again on the 4th of April and kept there till the 26th. He was subsequently again put in hospital, where he remained until the 22nd of July, when bail was procured for him. During the whole period he was continually spitting blood and passing blood from the bowels. He was in a state of continual suffering. It is stated that the Lord Lieutenant's order for release arrived at the prison half an hour after the man's release on bail. I pass to the case of John M'Gee, a poor lad of 20. He with another young man were present in a neighbour's house at the time of an eviction, and offered some resistance to the bailiffs. The man evicted had made some money in Australia, had come back to his native land after years of hard labour, and invested all his capital in a farm. These two young fellows went to the place to make some show of resistance to the eviction, but no one was injured. Being Catholics, they were tried by a jury wholly Protestant, were convicted, and sent to Derry Gaol. All I can say is that these honest, virtuous, high-spirited young peasants are the sort of men who are the pride and the prop of all the free States of the world, and I say that if these two young men had in any country borne the parts which they bore here, and had sought refuge on your shore, you would have every man of your army shot down and every ship of your navy sunk before you would give them back to punishment. See how they fared under your own Administation. M'Gee was received into Derry Gaol on the 12th of March. His weight at that time was 10st. 61bs. At the end of May his weight was 10st.; on the 7th of August the day before his release, his weight was 8st. 11lbs. He lost in the course of five months in that prison something a little short of 2st., and the course of his decay, mark you, was gradual. At the end of May he began to complain of weakness and pain in his side. On the 1st of June he was sent to the hospital for debility—the cause of the release of the two meritorious criminals whose cases I have cited. He began to have a cough. In the first six days of June he was in bed, and his temperature was 101. He was afterwards sent back to the ordinary prison, and I have it stated that he was sent back contrary to his own protest. After he had been eight days in the ordinary cell his cough returned and with it came an attack of vomiting. He returned to the hospital on the 24th July. Now, Sir, I ask why was not this man released? If he was under sentence of imprisonment and not under sentence of death, why was the last letter of the sentence exacted? On the 6th of August he was delirious, and on the 8th of August, the last day of his sentence, he was released. According to the evidence of the hospital warder, M'Gee when finally leaving the hospital stumbled at the last step and was caught by a fellow prisoner. Father Stephens, who saw the incident, says M'Gee actually fell from sheer exhaustion. One of his companions was helping him along when the warder told him to let him alone, saying that he was well able to walk himself. The man left go, and M'Gee fell. This young man, who, according to his father, had entered the prison the hardiest boy in the county, left it to totter to his grave. The Report states that on the day of his release M'Gee proceeded the next morning a distance of 22 miles on an outside car exposed to heavy showers. I am able to confront that statement with one of undoubted credibility. Father Stephens has telegraphed to me as follows:— Balfour stated that poor M'Gee travelled in a storm. It is utterly false. The day was beautifully fine and warm until he reached Dunfanaghan, when some rain fell after he had got shelter. I was with him all the way on the road. If you think it is important and desirable to kill these men in prison you ought to be manly enough and frank enough to admit that you have done it. You ought not to insult the intelligence of Members of this House by offering us unintelligible explanations. Why did not the prison doctor release this man when he was able to leave the prison? Why did he not release him when he would have had some chance of living, or, if he insisted on keeping him till the last day of his sentence, why did he not send word to his father and mother or to some one who would take care of him? He told the poor boy before sending him out that he wa8 not fit to travel, and what was the answer of John M'Gee? "My mother," said he, "will die unless I go home." But what a hideous mockery it is for the prison officials to plead now that they warned him he was not in a fit condition to travel. Why did they not let him travel when he was in a fit condition? Here was a poor peasant, a boy from the Donegal mountains, used all his life to the woods and the fields, and to tell him he was not fit to travel! One might as well open the door of a cage and expect the bird not to take wing. We find it recorded that he was to have a car and four ounces of brandy. Four ounces of brandy—the right hon Gentlemen's State viaticum to a dying prisoner. In some respects the case of Michael Size was most remarkable. He was 20 years of age. He was received in the prison on the same day as John M'Gee. Though these episodes are not marked with the violence which characterised the treatment of Mr. Mandeville and Mr. W. O'Brien, though this is a story of ordinary officialism, yet, Sir, the certainty with which murder can be done by an appropriate official system within a certain time is to be seen from the fact that these young men who both entered the prison on the 12th of March died, both of them, on the 20th of August. On the 4th of April I find this entry about Size in the prison book: "He was placed in association with another prisoner, who was under observation for mental disease." What do these words mean? They may glance past the ear of a careless listener, but there is a startling meaning hidden under them. Will the Committee believe that this boy of 20, on coming into the prison, was selected with another Crimes Act prisoner to take care of a dangerous lunatic who had committed murder. It is expressed in a very much simpler way than in the Report in a letter which has been addressed to me: "He was put to guard a madman." The madman has since committed suicide. Can anyone imagine that poor inexperienced peasant boy being set to a task so harassing and so fatiguing? He had not only to guard this dangerous lunatic by day, but had to stay up with him every second night—so that every second night he was deprived of his natural rest. On the 20th June he developed febrile symptoms, and, says the ingenious and ingenuous Dr. O'Farrell, "it was probably due to chill." Well, I should say that a young man accustomed to an easy life and sufficient sleep, who has to guard a dangerous lunatic and sit up with him every second night is in a very likely condition for developing febrile symptoms. The next day he was a hospital patient, and he remained in bed during the rest of his imprisonment. Might not the Government have discharged him? No, Sir, they never thought of it. There is this fact, that on the 6th July the medical man happened to visit the prison. This boy was released on the 30th of July, and he clutched at the walls of the prison to keep himself from falling as he left. He was conveyed to the railway station, and his mother took him to his native place, where in three weeks' time he died. [An hon. MEMBER: Another murder.] I ask the right hon. Gentleman to explain these circumstances. It is absurd to say that the inspection of the prison made by Dr. O'Farrell was an efficient inspection. A searching examination ought to have been made by a sanitary engineer. The Government have had nearly a fortnight's notice of the matter, and their obstinate refusal to give such an examination as was necessary before this Vote was taken, showed, in my opinion, guilt on their part. Dublin Castle itself is not a truer sign or a gloomier memorial of the cowardly infamy of the misgovernment of Ireland by the Chief Secretary and his Colleagues than the mounds of the ashes of these two poor peasant boys who have been done to death in Irish prisons by what I must declare to be the most unmanly and un-English policy which has ever prostituted British power to the uses of tyranny in Ireland.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

If I had desired to give any stranger to our political controversies some notion of the length to which Party rancour will drive those who are engaged in this strife I should have liked him to be present during the speech of the right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down. Earlier in the evening we had a speech—not a speech, I confess, for which I have any great admiration—but, at any rate, a speech couched in moderate language from the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford, and another speech in excellent taste from the hon. Member for the St. Austell Division. The hon. Member for the St. Austell Division is acquainted with all the facts on which the right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down has commented; and if anyone compares the tone in which he addressed the Committee with the tone which it has pleased the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Belfast to adopt, the stranger would have had some measure by which he could estimate the lengths to which Irish controversy might be carried. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Belfast has thought it consistent with his duty as a Member of this House, and as a Repre- sentative, as he was proud to tell us, of the people of Ireland, to accuse a man who has been in the Public Service for 20 or 30 years of a deliberate attempt to murder. I presume that, as the right hon. Gentleman was not called to order by the Chairman, the expression was in order.

MR. SEXTON

Murder can be done by neglect as well as by design.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Murder in its very essence is deliberate; and the right hon. Gentleman over and over again accused this honourable, capable, and efficient official with deliberately attempting to compass the death of persons intrusted to his charge. I think that was bad enough. But it is worse when we reflect that the right hon. Gentleman had at his disposal ample information upon all the subjects upon which, I presume involuntarily, he has misled the judgment of the Committee. I do not suppose that Members on the Government side of the House have read the Report which I placed in the Library of the House of Commons a few days ago from the medical members of the Prisons Board. Had they done so, I might also have saved myself the trouble of making a speech, because the document from which the right hon. Gentleman has attempted to prove this monstrous case would, to those who read in an impartial spirit, supply an ample refutation of the statements which had been made and an ample vindication of the conduct of the officials. I do not choose to linger——

MR. SEXTON

Controvert the facts.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I do not choose to linger over the attack made upon me by the right hon. Gentleman in respect to the speech which I made earlier in the evening. The right hon. Gentleman accused me of a gross breach of taste, because I stated, in answer to a direct question, 1hat Father M'Fadden and other first-class misdemeanants had occupied the cell which is now occupied by the hon. Member for the Camborne Division. I appeal to any man who heard my speech in answer to the hon. Member for the St. Austell Division whether a more moderate statement of the case than that which I ventured to lay before the Committee could have been made? But the treatment which I received from the right hon. Gentleman is a very small matter. I am accustomed, and I am indifferent, to the attacks made upon me. But when it comes to the character of an official like the present Medical Officer of the Londonderry Gaol, the matter becomes one of great importance, and it is impossible that I should wholly disregard it. The right hon. Gentleman has attacked this doctor because he turned out M'Gee, who died shortly afterwards of acute tuberculosis—he has attacked the doctor for his want of humanity in the treatment of his prisoner. A more outrageous accusation was never made. The prison journals showed that every attention was offered to this lad; and when the time came for the sentence on M'Gee to expire the doctor told him that, in his opinion, he was unfit to travel. The doctor offered to keep him in the prison infirmary, or if that was unacceptable to recommend him to the town infirmary; and when both these offers were refused he provided him with a car to go to the station and with such refreshments as would enable him to bear the journey, against which he protested, with the least possible danger to life. That conduct was held up by the Member for Belfast as an example of inhumanity. The facts speak for themselves. The prisoner had in prison medical treatment and food which he could not have commanded at his own home. After the sentence expired, he was offered further medical treatment and food fit for an invalid, either in the prison infirmary or in the town infirmary, and that was refused. He was offered a car to take him to the station, and that was refused. Acting, unhappily, apparently under the advice of his friends, the prisoner determined to take the long railway journey and car journey of 22 miles. How the prison doctor could be implicated in that matter, when it could be shown he acted as a most humane and honourable gentleman, I am utterly, at a loss to understand. Was the case different with regard to the case of the man Size? The right hon. Gentleman complained of the prison doctor, Sir William Miller, because he did not let out the prisoner M'Gee in the middle of his sentence. Sir William Miller did let out Size in the middle of his sentence, and the right hon. Gentleman also complained of that. When the time came for the sentence to expire, the doctor thought Size too ill to travel, and he advised the prisoner to stay in. This, however, the prisoner declined to do. He, like M'Gee, insisted on travelling, and, like M'Gee, he had to bear the consequences of neglecting competent professional advice. Is there anything in those two cases, as brought before the Committee by the right hon. Member for West Belfast, and supplemented by a few facts by myself which I have drawn from sources open to the right hon. Gentleman—is there anything in those cases which goes to prove any other conclusion than that Sir William Miller was a most humane doctor? The right hon. Gentleman has given it on his authority that Londonderry Gaol is infected with the seeds of fever. I do not know where the right hon. Gentleman got his information. I presume that if the right hon. Gentleman wants an inquiry, he bases that desire upon some facts which lead to the conclusion he has laid before the House. What facts are there? Is the place infected by fever?

MR. SEXTON

I have said twice that the facts were that the prison was on the high part of the town; that it was an old building; that epidemics of typhoid fever were frequent in that part of the town; and that the sewage was tide-locked.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Those facts would have led anybody else to precisely the opposite conclusion. Epidemics of typhoid fever! Why, there has not been a case of typhoid fever within the memory of man in Londonderry Gaol, and therefore the fact that the gaol is situated in that fever-haunted spot, if fever-haunted it is, shows that the sanitary arrangements of Derry Gaol are well-nigh perfect. The assertion that Derry Gaol is a place where zymotic disease lurks is absolutely unfounded. There is not a single particle of medical evidence which would lead to that conclusion. On the contrary, the medical history of Derry Gaol would, in the words of the medical members of the Prisons Board, lead any impartial observer to the conclusion that the medical arrangements are peculiarly satisfactory. During the 10 years ending March 31, 1889, the number of deaths per 1,000 was 2.6, and since then there have been three deaths. Those three deaths did not in any way indicate any tendency to zymotic disease. One died of peritonitis, the second of sunstroke, and the third of suicide. [An hon. MEMBER: Madness.]. Madness is not a zymotic disease. If we consider the death-rate, and the causes of those deaths which have occurred, there is not the slightest ground for supposing that Derry Gaol has deserved the imputations levelled at it so recklessly by hon. Gentlemen opposite. But that is not all. We have been told that that prison is unhealthy. I have said the rate for the 10 years ending March 31 last was 2.6 per 1,000. Adding the three deaths which have occurred since would raise the average to about five per 1,000. The average number of deaths in English prisons is nine per 1,000, and the average throughout all Ireland is only 4.4 per 1,000. What inferences are we to draw from those figures?

MR. SEXTON

Did you send them out to die in Derry?

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Let the right hon. Gentleman choose what his complaint shall be. One-half of his speech is a complaint that M'Gee was not sent out, and the other half a complaint that Size was sent out. For my part, I do not care what inference you draw, because the fact remains that the death-rate in Irish prisons is half the death-rate in English prisons. If that is due to the fact that the sanitary arrangements of Irish prisons are good, it is so much to the credit of the Irish prisons; and if it is due to prisoners being sent out at an early stage of illness, it shows that the prison doctors of Ireland exercise the powers vested in them by law more readily than in English prisons. Reviewing these statistics, what possible grounds are there for the monstrous and iniquitous calumnies levelled against prison officials in Ireland by such men as the right hon. Gentleman; the Member for Belfast? Hon. Members may say that refers to ordinary prisoners in Ireland, but that when Crimes Act prisoners are being dealt with then the desire is to torture them to death, and the humanity which is shown towards ordinary prisoners disappears into thin air under the baneful influence of that monster of iniquity the Chief Secretary for Ireland. I have greatly softened the language, but that is the substance. What possible basis is there for these accusations? Let us consider how that matter may be deter- mined. I am perfectly well aware that hon. Gentlemen will not take my word, and that any intimation of good, intentions on my part will be received with derision. But there are methods by which that matter can be brought to some kind of test, and I have asked for some statistics with regard to privileges given to ordinary prisoners by the medical officers of the various prisons in Ireland. I find that while the proportion of ordinary prisoners who receive those special privileges is 9.5 per cent, the proportion of Crimes Act prisoners who have received those privileges is 26.5 per cent. That I think is a very interesting fact. There are two interpretations, and only two, which can be given to it. One is that gentlemen committed under the Crimes Act are persons of exceptionally delicate constitutions, and the other is that they are treated with exceptional leniency. I do not care which is accepted. I say that the figures I have given to the House show that the kind of attack made by hon. Gentlemen opposite is wholly and absolutely baseless. To any man of ordinary common-sense it would seem too grotesque even for the madness of political partisanship to accuse any Member of this House of an intention deliberately to try and destroy the life or the health of his political opponents. We have long been accustomed to political madness in certain quarters of the House, and have ceased to expect political sanity or moderation from those hon. Members. Even ordinary accuracy in quoting documents is a political virtue we do not expect for a moment to see; but, at all events, we have these tabulated results I have ventured to give to the House, which prove that unless, which I am unwilling to believe, prisoners under the Crimes Act are guilty of deliberate malingering, either they are persons of exceptionally delicate constitutions or they are treated with exceptional leniency by the prison officials. I have long ago come to the conclusion that the reckless extravagance of the accusations levelled against the Irish Government are a benefit rather than the reverse to the Government. I am not sanguine enough to suppose that everything that has been done by every Irish official has been beyond criticism during the last two or three years. But of this I am certain—that when hon. Members stun the ears of this country with charges which are not only false and calumnious but false and calumnious on the very face of them, even if by chance they should come across some valid indictment that indictment would be received with indifference and contempt by the people of this country. The fact is that Gentlemen opposite would have us believe that their motives in these criticisms are dictated by humanity; that when they tell us that the sanitary arrangements of this or that prison are defective, they are animated by a deep desire for the good of their fellow-creatures. I frankly tell the House that I wish I could believe that the drains of the House of Commons are half as good as the drains of Derry Gaol. The House has heard a good deal of what is going on in certain barracks in Ireland. Why, if we ventured to lodge our prisoners as we lodge our soldiers there would be a cry from one end of the country to the other which no Government could withstand; and if we ventured to feed our prisoners as we feed our paupers the attacks on the Chief Secretary would be even more virulent than they now are. I have taken the trouble to investigate the dietary of one or two workhouses in which Nationalist Boards of Guardians are supreme, and I find that the paupers in those Unions are not fed half so well as the criminals in the neighbouring gaol. [An hon. MEMBER: Neither are they in England.] Very likely not. My whole case is this—that whereas in England as well as in Ireland we have got a prison system, no attacks are made on English prisons. The attacks are made on the Irish prison system, which differs only from the English prison system in being far more lenient, and these attacks on the Irish prison system were never heard of until the Friends of hon. Gentlemen opposite were put in prison. Then, and then for the first time, their humanitarian instincts were aroused. Then, and then only, we were led to understand that the prison rules under which 25,000 of our fellow-countrymen are annually incarcerated, are so monstrously destitute of humanity that the 80 odd individuals now imprisoned under the Crimes Act cannot be expected to endure them and live. I do not know that I need add anything to what I have said. I had hoped to escape making a third speech; but the violence of the attack made by the right hon. Gentleman upon the prison officials of Derry Gaol made me think that I should be wanting in my duty to them if I did not bring before the Committee and the country the general view of the question, which I am convinced, in the opinion of every right-minded man, will acquit these officials of the gross calumnies of which they have been the object.

MR. SEXTON

The right hon. Gentleman has excelled himself in audacity. The first observation to be made on his speech is that, whatever the right hon. Gentleman may profess, he must have immeasurable contempt for the intelligence of his followers, for whilst professing to reply to a speech of mine, in which I spoke from documents in my hand—the Report of Dr.O'Farrell—giving a succinct account of the facts, the right hon. Gentleman has presumed and dared to speak of me as having made inaccurate quotations and presented misleading statements. The very contempt which the right hon. Gentleman entertains for me I return to the right hon. Gentleman with compound interest. If the intelligent foreigner to whom the right hon. Gentleman referred had been in the Gallery during the whole of the right hon. Gentleman's speech his education in the policy finesse and political audacity would have been considerably improved. What is the meaning of talking such nonsense about the drains of the House of Commons and those of Derry Prison? We can, at all events, get away from the drains of the House of Commons. But the unfortunate prisoners are kept within the influence of the drains of Derry Prison until they contract fatal disease. What is the use of citing the infrequency of deaths? There never is any need for a prisoner to die in the prison. When the prisoner is on the point of death he can be turned out. But the audacity of the right hon. Gentleman is not accounted for by his ignorance. I endeavoured to deal with this as a hygienic question. I pointed out that the sewage of the town was tide-locked. Derry Gaol is on the highest point of the town, and the sewage gas necessarily rises to the gaol. Every impartial man will agree with me that there is a strong case of presumption. There have been five cases of illness. Two persons have died, and three are on the point of death. The woman who has been referred to left the gaol on the 1st of August. The right hon. Gentleman, from his intellectual eminence, shows his contempt for the life of a poor Irish woman, and says that I lied when I quoted from the medical certificate, which showed that the woman was now suffering from typhoid fever, which must have been contracted within the walls of the prison. Instead of indulging in unseemly abuse of Members who are endeavouring to perform their duty, instead of sneering at the statements of "such men as the Member for West Belfast"—a most impudent phrase—

THE CHAIRMAN

Order, order! The Committee would make better progress if all Members would reflect upon the result which their own words may produce.

MR. SEXTON

I should have been glad to have heard that observation made earlier in the Debate. Why has not the right hon. Gentleman, in his reply, observed the ordinary courtesies of Debate, and answered specific questions which had been categorically put to him? Why has he not told us how it came to pass that one poor man, who was from the 22nd July suffering from internal bleeding, was allowed to pine away in prison? Was not this a case in which the man should have been discharged earlier? And then there is the case of John M'Gee. Is it true that this man was hardly able to crawl when he was discharged from prison? Is it true or not that he was delirious before he went out? Is it true that he fell down in the prison? Is it true that a fellow prisoner, seeing him stumble, came forward and offered him his arm to assist him down the stairs when a warder interfered and refused to allow him to have assistance? Is it true that immediately afterwards M'Gee fell down? Why have we not had an answer to all these questions? What about the lie about the thunderstorm? I have a telegram here from Father Stephens saying that M'Gee was not out in a storm, but was under shelter. Why have we heard nothing about the lunatic? Why was this boy of 20 put on to watch a dangerous lunatic and kept without his natural rest, having this hideous experience for two months, and having his faculties constantly on the stretch until his health was completely broken down by the anxiety? And when he developed febrile symptoms, why was he not released? Is it true or not that he was kept in prison until it was too late to save his life? I hold that it was the duty of the prison doctor when he saw this young man fading and pining away to represent the case as one necessitating the immediate discharge of the prisoner, and I believe the Home Secretary will agree with that proposition. And as to Derry Gaol itself, I say the facts which have been presented to the House afford a condemnation of the prison, and of the rules enforced there, which no rhetoric can displace. The absence of a high death-rate in the prison, is fully accounted for by the fact that the prisoners are detained there until they reach the point of death and are then released.

MR. T. W. RUSSELL (Tyrone, S.)

The right hon. Gentleman has not referred to the fact mentioned in Dr. O'Farrell's Report with reference to Londonderry Prison—that the prison sewers are completely disconnected from the city main sewer by traps and ventilators, so that it is utterly impossible that the sewer gas can be forced back into the prison.

MR. SEXTON

I referred to the fact of the existence of the traps and ventilators in my first speech, but my contention was that they did not suffice to keep back the sewer gas.

MR. T. W. RUSSELL

I apologise to the right hon. Gentleman. I did not hear the early part of his speech. But I submit that with these precautions which have been taken it is absolutely impossible that the sewer gas can be forced back into the prison. The right hon. Gentleman has made very serious charges against a personal friend of my own who happens now to be Mayor of the City of Derry, and who is the Medical Officer of the prison. The charges have been made on account of what has happened in the gaol, and I do not think they have been, or can be substantiated. Let me remind the right hon. Gentleman of what is the sanitary state of the city over which he presides as Chief Magistrate. The right hon. Gentleman might just as well accuse the Corporation of Dublin of murder, because the prisons of Dublin, for the sanitary condition of which they are responsible, are in an unhealthy condition. I believe they are drained on the same principle of Derry Gaol; there is a tidal lock, and intercepting shafts are provided to prevent the sewer gas being forced back into the prison. Now, what is the Report of Dr. O'Farrell? It is a great mistake that this Debate has been conducted on Dr. O'Farrell's Report, which has not been read by hon. Members. From that Report it appears that the drainage system of Derry Gaol is satisfactory; far more so than that of the city over which the Lord Mayor of Dublin presides, and which has one of the highest death-rates in the United Kingdom. There is no principal street or square in the City of Dublin which can boast of such a drainage system as that of Derry Gaol. I maintain, however, that Dr. O'Farrell was not the proper authority to send down to report on anything of this kind; what was wanted was a sanitary engineer. I am blaming nobody, but I am prepared to act upon evidence, and hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway are not. The public conscience has been touched by such facts as these, and the Government ought to spare no trouble in getting the best possible sanitary authority to investigate into the matter.

DR. FITZGERALD (Longford, S.)

Our task in laying these facts before the Chief Secretary is not made less difficult by the shouts of the hon. Members behind Ministers; and I would suggest to the hon. Member for Dover that if he would get up and make a speech in defence of the existing system of treating prisoners we should be prepared to make some allowance for his maiden effort. Now, I submit that the speech made by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, earlier in the evening, was deliberately intended to obscure the real issue before the Committee. Our object is to lay before the House and before the country the treatment to which prisoners in Ireland are subjected: we have shown that in many cases that treatment has ended in death, and that these cruelties are being inflicted in the prisons under the cover of an Act of Parliament obtained from this country by fraud. This Act the Government are using not for the purpose of detecting crime, but in order to collect rents for their supporters. I should like to call the attention of the Committee to the speech delivered by the Chief Secretary in the course of the Debate some weeks since on the prison treatment of the hon. Member for North-East Cork. Previously to that, the right hon. Gentleman had endeavoured to throw the onus for that prison treatment on the prison officials; but suddenly he turned round, took the responsibility upon himself, and personally gave directions as to what the treatment should be. Later on, when the case of the hon. Member for North Kildare was under debate, the right hon. Gentleman took up still another attitude, and altogether it seems as if on this question, at any rate, he has been afflicted by political palsy. I believe the heroic efforts made by the hon. Member for North Kildare in defending himself against the outrages sought to be inflicted on him by order of the Government marked the second epoch of what may be called the prison torture of the right hon. Gentleman, for those efforts compelled the right hon. Gentleman to order the discontinuance of these ancient barbarities. It will be remembered that up to this time the Government of Ireland had used a certain man called Dr. Barr to force the hands of the prison doctors, and so to shift the burden of responsibility for the safety of the lives of these prisoners upon those who are, generally speaking, a very respectable body of men. One has a considerable tendency to return to his old love, and so the right hon. Gentleman began to look around for a successor to Dr. Barr. I am not going to mince matters with regard to Dr. O'Farrell or any other professional man in Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman soon found a fitting representative of Dr. Barr in Dr. O'Farrell. My hon. Friend the Member for East Limerick (Mr. Finucane) was sent to Limerick Gaol. He is a very gentle, a very harmless, and also a very delicate man. He went on apparently very well under the care of the prison doctor, who, though not a political adherent of ours, is a highly educated and highly skilled man. But Dr. O'Farrell pops down to have a look at him, accompanied by a man named Peter Brown, a gentleman belonging to the Auxiliary Forces, and who may, in all probability, expect to fill the post of Surgeon General of the Forces which are to be gathered together somewhere on the plains of Ballykilbeg when Home Rule is granted to Ireland. He weighs about five stone, and has a brain to correspond with his size. Mr. Peter Brown gives it as his opinion that my hon. Friend wag fit to be breaking stones, and ought to be removed to Galway Gaol for change of air. The doctor of the prison refused to have his hand forced by these two men, and he told them that if they removed my hon. Friend they would not be responsible if he lost his life on the way. To show the bona fides of the prison doctor, I may say that my hon. Friend has since been discharged from gaol. He came to this House and remained here for two or three days, but is now in his home suffering from a disease which he contracted in prison—exactly the same disease as that from which Mr. Mandeville suffered, and one from which possibly he will never recover. Well, this is the sort of thing that Messrs. O'Farrell and Brown are doing in Ireland. They are proving themselves to be puny imitations of Dr. Barr. They are endeavouring to force the hands of the prison doctors, who have very onerous and responsible duties to perform. I certainly shall not be the man to screen Dr. O'Farrell because I suppose he is a Papist. I now turn to the Report of Dr. O'Farrell, particularly with regard to Derry Prison. That Report was called for because of the diseases that were contracted in Derry Gaol by certain prisoners, who, because of the unsurpassed ignorance of the doctor of that gaol and the cruel inhumanity of the Government who employ him, were turned upon the road to die, which offence in itself in this country is, I think, punished with a term of imprisonment lasting some years. The Report, on the face of it, is a garbled Report. I assert that, as far as prisons are concerned, it is not a faithful or a true Report. As far as prisoners are concerned, I say it is absolutely and entirely false. I think it would be useless, after what we have heard, to enter into a sanitary argument as to the condition of Derry Gaol. I am afraid the hon. Member for South Tyrone (Mr. T. W. Russell) is not a very clever sanitary adviser, and I will answer his argument at once. I challenge any man who knows anything about sanitary science and who is a man of common sense, to deny that there is any intercepting trap yet invented which will prevent sewer gas entering a drain. The sewer gas charges the water, and so passes to the other side of the trap. I need not explain to hon. Gentlemen opposite that if this were not a true story they would have no soda water to take with their whisky. Derry Gaol is nothing more or less than a fever den. I asked yesterday a question with regard to Clonmel Gaol, which is another gaol Dr. O'Farrell has very often visited and no doubt inspected. I asked the hon. and learned Solicitor General for Ireland (Mr. Madden) how many baths there were in that prison, and the hon. and learned Gentleman told me there were four baths. I have a telegram in my hand which informs me that there is only one bath for 125 male prisoners. There are three other baths, but one of them is suspected to be in a disused female prison, and one is somewhere in an outhouse. There is an extreme difficulty in speaking of the things I have to deal with, not only in the presence of Members of this House, but in the presence of persons who may be in other portions of the building. I will try and do it as delicately as I can. In this prison the cells are 4½ feet wide by 13 ft. long; in fact, they are not cells at all, but little halls. There is no common ventilation of any kind, and the only ventilation is a little hole at one end, which has been stuffed from time to time and allowed to become a regular filth hole. There are in this prison what are called McFarlane's lavatories, which have to be used for every purpose. The slops all are emptied into one bath. There are defects in the lavatories which cause them to overflow every morning, and to cause a state of filth which is certainly not only a disgrace to any public institution, but which, if it exists also in other prisons and is not remedied, will bring, along with the other blessings we have received from the Government, the blessings of such a plague as I believe has not visited Ireland since 1848. I beg the right hon. Gentleman to turn his attention to the condition of Clonmel Gaol lest a state of things should occur there similar to that at Derry, and I ask the Solicitor General for Ireland to get information which is really authentic, and not to rely upon persons who care not what information they send up to this House. I now turn to that part of Dr. O'Farrell's Report which deals with the condition of the prisoners. I desire, in the first place, to direct the mind of the Committee to the diagnosis and to the treatment of this most common form of tuberculosis disease which is generated partly by want of air and partly by privation and starvation. I will admit for the sake of argument that M'Gee died of this disease, but I charge Dr. O'Farrell with having made this Report in order to cloak the Government and in order to cloak the doctor who has been appointed to this prison for the one simple reason that he is an Orangeman and an ass. I charge the doctor of the prison with not knowing what was the matter with the boy, and when he suddenly woke up and discovered M'Gee was in a dying state, with turning him out on the mountain side to deliver up his soul there instead of in prison. It is easy to keep dead men out of prison if you turn them out to die. This boy died of the secondary consequences of the actual disease, which was typhoid. Dr. O'Farrell says that, looking back at the circumstances of the case, it is a pity that the poor boy's illness did not distinctly manifest itself until it was so late. He clearly admits that Sir William Miller did not know what was the matter with the boy. It is plain on the face of the Report that the Report was made from evidence received from the warder, and that the warder is really the doctor. I charge that this is a case of culpable homicide, and that the other cases were cases of the same kind. Now that they know the circumstances of the case, I maintain that the Government, in defending this incompetent ruffian whom the right hon. Gentleman calls an able public servant of 20 years' standing, are chargeable with the offence of having caused the death of this man. I could never understand, and I do not think I will ever understand, how it is that the Irish people are the only people on the face of the globe who are expected by hon. Gentlemen opposite to stand by and look on at the deliberate assassination of their kith and kin without striking one blow in defence. I agree with the right hon. Gentleman when he says that political assassination is the same as any other assassination—an abominable crime at all times, and I maintain that if this is anything it is a case of political assassination, for if you did not want to collect the rents of your friends you would never have sent this boy to prison. The people may well say, "What is the use of calling upon us not to resist; what is the use of telling us to be quiet. Our quietness or our want of resistance will not bring our fathers and sons and brothers to life." I hope, however, that in remaining quiet a little time, even under these most trying circumstances, the people will feel that they are doing something for the regeneration of their country by driving from Ireland a Government so mean, so contemptible, and so treacherous that it is a disgrace to a free Parliamentary institution.

MR. A. O'CONNOE (Donegal, E.)

I should not have interfered in this Debate at all, but that the Chief Secretary for Ireland, in reply to some observations of mine, jauntily declared the system it adopted in the Irish prisons contrasts favourably in point of leniency with that adopted in the English prisons. He also said he looked in vain for moderation of statement or language on these Benches, and that accurate quotation was a virtue not to be expected in us. I shall not venture to make any statement of my own, but shall confine myself entirely to official language, and to the Report of the Prison Commissioners. I can show in a very few words that there is an amount of almost incredible inhumanity practised in the prisons of Ireland such as is not in any way or degree to be equalled by anything found in English prisons. I will leave alone Members of Parliament or Crimes Act prisoners or any of the prisoners in the local prisons, and will take the prisoners in those prisons which are more immediately under the control of the Central Authorities in Dublin. The Report of the Commissioners of Irish Prisons shows that the few words I have said are perfectly true. The system of treatment of prisoners who have committed breaches of discipline or who have committed any offences within the prisons, is entirely under the direction of the Prison Authorities, and the punishment inflicted in the Irish prisons is such that nothing like it is to be found in any other country in Europe. There is nothing like it in France, Belgium, Spain, or Germany, and I doubt much whether the convicts in the mines of Siberia are subjected to treatment worse than that shown in this Report. The system of mechanical restraints largely prevails in the Irish prisons. In the local prisons muff straps or leathern muffs, which are instruments more or less softened for the flesh, are used, but in convict prisons the system of restraint by means of iron chains is still in use. In the local prisons where muff straps or leather n muffs are used the period during which a prisoner is under restraint is only a matter of a few hours. The restraint used in all these cases was that of the muffs. I turn to the Report of the Mountjoy Convict Prison, and I find that the Governor describes the conduct of the convicts as generally good. There was only one case of assault upon a warder, and that not of a serious character, committed by a convict whose sentence was about to expire in a few days. He was prosecuted at a Police Court and sentenced to two months' hard labour. There was no case of corporal punishment during the year, and no attempt at escape. Such is the account of the Governor in his annual Report. But fortunately Lord Cross's Committee in 1884 made a very strong recommendation that every case of mechanical restraint should be reported to the Commissioners, and turning to the heading, at Table 13, I find an enumeration of the punishments inflicted at Mountjoy Prison where muffs, handcuffs, or straight-waistcoats were used. I find two cases in which men were chained—one for assaulting a fellow prisoner, and another for assaulting an officer. I find that one prisoner for assaulting a fellow-prisoner was restrained by muffs on different occasions for 17 hours, 14½ hours, and 10¼ hours respectively; while another prisoner for assaulting an officer was kept chained day and night—for how long does the Committee suppose? For 56 days! Now, I challenge the Chief Secretary to give from the Report of any English prison anything that can compare with that. There is another case under the initials J. S. (the initials in the other case were J. F.). I find a man was, for assaulting a fellow-prisoner, kept chained day and night for 20 days. In Down patrick one prisoner for assaulting a convict was chained for 44 days, another for 37 days, and a third for assaulting an officer 75 days and nights. Now, we know perfectly well what effect this system has had on one very well-known prisoner. O'Donovan Rossa has declared over and over again that his irreconcileable hatred to this country and the English Government is due to the fact that he was chained hand and foot and compelled to lap his food from a dish like a dog for days and weeks together in a prison in Dublin. Is that not enough to drive any man mad? Here you have prisoners chained for 37, 44, 56, and 75 days, and I say a Governor who inflicts such penalties ought to be punished. Any official who can so treat his fellow human beings ought to be punished. I defy the Chief Secretary to show that any such system obtains in any English prison. If a man is mad he ought to be sent to the convict asylum at Dun-drum to be treated as a madman; if he is not mad, to subject him to such treatment in prison is enough to drive him mad. I will not trust myself to say anything more. I desire to confine myself to moderate language, and I do not go beyond the statements in the official Reports which hon. Members may read. Is it any wonder when you treat human beings as they are treated in the prisons of Ireland that, instead of generating respect for the law, you fill them with intense hatred for everything connected with the law and its administration.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE

Before the Debate closes I should like to say a few words on two points in the speech of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, in reply to statements I made at the commencement of the Debate. The whole answer of the right hon. Gentleman was based on the assumption that all the offences under the Crimes Act were closely connected with outrage and crimes of a violent nature. The Chief Secretary said that Irish leaders who incite men violently to attack the police by throwing boiling water over them, and so on, are as bad as the men who commit these offences. Well, I am quite prepared to accept that statement, and nothing I have ever said in or out of the House can lead to the belief that any man who commits or counsels these acts of violence should be treated as a political offender. The right hon. Gentleman says I have not devoted sufficient care to my subject, but I will venture to say that I have devoted more attention to the actual facts of these cases than he has. I have carefully examined every one of the speeches for which hon. Members have been prosecuted and convicted, and it is not possible to show that any one of those Gentlemen incited any person to violence or outrage; on the contrary, in every one of these speeches advice was given not to commit crime or outrage. Now the distinction between the class of offences to be treated as political and those of a different character was very well laid down in the judgment of Mr. O'Connor Morris, the County Court Judge of Roscommon, when he sentenced persons to punishment as first-class misdemeanants for advising tenants to take part in the Plan of Campaign, recognising that this is part of a great social movement now going on. Apart from the offences which hon. Members from Ireland may have committed, there is a large number of cases under the Coercion Act which cannot be described otherwise than as political offences—such as being present at Laud League meetings, being members of the Land League, reporting the proceedings of the League, or refusing supplies to the police. Do not these come under the head of political offences, or are they not in the nature of political offences? You may say they are the acts of bad citizens, though I do not think so; but to treat persons guilty of those offences as common criminals seems to me to be a crime of the greatest magnitude, and there is not another country in Europe where this would be done. The hon. Member for Mayo (Mr. Dillon) was convicted and sent to prison for six months for advising Lord Massareene's tenants to stand by one another and not to abandon those tenants who had already been evicted from their holdings. Now, I venture to say that, however he was treated, that was not an offence of an ordinary criminal nature. After his conviction the hon. Member for Mayo received an address signed by 150 Members of this House, expressing sympathy with him, and the opinion that the sentence was unjust. Should a man, under these circumstances, be regarded as a common criminal? I agree that it is not easy to lay down a strict rule between true criminal offences and political offences; but under no Code in Europe would the offence I have mentioned be treated otherwise than as a political offence, though the Code may not attempt to lay down the distinction between political and other offences. This is, in fact, an administrative question left for the Government to decide as cases occur, and I believe it is better to leave the question to administrative decision than to attempt to lay down a definition in a Statute. If the Chief Secretary had exercised a little more discretion in this matter, if he had not made those violent speeches in the country denouncing these offences as crimes, thus giving a cue to the Magistrates, this difficulty would not have arisen, and we should not have been brought into our present position. The right hon. Gentleman takes me to task for what he calls my halfhearted or lop-sided humanity, because he said I was not prepared to extend to common criminals exemption from the rules as to deprivation of the means of reading and writing that I advocated in respect to political prisoners. What I say is that the deprivation of reading and writing is a very serious punishment to an educated man who is a political offender, and that if subjected to it for any length of time it may seriously affect his health. As to common criminals, I am prepared to say, also, that this deprivation is so serious that a considerable relaxation of the rule as it affects this class of offenders might very well be adopted after the lapse of a certain time. The right hon. Gentleman paid no attention to my arguments founded on Lord Aberdare's Report; he did not make any reference to my statements in regard to the Belfast forgers or Mr. Joyce's evidence as to the convict in knickerbockers, or to the treatment of Members of this House in Tullamore Gaol, so I presume we may take these facts as accepted. I confess I am deeply disappointed at the right hon. Gentleman's speech, though I cannot say I am surprised, for it is in keeping with his policy in and out of the House. I do not think he can complain of the language of hon. Members from Ireland when they retort upon him for words and actions by which the right hon. Gentleman has endeavoured to fix upon many of them the status of persons connected with crime in the eyes of the people of this country. I can assure the right hon. Gentleman he is only at the commencement of this question. I have thought it my right and duty to raise Debate on this and other occasions, and having said what I have said in this House I mean to go to the public platform and to use all the efforts I can—whatever the Chief Secretary may think of their value—and to do my best to defeat the policy of the right hon. Gentleman.

MR. PARNELL (Cork)

I wish to say a word on two of the questions—on the treatment of ordinary prisoners and also on the question of the treatment of political prisoners, and I shall deal with the case of ordinary prisoners first. I have long thought that the treatment of ordinary prisoners in both English and Irish gaols is radically wrong and based on false principles. If I were to be asked to define the best system for the occupation and discipline of convicted prisoners, I should say, just the reverse of that which you adopt in Ireland. In Ireland you provide prisoners with the only work which your prison rules sanction—that is, the work of picking oakum. That is a badly-paid work, and consequently in many cases you cannot even find enough of this work for the prisoners to do. You make up for that by half starving them. You reduce the allowance of bread which they get to the smallest point at which this allowance is capable of sustaining life, with the result that the prisoner who serves two years' imprisonment with hard labour—we have it on the authority of an eminent Irish Judge—is always permanently enfeebled in either body or mind, as the result of the punishment, and very often permanently enfeebled in both. My view of the way in which a prisoner should be treated is this—that you should provide him with plenty of reproductive work to do, and you should give him sufficient food, and food of a proper quality, to enable him to do that work properly. I do not see why prisoners, instead of being a cost to the State, as they are, especially in Ireland, should not be a profit to the State. I do not see why you should make up for your want of employment for the prisoners in Irish prisons by half starving them, and by torturing them on the plank bed. There is no reason why, without inflicting any hardship upon the unemployed labour of the country, you should not find remunerative employment for the small number of prisoners which exist in Irish prisons, employment which would be remunerative to the State, which would save the State the cost of supporting prisoners, and which would be of some advantage to the community at large. Instead of that, you set them to work to pick oakum and to do other work which is no profit whatever to the State or to the prisoners; you enfeeble them in body and mind by starvation, by confinement under unsanitary conditions, and by a system of rigorous silence which is unnatural and barbarous. I would say, regarding prisoners under short terms of imprisonment; that is to say, prisoners sent for terms of not more than two years, you ought most largely to imitate the system in vogue in your long-term prisons in this country and adopted in the penal servitude prisons, of finding employment for the prisoners in the open air upon reproductive works which would benefit the community at large, and the practical result of which would be seen. Let me say a word as to the condition of criminal prisoners in Ireland. I have said that I believe these prisoners are systematically half-starved, and I am, convinced of that. I have myself examined the condition of many of these men. I have seen men go into prison strong, active, and robust countrymen, who have come out weak, pale, and emaciated, broken down in spirit, and with their bodies enfeebled, as the result of terms of imprisonment of 12 months, 18 months, and two years. I do not believe, Sir, that it is necessary for the maintenance of prison discipline and for effecting the reform which everybody desires in the minds of the prisoners convicted of offences, that they should be half-starved or browbeaten, or that their minds should become enfeebled. But these are the results of your present system. I believe a better and more humane system could be adopted by which you could better ensure the end you have in view—the reformation of the minds of these criminals—and which would result in some advantage and benefit to the community at large. It is not advisable to slowly torture prisoners and induce disease under the pretext of reforming their minds and making them useful members of the community. Let me refer to the condition of the prisons themselves. I am convinced that none of the older prisons in Ireland are fit for human beings to live in, and you have a remarkable example of this in the case of Kilmainham. That is composed partly of the old and partly of the new building. We heard from the right hon. Gentleman to-night that it was impossible to put up sheds in the exercise grounds for prisoners to exercise in on wet days. I admit it; but the right hon. Gentleman did not tell us—as he might have done—that all modern prisons are provided with spacious halls in which prisoners can exercise on wet days under as complete surveillance as if exercising in the open yards. That is the case with the prison at Kilmainham. In the modern portion there is a large hall, well lighted, well ventilated, and well warmed, in which there is abundant room for 100 or 200 prisoners to exercise on a wet day, with sufficient room; and the cells of this modern portion are properly ventilated and drained, and there is no fault to be found with them from the sanitary point of view. But if you go across the dividing line between the old prison and the new, you get into a portion of the prison which is unsanitary from top to bottom. There is, instead of being modern drains, the old style of drains, built of bricks, infested with rats, leaking at every pore (and from these leakages the sewer gas escapes into the cells of the unfortunate prisoners above), and whence liquid drainage leaks into the foundations of the prison, and forms a constant source of fever and disease. You find the cells themselves damp and almost uninhabitable, so badly ventilated that when any attempt is made to warm them they become furnaces, and when the furnaces go out they become deadly cold. The sewers leak and fill the whole building with sewer gas. Many of the sewers discharge themselves under the exercise yard, and periodically burst up and flood these yards with the sewage matter. I have myself been a witness of this. I have frequently seen the main sewer of the old portion of the prison at Kilmainham burst into the exercise yard and flood it to such an extent as to make it impossible for it to be used for exercise for many days together; and I believe this must be the case with every old-fashioned prison in Ireland, that they are not sanitary, and could not be improved, and that nothing would effect any sufficient reform in the condition of these old prisons and buildings except a thorough pulling down and rebuilding of them upon modern principles, and I am convinced this must be the case with Derry Prison. I am convinced that you have there an old prison not capable of reform on sanitary principles, and the result is, these mysterious cases of fever arise which the prison doctor attempts to put down as tuberculosis. It seizes not one but four or five different prisoners. Surely this should give rise to very grave cause for inquiry as to the sanitary condition of Derry Gaol. We know that there is nothing so terrible in modern maladies as typhoid fever, that it is an insidious disease, and that it creeps on without notice or warning, and that the unfortunate patient is past hope before his medical attendant knows he is ill. The right hon. Gentleman has displayed a lamentable culpability with regard to the lives of political and ordinary criminals confined in Derry Gaol. His attention was called to this matter by the unhappy deaths of two prisoners, and by the sudden and alarming illness of several others, and he has neglected up to the present moment to send a proper sanitary engineer to inquire into the condition of this prison. It is absurd to excuse himself under the plea that he has sent Dr. O'Farrell. It is Dr. O'Farrell's duty to know all about it without any further visit or inspection. It is a condemnation of Dr. O'Farrell if it turn out that this prison is unsanitary and unfit for the reception of prisoners. Is it likely that Dr. O'Farrell, even if he had the engineering knowledge requisite, which is exceedingly doubtful, would pass upon himself his own condemnation, by admitting that this prison is anything else but in the most perfect sanitary condition? I am glad to hear that Mr. Conybeare is to be removed from this pest house; but while we rejoice on behalf of Mr. Conybeare, let us not forget the more humble victims still left, and who have still to fear this lurking pest beneath the floors of their cells, and who may be stricken down at any moment. The right hon. Gentleman must not leave other unfortunate victims to die in this horrible place. I do trust that before the Vote is disposed of the right hon. Gentleman will give us some assurance that the very best scientific skill, the very best engineering skill that can be obtained of an independent character, will at once, without the loss of another 24 hours, be employed to inspect this horrible hole, and that the truth will at once be laid before the country; and that the Report, if it be in condemnation of this place, will be acted upon at once, and that prisoners of all kinds, political or otherwise, will be removed to some healthy place. Now I come to the question of political prisoners. It is a curious thing, but not the less true, that only in this country have there been exceptional rules, regulations, and privileges embodied in Statute form for the benefit of political prisoners. Why is this? This exceptional care on the part of the Legislature has been forced upon the Legislature from time to time by the barbarous treatment of political prisoners in Ireland. It is usually sufficient, and it is always understood in every country that political prisoners are to have exceptional treatment. In the old time political prisoners got exceptional treatment. They received privileges and lenient treatment which were not the lot of persons convicted of gross crimes, and the Executive of the day had always forced upon it by public opinion this duty and necessity of taking care that the incidence of punishment should not fall harshly upon political prisoners. It has never been necessary for the Legislature to interfere and to point out to the Executive its duty in this matter except in the case of Irish political prisoners, and this change was only forced upon the Legislature in 1877 owing to the barbarous treatment meted out to the Fenian political prisoners in 1865 and subsequent years by the Home Secretary, who had the responsibility in those days. These men were taken from all ranks in life. After conviction in Ireland they were brought over to the English convict prisons. They were deliberately stripped of their flannels in the depth of winter and the gaol flannels were refused to them. It is to me inconceivable that this should have been so, but it stands so—it stands upon record in the Report of the Devon Commission. They were ill-treated in many other ways, because, being Fenians, they were unpopular with all classes in England, and they were a special mark for the vindictiveness and petty spite of the gaolers in the convict prisons who had charge of them. Many of them lost their lives; many of them permanently lost their health, and subsequently died from disease contracted in these prisons. Some became paralysed. I myself saw in 1879 an unfortunate man named Neill, who has since died, and who was then dying in Loughlins-town Workhouse, and unable to move hand or foot. He had to be wheeled about in a chair as a pauper in this workhouse. He had been accused of malingering. His paralysis was asserted by the Government to be feigned. Most cruel tests were applied to him, and he was discharged finally, but too late to arrest the course of the paralysis which had seized him, and he died about a year afterwards. Others of them became insane; and few more terrible histories can be written than the history of many of these unfortunate men engaged in the Fenian conspiracy, and who suffered terribly, owing to the harshness and rigor of the prison treatment meted out to them. All these matters were brought before the Parliament of 1877, and to the honour of Mr. Cross, the then Home Secretary, be it said, he admitted the principle in the Prisons Act of that year of the exceptional treatment of political prisoners, and a clause was inserted providing that persons convicted of sedition and seditious libel should be treated as misdemeanants of the first division. That, I think, was the first—at all events it was the most remarkable—legislative recognition of the right of political prisoners to special and different treatment. It was the recognition which came from a Conservative Home Secretary and which came from a Conservative Government, and it was very much to their honour that they passed that into law, and it was also the condemnation of previous Governments' action which was used as an illustration of the necessity for the reform then obtained. But the right hon. Gentleman seeks to turn back the hands of the clock. He wants to go back, has gone back, in his treatment of political prisoners to the old bad times of 1865–1867. The right hon. Gentleman may hope that he is to some extent successful in intimidating his political opponents by harshness, but he, I think, will find in the long run that he is sadly mistaken. Just as the treatment by the Government of those days of political prisoners in 1865 and 1867 nourished feelings of hatred towards England, and made Irishmen stand up for their country to support the claims of her right to freedom by every possible means which the times permitted, he will find that the result of his action in Ireland will be the means of strengthening the determination of Irishmen not to yield to his attempts to tread down the Nationalist spirit of the people, and that greater enthusiasm and greater determination will be infused into our movement. It has always been so. Persecution always causes redoubled exertion on behalf of the persecuted; and if the right hon. Gentleman thinks that he is gaining by the intimidating effect of these harsh and cruel measures against his political opponents in Ireland, he will find the teachings of history do not justify the belief. What could be more disgusting than the treatment meted out to Mr. Fitzgibbon? The matter has been brought to the notice of the right hon. Gentleman. If any crime was political Mr. Fitzgibbon's was. He refused to sell an ostrich feather to some Emergency woman who went about among Emergency men and soldiers. He refused to supply her, and he was taken up on a charge of boycotting, and was convicted by two of the right hon. Gentleman's Removables, and was sentenced, if not upon this charge upon some other, to imprisonment with hard labour. He was one of the principal, if not the principal, merchants of Castlerea, a man of considerable substance, of good credit, and a large trader and shopkeeper. He was imprisoned in one of these Irish gaols, and the depth of the barbarism to which the instruments of the right hon. Gentleman descended will be well illustrated when I tell you that the work which the Governor selected as the most suitable for this political prisoner was to set him to clean out the latrines of the prison. It used to be the custom before the Christian era for savage nations to set their prisoners of war to this work; and the right hon. Gentleman in permitting similar treatment to political prisoners—for the matter has been brought to his notice, and he is responsible for it, and has defended it and similar action from his place in the House—is descending to the level of barbarous nations of old times, who, when they could not overcome their enemies in the open field, sought by de- gradations and by torture of this kind to make up for the deficiencies of their forces. It is horrible that respectable men in Ireland should have to submit to such barbarities. Mr. Fitzgibbon refused to do this work. He was right in refusing this work, and he received as a punishment repeated terms of bread and water. Two or three others of his fellow prisoners, the political prisoners convicted of the same offence of boycotting, were selected for the same work. The right hon. Gentleman did not put any of his pet Belfast forgers to clean out his prison cesspools. They were allowed, even before the change in prison rules which the right hon. Gentleman effected to get himself out of a dilemma, to wear their own clothes, to walk about in their shooting jackets and other light summer costumes, as if they were gentlemen at large in these gaols—indeed, they were not compelled to do any work at all, so far as I am aware, and certainly none of the dirty, disgusting work which was given to the right hon. Gentleman's political opponents. It is for political prisoners that the right hon. Gentleman reserves treatment of this kind. He reserves this treatment, not so much for Irish Members of Parliament—for he has some little shame with regard to them. He is somewhat afraid of the light of public opinion. He does not commonly inflict upon them sentences of hard labour. Sometimes he does, but not always, in the case of someone particularly objectionable, like the hon. Member for Kerry (Mr. E. Harrington). Commonly he does not put them to clean out privies, but he makes it as unpleasant as he can in many other ways. It is with humbler men, men upon whose sufferings public opinion cannot be centred in the same way as it is upon those of Members of Parliament that he inflicts these barbarities. If life is taken, as in the case of poor John Mandeville, it does not matter; he is only a poor farmer or tradesman, a man of whom the English people will not take much notice, who will be talked about for the time, but the memory of whom will not last long, perhaps not till the next General Election. But, Sir, what does this bring us to? It brings us to this conclusion, that if your treatment is not fit for ordinary prisoners, must it not be still more unfit for your political prisoners? The right hon. Gentleman says he will make no distinction between political prisoners and others. But he has made a distinction; he has made a distinction according to the class of political prisoners, that if they are drawn from a higher class and from a better grade than ordinary prisoners, they are to have privileges accorded them which are not accorded to the ordinary grade of political prisoners like Mr. Fitzgibbon. Mr. Fitzgibbon is to be put to clean prison sewers and cesspools, but the Irish Member of Parliament will be allowed to wear his own clothes, and he will not be allowed to do any more objectionable work than oakum-picking. This is proceeding altogether upon wrong lines. If one political prisoner who has committed an offence is to be treated in one way, and in a different way from another who has committed the same political offence, what becomes of your justice and of your consistency? If one man has done the same thing as the other, why should they not be treated in the same way? And where is the justice in setting up these lines of distinction because one man comes into prison with better clothes on his back than another? That is not the principle we have insisted upon. We wish to look to the quality of the offence; and if the offence is of such a character that it is committed for political motives, and for the sake of furthering a political cause with which the offender is identified, and not for selfish or unreasonable motives, we say that the offender is one who claims to be treated as a political prisoner, and that if there is any distinction to be made between a different class of prisoners that distinction should be based upon the difference in the political nature of the offences in the one case as compared with the gross nature of the offences in the other, and that the law should take cognisance of that in the infliction of the sentences. But the right hon. Gentleman proceeds upon different lines. He selects his political supporters in Belfast, who have committed disgraceful forgeries, and he says to them, "Because you are Conservatives and gentlemen I will permit you to wear your own clothes in prison, and to have privileges as regards hair-clipping and beard-cutting which I will not permit to such men as Mr. Fitzgibbon, of Castlerea"; and he says to Irish Members of Parliament, "I will permit you, whom I know, and who sit opposite to me in the House of Commons—I will permit you certain exemptions and certain privileges"—these concessions having only been obtained after a severe struggle between the right hon. Gentleman and these Members, in which struggle several have risked their lives. That is the principle upon which the right hon. Gentleman goes. Now, we protest against that and we shall not cease to protest against it until we induce Parliament to carry out our views. We consider that a man who forges a name to a document, a man who commits a robbery, a man who steals his neighbour's property, whether he be a peasant or whether he be a Lord, should be treated as a man who commits a disgraceful offence; and that the man, on the other hand, who has offended against the susceptibilities of the right hon. Gentleman or his agents in Ireland, who has advised the tenant farmers to combine for their own self-protection, and in doing so has transgressed the provisions of a law made specially for the purpose of reaching political offences, and political offences only, that such men should be treated, if you like, as men whom you may think it necessary to deter from a repetition of the same offence, but not as men who have committed any disgraceful offence, and whose minds stand in need of reformatory discipline. That is a plain position, and one which can be maintained. It is one which has received the sanction of the Executive Authorities of all countries at all times that political offences have been committed. It is one which received the sanction of the Conservative Legislature of this country 10 years ago. It is one which we shall continue to force upon the attention of the right hon. Gentleman and this House until we obtain its recognition, if not from this House, certainly from the next Parliament which the people of this country will have an opportunity of returning.

The Committee divided:—Ayes 113; Noes 69.—(Div. List, No. 339.)

4. £55,521, to complete the sum for Reformatory and Industrial Schools, Ireland.

5.£4,412, to complete the sum for the Dundrum Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Ireland.