Commons Sitting of 10 February 1893

QUESTION

  RELEASE OF CONVICTS.
  MR. T. M. HEALYasked whether the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Carson) had any objection to the granting of the Return in favour of which he (Mr. Healy) had placed a notice on the Paper, respecting convicts who had been granted early releases in Ireland?
  MR. CARSON: I shall have no objection, if the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland will answer the question I have put down on the Paper.

  MARRIAGE IN MALTA.
  MR. CARVELL WILLIAMS (Notts,): I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies whether he can inform the House when the case relative to the Law of Marriage in Malta, which the Government has submitted to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, is likely to be considered?
  THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (Mr. S. BUXTON,): Some delay has occurred in obtaining from Malta some evidence which was required in support of the Protestant case, but it is hoped that the case may be beard before the close of the present sittings of the Judicial Committee, over whose proceedings, of course, the Secretary of State has no control.

  PUBLIC SERVANTS AS WAITERS.
  MR. WALLACE: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland whether his attention has been called to a statement by a body of citizens of Edinburgh practising the calling of waiters, to the effect that numbers of Government messengers and porters in Public Departments in Edinburgh are in the habit of leaving their duties in the daytime to take employment as waiters, and giving specific cases of the practice complained of; whether he will inquire into the truth of the allegations so made; and, in the event of their proving to have foundation, whether he will take any, and what, steps in the matter?
  THE SECRETARY FOR SCOTLAND (Sir G. TREVELYAN,): An inquiry as to the facts alleged has been addressed to the Heads of the Departments concerned. When the replies are received perhaps my hon. Friend will put another question.

  FOREIGN MATERIAL FOR ENGLISH CONTRACTS.
  COLONEL HOWARD VINCENT: I beg to ask the Postmaster General if he is in a position to contradict the statements current in the trade that the Post office Guide is printed on wood paper made in Germany; and in the contrary case, if, having regard to the necessity of finding employment for the industrial population of the United Kingdom, no stipulation is imposed upon contractors that the materials supplied at the cost of the public revenue shall be, whenever practicable, produced within Great Britain or Ireland?
  MR. HENNIKER HEATON: May I, at the same time, ask whether it is true that our post cards are manufactured in Germany, though the printing on them is done in this country; and, further, whether those post cards contained, as alleged, 20 to 30 per cent. of German clay?
  THE POSTMASTER GENERAL (Mr. A. MORLEY,): I shall be glad to have notice of the last question. In reply to the question of the hon. and gallant Member for Sheffield, I have to say that the printing of the Post Office Guide is not under the control of the Post Office, and, consequently, I have no knowledge of the conditions

  1027
  under which it is printed. The whole of the Government printing is, I understand, under the control of the Stationery Office.
  COLONEL H. VINCENT: Will the right hon. Gentleman make further inquiry?
  MR. A. MORLEY: I think the hon. and gallant Member should apply to the Secretary to the Treasury.

  ALLEGED POLICE DISCONTENT IN COUNTY MONAGHAN.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether complaints have reached the Inspector General of the Royal Irish Constabulary from the force in County Monaghan as to language used during drill by the County Inspector, and that for trivial mistakes constables have been ordered on transfer at their own expense; and will inquiry be made as to discontent amongst the rank and file in the county at their treatment?
  THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. J. MORLEY,): No complaints of the nature referred to have reached me. A number of men have during the last 12 mouths been transferred at their own expense not for trivial mistakes, but for serious breaches of discipline. I am not aware that any discontent exists among the police in this county.

  PERJURY AT REVISION SESSIONS.
  MR. DANE: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether when District Inspector Dagg, of the Royal Irish Constabulary, was instructed by the Irish Government that the police were not to prosecute a Nationalist named Fitzpatrick for perjury committed at the last Revision Sessions of South Fermanagh, by means of which he got his name placed upon the register, the full facts of the case were before the Irish Authorities; will he explain why, when Fitzpatrick was prosecuted at Petty Sessions by the remount Inspector, and returned for trial to and convicted at the Ulster Winter Assizes, the Crown opposed the application of the private prosecutor to be indemnified the expenses of the prosecution at the Petty Sessions Court; has he observed that the Judge,
  1028
  in deciding that he could only order payment of expenses incurred in the Assize Court, expressed his regret thereat, and stated that, in his opinion, it was not right to throw upon private individuals the expense of such public prosecutions; can he explain why such prosecutions are not conducted in Ireland by the Solicitor for the Treasury, as is the case in England; and will he give instructions that for the future such prosecutions in Ireland will be conducted by the local Crown Solicitors, and will he direct that the private prosecutor in the case against Fitzpatrick be recouped the expenses he was put to?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: The Crown declined to take the initial steps at Petty Sessions, inasmuch as the preliminary investigation of charges of false swearing at Revision Sessions would be a large and expensive burthen on the Crown. The Crown did prosecute Fitzpatrick at the Winter Assizes and paid the expenses incurred at the Assize Court, The application for the expenses of the preliminary investigation to the Judge was made some days after the Crown Solicitor had left Belfast, where the Assizes were held, and therefore could not have been opposed by the Crown. Subsequently a Revision Agent, on behalf of the private prosecution, made a claim for the expenses of the preliminary investigation, which, for the reasons already stated, and in conformity with the existing practice, was refused.
  MR. DANE: Will the right hon. Gentleman state whether, in future, charge s of perjury arising at Sessions of this nature will be prosecuted, by the Crown in Ireland?
  MR. J. MORLEY: I cannot undertake to say that.
  MR. DANE: Will the right hon. Gentleman say whether similar prosecutions are not undertaken by the Crown in England?
  MR. J. MORLEY: I do not know.

  DILUTING BEER.
  MR. JOSEPH PEASE: I beg to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether cases have occurred in which the full, or any, penalty, has been paid to the Excise by licensed victuallers for adding water to beer, without conviction being recorded against such licensed victuallers

  1029
  for such offence; and, if so, how many cases have occurred during each of the last four years?
  THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER (Sir W. HARCOURT,): Yes; in the following number of cases:—1889, 12 cases, penalties received, £340; 1890, 44 cases, penalties received, £1,684; 1891, 55 cases, penalties received, £2,095; 1892, 48 cases, penalties received, £1,405.
  MR. J. PEASE: May I task the right hon. Gentleman whether he will, in future, prevent the more wealthy licensed victuallers thus escaping conviction by paying a penalty of £50 or less?
  SIR W. HARCOURT: I will consider that matter.

  CLUBS AND CLUB ABUSES.
  MR. JOSEPH PEASE: I beg to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, with a view to checking the abuses arising from the existence of clubs supplying intoxicating liquors during all hours, the Government will consider the advisability of introducing a clause into their licensing measure which will afford facilities to the police to visit all clubs possessing Excise licences; and whether they will empower the Licensing Authority to prohibit the supply of intoxicating liquors on evidence of misconduct in any such club?
  SIR W. HARCOURT: As licences are not granted for these places, the Local Authority does not possess power to do as the hon. Member suggests. I gather that my hon. Friend wants generally to know whether some authority should not be taken to deal with these clubs. I am strongly of opinion it should, and I think in that the noble Lord the Member for South Paddington agrees with me, as he introduced a measure upon this question which, in my opinion, is a difficult one and of great importance.

  IRISH LIGHTS.
  MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether, in view of the danger to shipping, it is intended to erect an improved light at the Old Head of Kinsale; and, if so, whether he will consider the Reports made in favour of the "Wigham Intensity Burner and Giant Lens," now fixed temporarily at Howth Baily Lighthouse?
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE, BOARD OF TRADE (Mr. MUNDELLA,): In compliance with an application from the Commissioners of Irish Lights, the Trinity House and the Board of Trade sanctioned, in May, 1891, an increase in the power of the light at the Old Head of Kinsale by the substitution of a ten-wick burner for a four-wick burner. On the application of the Commissioners of Irish Lights the Board of Trade sanctioned, in September last, the expenditure asked by the Commissioners for carrying out some experiments to test the "new intensity burner" brought under their notice by Mr. Wigham. No Report on these experiments has yet been received from the Commissioners. The Board of Trade have no power of initiation, and their duty is confined to sanctioning or refusing applications which are submitted by general Lighthouse Authorities.

  QUEEN'S COLLEGE, GALWAY.
  MR. PINKERTON: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he can state what is the average annual expenditure for printing connected with the Queen's College, Galway; and if there is public contract for such printing; and, if not, will he direct that tenders be publicly invited for such contracts in future?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: The authorities report that the annual expenditure for printing for the past three year has been £42 10s. 7d. There is no public contract for the work, nor is one, under the circumstances, deemed necessary.

  TEACHERS' SUPERANNUATION.
  SIR RICHARD TEMPLE: I beg to ask the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education whether he is prepared to take action on the Report of the Select Committee of last Session, regarding the Superannuation of Elementary Teachers in England and Wales?
  THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (Mr. A. H. D. ACLAND,): The subject of provision for teachers in old age is one of great importance, and the Report of the Select Committee on the subject has been carefully considered. The Report made by the Committee involves a heavy expenditure by the State, and it has not

  1031
  been found possible to embody in a Bill any proposal which can be laid before Parliament this year.

  THE BEHRING SEA FISHERIES.
  MR. GOURLEY: I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether any, and what, progress has been made towards a settlement of the disputes existing between this country and that of the United States and Dominion of Canada, relative to the Behring Sea Fisheries; and whether the Commissioners have yet made a Report; if so, will the Government place the same upon the Table of the House?
  THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Sir E. GREY,): The Tribunal of Arbitration appointed under the Treaty of Washington of February 29, 1892, for the settlement of the questions in connection with the Seal Fisheries in Behring Sea, will meet in Paris on the 23rd inst. A Report has been drawn tip and submitted to Her Majesty's Government by the British Commissioners nominated under Article IX. of the Treaty; but as there is an engagement that the proceedings in the Arbitration should for the present he considered as confidential, the Report cannot be laid before the House at this stage.

  THE CASE OF MISS E. B. MOORE.
  CAPTAIN M'CALMONT: I beg to ask the Postmaster General if he will explain the reasons why Miss E. B. Moore, whom on or about 29th December, 1892, he appointed postmistress in Carrickfergus, has since been superseded by a Miss O'Gorman; what is the previous service of Miss Moore in the Post Office; and has Miss O'Gorman been previously employed in the Department; if not, what has been her occupation?
  MR. A. MORLEY: It is a misapprehension to suppose that Miss E. B. Moore was appointed postmistress of Carrickfergus. Miss Moore had acted as an assistant to the late postmistress for four years. Miss O'Gorman had not had previous experience in Post Office business, but she was stated by the Post Office Surveyor for the district to be intelligent, and in every way a suitable
  1032
  person for the appointment. In making the appointment I was influenced by the strong recommendations in favour of Miss O'Gorman, and by the fact that she was 28 years of age, while Miss Moore was only 21 aid a-half years.
  CAPTAIN M'CALMONT: Is Mr. A.G. Leonard authorised to write letters on behalf of the hon. Gentleman?
  MR. A. MORLEY: A letter was written under a misapprehension, and as soon as I heard of it I wrote Miss Moore.
  CAPTAIN M'CALMONT: What, had been the previous occupation of Miss O'Gorman: had it been in connection with the management of a public-house?
  MR. A. MORLEYasked for notice of the question.

  GALWAY HOSPITAL.
  DR. KENNY: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he is aware that it is one of the regulations of the Royal University of Ireland that students of medicine before presenting themselves for examination for medical degrees must produce a certificate of attendance during 24 months at a general hospital containing at least 60 beds in constant occupation; and a certificate of attendance during three consecutive months in a fever hospital of repute, or in fever wards or a general hospital; whether he is aware that the rule of the College of Surgeons in Ireland is to require that the hospital for clinical instruction should contain 80 beds in constant occupation, and that, in consequence of the Report of the Queen's College Commission, various institutions in Galway were united with the Galway Hospital for the purpose of complying with this rule; whether he is aware that it is now proposed by the Galway College authorities to induce the Senate of the Royal University to recognise the Galway Hospital, formerly the Galway County Infirmary, as alone sufficient for clinical instruction, notwithstanding the fact that that hospital has been limited by the Governors to a maximum of 35 beds, and contains no beds for fever cases, and none for accidents; whether he can state the nature of the representations which induced the Senate of the Royal University to assent to the proposed change; by whom were the proposals made; and how it is proposed to

  1033
  make the Galway Hospital fulfil the conditions prescribed by the regulations; whether he is aware how hardly the proposed change will bear upon students studying in Galway; whether he will obtain the opinion of the General Medical Council on the matter; and whether he will institute an inquiry as to the cause of the proposed change, and exercise the authority of the Government to prevent it?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: The President of the Queen's College, Galway, reports that the regulations of the Royal University are correctly stated in the first part of the question. He understands that, the rules of the College of Surgeons require the same number of beds as those of the Royal University—namely, 60. He is not aware of any combination of hospitals in Galway made in consequence of any Commission. In response to an application from the medical staff of the Galway hospital, not of the Queen's College authorities, the Senate of the Royal University, by Minute dated October. 27th, 1892, recognised that institution as a general hospital sufficient by itself to give clinical instruction. No limitation to 35 beds has been made. On the contrary, the Local Government Board has fixed the number of beds to be maintained at 60. There are no fever wards, but accident cases are at all times admitted. As already stated, the Senate, Royal University, recognised the Galway Hospital, on the application of its medical staff, and the President of the Queen's College states that the medical faculty of the College report to him that that hospital fulfils in every particular the requirements set forth in the regulations of the Royal University. From the foregoing explanation it would appear that the students of the Galway Medical School are under no disability as regards compliance with the regulations of the Royal University. And the matter does not appear to call for a reference to the General Medical Council.

  ILLEGAL DEATH CERTIFICATES.
  MR. MADEN: I beg to ask the Secretary State for the Home Department whether his attention has been called to the report of an inquest in The Times (7th February) on the body of Richard Kil-
  1034
  lick, aged 60, who died at Hatch Row, Lambeth, on 31st January, 1893, and whose death was certified by Dr. Freeman, of 203, Blackfriars Road, although he had not seen him for a week previous to his death, but who signed the certificate as having seen him on the 29th January; and seeing there have been several cases of doctors giving illegal certificates lately, whether he will call the Registrar General's attention to this fact, and see that the existing law is carried into effect?
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT (Mr. ASQUITH,): I find on inquiry that the Coroner has already called the attention of the Registrar General to the circumstances of this case, and he, no doubt, will take any proceedings which may be necessary. Other irregularities appear to have been disclosed in connection with the case, which the Coroner informs me he intends to report to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and my hon. Friend may feel assured that every effort will be made to carry the existing law into effect in this and all other similar cases.

  THE UNIVERSITIES ACT, 1889.
  MR. CROMBIE: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland when the Ordinance dealing with Scotch decrees in law under "The Universities Act, 1889," will be issued; and whether he is aware that in the University of Aderdeen the institution of the law degree depends on the forthcoming Ordinance, and delay in its issue will cause much inconvenience to students who entered their law course in 1891, with a view to graduating this session?
  SIR G. TREVELYAN: The Scottish University Commission propose at an early date to consider the whole question of graduations in law in all the Scottish Universities. They do not consider it expedient, to separate the case of Aberdeen from that of the other Universities. No Ordinances are yet framed, but opinions are being collected on the subject.

  EXPORTS OF SPIRITS.
  MR. SNAPE: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Treasury what is the total amount of allowance made during the last financial

  1035
  year to the exporters of plain spirits; and what is the amount of allowance made during the same period to the exporters of sweetened or flavoured spirits?
  *THE SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY (Sir J. T. HIBBERT,): The allowance to exporters of plain spirits amounted to £28,538 6s. 5d., being at the rate of 2d. per gallon, and that to exporters of sweetened or flavoured spirits amounted to £9,159 17s. 9d., or at the rate of 4d. per gallon.
  MR. SNAPE: I beg to give notice that on an early day I will call attention to the information which the Secretary to the Treasury has laid before the House and move a Resolution thereon.

  THE BOARD OF IRISH LIGHTS.
  MR. WILLIAM KENNY: I beg to ask the President of the Bond of Trade whether any complaint has been made by any owner or shipping, or other person, of failure on the part of the Board of Irish Lights to discharge the ditties entrusted to that body?
  MR. MUNDELLA: No, Sir; no such complaints have reached me.

  THE CURRAGH.
  MR. FIELD: beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether it is the intention of the Government to import terra-cotta to be used in the buildings about to be commenced on the Curragh; and is the Fair Wages Resolution of this House enforced in his Department in Ireland?
  *THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR (Mr. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN,&c.): No, Sir; the War Office will not import any terra cotta. If any should be, required for the buildings at the Curragh the contractor will be at liberty to obtain it from Irish sources, provided the quality is satisfactory. The same precautions are taken in Ireland as in England to enforce the Resolution of the House referred to in the last part of the question.

  BALTIMORE RAILWAY.
  MR. FIELD: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether it is intended to directly connect the Baltimore Railway with the pier, so as to enable economic and expeditious transit?
  SIR J. T. HIBBERT: Perhaps the hon. Member will allow me to answer the question. There is no such intention. The present pier is, I am informed, not conveniently situated for establishing such a connection.

  BOARD OF AGRICULTURE FOR IRELAND.
  MR. FIELD: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant or Ireland whether the Government intend to establish a Board of Agriculture for Ireland on the lines suggested by the Irish Cattle Traders' and Stock Owners' Association, as resolutions in favour have been passed by the Dublin and other Corporations, the Royal Dublin Society, by many Town Commissioners and Poor Law Boards, and by Grand Juries all over the country?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: As regards this question, I have to observe that there is the Agricultural Department in connection with the Irish Land Commission, which undoubtedly collects a large amount of valuable information. Another part of the ground is covered by the Congested Districts Board, and there is, of course, the Veterinary Department of the Privy Council. After a good deal of consideration, I cannot feel satisfied with this distribution of agricultural affairs; and I have very little doubt that the formation of a Board of Agriculture would be expedient in a country like Ireland, whose largest interest is agriculture.
  MR. FIELD: Is it the Government's intention to propose a Board of Agriculture for Ireland similar to the one that now exists in England?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: No, Sir. I hope the Irish Government will do that.

  THE STROME FERRY MAILS.
  MR. WEIR: I beg to ask the Postmaster General whether, in the new contract for the conveyance of Her Majesty's mails between Strome Ferry and Stornoway, arrangements will he made for a steamer of sufficient power and speed to ensure the regular delivery of mails, and which shall afford suitable accommodation for second-class and steerage passengers?
  MR. A. MORLEY: Provision will certainly be made in the new contract for the use of a steamer of sufficient power

  1037
  and speed to ensure the regular delivery of the mails. I should hope that suitable accommodation for passengers would also be afforded; but this is a matter not within the scope of the contract.

  RELIGIOUS DISTURBANCES AT PLOCKTON.
  MR. WEIR: I beg to ask the Lord Advocate whether he has received a Report relating to the recent religious disturbances at Plockton, the persecution of Alexander Macrae, and the conduct of the police during the disturbances; and, if so, whether he will communicate its purport to the House?
  *THE LORD ADVOCATE (Mr. J. B. BALFOUR,): The subject to which this question relates was by my direction fully investigated on the spot by the Procurator Fiscal, and the evidence of the witness whom he examined was duly forwarded to me. It appears that a man named Alexander Macrae, from Loch Carron, was working as a mason's labourer at the erection of a house in Plockton, and that a feeling of irritation had arisen against him there, in consequence of its being believed that he had written and spoken disrespectfully of the Free Church Minister, although there is no evidence that he had done so. The result was that on several evenings bodies of young men assembled and requested Macrae to leave Plockton, intimating at the same time that if he did not do so voluntarily they would put him into a boat and convey him to Loch Carron. On the following Sunday he was prevented by some young men from entering the Free Church, and another hostile demonstration was made during the week, in consequence of which Macrae went to Strome Ferry, and he seems to have since been more or less under the protection of the police. No violence was, however, at any time used towards him, nor, so far as appears, was any violence seriously threatened. From the time when the police were called in, they seem to have behaved with judgment and discretion. On the occasion of Macrae's last visit to Plockton, before the Report was made tome, no notice was taken of him, and I hope that there will be no repetition of such unseemly proceedings.

  HIGHLAND DEER FORESTS.
  DR. MACGREGOR: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland whether he will consider the expediency of enlarging the scope of the Inquiry referred to a Royal Commission on Land in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, so as to include all the deer afforesting counties in that country?
  SIR G. TREVELYAN: The work Which the Commission Will have on its hands, within the limits of its existing Reference, is very considerable; and it is important that that work should be concluded as soon as possible. For this reason the Government has decided to confine the scope of the Commission to the counties affected by the Crofters Act of 1886.
  DR. MACGREGOR: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he thinks that a Report which embraces only a half of die counties that are deer afforested will be sufficiently complete to enable the House to judge of the land available for the people's use?
  SIR TREVELYAN: I think it will give us a great deal of very valuable information.

  DEVON SEA FISHERIES.
  SIR WILLIAM PEARCE: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether Petitions having been received from Plymouth, Brixham, and Beer against the new bye-laws of the Devon Sea Fisheries Committee, the Board of Trade Inquiry will he held at those ports instead of at Newton as proposed, in order that the evidence of the local fishermen may be taken?
  MR. F. B. MILDMAY: Will the right hon. Gentleman extend the Inquiry to other equally important centres in Devonshire?
  MR. MUNDELLA: I have received a large number of objections to the bye-laws recently made by the Committee of the Devon Sea Fisheries District, and an Inspector has been directed to hold an inquiry at Newton Abbot. It is important to hold an inquiry of this nature at one place only, since it will be attended at the expense of those interested by advocates who must be given the opportunity of examining and cross-examining the witnesses. Newton Abbot has been

  1039
  chosen as being most central and generally accessible by railway.

  PLEURO-PNEUMONIA IN CANADA.
  MR. WILLIAM WHITELAW: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Agriculture if the Government proposes to take any steps by joint action with the Canadian Authorities, or otherwise, to discover whether as a fact pleuro-pneumonia does or does not exist in Canada; and if he can state what, if any, regulations exist as to the importation of cattle into Canada?
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE (Mr. H. GARDNER,): It would not be practicable for my Department to conduct for itself on the spot any investigation into the sanitary condition of animals in Canada; but, as I have already stated, I shall give attentive consideration to any information on the subject which I may receive from the Canadian Government. I understand that the regulations at present in force in the Dominion require 90 days' quarantine in the case of cattle imported from the Eastern States of the United States; but some modification of this rule appears to be allowed in favour of settlers entering Manitoba and the North-Western Territories.

  THE APPOINTMENT OF COUNTY MAGISTRATES.
  MR. DODD (): I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether the Lord Chancellor is prepared, where necessary, to advise Her Majesty to appoint Justices in counties in which further appointments are in his judgment needed, without requiring in all such cases a recommendation from the Lords Lieutenant of such counties?
  MR. ASQUITH: If the Lord Chancellor should receive information which appeared primâ facie to show that more magistrates were needed in any county, he would call the attention of the Lord Lieutenant to the fact; if the Lord Lieutenant should thereupon decline to make any recommendation to the Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Chancellor should be satisfied that more magistrates were in fact needed, he would feel it his duty to make the requisite appointments without further reference to the Lord Lieutenant.
  MR. CONYBEARE: I wish to ask the right hon. Gentleman whether, if the names of duly-qualified gentlemen are submitted to the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Lieutenant having refused to take any notice of them, he will appoint them himself?
  MR. ASQUITH: I must ask for notice of that question.
  MR. SEXTON: Will this rule apply to Ireland?
  MR. J. MORLEY: I think so.
  MR. BARTLEY: May I ask whether the right hon. Gentleman's attention has been drawn to the recommendations which have been made by Mr. Michael Davitt during the last few months? Is it in accordance with the principle laid down by the right hon. Gentleman?
  [No answer was given.]

  WELSH PRIVATE RILLS.
  MR. DAVID THOMAS (): I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he can state separately for Wales and Monmouthshire, as has been done in the case of Scotland and Ireland, the total amount of expenses incurred by Local Authorities and Railway and other Companies in promoting or opposing Private Bills before Parliament during the six years 1886-1891?
  MR. ASQUITH: I am endeavouring to obtain this information; but as the preparation of it will take time, and as to the Railway and other Companies may prove impossible, I must ask my hon. Friend to postpone his question.

  VESSELS SIDE LIGHTS.
  MR. HOUSTON: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether it is the fact that the Order in Council, dated 30th January, 1893, referring to vessels' sidelights, is in contravention of the International Regulations of 1880, which at present are enforced by Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Chili, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United States; whether his attention has been called to the danger of collision and loss of life at sea which may arise from the alteration now in force or about to be enforced in the case of British vessels, while the old regulations

  1041
  now in force in the case of foreign vessels remain unaltered; whether he is aware that the late Mr. Justice Butt, in giving Judgment in the case of the Fire Queen, in 1887, expressed a strong opinion that under Article 2, Sub-section D, the lights must be so screened "as not to cross the line of the ship's keel projected ahead of the ship"; whether, in the event of collisions or loss of life at sea occasioned by collision between it British vessel and a foreign one, each of which would doubtless be held in fault in the Law Courts of the other, the British Government will undertake to indemnify the owners of British vessels against all claims or losses that may be mode by the owners of foreign vessels, or that may be incurred by the owners of British vessels arising from or through collision; and, if not, whether the Government will suspend the said Order in Council until the opinions of the various Steam and Soiling Ship Owners' Associations throughout the Kingdom have been obtained; and whether he has received any representation to the effect that the said Order in Council is in itself contradictory and impossible to comply with, or, if not so, that the wording of it is ambiguous?
  MR. MUNDELLA: The Order in Council of 30th January, 1893, referring to vessels' side lights is not in contravention of the Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea previously in force, but is explanatory only. The object of the new Order is to substitute uniformity of practice for the diversity which previously prevailed. Representations have been made to me that danger is likely to arise prior to the adoption by foreign countries of the interpretation contained in the new Order. But I am strongly advised that that Order is in the direction of safety, and not of danger. Under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1862, whenever foreign ships are within British jurisdiction, the new Order will apply to such foreign ships, and in cases arising here concerning matters happening Within British jurisdiction, foreign ships will be treated as if they were British ships. As soon as the interpreting Regulation has been adopted by any foreign country the ships of that country when on the high seas will also be bound by it. I am aware of the Judgment in the case of the Fire
  1042
  Queen, but I am advised that in any future case the Courts here will no doubt be guided by the interpretation of the Regulations embodied in the new Order in Council. I do not share the apprehension of the hon. Gentleman that questions of indemnity are likely to arise prior to the adoption of the interpreting Order by Foreign Powers. I have not received any such representation as that referred to in the last paragraph.
  MR. HOUSTON: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I give notice that I shall bring the matter before the House at an early date.

  INCOME TAX APPEALS.
  MR. THOMAS B. CURRAN: I beg to ask the Chancellor the Exchequer if he has recently received complaints as to the present system of hearing appeals from assessments made by District Commissioners of Income Tax; and if he proposes to make any change in the law on the matter?
  SIR W. HARCOURT: I have received from time to time complaints upon this subject, but they have not appeared to me to be of such a character as to require or justify a change in the law.

  THE COLONISATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA.
  MR. SETON-KARR: I beg to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much (if any) of the £150,000 loan agreed to be advanced by Her Majesty's Government to the British Columbian Government for colonisation purposes has already been advanced; whether such sum (if any) has been advanced direct to the British Columbian Government, or to any syndicate or commercial company, acting under them or otherwise; by whom the details of the proposed colonisation scheme are being or will be carried out; whether any families have already been selected; and, if so, how many and from what part of the United Kingdom; and generally what progress has been made in carrying out the scheme; and in what sums and on what date the remainder of the loan is to be advanced?
  SIR W. HARCOURT: No money has been advanced from the Treasury under the British Columbia (Loan) Act, 1892; and, as far as I am aware, no ar-

  1043
  rangements have been yet completed by the Columbian Government in respect of the conditions necessary for such advance.
  MR. SETON-KARR: Is it the fact that this loan has been definitely agreed to?
  SIR W. HARCOURT: No, Sir; the loan could not be agreed to until certain conditions which have been laid down with reference to the company that was to be formed have been fulfilled.
  MR. SETON-KARR: Will the right hon. Gentleman state what those conditions are?
  SIR W. HARCOURT: The conditions are set out in the Act of Parliament. It would be a very long story to enter into the matter fully. Anybody can ascertain for themselves what the conditions are by referring to the Act.

  COLONISATION OF CANADA.
  MR. SETON-KARR: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland whether, in view of the favourable Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners, appointed to carry out a scheme of colonisation in the Dominion of Canada, dated 29th April, 1892, it is proposed to further continue or extend the said scheme; and, if so, to what extent, in what manner, and at what time; if not, what are the reasons for not extending or continuing the said scheme?
  SIR G. TREVELYAN: The intention of the Board of Colonisation early in last year had been to continue the emigration of Canada. Posters were distributed, in English and Gaelic, explaining the scheme and inviting applicants; but by November no applications whatever had come in from the congested districts in the West of Scotland which Parliament had in contemplation when it voted the money, and from which the previous emigrants had been drawn. Under these circumstances, the Government did not proceed with the scheme this winter.
  MR. SETON-KARR: Are there any funds still remaining available for the purpose?
  SIR G. TREVELYAN: Yes, about £10,000, which runs on from year to year.

  HOME CAVALRY REGIMENTS.
  MR. BROOKFIELD: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether he can state the present proportion between horses and men in Cavalry regiments of the Line serving at home; and whether he can state the principle upon which such proportion is regulated?
  *MR. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: In Cavalry regiments of the Line serving at home the proportion of men to horses may be taken to be three men to two horses. The proportion of men available for duty in the ranks is, of course, affected by the number of recruits under training, and there are always a considerable number of men necessarily performing dismounted duties.

  THE BAWNMORE.
  MR. JOHNSTON: I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if he can afford any information concerning the kidnapping of the crew of a Belfast steamship, the Bawnmore, on the 21st ultimo, at Nanaimo, British Columbia, and whether any steps have been taken to punish the perpetrators of the outrage, either by the Canadian or Imperial Government?
  SIR E. GREY: No sufficient information has yet been received concerning this ship. If the hon. Member will postpone his question for a few days I will endeavour to obtain information.

  RAILWAY RATES—THE CARRIAGE OF MILK.
  MR. STRACHEY: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether, in view of the decision of the and land Railway Company to go back to the old rates for the carriage of milk until the 30th of June next pending a further inquiry, he would ask the Great Western and South Western Railway Companies to do the same?
  MR. MUNDELLA: Yes, Sir; the London and South Western Railway Company have for the present decided to charge the old rates for the carriage of milk, and will apply the same as from January 1st. I have not received any such assurances from the Great Western Railway Company, but the matter is being pressed upon their attention.
  SIR J. WHITEHEAD: Does the decision of the Midland Railway Company to go back to the old rates for the carriage of milk, and the decision of the South Western Railway Company in the same direction, apply to all stations on each line?
  MR. MUNDELLA: The Midland and South Western Railway Companies have decided to supply all stations under their control, and in the case of the other stations they are in negotiation with other companies.
  SIR J. WHITEHEAD: In other words, the new rates will not apply to competing stations.
  MR. MUNDELLA: They will apply to nearly all stations.
  MR. THOMAS HENRY BOLTON: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether, with regard to railway rates, he will direct a record to be kept of all cases of reduced charges procured through the intervention or with the co-operation of the Board of Trade of coming to the knowledge of that Board, and have same tabulated in such a form that the information may be embodied in a Parliamentary Paper, available for the use of traders, so that they may learn the reductions made in particular cases with a view to getting like reductions in similar cases?
  MR. MUNDELLA: A very considerable proportion of the complaints of increases in rates which have reached the Board of Trade are in general terms, and it would not be possible to keep such a record as that referred to by the hon. Member. We are, as far as we are able, keeping a record of our negotiations with the companies.

  TUBERCULOSIS IN CATTLE.
  MR. HOZIER: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Agriculture whether there is any prospect of a measure being introduced to provide compensation for loss due to tuberculosis in cattle?
  MR. GARDNER: I should he glad to take any steps which might be practicable to minimise the extent to which tuberculosis prevails amongst cattle, and the subject is engaging my attention at the present time. But it would not be possible for me to propose legislation of the general and costly character suggested in the question.

  MEATH ELECTIONS.
  SIR HENRY HOWORTH: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been called to the electioneering proceedings of the priests in the County of Meath during the last three weeks; and whether he proposes to take any steps, by initiating legislation or otherwise, to prevent a recurrence, at the coining elections in that county, of the intimidation and undue influence which caused the Judges to decide that "the election for the Southern Division of Meath, both under the Statute and the Common Law, was void and must he set aside" through undue influence?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: I am happy to say that my attention has not been called to electioneering proceedings in Meath during the last three weeks. With regard to the second part of the hon. Member's question, whether I shall propose any legislation to prevent a recurrence of intimidation, I may say that the election takes place in five or six days, and I think that the hon. Member will see that the interval is rather short.

  EAST SUSSEX BANKRUPTCIES.
  MR. THOMAS HENRY BOLTON: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether he is aware that, in bankruptcies in East Sussex, parties are required to attend to give information to the Official Receiver at an office near Loudon Bridge; and whether he will insist that every Official Receiver has an office in the district for which he is appointed to act?
  MR. MUNDELLA; The great majority of East Sussex bankrupts attend at the Official Receiver's Office in Brighton. A few in the Tunbridge Wells District (and whose travelling expenses are paid when necessary) attend at the chief office of the Southern District, which adjoins the London Bridge Railway Station, and which has been found by experience to be the most convenient centre both for debtors and creditors, many of the latter being in London. It is not, in my opinion, desirable to attach a separate office and staff to every Court which exercises bankruptcy jurisdiction. Such an arrangement would not conduce either to efficiency or economy.

  STARVING SCHOOL CHILDREN.
  MR. ROBERT WALLACE: I beg to ask the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education whether there are any grounds for apprehending that numbers of children throughout the country are compelled by law to attend public schools and receive instruction during many hours of the day, while in a state of starvation or excessive hunger due to the poverty of their parents; and, if so, whether he will direct an immediate and thorough inquiry into the matter?
  MR. ACLAND: There is no doubt that a certain number of children, if all the schools of the country are taken into consideration, attend school without a sufficient amount of food to enable them to receive instruction with full benefit to themselves. The provision of free meals by voluntary effort to meet such cases is a matter always requiring much care and watchfulness. I feel sure, from inquiries I have made, that in many schools, managers and teachers (who alone know all the circumstances of the cases) do much, by the aid of voluntary contributions, to meet the difficulty with great tact and judgment. I will, however, communicate with some of our largest School Boards in order to ascertain their views on the subject, and the extent to which, in their opinion, such destitution as that alluded to in the question prevails.

  THE PATENT LAWS.
  MR. SCHWANN: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether he intends to bring in a Bill this Session to assimilate the Patent Laws of the United Kingdom to those of the United States of America with regard to fees and other particulars; and, if not, whether he would be disposed to introduce, at any rate, into English Patent Law the preliminary examination by experts in the Patent Office into the novelty and the validity of proposed patents which obtains (causing a great saving of time and money to inventors) in the United States?
  MR. MUNDELLA: I see no prospect of introducing any measure dealing with alterations in the Patent Laws at present.

  THE REVISION OF IRISH SENTENCES.
  MR. CARSON: I had given notice to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he will state the names of all convicts in Ireland whose sentences have been wholly or partially remitted or reduced since the 21st of August, 1892; and for what crimes such convicts respectively were convicted, and to what terms of imprisonment such convicts respectively were sentenced? At the request, however, of the right hon. Gentleman I will postpone the question.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: When the right hon. Gentleman deals with this on Monday I will ask him to bear in mind the hon. and learned Gentleman has blocked a Return which would secure this information. Will the right hon. Gentleman give it in the form of an answer to a question?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: I will see; but I am afraid the details will prove too copious for that.

  SCOTCH SHERIFFS AS POLITICIANS.
  MR. DALZIEL: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland whether the interference of Sheriffs of Counties in Parliamentary elections is permissible under the conditions governing such appointments; whether he is aware that the Sheriff of Perthshire and the Sheriff of Dumfriesshire and Kirkcudbrightshire were actively engaged as speakers at political meetings during the recent General Election; and will he take such action as may prevent persons occupying a judicial position prominently identifying themselves with the candidates of any particular Party?
  SIR G. TREVELYAN: The Sheriffs in Scotland are not bound by the regulations which govern the Permanent Civil Service with regard to political action; but it is well established that Judges of the Supreme Court abstain from taking an active part in elections, from a sense that their duty requires them to preserve the confidence of men of all parties in politics; and the same considerations should weigh with the Sheriffs, especially when it is considered that they perform the double function of settling the registration of voters and superintending

  1049
  Parliamentary elections in the character of Returning Officer.
  SIR MARK STEWART: Has the right hon. Gentleman any information that the Sheriffs were actively engaged at public meetings during the last General Election?
  SIR G. TREVELYAN: I should prefer not to answer that question.

  INTERMEDIATE EDUCATION IN CARNARVONSHIRE.
  MR. LLOYD-GEORGE: I beg to ask the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education whether any, and, if so, what, Petitions have been presented to the Privy Council against the Carnarvonshire Intermediate Education Scheme, framed under the Intermediate Education Act for Wales, 1889; for how long this scheme has been under preparation and public discussion in the county; whether it has been approved by the County Council; and what delay will be involved by such Petitions, if any, before the work of building the Intermediate Schools for the county can be begun?
  MR. ACLAND: The Carnarvonshire scheme is the first county scheme in Wales which has passed through all the necessary stages under the Intermediate Education Act of 1889, and it is, therefore, a case of some interest. The County Council provides under it a sum of from £3,000 to £4,000 a year for the support of the schools, and it is probable that about four or five Intermediate Schools will be erected at once in the county under the scheme, and possibly others later on. The scheme might have become law yesterday if it had not been for the presentation of three Petitions to the Education Department. Two of these are forwarded by the Bishop of Bangor, and one by Mr. Morgan Jones. One is signed by seven Trustees of Bottwnog School. There is no evidence to show whether this Petition was adopted at a duly constituted meeting of the Governors. But there are two other Petitions, one signed by 26 ratepayers of Bangor, and the other by 31 ratepayers of Bangor, alleging grievances in connection with Friar's School, Bangor. It should be noted that the Governors of this school have presented no Petition. This county scheme has been under preparation by the Joint Committee (consisting of two
  1050
  members named by the late Government and three by the County Council), and under public discussions arranged by the committee in different parts of the county for more than three years. It was discussed clause by clause in the County Council and approved. The delay involved by the Petitions will vary according to circumstances. In any case, the scheme must now be delayed for two more mouths. Should an Address be carried in either House praying Her Majesty to withhold consent from the scheme, the procedure must be begun over again from the beginning, and this would probably take not less than two years.
  MR. LLOYD-GEORGE: Are any copies of the scheme available for Welsh Members?
  MR. ACLAND: I shall be happy to give hon. Gentlemen copies.

  SEED LOANS IN IRELAND.
  MR. J. K. WINGFIELD-DIGBY: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been draw to a statement, publicly made that the Killarney Board of Guardians is unable to collect the seed loan in consequence of the recent Order refusing police protection to the Sheriff when proceeding to the scene of seizure before daylight; and whether he intends taking any steps to facilitate the recovery of their debts by the Killarney Board of Guardians?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: I have received from the Local Government a Report in which it is stated that it was not alleged by the collectors, at the meeting of the Killarney Guardians, that they had been refused protection in the collection of the seed rate, but that the collectors stated that the police would not collect the rate for them. The Local Government Board's Inspector, who was present at the meeting, informed the collectors that it was their duty to collect the rate, and that they could do so by seizure, if necessary.
  COLONEL SAUNDERSON: Will the right hon. Gentleman be kind enough to inform the House whether, in consequence of the recent decision of the Court of Queen's Bench in Ireland, he has given orders for suspending the instruction as to withholding protection to the Sheriff?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: My answer is in the affirmative.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: Have the Sheriffs anything to do with the collection of the seed rate?
  *MR. J. MORLEY: I think not.

  WEDDING OBSTRUCTION AT CHELSEA.
  MR. ATHERLEY-JONES: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been directed to the charge before Mr. Shiel, police magistrate at Westminster Police Court, against Mr. John Wilson, of disorderly conduct, in which the evidence was, that Mr. Wilson was prevented by certain police officers from passing along the footway of a public thoroughfare on the occasion of a wedding at Holy Trinity Church, Chelsea; whether there is any, and, if so, what, authority by Law which enables the police to prevent the passing and repassing of the public along the footway of a public thoroughfare; and, if so, whether the closing of the footway in question was in conformity with that authority; whether he is aware that the police magistrate, in spite of the fact that Mr. Wilson stated he had not finished his cross-examination of a witness, and of his protest, prevented him from continuing his cross-examination, and convicted him of disorderly conduct; and whether he will take any steps to secure a remission of this sentence?
  MR. ASQUITH: I am making inquiries into this case, and must ask my hon. Friend to postpone his question till Tuesday.

  THE CHAIRMANSHIP OF COMMITTEES.
  MR. CONYBEARE: I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether it is the intention of the Government to move Mr. Speaker out of the Chair immediately after the Address has been voted; and, if not, whether they will give notice beforehand of their intention to do so?
  THE FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY (Mr. W. E. GLADSTONE,): It is not the intention, nor would it be in accordance with the usual precedent, to move the Speaker out of the Chair at the close of the Debate on the Address, The prac-
  1052
  tice is to give previous notice of setting up Supply, in order that hon. Members may give notice of any Motions which they may desire to bring forward; and to move the Speaker out of the Chair notice must be given.

  DANGEROUS PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS.
  MR. MACFARLANE: I desire to ask the Home Secretary if his attention has been drawn to the recent fatal trapeze accident at Leicester, and if he has any power to prevent such dangerous public exhibitions?
  MR. ASQUITH: I must ask for notice of the question

  ARMY (ORDNANCE FACTORIES) (APPROPRIATION ACCOUNT).
  Appropriation Account presented,—of the Sums granted by Parliament, for the expense of the Ordnance Factories for the year ended 31st March, 1892, with the Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General thereon [by Act]; to lie upon the Table.
  FINANCIAL RELATIONS (ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND).
  Copy ordered, "of Return showing, for the years ended the 31st day of March, 1890, 1891, and 1892 respectively, (1) the amount contributed by England, Scotland, and Ireland respectively to the Revenue collected by Imperial Officers; (2) the expenditure on English, Scottish, and Irish Services met out of such Revenue."—(Mr. Clancy.)
  BARRISTERS AND PARLIAMENT.

    MR. ROSS'S AMENDMENT.
    MR. CONYBEARE: I wish to ask the Attorney General a question of which I have given him private notice. It is whether it is consonant with the practice of the Bar that a counsel, who has been engaged in a criminal prosecution, should in his capacity of Member of this House make use of and divulge information which he has become possessed of in his capacity as prosecuting counsel, in bringing before the House a Motion relative to the case in which he has been engaged?
    *THE ATTORNEY GENERAL (Sir CHARLES RUSSELL,): Assuming the facts to be that the hon. and learned Gentleman referred to acted as counsel for the Crown in the criminal prosecution of the Gweedore prisoners, it would be contrary to what is understood to be not proper professional conduct in England to use his knowledge of facts obtained as counsel in a criminal case, for the purposes of political discussion in this House. I wish it to be understood that I do not mean for a moment to imply that the hon. and learned Gentleman has knowingly and intentionally offended against the rules of honourable professional practice. Probably when the Amendment was put upon the Paper the matter had not occurred to him in this light. I wish to add that, although I only received notice of this question this morning, I took the opportunity of consulting several of the Judges, and the majority of those Judges seemed to think that the Rule went even further than I have said, and that no counsel should take part in any public discussion relating to any criminal case in which he has been engaged, unless it be under exceptional circumstances calling for explanations or the like.
    MR. A. J. BALFOUR: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman, for the information of myself and of the House, whether it is not a fact that, when he was engaged as counsel in the Parnell Commission, he did not, in conjunction with another eminent counsel, who is also a leading Member of this House, engage in, if he did not initiate, a discussion in this House upon the subject of that Commission, and take advantage of his position as a Member of this House to attack another leading counsel?
    *SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: There is no analogy whatever between the case referred to by the right hon. Gentleman, and my conduct in relation to that matter, and the point involved in the question now before the House. The Parnell case was a Commission constituted by Act of Parliament, and the function of the Judges who were appointed to sit upon that Commission was to report to this House. I initiated no discussion upon it. So far from that, when a discussion did take place before the Re-
    1054
    port of the Commission I abstained from taking part in it.
    MR. A. J. BALFOUR: The hon. and learned Gentleman has no doubt refreshed his memory upon the point whether he spoke on the subject before the Report was issued. Am I not right in saying that the speech was made before the Report of the Parnell Commission was presented? May I ask whether there is any difference between that case and the present one? Both he and the hon. Member for Londonderry (Mr. Ross) were paid counsel.
    *SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: There is no analogy between the two cases. The Parnell Commission was not a criminal case. It was, as I have already pointed out, a Commission, bound to report to this House.
    MR. MACNEILL: Perhaps, Sir, you will permit me to ask a question, seeing that this is a matter which affects the dignity of this House. I wish to ask if the hon. and learned Member who now puts forward a Motion condemning the exercise of the clemency of the Crown in favour of the persons against whom he was employed as prosecuting counsel, does not confound his duties as a barrister with his duties as a Member of Parliament, and is not such conduct in distinct contravention of the Resolution passed by this House on the 22nd June, 1858, which laid down the Rule—
    "It is contrary to the usage and derogatory to the dignity of this House that any of its Members should bring forward, promote, or advocate in this House any proceeding or measure in which he may have acted or been concerned for or in consideration of any pecuniary fee or reward."
    As this matter is of great importance, you will, I am sure, allow me to briefly describe the circumstances under which Lord Hotham's Rule was laid down. It was carried in a fairly full House by 210 votes against 27, a majority of 183, and in the course of the Debate upon it every lawyer of eminence then in the House spoke. The views of the Lord Chancellor of the day—[Interruptions]—I appeal to you, Mr. Speaker, as the guardian of the dignity of this House, to protect me against these interruptions.
    *MR. SPEAKER: The hon. Member is, I gather, referring to precedents on a point of Order which he has advanced, and, if so, he is in order.
    MR. MACNEILL: The Lord Chancellor of the day was Lord Chelmsford, and in the Debate to which I am referring the Mover said it was well known that it was the practice of Lord Chelmsford while he was at the Bar to take no part in any proceeding in the House in which he was professionally concerned out of it; and, on the other hand, he would never act as advocate out of the House in any case in which he had been professionally concerned within its walls. Mr. Whitehead, afterwards Chief Justice of Ireland, said that hon. Members were prohibited from practising before any Parliamentary Committees for the reason set forth in the Resolution. Sir Henry Keating, a Judge of great eminence, who was Solicitor General at that time, said he believed that anyone who had that feeling of honour which was common to the whole Bar would decline either to speak or even vote upon a subject in which he had been professionally engaged outside, lest he should, unconsciously perhaps, be influenced by opinions which he had expressed elsewhere. Under these circumstances, Sir, I beg to ask you whether the conduct of the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Londonderry does not completely come under the rule thus laid down; and whether it is not only inconsistent with good order, but with good taste, that a gentleman should be a paid advocate one day, and the next day should, as an independent Member of Parliament, take part in a discussion on the ease in which he had previously been professionally engaged, and deal with the ease as a matter of public policy?
    *MR. SPEAKER: As I have been appealed to, I am bound to express an opinion on the subject, but the hon. Gentleman has not given me very much time to consider it. There are two Resolutions of this House dealing with the question. One was passed in the year 1830, and the other in 1858. In the year 1830 it was alleged that Members of this House promoted, for pecuniary reward, Private Bills, in which they were professionally interested, and a Resolution was passed forbidding any Member, by himself or by his partner, to promote in this House Private Bills in which he was engaged. Some years passed, and in the year 1858 another allegation was made—namely, that that Rule had been
    1056
    evaded, and that Members of this House in taking up cases were really paid for advocating those eases in the House, and a very stringent Resolution was passed, which by leave of the House, I will read—
    "It is contrary to the usage and derogatory to the dignity of this House that any of its Members should bring forward, promote, or advocate in this House any proceeding or measure in which he may have acted or been concerned for or in consideration of any pecuniary fee or reward."
    The House will see that that was strictly confined to the cases in which a Member, in his public capacity as a Member of Parliament, advocated a particular person's cause or promoted any case, and received a pecuniary reward for so doing. That, I think, is the distinction. To say that any Member who has been engaged in a criminal case is not to engage in this House on a subsequent occasion in a Debate relating to the same case I cannot, because as far as the Rules of the House are concerned I do not think it is contrary to them. I can quite understand that it would be highly improper for any Member to take part in a discussion here on a case in which he was concerned and which was still undecided; but after the case had been decided, then there might be information at his disposal which could be usefully supplied for the conduct of the Debate. I am not about to set my opinion against that of the Judges of the land, or to say that it is contrary to or in accordance with professional etiquette for any Member of this House to make use of facts or information which have been gained by him in his capacity either for or against a case. The House will therefore see, on the point of Order, that I cannot stand in the way of the hon. Gentleman to whom reference has been made bringing on this matter; but, at the same time, I shall leave it to the Legal Profession to decide whether it is contrary to legal etiquette for hon. and learned Members to take part in a Debate under the circumstances.
    MR. A. J. BALFOUR: As you, Mr. Speaker, have ruled that it is a question of legal etiquette, may I again press the hon. and learned Gentleman as to whether it is not the fact that, pendente lite and before the decision of the Commisson, he intervened in the Debate, and used these words with regard to my hon. and learned Friend who sits near me (Sir R.

    1057
    Webster)—"I did think that the conduct of the case had been unfair to the defendants"?—(Hansard's Reports, vol.334, page 735.) I must again press him for his views on that point in the light of the answer he gave to the question of the hon. Member for Camborne (Mr. Conybeare).
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: If the right hon. Gentleman will tell me what was the occasion on which the language was used I will answer his question. I have no reason to doubt the entire accuracy of what I have said. When the statement to which the right hon. Gentleman refers was made, as he says, pendente lite, there was no lis perders; and there is all entire absence of analogy between that ease and this case. Although strongly provoked, I abstained from taking part in the Debate on the occasion referred to.
    SIR R. WEBSTER: I shall not, of course, introduce into this discussion the slightest element of personal consideration, but my recollection does not quite accord with that of my hon. and learned Friend. Speeches were made by Members of the Bar, and, I think, by himself, after the date of the Report of the Commission. But even if that does not apply to my hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General (Sir Charles Russell) it applies unquestionably to the hon. and learned Member for York (Mr. Lockwood), to the hon. and learned Member for a Scotch constituency (Mr. R. T. Reid), and to some others who made speeches in this House while the proceedings were pending, and with reference to matters which must have come, to a certain extent, to their knowledge as counsel in the case. I am sure my hon. and learned Friend will acquit me of speaking from personal considerations. I am not intervening now because of any feeling on my part as to the way in which I was treated. If I may humbly say so, I believe, from my study of the question, that you, Mr. Speaker, have laid down the correct Rule—that the Standing Orders of this House, and the rules which govern men apart from Standing Orders, forbid any Member bringing forward or supporting in this House any measure for the purpose of obtaining a fee or reward; and further than that, I think no hon. Member should in his
    1058
    capacity as a Member of this House advocate afterwards any case in respect of which he has received fee or reward. That is the letter and the spirit of the understanding which should actuate Members of my own profession and all other Members. But there is another and an entirely different principle to which you have referred. I have understood that it is a duty which a man owes to his own conscience, and also to his position in our profession, that he should never use, for the purpose of Debate, information which has been communicated to him professionally; and if I had any reason to think that my hon. and learned Friend (Mr. Ross) had contemplated making use of information which came to him as prosecuting counsel, I should have suggested to him, quite independently of any consideration as to the Rules of the House, that he ought to take no part in such a proceeding. But, as I understand, the matter which he wishes to bring forward has become publicly known, and that comments have already been made in Parliament and in the Press on the conduct of the Executive in releasing certain persons who have been in prison, and as to the circumstances of whose trial no question can directly or indirectly arise. I have ventured to intervene because I cherish as keenly as anyone the hope that Members of our profession will obey both the letter and the spirit of the Standing Order; but it does not seem to me that any fact has been brought to the notice of the House from which it can possibly be assumed that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Londonderry was in any way intending either in spirit, much less in letter, to violate the Standing Orders of this House.
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: I wish the House to be in possession of the exact facts of the case. I have now referred to Hansard, and find my recollection was strictly accurate. On the occasion referred to by the right hon. Gentleman, a Motion was brought before the House by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which he impugned, in certain respects to which I will not refer, the conduct of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for the Isle of Wight (Sir R. Webster). On that occasion I took no part whatever in the Debate; I

    1059
    said I would take no part in the discussion, and I absented myself from the House. I found in the reports in the papers next day that a statement had been made by my hon. and learned Friend which was considered a matter of moment on the point raised as to my hon. and learned Friend's conduct, which was that he had handed to me and to my right hon. Friend the present Home Secretary, with whom I was associated, a particular letter on a particular day. I knew that that was not correct, and that I could demonstrate from the shorthand notes that it was not correct, and I came down on the next occasion and explained, and I venture to think demonstrated, to the House that my hon. and learned Friend had fallen into an error. I took the opportunity upon that occasion of stating that I could be no party to making an accusation of dishonourable or intentionally unfair conduct against my hon. and learned Friend; and it is in that connection, and in that connection alone, that I used the language referred to by the Leader of the Opposition, in which I said—
    "I regret to say I still think that the conduct of the case has been practically unfair to the defendants."
    SIR R. WEBSTER: The proceedings were pending.
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: Of course the proceedings were pending. The House will, therefore, see that what I was doing on that occasion was not initiating a discussion, or taking part in a Debate, but after the Debate was over, setting right a mistake which had been made, and showing that a statement which affected me and my learned Friend the Home Secretary was, in fact, incorrect.
    *SIR H. JAMES: I do not know whether there is any Question before the House, and therefore whether I am in Order in saying one word on a Question which affects both persons and our profession. As regards the point of Order, I would really suggest that there could be no question raised on this matter. I will, if I may, show how little the Rule that has been read applies. Suppose I, as the counsel who had prosecuted James Egan, had stood by the side of the Home Secretary and said I thought that there would be no impropriety in his bringing a fair discretion to bear in that
    1060
    case, would I be shut out from expressing that opinion by virtue of this Rule? And if it would be improper to discuss the prerogative of mercy from a hostile point of view, it would be equally out of Order to say a word from a favourable point of view. But I am disposed to take a somewhat generous view of this Rule. The object of the Rule, no doubt, was that a person should not advocate the same cause in this House for which he bad received fee or reward out of it. Although my hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General has said that there was no litigation in respect of the Parnell Commission, there certainly was a proceeding which comes within the terms of Lord Hotham's Rule, and I am not disclosing any confidence when I say—for I have mentioned it in this House before—that I felt that fact so strongly, that after the determination of the proceedings, and after the Report had been made and when the matter came up for discussion before this House, I appealed to the present Attorney General, and I offered him that if he and all the other counsel, the Home Secretary and the Members for Dumfries and York, would abstain from discussing that proceeding in which they had been engaged, I and the late Attorney General would also abstain. My hon. and learned Friend clung to his right, for reasons I do not complain of; and I am sorry to say the House on that occasion had to listen to six learned counsel who had been in the case. But I wish to say this is a question entirely for the consideration of the hon. and learned Gentleman who brings forward this Amendment. If he thinks, after taking advice from those who act with him, that he will not bring to bear upon the discussion any question which will have an influence cast into it by his being professionally retained in the ease, then he is within his right in bringing forward this Amendment. I cannot and do not understand what Her Majesty's Judges have to do with this question. I know not who are the Judges my hon. and learned Friend has taken into his confidence or consulted, but I speak of them all with the greatest respect, and I am sure that he could not have made a selection that would not be a good one. But this is a question first for the Rule and Order of this House, and why should we consult the Judges

    1061
    upon that? And, secondly, it was a question of professional etiquette in this House. That must be a question for the Members of this House, and I say we are quite competent and fit to form our own judgment and to protect our own honour without receiving the guidance of men even as distinguished and as impartial as Her Majesty's Judges.
    MR. T. M. HEALY: It has been suggested by the hon. and learned Member for the Isle of Wight and by the Leader of the Opposition that the Attorney General took part in a Debate or initiated a Debate, whereas it seems quite clear from Hansard that what the Attorney General was doing was answering a complaint which had been made against him by the then Attorney General. "I ask the permission of the House," the Attorney General said,
    "To make an explanation with reference to the assertion of facts made by the Attorney General in the Debate on Friday night with which my name has been associated."
    With regard to the statement of the right hon. and learned Member for Bury (Sir Henry James) a series of accusations or innuendoes were made against myself by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham (Mr. Joseph Chamberlain) who stated that he would not enter into the arrangements that I had had with the Crown in connection with this case. I conceived, at any rate so far as I was concerned, though a mere Nationalist, that I was debarred from making any explanation whatever in reference to my conduct in that case. What is more, I bore for months and months a series of allegations such as that made against me the other night by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham, and bore them in silence; but now, as I understand, a gentleman who has received large fees from the Crown and who is in the expectation of a Judgeship if the present Opposition succeeds, is to be allowed to bring forward the facts in a case in which he was prosecuting counsel.
    MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN: I—[Cries of "Order!"]
    *MR. SPEAKER: I am bound to say that there is no Question before the House. A Question of Order was raised, and I was asked to give an opinion upon it. I have done so.
    MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN: I only rose to explain, in reference to the gratuitous remark of the hon. and learned Gentleman opposite, that in what I said on the occasion to which he refers I made absolutely no imputation whatever against him. I quoted the exact words which he had used on a certain occasion as proof of the fact that he was himself convinced of the guilt of certain persons.

  NEW WRIT.
  For Sussex (North Western or Horsham Division),v. Right Hon. Sir Walter Barttelot, Baronet, deceased.—(Mr. Akers-Douglas.)
  NEW MEMBER SWORN.
  Michael Davitt, esquire, for County of Cork (North East Cork Division).

  BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE—THE DEBATE ON THE ADDRESS.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I desire, Sir, to ask the Prime Minister a question in relation to the course which he desires the House to pursue in relation to the Debate on the Address. I would ask him whether he is aware that from 1886 to 1892—omitting, 1890, in which there were exceptional circumstances—the average length of the Debate on the Address has been nearly 10 Parliamentary days; whether he is aware that in 1892, the precedent on which last night, in the absence of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer especially relied, though the Address only lasted five nights, three-fourths of that time was occupied by speeches and Amendments of the then Opposition, and the comparative shortness of the Debate was entirely due to the abstention of the supporters of the then Government from pressing questions in which they were interested on the attention of the House; whether he is aware that of the seven and a-half nights which have been occupied up to the end of last night's Sitting, one-half of the time has been taken up by speeches of the right hon. Gentleman's supporters, and of the five Amendments that have been moved three have been moved by Members of the Home Rule Party, and whether

  1063
  under these circumstances he still thinks it fair to the Opposition to compel them to debate questions in which they have an interest on so inconvenient an occasion as Saturday afternoon?
  MR. W. E. GLADSTONE: It is totally impossible for me to follow the right hon. Gentleman through the statements of a somewhat complicated and arbitrary character made without a single moment's notice. The right hon. Gentleman chooses a number of years from 1886 to 1892. I might choose another number of years to show a totally different result. In the case of the last year that he has referred to, it appears to me that in putting a question he has made an argument which has nothing whatever to do with the legitimate purpose of the question. I should say that we cannot lay down any absolute rule for the Debate upon the Address. It is impossible to do so without reference to the subjects, and I would also say without reference to the nature of the Public Business in which this House is about to be engaged. In my opinion, the proposal before the House is a perfectly reasonable one, namely, that we should close the Debate on the present Address with respect to the subjects that are to be brought forward within the time already specified; and if the right hon. Gentleman desires to have a discussion on the subject of the time that has been taken on other occasions in debating the Address, I think at least we ought to know before-hand what is the subject we are to debate in order to have an opportunity of instituting reasonable comparison.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: The right hon. Gentleman appears to impute to me something of the nature of discourtesy in not having given him notice of my question. But perhaps he is not aware, having been more agreeably occupied, that the subject of my question was the very topic we were debating for two hours and a-half last night. I assumed, of course, he had been made fully acquainted with these facts by the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It seems that we are not only to be led by two gentlemen, but by two who do not communicate with each other.
  MR. W. E. GLADSTONE: I must say that I think, under all the circumstances of the time under which I am
  1064
  endeavouring to serve the House to the best of my ability, the right hon. Gentleman would have shown better taste and have better fulfilled the ditties of the situation which he occupies if he had spared his reference to my more agreeable occupation.
  MR. T. P. O'CONNOR: Mr. Speaker, I rise to a point of Order. I wish to ask, as a matter of Order, whether there is any Question before the House?
  *MR. SPEAKER: There is not only no Question before the House, but the Debate is contravening the Standing Order, which says that the Motion which the right hon. Gentleman has made shall be put without amendment or debate. I understand that the right hon. Gentleman rose to make a personal explanation.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I rise merely to say, Sir, that if I have unwittingly hurt the feelings of the right hon. Gentleman, or, I will say, if I have unwittingly given him cause of offence, I apologise to him, as he is the last person in the House whose feelings I should desire to hurt. I was not attacking him, but the right hon. Gentleman next to him (the Chancellor of the Exchequer).
  *MR. J. LOWTHER: I rise to ask the right hon. Gentleman if he is in a position to make any statement as regards the conduct of Public Business to-day and to-morrow? I refer specially to arrangements for the allocation of the time of the House to specific Amendments with a view to avoid what occurred at au early hour this morning with regard to an Amendment which had not been previously under discussion, an attempt being made to force it on after the usual time during which the Sittings of the House are conducted. I would wish to ask him whether I am to understand that, in accordance with the indication he himself gave the other day, no attempt will be made to force on the Motion which stands in my name at an unreasonable how? I have gathered that the House will sit on Saturday, and when I speak about an unreasonable hour I am not referring to the earlier hours of Saturday. I think the House will like to have from the right hon. Gentleman an assurance that no attempt will be made to commence the initiation of a discussion at an unreasonable hour.
  MR. W. E. GLADSTONE: I do not think that any advantage would accrue if I were to attempt to enter into any engagement of the kind suggested. In the conduct of Business, as time proceeds, an estimate may be formed which cannot be made beforehand, and what will most conduce to the convenience of Members of the House is that we should studiously, in a spirit of fairness and impartiality, watch the course of the proceedings, with au endeavour to adjust the time of the House, as far as possible, for the general convenience.

  MEMBERS' SEATS.
  SIR MARK STEWART: I desire to ask you, Sir, a question, and, if need be, for your ruling on a matter of general convenience to the Members of the House. It will be recollected that on the first day of the Session many hon. Members came to secure their seats between 5 and 6 o'clock in the morning. My suggestion is that you, Sir, might see your way to impose a limit to entrance to this House on Monday next, and also to the Ladies' Gallery, in order that hon. Gentlemen who are not in the habit of getting up at 5 in the morning may not be placed at a disadvantage.
  *MR. SPEAKER: I should be happy to lay down any Rule which may be for the general convenience of the House. I can, of course, see that great inconvenience, almost indecorum, has arisen from Members coming into this House at the dawn of day or even before it. If it is a matter of convenience to the House I will name a particular hour. The House has to be cleaned and the servants have to be here for that purpose, so that if Members arrive at an inconveniently early hour it will interfere with that proceeding. If it will be any advantage to the House I will name an hour—say, 12 o'clock.
  MR. CHILLY: Do I understand you to name an hour, Sir?—an hour before which no Member of the Irish Party is to come into the House, because, if necessary, if you do not lay down a hard and fast rule, I will be here pretty early—and before 12 o'clock.
  *MR. SPEAKER: I do not wish to lay down a Rule that will be inconvenient to the Irish Party or to any Party. I have named 12 o'clock, because I thought it would be generally convenient.

  SITTINGS OF THE HOUSE (EXEMPTION FROM THE STANDING ORDER).
  Ordered, That the proceedings on the Motion for an Address in Answer to Her Majesty's Speech, if under discussion at Twelve o'clock this night, be not interrupted under the Standing Order "Sittings of the House."—(Mr. W. E. Gladstone.)
ORDERS OF THE DAY.
  ADDRESS IN ANSWER TO HER MAJESTY'S MOST GRACIOUS SPEECH.

    MOTION FOR ADDRESS. [ADJOURNED DEBATE.]
    Order read, for resuming Adjourned Debate on Main Question [31st January], "That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, as followed:—
    Most Gracious Sovereign,
    We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank lour Majesty for the Most Gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament"—(Mr. Lambert.)
    Question again proposed.
    Debate resumed.

    DEATH OF INSPECTOR MARTIN—RELEASE OF PRISONERS.
    MR. ROSS: With the permission of the House I wish to explain the course I have determined to adopt under circumstances which the House will admit are particularly embarrassing to a junior Member like myself. I wish to say, Sir, it was never my intention to allude to one fact or to one circumstance that had come within my knowledge as counsel in the case alluded to. I am sure members of my profession who are acquainted with me, on both sides of the House, will bear me out when I say that is a thing of which I should be quite incapable. I had intended to allude to acts which were notorious, and to the public conduct of a Minister in his executive capacity; but, inasmuch as I see so high an authority as the Attorney General for England has some doubt as to whether my interference in this matter would be professional, I do not wish to imperil the great traditions of the great profession to which I have the honour to belong;

    1067
    and accordingly, Sir, I confine myself merely to formally moving the Amendment which stands in my name.
    SIR FREDERICK MILNER (Notts,), in seconding the Amendment, said, he was not surprised at the anxiety which had been displayed to prevent the hon. Member dealing with the case of the Gweedore prisoners, because it was known he had a very powerful case to bring forward. It was part and parcel of an endeavour on the part of Ministers and of the House generally to shirk discussion upon this question, because they had a weak case. The Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous night endeavoured to force on the Debate at an hour when it was impossible for any report of the discussion to be given, and he endeavoured to throw the onus of obstruction on the Opposition. The public, however, would recognise the right hon. Gentleman's action as an attempt to prevent this question being discussed by the House. Hon. Members had already heard an indictment of the Gweedore prisoners from the late Attorney General for Ireland, and the defence put forward in the House by the Chief Secretary; and in the House of Lords the Lord Chancellor had demonstrated the weakness of the case of the Government more powerfully than even the strong indictment of the late Attorney General. In releasing the Gweedore prisoners, the Government had acted in an unconstitutional and unprecedented manner. In cases of a revision of sentences the opinion of the Judge was always asked before anything was done; but the Government had admitted that in this case they had not taken that course, therefore their action was both unconstitutional and unprecedented. The reason stated in the other House for not obtaining the opinion of the Judge was that the Government did not wish to put him to the trouble of going into the case. They were told by the Lord Chancellor in the Debate in the other House that the object of punishment was to deter offenders from repeating their offences, and others from imitating them. He entirely concurred in that statement. But did the House think the course adopted by the Chief Secretary would act as a deterrent to gentlemen who had a homicidal mania towards policemen? He thought that, instead of deterring
    1068
    them, it would act directly as an encouragement. They would argue that if, for the brutal murder of a policeman, for dancing on his body and crushing in his the skull, they only got three years, then if they knocked a policeman down and only injured him a little they would not get any punishment at all. That was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the mistaken clemency shown to these men. He had been puzzled at the extraordinary tenderness developed in the bosoms of the Chief Secretary and the Lord Chancellor for Irish criminals. Did they think, as was once suggested by the Prime Minister, that they were endowed with a double dose of original sin? He would ask the House to contrast the sentences which were passed upon criminals in England for offences against property with the sentences awarded these men for a most brutal murder. In the case of a woman who, some little time back, obtained £3 by false representations, a sentence of five years penal servitude was passed, whilst a man who stole a coat received seven years. It seemed to him the Chief Secretary and the Lord Chancellor were going to differentiate, between offences against property and offences against human life, in favour of the latter. The murder of Inspector Martin was a peculiarly cruel and brutal one; and one deserving less sympathy was never committed in any country. There was only one excuse that could be urged for the men who committed it, and that was that the priest, who ought to have been their guide, comforter, and friend, who ought to have preached peace and goodwill towards men, and taught them their duty to God and their neighbours, proved the falsest friend that ever an unfortunate people were cursed with. He thought it could not be contended otherwise than that the advice given by Father McFadden to his people showed that he was a bad friend to them. Nobody could deny that Father McFadden was a law-breaker and counselled his people to break the law; that he was a member of a criminal conspiracy, and did his best to make his people members of a criminal conspiracy. Father McFadden said that if any attempt were made to arrest him there would be bloodshed, and hon. Members knew the result. He had only alluded to Father

    1069
    McFadden because his conduct and advice to poor ignorant people were the only possible excuses that could be urged for this brutal murder. He would like to call the attention of the House to a crime which occurred in 1867, and some of the circumstances connected therewith. In that year some Fenian prisoners were being escorted through the town of Manchester when a determined attempt was made to rescue them by some of their brethren. A man placed his pistol to the lock of the prison van and fired with a view to forcing the door. There was no intent to murder or cause injury to anyone, but the bullet struck Sergeant Brett, killing him. These men were tried at Manchester; and although it was not alleged they had the slightest intention to take human life, they were sentenced to death, and the sentence of the law was carried out. A gentleman who was then in that House moved the adjournment of the House in order that some consideration should be shown to the men who had been condemned to death. He was supported by Sir Patrick O'Brien and the late Professor Fawcett, who made a most eloquent and urgent appeal to the then Home Secretary to stay the hand of the law. All they asked for was not that these men should he let off, lost that the sentence of death should be commuted to penal servitude for life, and the present Prime Minister supported the Government in their refusal to allow the sentences to be re-considered. He asked the House could they say that this crime committed at Gweedore was not worse than the crime committed by the Fenian convicts at Manchester? He contended they could not be compared. Sergeant Brett was killed by pure accident, but Inspector Martin was not only knocked down, but he was done to death by these fiends when he was on the ground. A more brutal murder was never perpetrated, and never was clemency shown in a more unworthy case. He had a great respect for the talents of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, whose works in literature had claimed many an hour of his leisure, but he begged to state his opinion that on the Irish Question the Chief Secretary's political morality had been drilled and destroyed by political expediency. He would compare him to a philosopher who had conceived an ideal state of things
    1070
    and who deemed any methods lawful that enabled him to reach his ideal. If he would give a straightforward answer, as the Home Secretary had done last night, as to why these men were released, he would certainly feel more satisfied with the right hon. Gentleman than he did at the present time. He would urge hon. Members opposite to examine their consciences before voting on this question. They could not deny that a foul and brutal murder had been committed; they could not deny that the men who were convicted were not convicted by a packed jury or by a prejudiced Judge; they could not deny that counsel for the prisoners stated that they got off very cheaply indeed; they could not deny that the Judge, when consulted, did not consider any revision of the sentences should take place; and, lastly, they could not deny that, in the case of the release of these last prisoners, the Judge was not consulted at all as he ought to have been. They had proved to demonstration—and it would be proved still further before the Debate closed—that the exercise of the clemency of the Crown in these cases was a gross abuse of the Royal prerogative of mercy. He trusted they would hear a fuller explanation of it than they had yet had.
    Amendment proposed,
    At the end of the Question, to add the words,—"But this House deeply regrets that Your Majesty has been advised to extend the clemency of the Crown to William Coll, Patrick Roarty, Dominic Rodgers, and Connell Magee, who were duly convicted of the manslaughter of District Inspector Martin."—(Mr. Ross.)
    Question proposed, "That those words be there added."
    MR. W. E. MACARTNEYsaid, there were two questions to be considered on this Amendment—whether the Chief Secretary could justify his action in granting the clemency of the Crown to these men, and whether he had not by doing so violated the traditions attaching to the exercise of his office. The right hon. Gentleman had said—or it was said on his behalf—that he had made his defence, and was perfectly content to rest his case on that defence, as he had nothing more to add. He (Mr. Macartney) did not know whether he intended to add anything to-night; but

    1071
    he was bound to say that the defence already made was not only extremely inconclusive, but was based upon diametrically opposite grounds. He did not intend going in detail into the trial of these prisoners. No one appeared to dispute—there had been no attempt on the part of the right hon. Gentleman to dispute—that a murder of a most cruel character had been committed. All he had suggested was that there was no ground for believing that anyone of the prisoners whom he released was convicted of the death of Inspector Martin; and in another place, he observed, the Lord Chancellor took upon himself to say that unquestionably not one of the men released struck the fatal blow. He wished to ask the right hon. Gentleman upon what evidence he had formed that opinion, or upon what evidence the Lord Chancellor had formed that opinion? It was certainly not on the evidence given at the trial, because the evidence went to show that everyone of these four men was intimately connected with the struggle going on around Inspector Martin. They were within the death circle, and the only one who left—who was proved to have left—that circle was one who went to engage in a conflict with two other policemen. Would the right hon. Gentleman say what were the grounds upon which he had formed the opinion that these men whom he had released were not to be considered as direct instruments in causing the death of Inspector Martin? He quite admitted that it could not be said with certainty that the fatal blow was struck by any one person—the blow that eventually killed Mr. Martin. But there could be no doubt that the acts of these persons—someone of them or all those acts, the series of acts put together—caused the death of that gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman had said he did not consult the Judge who tried the prisoners in regard to the exercise of the clemency of the Crown. He departed from the traditional course, and the reason alleged was that the Judge had been appealed to before, and that he had stated his opinion regarding the cases in such strong terms that it was not deemed necessary to consult him again. If the Judge was appealed to in one case why was he not appealed to in other cases? He (Mr. Macartney) could only account
    1072
    for that by saying that the right hon. Gentleman had made up his mind to take a certain course, and he did not want to appeal to any opinion that might run counter to that course. He appealed to the Lord Chancellor of England. He would like to inquire did the Lord Chancellor know that the Judge who tried the cases in Ireland had not been consulted?
    MR. MACNEILL: He was consulted before.
    MR. MACARTNEYsaid, he was addressing the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary and not the hon. Gentleman behind him. What he wanted to know was whether the Lord Chancellor of England was aware that the Judge had not been consulted, and he also wanted to know was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland consulted before the Lord Chancellor of England, and, if not, was the Lord Chancellor of England aware of the fact? The right hon. Gentleman said that, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland had formally given his opinion in writing in favour of the release of the prisoners. Was that before the Lord Chancellor of England had been consulted, or was it after the beginning of the Debates in that House? And if the Lord Chancellor or Ireland was consulted, what necessity was there for going to the Lord Chancellor of England? Was the right hon. Gentleman not satisfied with the opinion expressed by the Lord Chancellor of Ireland that he felt it necessary to bolster himself up with the opinion of the Lord Chancellor of England to enable him to carry out the release? He thought the right hon. Gentleman was entitled to give some explanation of his conduct on his occasion. He would next draw the attention of the House to the statement made in another place on this question by the Lord Chancellor of England. It was suggested that the release was carried out in order to obtain some political support; but the Lord Chancellor failed to see what political support was to be got by it. How did that agree with the statement made in the House by the Chief Secretary himself, who told them the other night that he considered a wise clemency to be one of the arts of Government? If the right hon. Gentleman held that opinion, surely he exercised his power in this matter as a political act, and the Lord Chancellor aided

    1073
    him in carrying out the political object he had before him. It was said that the extremely difficult character of the evidence at the trials, especially as to identification, and the fact that sufficient punishment had already been suffered were the reasons why the right hon. Gentleman exercised this clemency. How did that tally with the principles laid down by the Home Secretary on the previous night? It appeared to him (Mr. Macartney) that there was very little distinction to be drawn between the Gweedore prisoners and the prisoners who had been convicted in this country for dynamite outrages; but the right hon. Gentleman's colleague declined to be a party to holding out any hopes for the release of the dynamite prisoners on the ground that he could not feel sure for one moment that there was any less degree of heinousness in their crimes because the motive happened to he political. If they applied the dictum laid down by the Home Secretary to these cases, what was the distinction between these cases and the cases that were under review on the previous day? The defence for all the agitation in Donegal had always been that it was based on a political motive. Agrarian outrages and agitation in Donegal were part of a great political combination in Ireland, and the circumstances under which Father McFadden came into conflict with the Crown, were part of this combination. The result of Father McFadden's refusal to submit to the law was this: that those whom he had for years taught to believe that he was the law, and that the Queen's Writ did not run in Donegal, that those whom he excited to passionate excitement—these men, led on, headed by him, brought themselves to commit an act which resulted in this political murder of Inspector Martin. He wished to ascertain how the right hon. Gentleman could distinguish between the cases of those men and the cases of the prisoners whom the Home Secretary had refused to release? How were they to distinguish between their offence and the offence of men who had political motives at the bottom of their dynamite conspiracies? If this dictum was to be acted upon in England and not in Ireland, then the Chief Secretary should tell them where the distinction lay. But if that dictum was to be
    1074
    acted upon in Ireland, then the right hon. Gentleman should tell them how it was that he could recommend the clemency of the Crown in favour of these men belonging to Gweedore. The right hon. Gentleman said the state of Donegal would sanction the release of the prisoners. Were they to understand that the most horrible murder, the most dreadful outrage, ought to be condoned by I he state of the country in which it might occur? Were they to believe that, if a murder was committed that, after two or three months or two years, the man who committed that murder was to he released on the ground that he would not do the like again? The Lord Chancellor said the object of punishment was to deter from crime, and they were asked to suppose that these men had undergone sufficient punishment to prevent them, he presumed, from committing a similar crime again? Upon what ground was that supposition founded? Were they to apply it generally to crimes other than murder? Let them take a case of forgery. A man might commit a most serious forgery which he could not he tempted to commit again; but because he had been convicted and had received a heavy sentence, was he to be released after a short period of punishment had elapsed simply because he was not likely to repeat his crime? It appeared to him that the evidence put forward in this House and in another place was absolutely inconclusive and insufficient to support the action of the right hon. Gentleman. There were other cases in Ireland in which other prisoners were suffering long periods of punishment. Did the right hon. Gentleman propose to apply to all these prisoners the same principles as he had applied in the cases of the Gweedore convictions? One of his hon. Friends would probably refer to that aspect of the case later on. They wished to know distinctly from the right hon. Gentleman whether he was prepared to state that it was a satisfactory point of view to appeal, in circumstances of the character of those described, from time Irish authorities to the English authorities to enable him to carry out the policy into which He had been driven by political necessities? He said he did not care what the House or the country said about his action. That was a very serious statement, considering the position of the

    1075
    right hon. Gentleman from whom it came. Were they, who were subject in some degree to the Executive administration of the right hon. Gentleman, to be told that the right hon. Gentleman was not to be subject to the opinion of that House or to the opinion of the country? At all events, during the time he had been in Office he had not been inclined to show any very great regard for the position of the minority in Ireland. During the past six months he had been playing continuously up to the support of those who had placed his Party in Office, and had been trying to carry out the bargain made in that House by which concession was to be the price of support. He hoped the right hon. Gentleman would be able to answer the questions he had put to him.
    *MR. T. W. RUSSELLsaid, the right hon. Gentleman declared the other night that in releasing the Gweedore prisoners he was exercising a wise and just clemency. Well, if he had convinced himself that the clemency so extended was wise and just he was entitled to say that; but if that clemency was part of the understanding and agreement with the Member for East Mayo, the question arose whether it was either wise or just or whether it was not as payment of blackmail for support. In considering these cases they must look to the circumstances under which this murder of Inspector Martin occurred. In the first place, it arose out of the Plan of Campaign conspiracy. Of that there was no doubt. It was beyond all doubt. That conspiracy was an illegal one, and any murder arising out of such a conspiracy had very little claim for consideration at the hands of the right hon. Gentleman. Some of the right hon. Gentleman's supporters on that (the Liberal) side of the House took an active part in the Plan of Campaign, and he, for his part, could understand the First Commissioner of Works (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) doing what the right hon. Gentleman had done, but he did not think the Chief Secretary had ever gone about supporting the Plan. It was a very nice commentary indeed upon hon. Members' opposite that the moment difficulties overtook them the Plan of Campaign on the Olphert Estate collapsed, and the tenants paid three years' rent and costs and returned to their holdings.
    1076
    Now, there was a warrant issued for the arrest of Father McFadden. He chose to evade the execution of that warrant for weeks.
    MR. MACNEILL: No.
    MR. T. W. RUSSELL: The hon. Member said "No." He said he deliberately and systematically evaded the execution of that warrant, and that was the reason why Sunday—the only day they could execute it—was chosen for the arrest, and out of that arrest the murder of Inspector Martin arose. Did the right hon. Gentleman question the guilt of these four men? Did he deny that they were present or that they took part in the struggle? If he could not deny these things, he would like to know upon what ground he had liberated these men? He described the murder as a deliberate and brutal one. They kept in dynamitards, but they liberated those murderers and sent them back to Ulster. He would be told that the two sorts of crime could not be compared; and he admitted that in one sense, but not in another. It was quite true, as stated from the opposite Benches on the previous night, that by the dynamiters no blood was shed and there was no loss of life; but in a case where blood was shed and life lost the right hon. Gentleman liberated the murderers at the demand of gentlemen opposite. The right hon. Gentleman said that he came to the consideration of the whole question with an open and impartial mind; but he might tell them how he could have approached the question in that light when he, after the trials, assailed the trials and attacked them even with regard to the change of venue. What a wise thing it would have been to try these men by Father McFadden's own parishioners I Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his friends went about the country denouncing the change of venue from the County Donegal, where a conviction would have been impossible, no matter how plain the evidence. The man who had gone about England, after the trials, declaring them to be unjust, now called on the House to believe that he bad come to the consideration of this matter with a practically impartial and open mind. He (Mr. Russell) had a suspicion as to the subject the hon. Member for Waterford referred to last night, that the understanding or agreement come to between the

    1077
    hon. Member for Mayo and the Government had something to do with the exercise of this just and wise clemency Under Which one bridal murderer had been liberated and three other men concerned in the murder had been let loose to Society in Ulster. He would ask—and the question had been put two or three times already—had there been any case in England where a prisoner had been released in this way without the concurrence of the Judge who tried him? If there had been any case let the right hon. Gentleman quote it. He (Mr. Russell) did not believe that the right hon. Gentleman would be able to produce any ease of the kind. If the Judge had concurred he did not believe this Amendment would have been moved; but looking at the way in which this murder arose, out of this illegal conspiracy—a conspiracy that broke down the moment hon. Gentlemen opposite ceased to have funds to keep it up, the tenants going back to their farms and paying three years' rent and costs—and looking at the arrangement and understanding and agreement between hon. Members opposite and the right hon. Gentleman, he (Mr. Russell) chose to believe that this "wise and just clemency" had resulted from that arrangement and understanding', and that the right hon. Gentleman had outraged the Province of Ulster in a way that he would not have dared to outrage England, by letting people of this kind loose upon Society.
    COLONEL WARINGwished to intervene for only a few moments on a point that the Chief Secretary would not, perhaps, blame him for introducing. The right hon. Gentleman had assured the House that he had been guided by no political motive, but entirely by a desire to show a wise and just clemency in the release of the prisoner whose ease had been alluded to by the right hon. Gentleman who had just sat down. He (Colonel Waring) was one of those who was most anxiously desirous of giving the Chief Secretary for Ireland credit for very good intentions in this matter, and he thought he could point out a process by which he could greatly assist him (Colonel Waring) and Ins hon. Friends in acquitting him of any improper motive. The riots that took place in Belfast in 1886 had no doubt been impressed on the right hon. Gentle-
    1078
    man's memory, for he then held the same position that he did now, and was largely concerned in the suppression of those riots. During these riots many serious conflicts took place between the police and military and the inhabitants of the town, who were misguided enough to use deadly weapons in the conflict. Bullets were flying in all directions—the police were firing on the inhabitants, and some of the inhabitants were firing back at the police. During one of these encounters an old man, named Joseph Walker, fired a revolver, the bullet, unfortunately, striking one of Her Majesty's soldiers and causing his death. Walker, who was now a man of 60 years of age, was sentenced to penal servitude for 20 years. He had served eight of them. Well, would the right hon. Gentleman assist them in acquitting him of any political motive in releasing the Gweedore prisoners by extending clemency to Joseph Walker and letting him return to the bosom of his family? The man had been sentenced for a crime committed in the heat of action and without deliberation, and his offence certainly compared most favourably with what was done by the Gweedore prisoners. The cases were parallel. The Chief Secretary was an authority on literature. No doubt he had respect for the fathers of English' literature. Well, he (Colonel Waring) would call attention to a passage from one of these—the most celebrated—which touched upon the question in hand, and was so prophetic that it might have been written with a knowledge of what load happened during the past few days. Edmund Spencer, in a work on the state of Ireland, published before the reign of Queen Elizabeth ended, said—
    "As, for example, some of them seeing the end of their Government draw nigh and some mischiefs and troublous practices growing up which afterwards may work trouble to the next succeeding Governor will not attempt the redress or cutting off thereof lest the next that cometh should receive the same too quiet, and so haply with more praise thereof than they before. And, therefore, they will not, as I said, seek at all to repress that evil, but will either by granting protection for a time or holding some emparlance with the rebel or by treaty of Commissioners or by other like devices only smother and keep down the flame of mischief, so as it may not break out in their time of Government. What comes afterwards they care not, or rather wish the worst. This course hath been noted in some Governors."
    THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOE IRELAND (Mr. J. MORLEY,): The precise application of the hon. and gallant Gentleman's quotation I fail to see. I remember the case to which he referred very well; and if he will send in a Memorial to the Lord Lieutenant on the subject it will be considered with cases of the same kind. I do not think the House will expect me, after the lassitude which seems to have overtaken this Debate, to go at length into the controversy of which we had a fair share the other night, and which does not seem to me to be likely to receive further light from the tone the Debate has now taken. I must say that I think we all recognise the good taste which made the hon. and learned Gentleman who was to have moved this Amendment assign the part to another Member; but I hope the late Solicitor General for Ireland will reflect upon the part which he himself took the other night when he made a speech of signal ability. I think the weight and authority of that speech would have been far less if the House had been aware at the time he was making it—as I was—that the hon. and learned Gentleman was second or third counsel in the case.
    MR. CARSON: I stated that I was a counsel.
    MR. J. MORLEY: The hon. Member for Tyrone, as usual, starts all Irish discussions with a reference to the Plait of Campaign. I cannot imagine a more irrelevant consideration that could be brought to bear upon this matter. The question we are arguing is whether the advice to the Crown to exercise clemency was rightly or wrongly given. Some Members seem to think that the Plan of Campaign has some direct bearing on the point; but the question as to the circumstances under which the original warrant was issued against Father McFadden has no bearing or relevance whatever to it. How did the murder arise? I will not say one word in defence or in palliation of the brutality of it—I have never done so, and I hope I am incapable of it—but that murder was provoked by the want of discretion in those who had the police arrangements in hand. [Cries of "No!"] hon. Gentlemen say "No." The right hon. Gentleman w ho was at that time Chief Secretary will not say
    1080
    "No." The right hon. Gentleman now the Leader of the Opposition, speaking in February, 1889, and talking of the melancholy and tragic circumstances connected with Father McFadden, said—
    "Unquestionably there was an error committed by the officer on the spot an error of judgment. Nobody doubts it. But for the right hon. Gentleman "—myself—" to say that the central Government VMS responsible is surely harsh."
    The right hon. Gentleman admitted, what nobody who has examined the circumstances, however superficially, can deny, that an error or judgment was committed in the circumstances of the arrest. That brings me to the point raised by the hon. and learned Gentleman the late Solicitor General for Ireland (Mr. Carson) as to Father McFadden's share in this transaction. The hon. and learned Gentleman read out with great effect a passage from a speech or sermon of Father McFadden, which, no doubt, contained menacing and incendiary expressions—menacing at all events. But when was that speech made? A year and a half before the transactions connected with the murder of Inspector Martin. Therefore, what was the significance of that quotation from Father McFadden's speech'? I would say another thing. Supposing that Father McFadden's utterances had been of the kind described by the hon. and learned Gentleman, and had come before the Executive Government, was not that the very reason why the Executive Government should hove taken special care that the arrest should take place under circumstances which would guard against the dangers prophesied by Father McFadden? The hon. and learned Gentleman tried to lay more on Father McFadden than the conduct of the prosecuting counsel afterwards would justify. If Father McFadden, as the hon. and learned Gentleman said, was the fountain and origin of this miserable transaction—if he was a party to the conspiracy which ended in the murder of Inspector Martin, why did the Government deal with him as they did? I want the House to listen to the actual facts of the treatment of Father McFadden by the Crown. You would suppose from the language of the hon. and learned Gentleman the other night that, Father McFadden being so guilty, the Crown would have taken good care to bring

    1081
    him, the guiltiest of all, to justice. Did they do so? Father McFadden was arrested. He was returned for trial for murder. He passed many weeks in prison without bail. Ultimately he was admitted to bail. Two true bills were sent up against him by the Grand Jury—one for murder and one for couspiracy; and he pleaded guilty not to murder and not to any act of violence or wrong-doing whatever on February 3rd, 1889.
    MR. CARSON: Obstructing the police.
    MR. J. MORLEY: No, obstructing the police on a previous day. Of course, like the hon. Member, I only know what I have read in the Reports about this transaction. I have not the advantage of having been the prosecuting counsel. I say that Father McFadden pleaded guilty to no act of violence; he walked away from the Court untried. The hon. and learned Gentleman's Whole speech tent to show that Father McFadden ought to have received a severer punishment than any of these wretched peasants; but, as a matter of fact, Father McFadden, whom he regards as the guiltiest of them all, walked away unscathed and untouched. I do not think this was understood from the version of the transaction given by the hon. and learned Gentleman, I ask him why do you complain of us for having released these four men after they have undergone three years' penal servitude when you let the man who, according to your contention, way the guiltiest of them all escape without any punishment at all? There are one or two more remarks to he made on that aspect of the case. You must understand that there were altogether 23 men returned for trial in connection with this transaction—10 were charged with murder and 13 with conspiracy Of the 10 who were indicted for murder six were discharged without punishment including the man Gallagher and the man, Ferry; while of the 13 who were indicted for conspiracy five, among whom was Father McFadden, were also discharged, while eight who pleaded guilty and got small sentences. The House is dealing with the cases of four of the men—and one of them may be left out of account practically, for he was not punished for being directly concerned in the attack on the person of Inspector Martin—who were convicted and who were sentenced
    1082
    to terms of penal servitude, varying from ten to seven years. It is said that I ought to have consulted Mr. Justice Gibson; but, as I have said before, and I am sorry to be obliged to repeat it, that learned Judge made a very careful Report of the case to the Lord Lieutenant a couple of years ago, in which he surveyed the whole case and the quality of the evidence; and (though I am not at liberty to quote his language) he expressed his views with regard to it, to the effect that, although he had no complaint to make of the verdict, still he could understand that another verdict could have been given, We had before us his view of the transaction, and to ask him for a Report would have been merely giving him the trouble to repeat again opinions which he had already stated perfectly adequately. The assertion—I will not say the innuendo—of the hon. Member for South Tyrone, made in his genial way, is that I consulted all English legal authority in the matter because I was intent upon getting an opinion favourable to the prisoners.
    MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I never said that the right hon. Gentleman had consulted an English legal authority for the purpose of getting a favourable opinion.
    MR. CARSON: I did.
    MR. J. MORLEY: Then I withdraw the statement.
    MR. T. W. RUSSELL: Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will take back the geniality as well.
    MR. J. MORLEY: The hon. Gentleman opposite put a great many questions to me as to confidential communications between a Minister and his law advisers. The House is welcome to know the details of these communications, but they would have no bearing on the question before us. The Irish Lord Chancellor gave his opinion independently of the English Lord Chancellor, whose opinion he did not know; and the English Lord Chancellor gave me Iris opinion with regard to it independently of the Irish Lord Chancellor. Do let hon. Gentlemen believe that even a Minister may he capable of carrying on a transaction of this kind with something like common rainless, common candour, and common sense. In passing, I may say that the charge against me is that, in forming my judgment in the case as I did, I did not go carefully into the

    1083
    evidence or the merits, but arrived at it as a foregone conclusion, and—the hon. Member for South Tyrone will not object to the geniality here—the suggestion is that I took the course I did as the payment of blackmail. I think I can safely leave all these insinuations and assertions to take care of themselves. I will tell the House of the number of these prisoners and the fortunes that befell them. We were specially concerned with Coll, Roherty, and Rogers. The hon. and learned Gentleman opposite made a great point of the fact that two of these men, Roherty and Rogers, had pleaded guilty, but the hon. and learned Gentleman did not tell the House the circumstances under which they had done so. I will now tell hon. Members what happened and how it was that they came to plead guilty. Coll had been found guilty of manslaughter—but was not yet sentenced—on the evidence of a certain constable, and the two men in question were visited in prison by Father McFadden, who told them what had happened in Coll's case, and that Gallagher and Ferry, against whom the constable had given similar evidence, had been discharged.
    MR. DANE: I rise to Order. Where does the right hon. Gentleman get this information from?
    MR. T. M. HEALY: Nonsense; that is not a point of Order.
    MR. J. MORLEY: The whole of the facts have come out since these men were sent to prison. The men were told by Father McFadden that they world be let off with light sentences—sentences made lighter by the consideration of the provocation they had received, in the event of their pleading guilty. We have it now stated—it has come out to-day—that the Irish Atttorney General bad said that he would ask the Judge to regard the plea of guilty as a mitigating circumstance in their case. Those were the reasons which induced the men to plead guilty, and to say that because they pleaded guilty under such circumstances—we are justified in assuming that all the charges against them were proved up to the hilt—isoue of those things that no one with a knowledge of human nature or common sense would recommend to the consideration of the House of Commons. The constable to whom I have alluded was the only man who swore that the men released
    1084
    had struck Martin. He stated that he had seen a man who was unknown step back two paces and then strike Martin with a paling post a blow on the head. That blow might have caused Martin's death. The hon. Member asks how we know that these men were not the actual murderers. According to the evidence of the constable the real murderer was the unknown man. With the paling he struck Martin and felled him to the ground and repeated the blow, and undoubtedly caused the death of the Inspector. The hon. and learned Gentleman's picture—terrible no doubt—of the condition of the corpse of this unfortunate man—really does not bear on the point before us. There was no evidence to show that any of these men struck Martin the blow which caused his death. It is true that the constable stated that he saw Jack Gallagher and Pat Roherty strike Martin on the head with stones after he fell, and that he had seen Coll and Dominic Rogers fling stones; but it must be remembered that the constable at the time he said he witnessed these things was flying for Ids life, and that Martin was lying on the ground surrounded by a vast crowd. It is very doubtful whether, under such circumstances, he could see what took place. What did the Court do? In the case of Gallagher, against whom the evidence was equally strong, the jury disagreed, and the Crown did not put him upon his trial again, but discharged him. The same is true of the ease of William Ferry. Among the considerations which have been present to my mind in forming this responsible duty was the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence—not the evidence judged by me, but as the Crown counsel themselves must have found it. The inconsistency and incoherence in the line taken by the prosecution make it impossible, for anyone reviewing the case, to look that the identification of the prisoners whom we have released could be regarded as satisfactory. If counsel had attached much credibility to the evidence, they would have proceeded further in the cases of Gallagher and Ferry than they did. The hon. and learned Gentleman the other night made no reference to the cases of these men.
    MR. CARSON: You have not referred to them.
    MR. J. MORLEY: Then the hon. Gentleman was not endeavouring to lead

    1085
    us to a true conclusion, but was merely making a debating, speech for Party purposes. This is the way in which the deliberations of the House are to be guided by eminent Queen's Counsel. I repeat that our grounds for releasing these prisoners were threefold. First, that the course adopted by the Crown in the prosecution was not such as to give us that confidence in the evidence as to make its feel sure that the men were guilty; secondly, in regard to the severity of the sentences, it was necessary and proper to consider the circumstances under which the crime was committed; and the third point was the severity of the sentences had been such as to adequately vindicate all the ends of justice, even if I had attached too much weight to either of the two first considerations. The hon. Gentleman below the Gangway to-night stated that it was quite an unknown doctrine and a perfect innovation to suppose that because Donegal was quieter now than it was when the crime was committed, therefore there was no reason for altering or reducing the sentences. If the hon. Gentleman knew the very rudiments of this resort to the clemency of the Crown, he would be aware that this is a consideration which is always borne in mind by the Judges when consulted on these questions of remission of punishment by those upon whom devolves the responsible duty of advising the exercise of the clemency of the Crown.
    MR. ROSS: In murder cases?
    MR. J. MORLEY: Certainly. Only the other day a Memorial came before the Lord Lieutenant praying fir the clemency of the Crown for a man who had been seven years in penal servitude. The Judge to whom it was referred at once inquired whether the district was quiet; and, upon being informed that this was the case, he at once struck off about one-third of the sentence. That is one illustration of a thing which is constantly done.
    MR. MACARTNEY: The right hon. Gentleman did not consult the Judge in these cases.
    MR. MORLEY: That is not the point at all. That is one of the most irrelevant interruptions I hat I have yet heard. The argument that I was pressing was that these remissions of sentences depend on the state of a particular
    1086
    district at the time when a sentence comes under review. Does the hon. Member mean to tell me that a Judge of the land is better able to decide as to the state of the country than the Executive Government? As for the state of Donegal, that was sufficiently shown by the fact to which I have called attention. At the last Winter Assizes held at Sligo there was not a single case for trial from County Donegal. Am I to be told, then, that we in re-considering these cases are to leave out of account the fact that Donegal was in a state of absolute tranquillity and quiet? The charge that I have abused the prerogative of clemency by using it as a political weapon, or in order to attract political support, is absolutely and obviously baseless. What political support can you point to? What single vote could be effected by the action which we took in this matter? On the contrary; I was well aware that there was something to lose; for I knew very well that this attack would be made upon me. I do not allude to the comparatively languid attack made to-night; I mean the vigorous attack the Leader of the Opposition was sure to make upon me, and the hon. and learned Gentleman. I foresaw all the sensational pictures the right hon. Gentleman would draw, all the all the appeals to passion that he and others would make. I heard in anticipation all the foolish strong language; I foresaw all the heat—some of it feigned—that he would show. But I should have been the most contemptible of men if I had allowed any regard for my own Parliamentary peace and quietness which would I have been preserved by my abstaining from advising this just, merciful, and most politic act to influence me. I use the word "politic" not in the arrow meaning of Party interest. If hon. Gentlemen opposite do not know any other meaning of that word, their vocabulary is extremely limited. No narrow interest of a Party is involved. It is politic I say, in the highest and widest sense of the word.
    MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I think it will be admitted that the Motion of my hon. and learned Friend has served its purpose in eliciting the full defence of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary. It appears that that defence was cut in two halves. He gave us

    1087
    the first half the other night without dropping any suggestion as to the second half, which was, I suppose, present to his mind when he spoke. The first defence was blown to pieces by my right hon. and learned Friend who sits near me. I do not think that anybody who has in his mind any recollection of that speech will think it necessary to go over that part of the defence which the right hon. Gentleman has served up to the House. With regard to the second volume which he has given us to-night, it is only necessary for me to say that it turned on the supposed inadequacy of the evidence and the supposed injustice of the sentences—suppositious which were distinctly thrown aside by the Lord Chancellor of England, who threw no doubt whatever on the justice of the sentences passed. When the right hon. Gentleman was reduced to basing his action on the supposed innocence of men who pleaded guilty, no further argument is needed, and I think we may well afford to leave the question where it has been left by the various speeches delivered on either side, conscious that we have now got the full case of the Government, and conscious as we all must be how utterly weak and utterly rotten that case is. I would, therefore, recommend my hon. and learned Friend either to withdraw his Amendment or divide, as may seem good to him, so that we may pass to the other questions on the Paper.
    MR. MAC NEILLdeclared that the prisoners had been tried unfairly and by a packed jury. One of them, who could not speak a word of English, was tried by a jury who could not speak a word of Irish, and his trial had been declared illegal by the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Chief Baron Palles, and two other Judges. He would not, however, go into the details of the case, as he did not wish to interpose between the House and the Division.
    MR. SPEAKER: Does the hon. and learned Gentleman propose to withdraw the Amendment?
    MR. ROSS: Yes, Sir.
    Objection being taken,
    Question put, and negatived.
    Main Question again proposed.

    CLERICAL INFLUENCE AT ELECTIONS.
    *MR. ARNOLD-FORSTERmoved the following Amendment:—
    "Humbly to represent to Your Majesty that this House has learnt with great regret that a vast amount of clerical influence was exercised so as to intimidate voters during the late elections, and that in the opinion of this House measures should be taken to prevent any repetition of the exercise of such intimidations."
    He said the proposal would probably be supported by the opinion of most of the Menders of the House, although he was not so clear that it would carry their votes. That a vast amount of clerical influence was exercised during the late elections in Meath was a matter about which there could be no dispute whatever. Indeed, it was a matter of record, certified by the Reports of the Election Petition Judges. In the case of the South Meath Petition, the Judges said that voters were intimidated, that. Mr. Fullam was guilty, by his agents, of the corrupt practice of undue influence, and that the corrupt practice of undue influence by spiritual intimidation had extensively prevailed at the election. Thus, of the South Meath election, two noteworthy facts were oil record: One was that there was widespread intimidation, and the other that it succeeded in its object of preventing Her Majesty's subjects from carrying out their civil duties. He did not think it was an extravagant thing to ask that Parliament should take reasonable steps by which the recurrence of such intimidation aught be prevented in the future. This was the whole substance and essence of his Amendment, and he should like to see any Member rising in his place and saying that he was prepared to object to any one the propositions it contained. Before he went to the actual matter of the charge he had to submit to the House, he wished to say a word or two by way of preface. It had been said of the Amendments placed on the Paper—six of them having been given notice of by Members of the Government Party, and five by Members of the Opposition—that they were intended merely to postpone an opportunity which everybody desired to secure. His particular Amendment, however, stood on a different footing from the rest, and might be regarded as a plea, in bar of any Motion which might be brought on by the Prime Minister on

    1089
    Monday. The Home Secretary had said that the verdict of the country had been given, and it was impossible to go behind it. He thought, however, the right hon. Gentleman would admit that there was a case in which one could go beyond the verdict, and that was a case in which it could be proved that the verdict had been obtained by fraud. His contention was that the verdict obtained in a large number of elections had been secured by fraud. He desired to make no attack either upon individuals or, beyond what was actually necessary for the purposes or his case, upon the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. If the language and action of the priests at the Meath election had been marked by decency, good order, and obedience to the law, instead of by the opposite of these things, he should still have been prepared to propound his Amendment. Had the Church which was responsible been any other Church or body, he should still say that any Church which exercised, or attempted to exercise, a right to interfere with the privileges of British subjects ought to receive precisely the same condemnation as he asked the House to mete out to those who had acted in the name of the Roman Catholic Church in Meath. He did not fail to recognise the right of ministers of religion to counsel and advise in all mailers of morals, nor did he suggest that the dominion of politics was onside the sphere in which ministers of religion were entitled to exercise a just and reasonable influence. There had often been cases where the line of division between what was reasonable and right and what was unreasonable and wrong in the conduct of a minister was hard to draw, there was, however, no such difficulty in this case. Here they were dealing with a question of State policy, with a matter which concerned the primary rights of the citizen, with a conspiracy against rights which had been fought for year after year and century after century, and maintained by means of efforts in which that House had taken a very prominent and distinguished part. He could not take the view which had been suggested by the hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon)—namely, that they were bound to speak with bated breath of any man, whether priest or layman. He had been taught that noblesse oblige might be
    1090
    held to apply to the priest, and that greater strictness of behaviour might be required of him than of others, but he could not admit that men must refrain from commenting upon the conduct of a person because that person happened to wear a cassock.
    MR. DILLON: I beg the hon. Member's pardon.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTERsaid, he was referring to the remarks of the hon. Member when he interrupted the hon. and gallant Member for North Armagh.
    MR. DILLON: I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Member, but that interruption was made in the interests of decency, and would have been made whether the epithet was applied to a priest or any other person.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTERwas only too glad to accept the explanation of the hon. Member, and he trusted if the hon. Member held that view that it would be shared by every hon. Member who acted with him. But he would point out they were dealing in Ireland with realities; and when it was found that the very Judges who tried the Election Petition spoke of the imputation of "almost nameless offences," and the compositors of the Independent were absolutely ashamed to print the language that was uttered—they would understand the kind of language that was used. It was sometimes very difficult to draw the line as to the legitimate exercise of the right of a minister of religion to interfere; but in this case no difficulty arose. Here they were face to face with the fact that a cause was promoted by cruelty, violence, insolence, insults to women, assaults on men, intimidation of witnesses, and threats of spiritual penalties, for exercising legal rights. When that was the ease, he said, they were discharged from these nice inquiries whether the line had been overstepped or not. The action of the clergy in the past had been opposed not only to decency, but to the law of the land. This was a question on which judgment had already been given; the whole history of the country was proof of his assertion. The country had already decided that no sect or creed or

    1091
    denomination should exercise any right to over-ride the law of the land. He was prepared to believe that hon. Gentlemen were acting conscientiously in many of the things which they said and did, but if so, all he could say was that the action they had thought fit to take was incompatible with the existence of a law-abiding state in the 19th century. He would not weary the House by going too much into detail of this great controversy, though he thought details were of vital importance, and he should do his best to see that every man, woman, aye, and every child who could understand the difference between right and wrong should be masters of the details of this case. But in the present case he wanted to confine himself to specific instances in order to show that he was not overstating the case. The contests at these elections were characterised by a brutality of speech and action that was happily rare even in the South of Ireland. They had been characterised by insults and assaults on men and women; by deliberate interference with the cause of justice; by intimidation of witnesses; by threats or spiritual penalties; and, what was more serious, these things had been undertaken and promoted, not as the action individuals, but as the outcome of a system that had been inaugurated, encouraged, and sanctioned by authority. He could cite many examples, but it was necessary to read as he had the full history of these trials to realise the infamy of the proceedings which marked them and their sickening character. He had spoken of brutality of speech and brutality of action. He found that an old man of 75 was attacked by a priest, called "an old reprobate, an old devil," and then thrown down in the street and injured. A gentleman who had given no provocation, except that of attending a meeting and voting for the man of his choice, was spoken of as "a blackguard," and "a marked man." He knew what it was to be a marked man in Ireland; he had seen many of them; and he trusted they were not far from the time when such a, penalty would cease to be attached to any person in Ireland. He would content himself by summing up these cases in the words of the learned Judge who tried the Petition. The learned Judge said—
    1092
    "The evidence disclosed a considerable number of eases in which clergymen allowed loss of temper to betray them into deplorable acts of personal violence, which in some cases were known to have been committed against women."
    But it would be said that these brutal actions and brutal words might well characterise any election in Ireland where feeling ran high, and he did not wish to overrate their importance. But he now came to a matter or more importance, the deliberate intimidation of witnesses and deliberate interference with the course of justice. This intimidation was put in practice by the Press, the counsel, the priests, and the Bishops. Here was a paragraph which appeared in the West-meath Nationalist or December 15th, between the two Petitions—
    "Mr. Fullam has been unseated, and with costs, and disqualified for sitting for the constituency. It is a cruel, nasty blow. Brit it is not one whose consequences will promote the interest of the priest-hunting factionists. On the contrary, their conduct in this trial has amazed and shocked Catholic Ireland. It has filled the country with horror that such wretches should nestle in her bosom."
    ["Hear, hear!"] Hon. Gentlemen said "hear, hear!" but the offence committed was voting according to their consciences.
    "It has made it absolutely certain that in no owner of Ireland will a factionist win a seat in Ireland again. The point that should not escape notice is the character of the witnesses who figured against the priests. The testimony was really engineered by a couple of families with their dependents, the Saurins, the loathsome Carews. The Robinsons and the butcher Collins were the moving spirits. Their underlings composed the procession of witnesses, and if men were to be hanged for their faces, a more hang-dog lot never went into Court. The loathsome witness McKenna, and his Parnellite brother, the ragman, came from a stock that could rival King Solomon in his patriarchal habits."
    That was brought to the notice of the learned Judge, who said—
    "I do not use language disproportionate to the occasion when I say that this language is language of scandalous vituperation. The public action of witnesses was assailed, the sanctuary of private life was invaded, and there was this ignoble reference even to their personal appearance. Is not that calculated, with reference to the Petition which is coming on, to deter witnesses from coming forward"?
    It was intended to deter witnesses. Witnesses were intimidated by counsel. The senior counsel spoke of witnesses as "reprobates," as "degraded," and he spoke of their "trumped-up stories," and

    1093
    he said, "I will not call the Bishop to contradict them," and he did not. The impression conveyed was that the witnesses were too reprobate and worthless, and that was why he would not call the Bishop to contradict them; but through his not calling the Bishop the evidence remained unchallenged at the present moment. That there was intimidation by the priests was proved in every page of the report. In regard to the proceedings of the Petition, the Rev. Father Fay, speaking at Coole, said—
    "Parnellite witnesses are imbued with the devil; possessed by the devil of impurity—this is pure Parnellism. Report every word of this accurately in your Independent. Don't leave out a single word, for I'll he there, and I'll prove that every witness that will come up is a black dyed scamp. I never intimidated you. I never said I would kill you or break your neck, or said you would go to hell. You may go there it you like. We will resume this in Trim. The priest is the ambassador of Jesus Christ, and not like other ambassadors—they carried their Lord and Master with them, and when a priest was with the people, the Almighty God was with them."
    That was gross profanity, and he would not weary the House with any more of it. When he found that a class of Her Majesty's subjects, for no other reason than that they voted according to their consciences, were described, the men as adulterers, and their wives as prostitutes, he thought his case had been made out. But there was also the constant threatening of spiritual penalties, the threat of withholding the Sacrament. The Confessional, or at all events the threshhold of the Confessional, was used, as an attorney's clerk might use the tap-room of a public-house, to get voters to disclose for whom it was their intention to vote. He was not speaking without book in this matter, which was a most serious matter, because he had the statement or the learned Judge, Mr. Justice O'Brien, on this incident, winch was—
    "The statement made was that several clergymen, the names of whom are mentioned, had canvassed voters in the Confessional, and there is no person at all—there is no Catholic—who cannot understand the tremendous importance of evidence of that kind… In all the instances but one, undoubtedly the communication was after the confession was over; but there was one incident—a tremendous and unexampled incident—in which this interference with the franchise—entirely innocent, I believe, and from the purest reasons and motives, according to the
    1094
    evidence—was allowed to intrude into the mysterious sanctity of the Divine Commission itself, and in which the absolution of the penitent was postponed."
    Those were not his words, but the words or the learned Judge, when he delivered his Charge. If the priests were active the Bishops were more active still. In a sermon at Bishop Nulty said—
    "Parnellism is nothing better than a heresy. I would approach the deathbed of a drunkard or a profligate with greater confidence as to his salvation than to a Parnellite."
    That meant that the power of the priest was held in terrorem over the men and women of the country, a thing that was absolutely intolerable. Bishop Nulty also said he would—
    "stand to plead against Parnelites at the bar of eternal justice. The dying Parnellite him-self will hardly dare to face the justice of his Creator till he has been prepared and anointed by us for the last awful struggle, or for the terrible judgment that will immediately follow it."
    These were not isolated instances, but part of a deliberate system that was being inculcated in Ireland, and which would continue to be inculcated. The Bishops claim that they, much they alone, had the right to decide what were morals, and in pursuance of that claim they found Bishop Nulty saying—
    "I myself, and every Bishop now living, received directly and immediately from our Lord Himself the same commission and the same command, and in the very same words as the Apostles themselves. Invincible ignorance may undoubtedly excuse many of the misguided, but well-intentioned men, who still cling to Parnellism, but no intelligent, or well informed man can continue and remain a Catholic as long as he elects to cling to Parnellism."
    This was not the opinion only of the priests or Bishops, but the opinion of the learned counsel for the respondent. The hon. and learned Member for North Louth (Mr. T. M. Healy) said—
    "If within the moral order a church be competent to decide upon Morals it is competent to decide what morals are as far as the individuals owning the Faith are concerned, be it Protestant, Catholic, or Mahomedan—there is no other way or scheme by which either civil or moral law, or any other law, can be followed."
    He submitted that when the views of the priests came into conflict with the law of the land, as decided by this House and Parliament, there could be no option as to which of the two must give way. The doctrine set forth by the hon. and

    1095
    learned Member for North Louth was not one that ought to find favour in this House. He agreed with the learned Judge, who said it was a great danger to the State. The learned Judge said—
    "The Church became a vast political agency' a great moral machine moving with resistlesss influence, united action, and a single will. Every priest who was examined was a canvasser; the canvass was everywhere. At the altar, in the vestry, on the roads, in the home, there was no place left for evasion affected ignorance, weakness or treachery."
    He would ask hon. Members whether they approved of this system, whether they desired that it should continue—whether they claimed the title of Radical or Liberal—were they content the system should continue in a part of the United Kingdom in which he took a deep and a keen interest? He would remind the hon. Member for Waterford (Mr. J. E. Redmond) that this took place in not one constituency alone, but there was not a constituency south of the Boyne in which the election could not have been set aside on the ground of corruption and gross intimidation. He would remind the hon. Gentleman of the correspondence that took place between him and Canon Mahony.
    MR. J. E. REDMOND: It was not between me and the Canon, but between my brother and the Canon, in whose constituency he was a candidate at the time.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTERaccepted the correction. But this was the sort opinion given by Canon Mahony in regard to the hon. Member for East Clare (Mr. W. Redmond) at a meeting held in Cork. Canon Mahony said—
    "In the first place, we must hold responsible for this crime the men who signed John Redmond's nomination papers last November; all who canvassed and all who voted. Still greater is the responsibility of men who, with the knowledge of what Parnellism had done, deliberately again resolved that they would publicly affix their names to the nomination papers, canvass for them, and vote."
    Canon Mahony, on another occasion, at a meeting in Cork, said—
    "I wonder if there is anyone in this City who thinks that it is going too far to say it is a crime, a sin—a mortal sin of the deepest dye—to vote for them, or support them in any way. I am sure if you were to be so misguided as to vote for those, or even to fail in doing your utmost against them, you would look back on your action or omission with sentiments of the deepest remorse hereafter."
    1096
    But he would point out that grave and serious as those statements were in the past, it was the action in the future he feared. Father Fay, who had been punished for utterances of his, upon another occasion said—
    "They were met there that day in the open air. They were not in the dock at Court House in Trim; but he thought that the Judges were on their trial before them."
    That was the spirit in which the contest was conducted. Here was a statement which he did not know that he might regard as authoritative, but it was made by an organ that represented one section of hon. Members opposite—the Irish Catholic. This organ said—
    "Mr. Justice O'Brien's decision may have been as creditable to thin as a lawyer as it was, in the tone and matter of many of its passages, discreditable to him as a Catholic; but we have no hesitation in saying that if those at whose demand it was pronounced fancy that it will act as any deterrent to Irish priests from discharging their duties as electors and as citizens, as well as the friends and advisers of their people, they forget the courage, the constancy, and the patriotism of the unconquerable and devoted clergy of Ireland."
    He now came to that part of his Amendment which dealt with the methods that should Readopted in order that these efforts to interfere with the liberty of the subject should be restrained in the future. The House might bet asked to follow the precedent that was laid down in the Mayo Election Petition in 1857. Lord Palmerston assented to a Motion for the prosecution of two priests who had acted during the Mayo election in a similar manner to the priests of Louth, and suspended the issue of the Writ pending the prosecution. As Lord Palmerston said on that occasion, that step was taken with the object of protecting the electors of the constituency from the intimidation they would otherwise suffer. But they did not suggest that that course should be taken in the present case. They did not desire to put into action any law which depended on the initiative of the present Chief Secretary for Ireland. The Home Secretary had said the other day that the Chief Secretary was more trusted by the Irish people than any other man in Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman must have meant that the Chief Secretary was trusted by the Separatist Party, and if that were a compliment it was not a very poor one. But if the

    1097
    Home Secretary meant when he alluded to the Irish people to include the loyalist section he was very much misinformed. The Chief Secretary was trusted by no man or woman amongst the loyalist community in Ireland, from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear, and they did not want to put the initiation of any legislation or any Executive act into the hands of the right hon. Gentleman. The loyalists had reasons in plenty why they should be suspicious of the Chief Secretary. The hon. Gentleman had within the past few days exercised a dispensing power in the matter of the execution of the Writs, and had got a rebuff in the Courts of Law such as no Minister of the Crown had ever received before in the memory of the House. The loyalists also noticed that the right hon. Gentleman was engaged in a process, which he must have borrowed from the worst period of the French Revolution, and which the revolutionists would have termed the "Purification" of the Public Offices of Ireland. And why was the right hon. Gentleman doing this? The right hon. Gentleman was not ashamed to declare that he was deliberately excluding from the functions they had performed for years men, not on the ground of incapacity, but because he desired to replace them for men whose creed was not their creed, and whose polities were not their polities.
    MR. DIAMOND: On a point of Order, Mr. Speaker. Are the hon. Member's remarks relevant to his Amendment?
    *MR. SPEAKER: I think the hon. Gentleman is going beyond the limits of his Amendment.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTERsaid he would bow to the ruling of the Chair. What were the steps that might be taken with advantage in order to prevent the recurrence of the evils of which he complained? If there was one thing which more than another was offensive at the Meath elections it was the presence in the polling booths of the Borneo Catholic priests. He found that in nine stations alone there had been 22 priests acting as personating agents, and he found that of eight counting agents seven were priests. He would say as to the conduct of those priests in the polling booths that "misconduct" only inadequately
    1098
    described it. He, therefore, suggested that the plethora of priests in the polling stations should he diminished in the future. He also suggested that the enormous privileges allowed by the present Ballot Act to the illiterate voters should be taken away. He found that while, according to the Census Returns, education had largely spread in Ireland, the percentage of illiterate voters in the elections had increased to a great extent. When he stated that one out of every four of the persons who voted for Mr. Davitt and Mr. Fullam was illiterate, the House would see the gravity of the matter. He was quite aware the hon. Member for North East Cork (Mr. Devitt) had stated that the majority of the iliiterates had not voted for him or Ids Party. He did not know where the hon. Member got his information; but he knew that that information did not coincide with the belief of other persons, who were as equally well qualified to form an opinion on the subject as the hon. Member, and he was sure the hon. Member for Waterford would not agree with the hon. Member for North East. Cork as to the distribution of the illiterate votes. But it was notorious that all over Ireland Where those elections had taken place they had these men—in the phrase current in Ireland—"polling publicly" under the orders of the priests, and, in his opinion, it was high time that this practice should be put an end to once and for all. There was another method that might be adopted with advantage. The number of constituencies in Ireland, represented by these clerically returned Members, was largely in excess of their due proportion and ought to be diminished. After the election that took place in Mayo, to which he had referred, it was said that it would have been as reasonable to send the Writ, for the election of a Member, to the Bishop of the Diocese as to the Sheriff of the County. In the case of the Meath elections they had gone much further than that, for the Judge hail laid it down that—
    "The priests were not the agents of the candidates in these elections, but the candidates were the agents of the priests."
    He therefore declared that the time had come when the over-representation of these clerically-represented constituencies should be diminished. There was one

    1099
    more important method which the House, without any trouble and to the great advantage of the country, might adopt. That was that they should be spared this ill-omened Bill, known as "The Bill for the Better Government of Ireland." The one thing, and the only thing, that could secure Ireland from the danger of an increase of this clerical domination was that Ireland should be kept with in the great current of thought and opinion of the United Kingdom. It might be said that as the Meath Election Petitions had been successfully promoted, nothing further need be done; that the law had been vindicated; that the hon. Members had been unseated; and that they had, in these matters, the protection of the law. But what would become of that protection if the appointment of the Judges was taken out of the hands in which it now rested? He was not imagining an impossible and hypothetical contingency when he asked what would be the state of affairs in Ireland were the hon. and learned Member for North Louth (Mr. T. M. Healy) Chief Justice of the Irish Bench. He wished the hon. Member every success in his profession, but he did not wish him that advancement. This danger was a real danger. He would give an illustration from Quebec of what would happen if the country were left absolutely free of all control and under the domination of the priests. The election of Sir Hector Langevin for the county of Charlevoix was, in 1875, contested on the ground of undue influence. M. Pellexier, Langevin's counsel, was desirous of subpœnaing priests, and, having first asked permission of the Archbishop of Quebec, obtained it. The case came on on October, 1876. Rev. P. Cinq-Mars, cure of St. Simeon's, stepped into the witness-box, and delivered himself as follows before taking the oath:—
    "In accordance with the instructions forwarded to all parish priests at the same time as the last pastoral letter of the Bishops of the Province of Quebec, it would be my duty respectfully to deny the competence of this tribunal. Nevertheless, as I am accused by a false witness, named Johnny Desbiens, and that leave lets been granted by my Bishop, the Archbishop a Quebec, to all parish priests of Charlevoix to appear as witnesses in this case, by a letter addressed to the counsel for the defendant and the parish priests of the county, I, of my own free will, come forward to give my evidence, nevertheless recording my protest.'"
    1100
    The following passage appeared in the Judgment delivered by Judge Routhier, one of her Majesty's Judges, a Roman Catholic, who presided:—
    "Immunity de persona is the privilege of the competent Court. It is personal, inherent in every ecclesiastical person, and consists in its not being possible that that ecclesiastical person should be accused or cited for trial before any but an Ecclesiastical Court. The personal immunity of the priests extends to all cases, whatever be their nature, save a few rare exceptions, which it would take too long to enumerate. Whether he may have acted as a priest or as a citizen in his public life, or as an individual in his private life, he is always an ecclesiastical person; he enjoys the privilege of a competent Court—that is to say, he can decline the competence of any lay Court. Such is the Catholic doctrine, and I can give its substance in a few words. I am competent in all cases where the question to be decided is one of dogmatic doctrine, of morals or discipline, and also in those cases where the person prosecuted is an ecclesiastic. I am competent to judge the actions of a priest so far as they affect the interest of third parties, provided that the actions are of a temporal description, and that the person of the priest is not involved."
    That was what would happen if they were to allow the Justiciary in Ireland to be appointed by the priests. The Judges in the Supreme Court of Canada were, like the Judges of this country, partly Protestant and partly Catholic. The case was taken to the Supreme Court, and was promptly upset. Thereupon the Archbishops and Bishops of Quebec published a violent protest against the conduct of the Judges, and the suggestion was made that they should be excommunicated. That was one of the reasons why he submitted Ireland should be kept under the sweet and wholesome influence of the public opinion of the United Kingdom, He should like to ask who in the House was going to oppose his Amendment? Not the Attorney General (Sir Charles Russell), who speaking, it was true, in England, had spoken in condemnation of the conduct of the priests. Not the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Halifax (Mr. Stansfeld), friend of Garibaldi, and therefore in the opinion of the Meath priests no better than a "wild beast." Not the President of the Local Government Board (Mr. H. H. Fowler), a representative of the best and most honourable type of Nonconformist opinion in the country—surely, he would not support men who had expressed the

    1101
    opinion that a Protestant was "next door to a Pagan?" Not the Prime Minister, the author of The Vatican Decrees, still less the Minister who had in time gone by done as much as any man to inform them of the dangers of this gross spiritual tyranny. Was the Chief Secretary for Ireland going to oppose that Amendment—he who had pointed out the realities of clerical domination, and had animated them in the fight against it. If not these, who then would oppose the Amendment? He (Mr. Arnold-Forster) had been brought up in the principles of the Liberal Party, and he could not believe that that Party would, for any purpose whatsoever, support the action of the priests in Ireland. The Liberal Party had striven for years to make all Parties equal before the law. He asked them now to see that the principles they had so long supported should not be rendered nugatory and absolutely futile in Ireland in the future. But if they were going to deny that the action of the priests in Mayo were not a public danger, then they ought to state the grounds on which they supported that view, and approved that conduct.
    MR. HORACE PLUNKETTin seconding the amendment, said, the ordeal of addressing the House for the first time was made to him not the less difficult by the choice of a subject upon which every Irishman felt in duty bound to be very careful in his words. He should have preferred to wait until he could have spoken on a simpler issue, were it not that the peculiar circumstances under which he was placed made him feel that it was his duty to give to the House such opinions as he felt were justified muter the experiences he had had in Ireland. He was the only Unionist Member in the three Southern Provinces of Ireland. He had been connected with what he hoped was a useful work to the country for a long time, and much of that work had been done in the poorer parts of the Provinces, where these terrible acts alleged against the priests had their most damaging effect. Besides that, he had lived the greater part of his life in Meath, and was well acquainted with persons of all creeds and classes. He could say, on behalf of the Unionists of Ireland, that they regarded the Meath
    1102
    elections with unmixed regret and even sorrow. It was true that a Party advantage had been gained through these elections by the Unionists, but they desired the good of Ireland far beyond Party advantage; and, Home Rule or no Home Rule, they believed that peace and prosperity would be secured to the country when every obstacle to religious and political freedom and every incentive to sectarian bitterness had been removed. They acknowledged that Ireland was, and must continue to be, a Roman Catholic country. They were aware that the priesthood of Ireland must continue in the future—as far into it as they could look—to exercise a mighty influence for good or evil; and they held that it was the duty of those who were responsible for the Government of the country to take steps to remove, by limiting the undue exercise of clerical influence, a state of things, which might he allowed in Quebec, but which was opposed to the manly spirit of the British. There was one feature of that clerical intimidation to which he felt particularly bound to refer, and which would carry them from ridicule to contempt, and from contempt to indignation. He meant that astounding—that cruel casuistry, by which the Bishop of Meath laid it down that mere sympathy with a political creed rendered guilty of the most atrocious crimes the women of the county of Meath, of whom he could say, after a life-long experience of them, that they were amongst the purest of the womanhood of the world. He was sure that every honest man who had read the evidence in these Petitions had determined that this accursed thing should be banished from their midst. He must say something about the political aspect. He knew that many hon. Members would say to themselves that these extravagances of the Meath clergy must defeat their own ends; they would say that the world had out-grown such extravagances as these, and that they must very soon come to an end. But, unfortunately, the Catholic Church in Meath had recognised that their spiritual political influence was coming to an end, and now they were constituting themselves into an ordinary political agency. The district of Dunshaughlin, where he lived, was the only place where the clergy did not take an active part,

    1103
    and where they had hoped and believed, until the contrary was proved, that clerical intimidation would not be exercised at all, but that a free and independent choice by the electors would be secured; but, finding that the local clergy would not, as he supposed the central authority thought, do their duty, the clergy were sent from other districts to conduct a house to house canvass. The district of Dunshaughlin was what was known in American polities as the pivotal district, which meant that if the Dunshaughlin district went anti-Parnellite an anti-Parnellite candidate would be returned, and vice versa. Three weeks before the election he made it his business to inquire as to which way the sympathies of the people were likely to lead them, and he found out that in this polling district they were going to vote for the Parnellite, and consequently that the Parnellite would be returned. Two days after the election he asked some of his informants how it was that they had changed their opinion. He was on the best of terms with people of all classes and creeds in that community, and they told him quite frankly what hail happened. They told him that they had been visited. Of course, he did not inquire from them exactly what influences had been brought to bear upon them; it was unnecessary to inquire, as it was too well-known. In the district in which he lived a young priest came round; he was told he came round on a bicycle—he supposed to give the famous pastoral the force of an encyclical. They knew what was the result. It would be of interest to this House to know how the next election was likely to go. He was not going to prophesy; but he said, with deep regret, that the clergy were again exercising an influence which he feared would prevent a free and independent choice. They were not, however, next time coming into collision with the law, for they were acting, as he had said they had done in this particular district, in the ordinary way of a political organisation. It was evident to the meanest intelligence that although this pastoral had been condemned by one of Her Majesty's Judges, that fact would not in any way lessen its force, and the influence that had been exercised, that abiding influence, might have wrought changes that would surprise them in the coming election. It
    1104
    was hard to say how many poor, ignorant voters, who bravely voted against the clergy at the last election, might be longing for the opportunity to make their peace with Heaven, and to secure the offices of the clergy in their dying hours by supporting the priests in the coming election. Those who brought this subject before the House were not actuated by political animosity or by religious bigotry; if he did not believe the facts to be true he would not state them as ha had done. Their feeling in the matter was definite and clear. They did not wish to establish—they knew it would be idle if they did wish to attempt to establish—a Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, but they would be very glad to see their Roman Catholic friends reestablish the faith they held upon a firmer basis of higher intelligence, of greater manliness, and of greater independence, and they called upon the Government to support this Amendment. The right hon. Gentlemen on the Front Bench had before shown that they themselves were amenable to clerical intimidation; and although they might refuse to support the Amendment now, he would not be at all surprised if they were constrained a little later on to act in accordance with its spirit. Perhaps all the Nonconformist pressure might be applied to them again, and they might have to resort to the piteous confession of the Prince of Denmark: "Conscience doth make cowards of us all." Therefore, in asking them to support this Amendment, he warned them that the action of the clergy in Meath had made Home Rule morally impossible; and if they refused to accept that position, or if they refused to do their best to abolish that influence which they said had made Home Rule morally impossible, they would find themselves confronted with a loyal minority, supported by the manhood of England, which was determined to make Home Rule physically impossible.
    Amendment proposed,
    At the end of the Question, to add the words,—"And humbly to represent to Your Majesty that this House has learnt with great regret that a vast amount of clerical influence was exercised so as to intimidate voters during the late elections, and that in the opinion of this House measures should he taken to prevent any repetition of the exercise of such intimidations."—(Mr. Arnold-Forster.)
    Question proposed, "That those words be there added."
    *MR. PAULsaid, that he and the hon. Member for West Belfast differed, and differed widely, on almost every political question, but he was glad to be the first to congratulate the hon. Member on the brilliant success which he had just achieved. Whatever might be the opinion about the prolongation of the Debate on the Address, he thought it would not be denied that the hon. Member had brought forward a question of great importance and of still greater interest. It was said that the only two things which permanently interested the people of this country were politics religion, and in the Amendment of his hon. Friend they had a substantial combination of the two. His hon. Friend spoke as a Protestant, and he did not think he should be doing him an injustice—and he certainly did not mean to insult him—by saying he spoke as a somewhat aggressive Protestant. In that respect he thought he took a leaf out of the enemy's book. For absolute unswerving conviction in the correctness of his own views, for undeviating belief in the accuracy of his own assertions—a belief which had survived some shocks, and which he had no doubt would survive many more—he would back his hon. Friend to give His Holiness the Pope two stone and a beating. It was, he supposed, in the exercise of that plus quam pontifical faculty that his hon. Friend said that nineteen-twentieths of the Members of that House were about to vote contrary to their own opinions. It might surprise his hon. Friend to learn that he (Mr. Pail) was going to vote in accordance with his opinion; and it might surprise him still more to learn that it was his deliberate opinion, formed solely upon the speech of his hon. Friend himself, that he had not made out his case. During that most eloquent speech he was tempted to ask, had his hon. Friend read his own Amendment? That Amendment asked them to assert that a vast amount of clerical influence was exercised so as to intimidate voters during the late elections. There was in the language of the Amendment no geographical limitation. His hon. Friend asserted that clerical intimidation was general at the late elec-
    1106
    tions, and how did he support that assertion? By evidence entirely confined to two constituencies in one county of Ireland. He thought if the hon. Member had pursued his researches the result might not have been altogether pleasant to the Party or principles which he represented. It was rather a large conclusion to ask the House to draw—assuming for the sake of argument that the elections in North and South Meath had been determined by the undue influence of the clergy—that the whole of the late elections, which resulted in a Liberal majority being returned to that House, were vitiated by what his hon. Friend called fraud and corruption. If they were to confine their attention to the Northern and Southern Divisions of County Meath, even then he submitted his hon. Friend had not made out his case. He quoted a great deal of strong language, and gave them some reason to believe that a large amount of clerical influence was exercised in these two constituencies. He had listened carefully to the speech of his Friend, in order to ascertain whether he would assert or prove that a single vote was altered by that intimidation, but the hon. Member had not done so. He had been unable to ascertain whether counsel for the petitioner had produced a single witness to show that any voter, owing to priestly intimidation, had given a vote he would not otherwise have given. Some of the witnesses who described the clerical intimidation which had been addressed to them were asked whether they would have voted in the same way without it, and he thought he was right when he said that they declared they would. The hon. Member referred to the necessity of maintaining the law. The law had been maintained by Her Majesty's Judges, and he did not for one moment suggest that they had not interpreted it correctly. The hon. Member said that this was no protection; but the practical remedies which the hon. Member proposed seemed to be somewhat inadequate to the magnitude of the evil which he tried to describe. Those remedies were simply to keep the priests out of the polling-booth and the Home Rule Bill out of the House. Reference to the home little Bill brought some light to Ids mind, and he began to understand why the Amendment had been moved. It was possible that the object

    1107
    of some of those older Parliamentary hands with whom the hon. Member acted might have been to endeavour to prejudice the mind of the public on the eve of the great constitutional Debates in which the House would shortly be engaged. His hon. Friend was not content in dealing with what occurred before the elections; he went into what occurred after them, even quoting from an article in a Westmeath journal; but whatever else might, be said of these trials, it could not he said that there was not an abundance of witnesses, and if there was one man who was prevented by intimidation from recording his vote, surely he could have been called to say so. The Amendment was not intended as a Vote of Censure on the Government, but if it were carried it might have the effect of leading, to some kind of legislation. They might very reasonably call for some more evidence, and he thought they might have been spared the suggestion that his (the hon. Member's) Colleagues on the Liberal Benches were capable of thinking one way and voting another. What they wanted was a little more of the facts. Now, he had a respect for Universities, and it was through no feeling of disrespect to them that he gave it as his opinion that there was an air of academic unreality about the Debate. They had the circumstances of the Member for North Galway moving the Writ for one of the Divisions of Meath on the first day of the Session—or giving notice of it—and the Member for South Antrim giving notice of an Amendment on the alleged intimidation, and then, when the time came for moving the Amendment, they had its withdrawal. Then later on they had the unopposed issue of the Writs. Ulster would not fight, and he had no doubt Ulster was right. Still, they were engaged in the conflict; but if this action had gone on at the beginning they should have had a real battle, and not a sham engagement. They were not now discussing the Meath elections, for the Writs had passed out of the control of the House, and the Amendment said nothing about Meath, but asked them to declare that intimidation existed throughout the whole Kingdom. He invited the attention of the House to that fact—that there was nothing about local intimidation in the
    1108
    Amendment, and nothing about Ireland or about Meath in particular. The allegation was, plainly end directly, that the intimidation existed throughout the whole Kingdom; Whereas it appeared that the only place where it could be alleged that this sort of intimidation did exist was in one Irish county. When the Writs were moved the only dispute that took place—if dispute it could be called—it was rather a friendly difference—was between the two sections of the Nationalist Party as to which should have what the hon. and learned Member for North Louth called in legal phraseology the carriage of the Writs. He did not think anything more was wanted to prove the unreality of the Debate than the issuing of the Writs. There was no evidence of intimidation outside these two constituencies. It had been alleged there was intimidation in other constituencies in Ireland. If that was so, how was it they could not get evidence of it? [An hon. MEMBER: No money.] They could not get money! Well, he had heard a great many things charged against the Unionist Party—some of them he believed and some he did not—but he had never heard their worst enemy charge them with poverty. The Member for South Belfast he thought it was who said they had no money; but he was not referring to the constituencies where Irish Nationalists were pitted against Unionists, butt to the constituencies where Nationalists were against each other. In all these constituencies not a single witness could be brought forward to swear that there had been intimidation that would prevent the free exercise of the power of voting. When they talked about want of evidence, it did not require, he imagined, a great many witnesses to show that a certain Roman Catholic Bishop issued a pastoral saying certain things which might cause intimidation. Another point to which attention bad been drawn was as to the way in which these Meath elections were regarded by the parties concerned. The Unionists were not directly concerned, for they had no candidate at the General Election, and they had no candidate now, and it was those against whom this undue spiritual influence was employed at the General Election who were most desirous of having another election. It certainly struck him as singular and significant that that

    1109
    party were just as anxious for another contest and for all appeal to the common-sense of their countrymen as the other branch of the Irish Nationalist Party. The followers of the hon. and learned Member for Waterford and those of the hon. Member for North Longford were both appealing once more to the judgment of their fellow-citizens. His hon. Friend read the utterances of the Bishop of Meath, Dr. Nulty, and several priests who had used strong and coarse language about Parnellism and the Parnellites. He had no sympathy whatever with that language. He could not conceive it to be a crime or a sin to be a Parnellite, and he should never mention the name of Mr. Parnell without adding a tribute of admiration for his political genius and the great services he had rendered to his country; and he repudiated and detested such language as had been used. But when did hon. Members opposite become so sensitive about the association of the Parnellites with crime? He remembered a pamphlet which was circulated broadcast throughout the country, and which was distinguished by the accuracy of its statements, and in it the hon. Member for North Longford was described as having concocted the Phœnix Park murders—at Willesden Junction. He repudiated then the association of Parnellism with crime, and he repudiated it now. One reason why he was a Home Ruler was that, whereas the Irish people perfectly well understood each other and understood the English, the latter did not always entirely understand them. He acknowledged that the Liberal Party was not altogether free to denounce those who associated personal character with political position. He could not forget, when considering the conduct of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, that the Liberal Party did not regard the leadership and the private character of Mr. Parnell as wholly dissociated from political questions. A great deal had been said about the Nonconformist conscience. He demurred to the phrase, because he did not think a man required to be a Nonconformist in order to have a conscience. He did not like to touch upon a subject of so much delicacy, but he thought he might say that it was the feeling of the Liberal Party that it was impossible to act with a man upon whose private character there rested a cloud.
    1110
    He thought they ought not to draw the inference from the Meath elections that the Irish priests claimed to take part in all ordinary questions of politics. They maintained that this was not an ordinary question of politics at all, but a question of faith and morals. The findings of the Election Judges in Ireland were not like the findings the House had to consider in the Rochester election. He did not believe there were any corrupt practices in any part of Ireland. The Judges hail reported as regarded Rochester that they did not know whether they had or had not reason to believe or disbelieve that corrupt practices did or did not excessively prevail in Rochester. Perhaps the noble Lord who had been returned for that city could throw some further light on the subject.
    MR. JOHNSTON: Returned unopposed.
    MR. PAUL: Yes; opposition was a very expensive affair in the City of Rochester. The Judges who tried the Meath Petition disagreed as to whether they would report any person to the House as being guilty of the offence of intimidation. He could not set that against the deliberate finding that such intimidation prevailed; but it was a fair subject of comment that if the intimidation had been so general and so gross as the hon. Member for West Belfast invited the House to believe, there must have been some priests or even a Bishop whom the Judges might have agreed to report to the House as guilty of the offence of intimidation. There was no question in the whole range of polities more delicate or more difficult to determine than the borderland which lay between politics and theology. The Roman Catholic Church had always claimed jurisdiction in matters of faith and morals. The Leader of the Opposition was a great philosopher. He should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman how it was possible for the Roman Catholic Church to exercise any authority in those matters if it were left to any individual to decide what were the limits of faith and morals? It was not a question which concerned him, or which concerned the great majority of the House. [Laughter.] He referred to the limits, and not the area of faith and morals. He presumed it did concern a very large portion of Her Majesty's subjects, and

    1111
    in a special sense those who lived in counties such as Meath. It was difficult to deal with this question in a secular Court. If it was open to anyone to say to a priest, or any other authority in the Roman Catholic Church who attempted to intervene on any ecclesiastical question or theological dogma, "Mind your own business; since I last saw you this question has come within the range of practical politics," then what would become of the claim to adjudicate upon theological questions? Why, Heaven and the Vatican only knew. Lord Melbourne once went to church. He heard a sermon dealing not with abstract questions of doctrine, but with the, faults and vices of the society to which Lord Melbourne belonged, and when he came out of the sacred edifice he said—
    "No man has a greater respect for religion or the clergy than I have, but when it comes to invading the domain of private life I think a protest ought to be made."
    He (Mr. Paul) thought it could not be denied that the Roman Catholic clergy in the County of Meath had invaded the domain of public life, partly in a legitimate way as patriots and citizens, and partly in an illegitimate way as bringing undue spiritual pressure to bear, though no one had suggested there was any proof that that spiritual pressure had any practical effect. In the evidence given on the hearing of the Election Petitions he had found no instance where any witness had said his vote had been changed by spiritual intimidation applied to him; but witness after witness came forward and gave evidence against the priests, showing they were not afraid of them, and these witnesses never said their votes had been affected or altered by that spiritual pressure. The fact was that the objection to spiritual influence in Ireland was not to the character of that influence itself, but to the side on which it was exercised. All parties in Great Britain and all parties in Ireland had been glad enough of the help of the priests whenever they could get it. He did not think they had all forgotten the Papal Rescript or the appeals which were addressed to the Court of Rome to put down the Plan of Campaign. He did not think they had altogether forgotten the mission of the Duke of Norfolk, or the Conservative jubilation with which the issue of the Rescript was re-
    1112
    ceived, or the attacks that were levelled against the Bishops and priests of the Church of Ireland, because they did not at once meekly accept the doctrines of the Head of their own Church upon a question which the Leader of the Opposition declared the other night was a political question, pure and simple, from beginning to end—namely, the Plan of Campaign. He did not wish to say anything which would in any way tend to embitter Party feeling in Ireland; but when the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for North Galway (Colonel Nolan) moved that Writ the other day, he could not help carrying his mind back from the hon. and gallant Gentleman who had been so many years a Member of that House to a famous Judgment delivered in the county which the gallant Gentleman represented, setting aside his election on the ground of spiritual intimidation. He did not know whether the hon. and gallant Gentleman was as hostile to sacerdotal influence then as he apparently was now. He hoped before the Debate closed they would hear the eloquent voice of the Member for Bury (Sir H. James.) The right hon. and learned Gentleman had always taken a great interest in this question. He remembered, when a boy, reading and re-reading, and almost learning by heart, as a specimen of Parliamentary eloquence, the great oration in which the right hon. and learned Gentleman defended the Galway Judgment, and defended a notorious personage who stood hi much need of his brilliant advocacy—the late Mr. Justice Keogh. The right hon. and learned Gentleman was a Protestant, as well as a most eminent and distinguished lawyer. He dared say the right hon. Gentleman regarded the provisions of Acts of Parliament, and especially those which he had had a hand in framing, as more sacred than all the doctrines of all the Churches. He remembered very well the eloquent words in which the right hon. and learned Gentleman said they must teach a proud priesthood they owed no allegiance save to the Sovereign, and no obedience except to the law. He (Mr. Paul) should be very glad to teach a proud priesthood any lesson which he thought they would learn, but they did not seem to have benefitted very much by the powerful and

    1113
    forcible instruction of the right hon. and learned Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman was, he believed, mainly responsible for the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883, and he should like to direct his attention to some very remarkable words in that Act, inserted, of course, many years after the Galway Judgment, but, he could not help thinking, with some reference to the doctrines laid down by Mr. Justice Keogh. Those words were, in the definition of the offence, of undue influence, and of that part of it which was spiritual. They were—
    "To inflict or threaten to inflict… any temporal or spiritual injury, damage, harm, or loss."
    He could quite understand that if a priest threatened to deprive one of his parishioners of the sacraments of the Church on account of their political opinions those words carried, and were meant to carry, a threat. But if a Bishop or priest in the exercise—and he would call it a lamentable and deplorable exercise—of what he believed to be his religious rights and duties told the people that by voting in a particular way they would imperil their salvation, it seemed to him as a layman that those words must have been devised expressly to exclude such a case, unless it was held by the right hon. Gentleman and by the Judges that a priest had power to send a man to hell. He should like to read one extract from a speech delivered in that great historical Debate on the Judgment of Mr. Justice Keogh. The words were as follows:—
    "When did this clerical action begin? It began in the famous election of Clare. They all, no doubt, recollected the eloquent speech of Sheil, in which he boasted that every altar had been turned into a tribune to return O'Connell at the election for Clare, before emancipation was passed. That was an election which was said to justify the action of the clergy. ['No, no.'] Hon. Members who cried 'no' had never lived under the control of Penal Laws, and did not understand what was the situation of Ireland at that time. It was the great Liberal Party which had deliberately fostered and encouraged that action; and for 40 years had cheerfully availed themselves of the clerical influence in political contests. That, he repeated, was a social misfortune in Ireland; but the landlords must bear their fair share of blame for this result. Why had the Irish landlords generally contrived to run counter to the wishes of the people who had in their clergy their only advisers and leaders?"
    1114
    Those were the eloquent words of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for East Birmingham (Mr. H. Matthews), Home Secretary in the late Conservative Administration, who then represented the borough, and, as some said, the Fenianism of Dungarvan. He did not quote these words for controversial or critical purposes, but because they summed up in better words than he could employ the historical position and the historical strength of the Irish priesthood, When they were told that the Irish people were governed by their priests, they were entitled to draw a distinction which all history suggested between the cases where the priests were on the side of the people, and led them where they wanted to go, and when they endeavoured without success to stem the popular tide. There was the famous instance when the priests set themselves against the Catholic laity at the time when Archbishop Murray was an active any of the Whig Government of Lord Melbourne, when he and the clerical representatives of his Church were ready to accept the veto of the English Government in the appointment of Catholic Bishops, and when the Catholic laity in Ireland rose up and rebelled against the compact. There was a case more recent and familiar in the early days of the Land League, when many priests endeavoured, but without success, to impede the progress of that Organisation. There were forces at work in Ireland with which he did not believe any Party in that House were connected. There were, and had been of late years, Secret Societies, dangerous Organisations against which it might be the duty of the Irish priesthood to use, and even, perhaps, on an emergency, strain, their powers; but he thought it became statesmen when they denounced the influence of the priesthood, and especially when they denounced it in a Protestant country, to consider whether there were not circumstances in which that influence might be useful in maintaining those foundations of society which men of all Parties agreed that by some means or other must be maintained. The priests of Ireland were the friends of the people of Ireland when the world was not their friend, nor the world's law. They were their friends when priests and people alike were harassed

    1115
    by those odious Penal Laws which for their disgraceful cruelty and their stupid cowardice might challenge comparison in the annals of mankind. When they were asked to condemn this influence, and to provide remedies, they ought to ask themselves as practical men what were the remedies which could be devised, and how they would operate. He did not think he need waste time in proving that coercion was no remedy. It it were, they should not be discussing that subject that night. When he was told of judicial and of purely secular authorities that could interfere with the influence of the priests, he was reminded of the case where some poor wretched man or woman, who had endeavoured by desperate means to escape the miseries of this world, was brought up before a County Bench on a charge of attempting to commit suicide, as if people who were not afraid of death would be afraid of a Chairman of Quarter Sessions! If a priest told his people that their salvation depended upon their votes, and the people believed him, what did they care for Election Judges; or for any human tribunal? There were only two remedies which he had seen proposed for this undue spiritual influence. One of them was practical and rational, and the other was impracticable and absurd. He would begin with the second. It was propounded at a Liberal Unionist meeting, when one of the speakers said that the object of the Government ought to be to convert the people of Ireland to the Protestant religion. He thought Her Majesty's Ministers had reason to congratulate themselves that that was not one of their multifarious functions. The other remedy was to set up an authority which would represent the people of Ireland in their political capacity far better and far more efficiently than any Church could do. That was the remedy which they (the Liberals) proposed; that was the remedy which the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government would introduce on Monday. It was all very well to talk about Home Rule being Rome Rule. They had been reminded in that Debate that Rome Rule might exist without Home Rule, and all analogies showed them that with Home Rule, Rome Rule in the sphere of
    1116
    politics would pass away. The Irish people in the United States of America were very great politicians. They had all heard of the American statesman who said he was going to Ireland because he wanted to see the only country which was not governed by Irishmen. The Irish people in America were not under the control of the priests. The instance of Quebec had been cited by the Member for West Belfast; but the case of Quebec was not the case of a National Parliament and Government, but of a Provincial Legislature on the analogy of those Provincial Councils which were to be applied to Ireland by the right hon. Member for West Birmingham. He thanked the House most cordially and sincerely, hon. Gentlemen opposite not less than his hon. Friends and enemies on his own side of the House, for the kindness and courtesy, he was afraid he must add, the patience and forbearance with which they had been good enough to hear him.
    *MR. BUTCHERsaid, that whilst claiming the indulgence of the House, which was usually accorded to a Member who addressed it for the first time, he ought, perhaps, to explain why he had thought fit to intervene in this Debate. In the first place, he was an Irishman; he was proud to be one, and he felt a sincere interest in the people of that country. But, in the second place, he had the honour to represent a great Yorkshire constituency, to whose sturdy sense of manly independence everything that savoured of intimidation or undue influence, whether of a spiritual or temporal character, was repugnant and abhorrent. An eminent statesman, who now occupied a seat on the Treasury Bench, had told them that—
    "In Churches subject to the Pope all that nurtured freedom, and all that guaranteed it have been harassed and denounced, cabined and confined, attenuated and starved."
    He dissented entirely from that utterance. Another right hon. Gentleman on the Treasury Bench had said—
    "The clergy are essentially lovers of despotism and haters of liberty."
    He also dissented from that observation. He had not risen in that Debate for the purpose of preferring an indictment against the Catholic Church or Catholic population of Ireland; for he recognised that if they

    1117
    were to promote the prosperity of Ireland In some permanent manner, they must have Protestants and Catholics loyally co-operating together. Therefore, if he had to make some comments upon the conduct of Catholic Bishops and Catholic clergy, he desired the inference should not be drawn that he preferred any wholesale indictment either against that Church, against that clergy, or against the population of Ireland. But whilst making that disclaimer, he thought that when a state of things existed, such as was proved by the result of a judicial inquiry to have existed in the County of Meath at the last election, the matter was one which required serious consideration. The hon. Member for West Edinburgh got some cheers by saying they on that (the Opposition) side of the House objected to spiritual influence because it was used against them. It was hardly necessary for him to repudiate that assertion. But he asked the hon. Member did he condone that influence because it was directed in favour of the Party with which he himself was associated? He ventured to think some of those who heard the hon. Member's apologies and explanations could not help thinking the condonation given in his speech was not wholly uninfluenced by political motives. The Catholic clergy in the County of Meath were proved to have exercised all the resistless forces of the Catholic Church for the purpose of destroying and annihilating the private right of judgment. They coerced the freedom of the will of the electors by means the most terrible that men could employ, and prevented them from exercising the rights of citizenship. The Pastoral issued by Bishop Nulty shortly before the election was read aloud by direction of the Bishop in every chapel throughout the diocese; it was listened to by the peasants who heard the terrors it held before them. The Bishop in that Pastoral went beyond all fair and legitimate influence which, as a dignitary of the Church, he was entitled to exercise. He came before the peasantry of Meath as the accredited minister of God, as a Bishop and successor of the Apostles, and he claimed the Divine right to instruct the people on this question of Parnellism. He told them that Parnellism—which meant Mr. Dalton, the
    1118
    Parnellite candidate for Meath, at that moment—was a thing unholy, and that unless they would defy the Church they must vote against Parnellism. There was one passage in the Pastoral which contained a hidden threat of a most terrible character. After pointing out the retribution that would fall upon a Parnellite for exercising his vote according to his conscience, the Pastoral went on to say that a dying Parnellite would hardly dare to face the justice of his Creator till he had been prepared and anointed by the clergy for the last awful struggle, and for the terrible judgment that would immediately follow him. The hon. and learned Member for North Loath (Mr. T. M. Healy) had suggested that those words were not menacing, but affectionate. That was not the inference drawn from them by the priests of Meath who read that Circular in the churches. One priest, in his sermon, told the Parnellites they would be damned, whilst another priest told a man if he voted Parnellite he would refuse him absolution. Another priest told the people that Parnellism was a mortal sin, the meaning of which was, that, if after committing this sin, they died without absolution, they would be eternally ruined beyond all possibility of hope. The hon. Member for Edinburgh told them that threats of this kind addressed to an ignorant—and a religious—peasantry had no practical effect, because witnesses did not come forward to say they had been terrorised.
    MR. PAUL: I should like to point out to the hon. Member my argument was, that witnesses came forward; they had not been frightened, and they had described the intimidation exercised by the clergy. They had not said it altered their votes; but, on the contrary, they said it had not.
    MR. BUTCHERsaid, the explanation of the hon. Gentleman scarcely dealt with the question. The point was, did they get the terrorised men to come forward? The men who came forward were the men who had not been terrorised; those who had been terrorised dared not come forward. The hon. Gentleman would not contend that the persons who were influenced by this oppression could be brought forward to give evidence of the tyranny to which they were subjected. The Bishop of

    1119
    Meath did not confine his attention to issuing this Pastoral, but he also indulged in a sermon; and he was glad the hon. Member who had last spoken had stated that he repudiated and detested such language as was contained in the sermon and Pastoral; and he had no doubt that when the Division came, they would find the hon. Member, in the words of the Amendment, expressing his regret and hope that some measure might be devised to prevent a repetition of the exercise of such intimidation. If the hon. Member did not vote for the Amendment, then he could not think much of his repudiation. There was a passage to which he would refer in the sermon of the Bishop of Meath. He was glad to think, for the credit of the Nationalist Party in Ireland, that, with few exceptions, they had not dragged women into this bitter controversy. But the Bishop of Meath did not so abstain; for after saying that he would approach the deathbed of a profligate and drunkard in greater confidence of salvation than that of a Parnellite, he went on to say that any woman who sympathised with Parnellism was an abandoned woman. He (Mr. Butcher) protested on the part of the female population of Ireland, who were known and honoured for their virtue, against such a suggestion or innuendo come from what quarter it might. He trusted he had said enough to satisfy the House that intimidation of the worst possible character was used at the Meath election. What were the attempted defences? One of the justifications put forward by what he might call the Clerical Party in Ireland was that the question was one of morals, and that upon a question of morals the Roman Catholic Church was entitled to say what were morals and what were politics. Mr. Justice O'Brien, himself a Catholic, in his Judgment on the Election Petition, repudiated the suggestion that the question was one of morals, and in the course of an eloquent passage asked—
    "Was it just to dig up the grave and revive dead and buried shame, to raise the lid of the tomb, and again uncover the poor remains of human frailty in order to array a Political Party in the shroud of departed sin."
    The hon. and learned Member for North Louth, in his speech before the Judges, had adopted the "moral" plea, and said that morals ought not to he divorced from politics. That, however, was not
    1120
    the opinion expressed by the present Lord Chancellor of Ireland, on the memorable occasion when he attended a meeting in the Leinster Hall after the Divorce Court disclosures, and announced his adhesion to Mr. Parnell. It was sad to think that two such luminaries of the law as the hon. and learned Member for North Louth and the Lord Chancellor of Ireland should take such opposite views on so momentous a question. How long had the Nationalist Members thought fit to pose as rigid custodians of morals? The Leinster Hall meeting was attended by every prominent Member of the present two sections of the Nationalist Party in Ireland, with the exception of the hon. Members for Mayo (Mr. Dillon) and Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien), who were returning from their somewhat forced trip to America, and who sent a telegram expressing their entire concurrence with the resolutions about to he passed. Those resolutions affirmed in the strongest manner that these were not questions of morals, that morals were divorced from politics, and that Mr. Parnell was to be supported as the leader of the Party. When did Nationalist Members first come to admit the claim of the Roman Catholic Church to say what were morals and what were politics? In 1888 the Bead of the Catholic Church issued his now famous Rescript declaring that boycotting and the Plan of Campaign were questions of morals and condemning them. The Nationalist Members, however, derided the suggestion that the Pope was entitled to draw the distinction between morals and politics, and persisted in the practices which had been pronounced by the Holy See to be contrary to good morals. Another defence had been put forward by the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary (Mr. Asquith) in a speech delivered at Liverpool not long ago. The right hon. Gentleman derived some comfort from the fact that he would prefer to go to the poll under the influence of the priests rather than under the influence of drink. He (Mr. Butcher) was interested to hear it; but he claimed for the inhabitants of Ireland, and of the whole of this country, that they should he allowed to go to the poll under the influence neither of drink nor of spiritual dictation. The right hon. Gentleman

    1121
    went on to combat the suggestion of wide-spread intimidation, and said—
    "Mr. Redmond has said that he could have upset more elections if he had had a little more money. Whatever else the Unionist Party lacks—and it lacks a great deal—it certainly does not lack money. Why in the name of common-sense do not our Unionist friends do what Mr. Redmond has done—present an Election Petition, and have the matter fairly fought out in the Court of Law? Until they do that we shall continue to believe they do not do it because they cannot and because they have got no case."
    The Home Secretary, with his vast experience, might not unreasonably have come to the conclusion that in order to win an Election Petition evidence was wanted as well as money. When the right hon. Gentleman suggested that it was open to Unionists in Ireland to get Catholic voters to come forward whenever they liked to give evidence against the priesthood, he could only say that the right hon. Gentleman displayed a depth of ignorance of Irish topics which was amazing. His (Mr. Butcher's) wonder was that the peasants of Meath—religious, God-fearing men as they were—were induced, even at the instigation of Catholic Nationalists, to give evidence of the terrorism to which they had been subjected, knowing as they did that they would have to live in the village where the priest against whom they gave evidence resided, that they would have to depend upon him for the spiritual ministrations which they valued above all things, and that they would have to go to him in their dying moments to get that absolution without which they believed their eternal happiness could not be secured. What chance had Unionists of obtaining such evidence? The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland, in a speech at Newcastle, said—
    "All this about priestly intimidation, as far as English politics are concerned, take my word for it, cant."
    There were Members on the Ministerial Benches who loathed priestly and spiritual intimidation as much as did those who sat on the Opposition side, and he was sure that the right hon. Gentleman would not characterise their conscientious feelings as cant. There was no doubt that the Prime Minister, with his magnificent love for religious liberty, would not seek to defend religious
    1122
    intimidation. Surely it was desirable to do something to suppress priestly intimidation, if it were proved to exist. He looked forward to a brighter future for Ireland, but not through the introduction of schemes which would revive the old racial hatred and intensify those religious feuds and animosities which, unfortunately, now divided the various sections of the Irish people. He maintained that by union with England alone, by contact with wider sympathies, larger ideas, and greater independence, could Ireland be redeemed from the curse of spiritual intimidation, and from the grosser forms of temporal terrorism from which she had been free for some time past. He looked forward to the time when, under the broad protection of English liberty—that ægis which had been thrown over all who lived under the sway of the Queen—the Catholics and Protestants of Ireland would be united in everything that tended to the promotion of the happiness of their common country.
    *MR. SEYMOUR KEAY (Egin and Nairn)said, the Amendment was not addressed in any special manner to anything connected with the North and South Meath Election Petitions, and he Hurst assume that its Mover had no idea of restricting Debate to the comparatively paltry question or the evidence adduced with regard to those Petitions. The allegations proved in those cases were undue clerical influence, or undue clerical intimidation. The Mover of the Amendment had told them that it practically applied only to those constituencies contested by Parnellite candidates; but he did not say that in the majority of cases in which the Parnellites were defeated the elections were gained by clerical intimidation. But even if that were so it would only mean 21 elections in the whole General Election in Ireland, while he was prepared to show that at the last General Election undue clerical influence prevailed throughout the length and breadth of Scotland, not in the case of 21 seats, as in Ireland, but practically in regard to the 72 seats of Scotland. Similar means to those said to have been used at Meath had been used by the party which had been formed out of the Established Church of Scotland, which called themselves for the last two years the Church Defence

    1123
    Association. If he were to move the Amendment of which he had given notice, which was to insert in the Amendment the words "particularly in Scotland," he should have the sympathy of many Members sitting near him. But although he refrained from moving that Amendment, he hoped to show that in other places besides North and South Meath an undue use was made of clerical influence. Clerical influence was a thing that had been well defined by the Judges. It had been held over and over again that clerical influence must be exercised in regard to election contests without denunciation, that clerical influence must not appeal to the fears, the terrors, or the superstitions of the electors, and that it must not hold out threats of punishment hereafter. And it should not be said that to vote for any candidate was a sin. He would show that the electors in Scotland had been told that to vote for Disestablishment candidates would mean the destruction of religion in Scotland, and he would show further that it had been repeatedly stated that Disestablishment of the Church in Scotland meant nothing more nor less than a crime committed against Almighty God. In making these charges he would confine himself altogether to evidence drawn from the two comities which he had the honour to represent. The Church Defence Association consisted entirely of some clergymen and adherents of the Church of Scotland. He declined to commit himself to the allegation that a great mass of the adherents in the Church or a majority of the clergy-men in the Church sympathised with the policy he was about to describe to the House, any more than that all the priests in Ireland were implicated in the conduct of the few. He was, however, entitled to show that there had been, broadly speaking, as great and more all-pervading clerical influence of an undue character in Scotland at the last General Election than had been shown to exist with regard to Ireland as a whole. The Church Defence Association was formed about two years ago. It pretended to be nothing more nor less than a political propaganda, and it had been formed for the purpose of preaching and denouncing the terrible crime of voting for the disestablishment candidates. He would quote a few extracts from speeches made at
    1124
    public meetings before the elections. At a meeting held at Buckie, on the 31st of October, 1890, the chairman, surrounded by Established Church clergymen, said—
    "We must support the establishment of the Church, which is, as we believe, rendering, by its bounden duty, a service to the King of Kings."
    He wished to point out that in all these speeches there was not a suggestion that this was merely a temporal matter; it was always said that it was a great spiritual matter. At Rothes, on the 17th February, 1891, a speech was delivered by a clergyman whose name he did not wish to mention, as he was a constituent of his. [Cries of "Name, name!"] Well, his name was the Rev. Mr. Bonallo, an Established Church clergyman. He said—
    "Establishment is a scriptural principle. We are told that we cannot appeal to the Bible on behalf of our Church. I do not know what version of the Bible some of these Disestablishers use. I know the version I am in the habit of using says: 'The nation and kingdom that shall not, serve God shall perish.' And the principle put forward in this text runs through my version of the Bible, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation."
    The House should remember that the large congregation to whom this clergyman ministered took the interpretation of the Scriptures from him; and, he asked, was it not an exercise of undue influence for such a rev. gentleman to say, that Establishment—which the Radicals intended to vote against—was a principle running through the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, and that everyone who voted against it should perish. The rev. gentleman went on to say—
    "The principle of the disestablishers seems to be that a nation is bound to be irreligious awl without God."
    Was that, he asked, fair comment? No one who knew Scotland could pretend that the disestablishers were godless men. In Scotland they had got. The Free Church, the United Presbyterian, and the Congregationalists—all energetic Religious Bodies of the highest and holiest views, but not supported by the State; and with these bodies in existence, could it be said that if the Church was disestablished Scotland would become irreligious?
    *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: On a point of Order, Mr. Speaker, I wish to ask is the discussion of the question of Disestablishment in Scotland in Order on this Amendment?
    *MR. SPEAKER: I must say that I think the hon. Member's observations are quite foreign to the subject.
    MR. SEYMOUR KEAYsaid, he was only mentioning the position of Scotland in having living vital Religions Bodies not paid by the State, to show that it was unfair and untrue for these rev. gentlemen, possessed of national emoluments, to say that their deprivation of these emoluments would have the effect of overthrowing religion in Scotland. He would now draw attention to an electoral manifesto issued to the electors of Elgin and Nairn, whom he had the honour to represent, by the Church Defence Association, and signed, amongst others, by the Rev. Mr. Bonallo. The Circular was issued five days before the polling day. He would read a few extracts from it to show how all political considerations were sunk, and how Considerations of a purely religious nature were brought to the front—
    "Fellow Electors—In a few days you have to discharge a most solemn task, and the Church Defence Association of Elgin and Nairn ask you to consider how very seriously your vote will affect the religious future of Scotland.
    "The national recognition of religion is the duty of every people, and our Church, which is its symbol, is among our best blessings.
    "Disestablishers have not made known to what purposes they mean to apply Church property, except that they will not permit it to be used in any way for the worship and service of God.
    "Electors who love the Church of their fathers may, without hesitation, leave their political Party upon this occasion.
    "In resisting Disestablishment you will be standing by a cause sacred in itself, and hallowed by the most precious memories of Scottish faith and valour, when our fathers fought and died for Christ's crown and covenant.
    "Fellow Electors—We only venture to address you, because of the grave and sacred interests at stake, and we ask you earnestly to weigh well, as between God and your conscience, the side you are to choose in this momentous conflict."
    The House would see that there was nothing in this Circular about the allocation of Church monies; there was nothing in it but the allegation that those who supported the Disestablishment of
    1126
    the Church were opposed to God's word; and was it not, he asked, a misuse of the religious influence which these rev. gentlemen possessed, when it was remembered that the people to whom they appealed listened to their ministers every Sunday, and accepted their interpretations of the Scriptures? At a public meeting at Auldearn, held on the 3rd July, 1892, that was to say, nine days before the polling day, the rev. gentleman said—
    "Mr. Seymour Keay's opinion of religious equality is that the Protestant religion would be put on the same footing as the Mahomedans, and that we dare not teach in God's name in the schools the sacredness of marriage."
    MR. JESSE COLLINGS: I wish to ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether a discussion on the Disestablishment of the Church in Scotland could be raised on this question?
    *MR. SPEAKER: There is nothing irregular in the extracts the hon. Member is now reading.
    MR. SEYMOUR KEAY: The right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Jesse Collings) has been misled by the Leader of the Opposition regarding the scope of this Amendment. As to the money now used for endowments the rev. gentleman said—
    "There is one thing that we are sure of: it is not to be given for God, and it is certain it is not to be given for religion. I hold it is a scandal and a shame that the Scotch Church should come to this. It is enough to bring, down the judgment of Almighty God upon their heads."
    [Laughter.] It might be a matter for laughter for hon. Gentlemen of other persuasions, but by the Scotch electors, who were a religious body, it was differently regarded. But worse than that, there were cases in which the most absurd statements were made for the purpose of intimidation. There was one case in which a certain clergyman was not ashamed to go into every farm kitchen and hotly in his district and tell the people that if a Liberal Government came into power, and a Home Rule Bill were passed for Ireland, the first effect would he that the whole of the Roman Catholic priests would be sent over from Ireland to Scotland, and that the Scottish Bibles would be publicly burned in the churchyards. That was not much worse than what took place in London when a clergyman said—it was Sacrament Sunday, and the Sacrament vessels were on the altar—that if Disestablishment was brought

    1127
    about they would find that those beautiful vessels would find their way as tankards into public-houses. And Mr. Esslemont, lately a Member of the House, stated publicly during the last election that he could name one clergyman at least who had been going about in East Aberdeenshire, warning the electors that sacrilege was to be committed on the buildings of the churches, and saying that to his knowledge it had been arranged that in case of Disestablishment the buildings of the churches would be pulled down, because he had been told by a Liberal farmer that he had got a promise of 12 tons of stone out of the church to build a new barn.
    *MR. SPEAKER: The hon. Gentleman is not speaking to the subject. I call him to Order a second time, and now I warn him.
    MR. SEYMOUR KEAYsaid, that his point was that the question of Disestablishment of the Church was that upon which intimidation was practised in Scotland, just as other religious questions were the cause of intimidation in Ireland. He would conclude by asking the House whether, though the subject which happened to be up in Scotland was different from the subject which was up at the Meath elections, the influence of the Church Defence Association during the recent elections in Scotland was not distinctly unjustifiable?
    *MR. SPEAKERcalled the attention of the House to the conduct of Mr. Seymour Keay, Member for Elgin and Nairn, in persisting in irrelevance, and directed brut to discontinue his speech.
    SIR HENRY JAMES: Mr. Speaker, there is one matter connected with this Debate which I am sure every Member of this House will think worthy of note, and that is that, until the contribution to the discussion by the hon. Member who has just resumed his seat, every Member who took part in the Debate was a newly-elected Member, and spoke for the first time in the House. Those of us who have, perhaps to our regret, sat in the House for a longer period will welcome the assurance gathered from the character of those speeches that this House is not likely to lose its traditional eloquence or to suffer from the manner in which its Debates are likely to be con-
    1128
    ducted. There are some of us who may even envy those hon. Gentlemen who have to-night taken part in our Debates for the first time. I have been reminded by one of those speakers, who made a most valuable contribution to this Debate—the hon. Member for South Edinburgh (Mr. Herbert Paul)—that some 20 years ago I was contending from these very Benches for the same cause as I am contending for to-night. I then sat among the Liberal Party as it was then constituted. I was speaking then on behalf of pure and free election, and was urging then on behalf of the peasants of Ireland that their votes should be allowed to be given without intimidation or interference. The Liberal Party sympathised then with these arguments. Some have appealed to-night to the traditions of the Liberal Party. I appeal to more. I appeal to their companionship—companionship in upholding freedom of election—and I am sure that in the vote they will give to-night the principles which then guided them they will endeavour to maintain. I know that those who complain of the action of any Church are likely to be told that they entertain bigoted views, and are endeavouring to raise religious hatred. But I have nothing to say with respect to the Roman Catholic Church as a Church. I believe that what has occurred is contrary to the very fundamental rule of that Church. I believe I am right in describing as the authoritative declaration of the Church of Rome what is contained in these words—
    "Without doubt the Church and the State has each its own domain, and consequently within the limits ordained by the Author of both, neither is subject to the other in the administration of its affairs. To drag the Church into the vortex of Party politics, or to desire her aid in overcoming adversaries, is the act of men who imprudently abuse religion. She sternly refuses, from a sense of right and duty, to take sides with any Party, or to accommodate herself to the conflicting changes of political affairs."
    I am sure that not even the Nationalist Members can object to that deduction of view. Those are the very words of instruction which the Supreme Pontiff, Leo XIII., the present Pope, wrote to 200,000,000 of Catholics in a Circular Letter. And it is these views, strictly in accordance with the Common Law of the land, that we ask the

    1129
    House to adopt to-night. I feel that it would be very wrong if isolated cases merely were relied on in connection with this matter. If there have been errors committed in one or two constituencies in breach of the law of this country, whilst we would regret them, we would say that, sad as they are, such errors might occur in every community; and if these cases in Meath stood alone, whilst we might wonder how such things could be, we should not think it necessary to take such evidence of breaches of the law as representing a system that widely prevailed. But we have to deal with a very different state of things. We treat the Meath elections as merely object-lessons of what is occurring, and will occur again, in different parts of the United Kingdom. I do not say this unadvisedly. What has been done in the Meath elections is not only justified, but it is asserted that the faults committed in these elections have been committed by those whose duty it was to commit them, and W h use bounden duty it will be to repeat them. The hon. and learned Member for North Louth (Mr. T. M. Healy), in concluding his speech on behalf of one of the sitting Members, for whom he appeared at the trials of the Petitions, fully bore out this statement, and said that, whatever might be the judgment of the Court, it would be the sacred duty of the priests to pursue the same course of action in future elections in obedience to a higher than any political authority. Another evidence of the fact has been furnished by a periodical issued in Dublin, and edited by a Roman Catholic clergyman—The Lyceum.I find in the last number of that Roman Catholic organ these words—
    "We have shown further that the exercise of the franchise in Meath, as elsewhere, may involve grave moral obligations, obligations under sin, even mortal sin; that it may in certain cases be mortally sinful to vote for or against particular. Parliamentary candidates, and that where such a case occurs it may be the duty of a confessor to intimate his obligation to a penitent and deny him Sacramental absolution should he refuse to comply with it."
    That was the attitude taken up by the priests who interfered in the Meath election. Their conduct has never received condemnation from any authority in their Church, and it has received no blame or censure from any journal representing the views of the bulk of the Nationalist
    1130
    Members in Ireland. But it has, I regret to say, received apology and excuse. The Chief Secretary, for example, has made a long and detailed apology for it; and surely he is the last man from whom any of us who have read his works would have expected such an apology. I have been a disciple of my right hon. Friend; some of his writings I know almost by heart, and when I read that speech it occurred to me that there must have been some mistake as to his identity. My right hon. Friend said—"Why blame the priests? they have always supported the Nationalist cause." Is it, then, my right hon. Friend's doctrine that when you are fighting for the Nationalist cause you may break the law? I know no more insidious words of treason than words that say that the end justifies a breach of the law. My right hon. Friend said also—
    "I say you cannot show me any Catholic country in Europe where the ecclesiastics have achieved a standing ecclesiastical supremacy—not in France, not in Spain, not in Italy, not in Austria, not in Belgium."
    What does this mean? Why, that if you do not actually establish sacerdotal supremacy there is no harm in whatever you may do, even if you do it for the very purpose of obtaining such supremacy. So long as the supremacy cannot be termed a standing supremacy my right hon. Friend's apology approves of it. It is the right hon. Gentleman's statement to the elector of Meath that he, who is the real ruler of Ireland, will stand by or defend the priest who intimidates the elector, because in France and Spain and other countries ecclesiastical supremacy has not been maintained.
    THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. JOHN MORLEY,): My argument was not at all what my right hon. Friend represents it to have been. My point is this, that you need have no fear of the action of the priests, if one may judge from analogy and precedent in European Catholic countries.
    SIR H. JAMES: I understand my right hon. Friend. He has no fear, although the law has been broken systematically and the Meath electors have been prevented from voting according to their consciences. We have it from him now that he will stand by and

    1131
    see the law broken and see the electors in constituencies intimidated. I now implore my right hon. Friend to make his reply to-night. He is the person who has charge of Ireland, and I say that if he values the position which he occupies he must in all propriety take part in this Debate and justify what he has stated to the House to-night. At Newcastle my right hon. Friend said—
    "All this about priestly domination, so far as English parties are concerned, take my word for it, is cant."
    The right hon. Gentleman, I presume, has read the accounts of the Meath election. Is what Mr. Justice O'Brien said cant? And this comes from the author of the words—"The worst enemy not only of science, but of the best interests of democracy, is c'est le cléricalisme. My right hon. Friend is in strange company to-night. He is the first who has accused us of canting when we ask for free elections. I say he is the person who ought to make his own apology and his own defence. There is one beside him who would tell him, perhaps, that his words about cant were not quite justified. My hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General said this, on July 11th, when speaking at Cambridge—
    "Now, Catholic as I am and Irishman as I am even I am glad of the result of the Election Petitions in Meath. I think that the Bishop and priests have allowed themselves to be carried to a point of excitement in action and in language utterly unjustifiable and reprehensible."
    Mr. Speaker, will my right hon. Friend stand up now at the Table and tell us, is that cant? Those were words spoken by one of his colleagues, a Roman Catholic, spoken by one to whom, I fear, he is going to delegate his defence to-night. I ask him, is that cant? Is it cant in us to say that the conduct of the Meath priests was unjustifiable and reprehensible when his own Colleague generously says it was so? But he has another colleague, the Home Secretary. Here is what my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said at Liverpool—
    "You and I will agree that when the Bishops and clergy, to whatever denomination or Church they belong, act in the manner in which they were proved to have acted in the county of Meath—when they are accepted, or at least not repudiated, as election agents in the counties—the election cannot and ought not to remain good."
    1132
    My right hon. Friend made us proud of his frankness last night. His language will not diminish our appreciation of him; but how strange is the irony when I have to defend him against the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant! Was the Home Secretary canting? I know my right hon. Friend too well to believe that he has ever been given to canting. Still, we have the spectacle of the Chief Secretary, who has been for years the champion of all that is opposed to clerical supremacy, prejudging his own colleagues and sitting between those whom he accuses of canting. It is said that we are narrow-minded and bigoted because we pointed out that free election did not exist. ["Hear, hear!"] Those who say "hear, hear!" must mean that they are asking for protection and immunity for the priest because he was a priest, and that they will allow a priest to do what they will not allow a layman to do. We dissent from that doctrine. But we have been charged with more than being narrow-minded and bigoted. I have been told it was impious to drag a venerable Bishop before the public. I will only say that it is not I who have brought that right reverend Prelate before the public. He brought himself before the public, and if he chooses to enter into political contests he must not object to be treated as other men are. I have been accused of impiety. May I recall my right hon. Friend's attention to the answer once given by a man who, I admit, is not to be treated as an authority in the Church? He says—
    "You call me impious. Of what impiety can you accuse me? The impious are those who unworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the fashions of men. The impious are those who daring to pose as interpreters of the Divinity and to judge between Him and men exact for themselves the honours that are due to Him alone. The impious are those who have libels read in the churches. Priests of the God of Peace, you shall render an account one day, be very sure of the use to which you have dared to put His home."
    Whatever may be his thoughts now, the Chief Secretary, writing of this letter, says it is as good in dialectics as it is in moral tone. How comes in the cant?
    MR. J. MORLEY: Was I speaking of the point of view of an English political Party?
    SIR H. JAMES: The right hon. Gentleman was speaking directly of the view of the interference of a French Archbishop in politics. Now, again, we have the right hon. Gentleman explaining his position. This to him is not a matter of principle; it is a matter of expediency. We have it that he, with his great power in Ireland, is going to permit that to be done in Ireland which was wrong in France. It was wrong, as a matter of principle, while he was dealing with a French Archbishop, but not when dealing with Irish politics. If an English Archbishop had done what that Archbishop had done, would not my right hon. Friend's condemnation be as complete of that action as it would be in relation to that which he took in the case of the French Archbishop? I am sorry to have given the right hon. Gentleman so much attention. The subject is a little too broad to deal with, perhaps, to confine one's attention to the right hon. Gentleman. I am not speaking, he knows well, in personal hostility. He must know, when he stands before the English public now, occupying the position he does in the councils of his Sovereign—in the peculiar position of Governor of Ireland, every word he utters upon this subject is full of inducements to others to follow his advice. I hope he will forgive me for saying that these words are destructive of the maintenance of the great principles, which, if unheeded and unnoticed, are likely to bear that bitter fruit which he above all men would desire not to be reaped and not to be plucked by the people. There was a speech made by the hon. Member for East Edinburgh, in which he said, in the first place—
    "You have no reason to complain here. You may be assured that if the voters had been intimidated they would have come forward and said they had been intimidated."
    That certainly was a most remarkable argument to use in this House. If a mall is weak enough to be intimidated, is it likely that he will be strong enough to come forward and say so? It is, indeed, a most remarkable fact in this case that witnesses should come forward and, in the presence of their Bishop and priests, give the evidence they did. It is an advance in the independence of the Irish peasants that they should give evidence
    1134
    against their priests. Then the hon. Member used an argument which I must confess I thought would shock every Member of the Liberal Party. He said if a priest tells the peasants that their salvation depends upon their votes which they are about to give, and if the peasants believe the priests, what have the judicial tribunals or this House to do with it?
    MR. PAUL: I must apologise for interrupting the right hon. Gentleman. What I said was that if the priests told the people that their salvation depended upon their votes, and if the people believed them, they would not care for this house or any mundane authority.
    SIR H. JAMES: Let it be so, but the hon. Gentleman's argument is a very dangerous one. I think he ought to try to teach them to care. He is telling them by his argument to set the decisions of the tribunals at naught, and he is telling these peasants to be careless of the fact that they are about to be protected by the strong arm of judicial decision. I do hope that there are peasants in Ireland still who, if they were told that this House had followed the example of the hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General, and had said that the words of the Bishop and the priests were most reprehensible and unjustifiable, would believe that they ought to vote accenting to their conscience, and not be guided by the opinion of others, whoever they might be. The hon. Member also pointed out how foolish it was to urge that a judicial and purely secular authority should interfere with the influences of the priests, no matter what those influences were; and he was justifying this—that the secular authority ought never to interfere with the influence of the priest, even as it was exercised at Meath, and that freedom should be given it the priests to use what influence they like. Here, in the House of Commons, when the supporter of the Government, who is selected to make the defence against this Amendment, presents that doctrine, is it not time that protest should be made?
    MR. PAUL: I did not say that this House, or any other tribunal, ought to interfere. I should be only too glad if any tribunal could interfere with effect. But my argument was that no tribunal

    1135
    could interfere, because the power exercised by the priests, if the people believe them to exercise it, was above and beyond the power of any tribunal.
    SIR H. JAMES: The hon. Member says that no tribunal could interfere. So, then, according to this new doctrine, the Petitions in the Meath election were all wrong, and they ought never to have been presented! The sitting Members ought never to have been unseated! But by the interference of a secular tribunal this result has been achieved, and it has been admitted by the Home Secretary and by the Attorney General that justice has been done. After this argument of the hon. Gentleman, even with what he has now said, which makes his position worse, the matter is so grave and serious [cries of "Oh!"] that it cannot be lightly dealt with or met by the ejaculations of hon. Members below the Gangway. I envy not those possessors of a new Liberalism. They are the possessors of a perfectly new Liberalism, which says that this is not a matter of importance, and that it is not within the power of the secular authority to interfere with or check this sad and disgraceful state of things. I ask earnestly the House to consider what is the substance of the matter with which we are dealing? We are dealing with a system that is now claimed to be maintained, and I am appealing to Members to consider what that system, which has been carried into effect, is, and what it leads to. Sir, in the first place, there is a claim, a perfect claim, to a denial of any exercise of individual and private judgment. This is the way in which this claim is put forward. It is put forward by the Rev. Father Buchanan. His words were in relation to an article that had been sent to him when it was contended that a man should vote according to Ids conscience. Father Buchanan said—
    "An audacious and outrageous article had appeared in one of those poisonous newspapers denounced by the Bishop, which had dared to lay down in this year 1892 that a Catholic voter had a perfect right to vote for the man whom he believed to be the most desirable candidate, though the Bishop took a different view. That is pure Protestantism."
    Father Buchanan said that the passage was Protestant teaching, because it advocated the right of private judgment; because it said that it was no
    1136
    matter what view the priest and Bishop took if the conscience of the electors taught them contrary. Father Buchanan said that that doctrine had been condemned by the Church. The right hon. Gentleman says it is not of the slightest importance. Does he agree with that? It is a doctrine that has been put forward, not by one priest but by all, that a man has no right to exercise his own judgment, or to be guided by Ids own judgment, as to the way in which he should vote, but must be guided by his Bishop and his priest. The claim put forward by the Bishop of Meath is that the Archbishop and the Bishops of the Church in Ireland—29 in number—have received a divine message authorising them to determine, first, what is a question of faith and morals; secondly, how such question shall be determined; and, thirdly, how their answer shall be applied to a man's vote, and so by virtue of that divine message they claim to determine how an elector shall vote, and also that an elector who votes contrary to the way they tell him commits a mortal sin which puts him outside the pale of the Catholic Church. I say that that is the claim which has been put forward by the Bishop of Meath, and it is asserted that until that claim has been appealed against to the Church at Rome it has as much effect amongst the Irish Roman Catholics as a judgment of a Court of Law would have in this country. The Bishop of Meath claims to have the power to tell every elector in Meath how he is to vote, and that if he does not vote according to that decision, according to the code of faith and morals as drawn up by the Bishop, he commits a mortal sin, and is liable to be deprived of the offices of his Church. We are told from the Liberal Benches that it is of no importance that that doctrine shall be preached, and that we must sit silently by and allow a continuance of that system. The Liberal Party has done much to give liberty to the people of this country, and amongst other gifts it wishes now to give them that of "One Man One Vote." But what do they say to-night? One Bishop 10,000 votes. This, Sir, is a matter of no importance among those who now occupy those (the Government) Benches. Sir, I have mentioned this authoritative letter which was written

    1137
    on the eve of the Meath elections, on the 29th June. I have now an apology to make to the Home Secretary. I think in a speech he delivered some little time ago he spoke of the evils of raking up the ashes of the sinful dust. I thought at first he was referring to the Unionists, but on a second perusal of the speech I find he was doing nothing of the kind. He was complaining, I presume, of the Bishop of Meath, who, in the Pastoral Letter, was raking up the ashes of the sinful dust, and referring to Mr. Parnell's frailty, making that a reason why the electors of Meath should vote against Mr. Mahony or Mr. Dalton. The Bishop told his priests that they were to rake up Mr. Parnell's errors, and they did it from every altar. They were told in a loud voice at Mass, with their vestments on, to read these denunciations of Mr. Parnell's frailty. In the language of the learned Judge, they were found throughout the country opening the tomb and removing the coffin lid in order to attempt to array a Political Party in the shroud of a dead man's sin. This is what the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary complained of; this is what the learned Judge complained of; and this is what we all, except the Chief Secretary, complain of. As I have said, these orders of the Bishop were faithfully obeyed. Upon Sunday, the 3rd July, from every altar in both Divisions of Meath, this statement of the mortal sin that would be committed by every voter who voted for the Parnellite candidate was read. And what effect would that be likely to have? It was read; and what effect did it have? It was not spoken by one man to another; it was spoken by a priest who has been referred to to-night—Father Fay—
    "The priest is the Ambassador of Jesus Christ, and not like other Ambassadors, the priests carry their Lord and Master with them, and when the priest is wit is the people Almighty God is with them."
    That is what the Irish priest teaches the Irish peasant. The hon. Member for Devonport (Mr. E. J. C. Morton), speaking some nights ago from these Benches, said that, according to Ins observation, the people when they saw a priest coming away from Mass regarded him as one who had God in his hand. It is under these circumstances—not as man to man, but as the Ambassa-
    1138
    dor here spoken of—that from the altar, speaking with his holy vestments on, that the priests spoke to the people and told them it would be a mortal sin if they did not vote according to the bidding of the Bishop. Then, Sir, what are these peasants to do? Are they to disobey the Bishop, who tells them upon, the authority of the Church, that they must not vote contrary to the way he directs them, or they will commit a mortal sin? Are they to scoff at the authority and teaching of the Church and say this is all wrong, and so disdain the authority which the hon. and learned Member for North Louth said was conclusive until it was over-ruled? Or are they to yield and say this is the true doctrine of the Church? I must obey it, or be outside my Church, and so give up the right of judgment, and hand over my right of voting to another. What effect will this have? I do not know how many illiterate voters voted for one candidate or the other, but one of two things has happened: either the voter was intimidated, and voted according, to the order of the Bishop of Meath, or else resisted the intimidation and voted against him. And then, Sir, if he adopted the latter course the priests, who were personation agents, knew it, and the voter has had to run the risk of hearing the whole of the threats made against him—and which can be read by any person who desires to know the truth of this matter—threats that he shall not be attended in the last hours of his life, threats that he shall be excommunicated, and that the priests shall denounce him because he will not obey them. We are now told that these 1,100 men, these illiterate voters, out of an electorate of 5,000 or 6,000 are to be subjected to the knowledge of the priest who has thus threatened them, and to bear all the evil effects of these threats without any protection from any secular tribunal. If I am asked what effect these speeches had, I, in turn, would ask where is it that the priests exercised the greatest influence? I would presume they would have the greatest influence in the rural constituencies. If they are dealing with an urban constituency they are dealing with men who read the Press, who meet together, and can stand side by side and can resist the dictation of the Bishop or priest. It is not so in rural districts, where every priest knows every one of his

    1139
    parishioners. There were in Ireland at the recent elections, first, the borough contests. There were 10 borough contests not between Unionist and Nationalist, but between Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite, and in these borough contests 21,160 electors voted for the Parnellite and 15,800 for the Anti-Parnellite, very nearly a proportion of three to two, in favour of the Parnellite candidates. Of course, Dublin mainly contributed to that result, and I suppose Dublin will be regarded as a centre of intelligence in Ireland. There were 13,600 Parnellite votes recorded in Dublin. That is, the result in the boroughs was that the voting was three to two in favour of the Parnellite candidates. Now we come to the country constituencies, and there, in the 31 contests that took place between Parnellites and Anti-Parnellites, 91,000 electors voted for the Anti-Parnellites, and 43,100 voted for the Parnellites, so that in the urban constituencies the Parnellite Party has a majority of three to two voting in favour, and, in the rural constituencies, you have two to one voting against that Party. I shall look for the explanation. I know of no explanation of how it is except that the priest, when he is obeying the orders of his Bishop, is powerful to secure the return of Anti-Parnellites in the rural constituencies, but where he is not powerful is in the urban constituencies. I am aware how full this subject is of matter; I am well aware that the position which the priests have taken up can be demonstrated, but there is not time now for me to say more than I have said. Sir, I welcome, as everyone will, the presence in the House of the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister; I wish to bring to his mind all these facts; and I wish he could give some attention to this subject and do something to relieve the constituencies of that country from the shame of this sad influence. It would be the proudest—may I say it—the crowning act of his life, if he could give freedom, as he terms it, to the people of Ireland. What does that represent? Does it not represent the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty? Sir, if these things are allowed to continue; if he allows these doctrines to prevail—["Oh, oh!"]—if he allows these doctrines to prevail, and "the most reprehensible and unjustifiable
    1140
    conduct," as his own Attorney General tells him, of these priests to continue, disastrous results must follow. I know not whether under the circumstances I may appeal, apart from Party strife, to the old Liberal spirit—[laughter]—and the old Liberal spirit which was once not laughed down—["Oh, oh!"]—and—
    *MR. SPEAKER: Order, order!
    SIR H. JAMES: I care not for interruption, but I do not think it goes well to laugh and scoff at the men asking for protection. Sir, I know that there are Members of these Benches who represent and entertain the old feelings of Liberalism. I pray them for their own political safety to study these proceedings, to learn more of them, and to know what is really the state of the case. When they meet their constituents we shall not be on their platforms, but there ever will be an accuser by them, and their accuser will be to every one of them his own conscience. I say it, and they know it—["No, no!"] Sir, I say it—their conscience. They say "No," and that is the answer that is given. During the last 20 years it has been my good fortune to be allowed to assist others in doing something to procure free and pure election. The views I have expressed are not born of my Unionism. From the time we commenced the maintenance of the cause of free elections to this day there never have been such sad examples of breach of the law and interference with pure election as has been proved to exist now. I know something of this matter. You cannot tell us, as the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary did, "that he would rather be influenced by a priest than taken into a booth by a publican." That is a speech that is worthy of a partisan on the platform—it is not statesmanship. There can be no set-off in corrupt practices. You do not stop one evil by proving the existence of another; and if you prove any sufficient existence of a corrupt form let us aid you; let us help you to put an end to it. I pray this House, having regard for its honour, by all its traditions, to do something to stay this evil of corruption that disgraces it and the Liberal Party.
    "THE ATTORNEY GENERAL (Sir CHARLES RUSSELL,): The House no doubt naturally expected the

    1141
    intervention of my right hon. Friend in in this Debate. One of the earliest speeches that helped to make his reputation was delivered on this subject, now a good many years ago, and on this occasion he has, in his recently published pamphlet, supplied mental pabulum to those who desire to speak to the Amendment before the House. I could not avoid the thought, as I listened to the able speech of my right hon. Friend, that many of his sentiments, and certainly the legitimate consequences of many of his propositions, seemed to come back like an echo of speeches made in the days before Catholic emancipation, and had indeed a strong flavour of Lord Eldon about them. ["No!"] Yes, because whilst at the outset my right hon. Friend professed to desire to make no attack upon the clergy, he soon lost sight of his early promise, and attributed to Catholics, upon the supposed authority of their Church, sentiments which, if they be true, opinions which, if generally held, would have justified a great deal of the argument that was advanced in the days before Catholic emancipation. But my right hon. Friend indulged in some sentiments, briefly and eloquently expressed, upon the subject—the important subject of the free exercise of civil rights. My right hon. Friend has referred to the views the Liberal Party in days gone by have taken on this matter. Let me tell him the Liberal Party is not less anxious to-day than it was in the time when he was a member of it to preserve civil and religious liberty. My right hon. Friend began with a statement which led me to hope better things from him. He cited the authoritative statement of the Head of the Catholic Church at this time Leo XIII., as to the true dividing line between the sphere of political and the sphere of spiritual influence, and my right hon. Friend was good enough to give his approval to that decision. But having done that, he proceeds to the circumstances of these elections, and he says—
    "I admit that if it were merely these elections in Meath it would be too small a basis on which to build so great a superstructure as to make a general charge against Catholic priests and Bishops; therefore," says my right hon. Friend, "I have to show that what is done at Meath is approved outside and is adopted all over the country."
    1142
    And what was proved? That the hon. and learned Member for North Louth (Mr. T. M. Healy), who was counsel in the Election Petition, differed, if correctly reported, from the theological opinions authoritatively expressed by the Pope! The hon. and learned Member for North Louth has had many compliments paid him, but he never, I think, had a compliment paid him of the same magnitude. And into the scale the hon. and learned Member has thrown a letter of one Father Buchanan and a magazine article.
    SIR HENRY JAMES: Father Buchanan gave his evidence in the witness box.
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: I thought it was a letter, but I accept the correction. So we have on the one side the authoritative expression of the true dividing line between spiritual and political questions—the line that my right hon. Friend freely admits is justly drawn, a line that is not inconsistent with principles of civil freedom; and against that we have but the assertion attributed to the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for North Louth in his character of counsel, plus Father Buchanan, plus The Lyceum magazine article. I must confess that until this evening I never saw the magazine, and I ought to apologise for being behind the literature of this question; but my right hon. Friend did not do me the honour, as he might have done, of sending me a copy of the first, or even of the second, edition of his valuable pamphlet, which, I understand, is already printed in its tens of thousands, and at the cheapest price for dissemination throughout the land. My right hon. Friend then proceeded to attack the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. I ask the House was that attack fair or just? I do not attribute intentional unfairness, but I think my right hon. Friend was carried away by the bitterness of Party feeling. Could anything be a more complete—I will not say perversion, but misrepresentation, of the references made by my right hon. Friend to the case of Spain, France, and Belgium? What did my right hon. Friend say about those elections which I (as has been truly stated) publicly denounced as in the highest degree condemnable? The Tory Press was making a great deal of fuss about them.

    1143
    ["Hear, hear!"] I am not complaining of their doing so; they were turning it to Party account. My right hon. Friend at Newcastle said, "Don't you suppose, because there may have been this or that that is reprehensible in Meath, that that means there is going to be clerical intimidation and supremacy in Ireland"; and he pointed to the Catholic countries, France, Belgium, and Spain in justification of his position. If my right hon. Friend the Member for Bury is anxious to adopt the safest security against the existence of more clerical influence he could find no surer guarantee for freedom in civil matters than to endow the people, as a people, with their own Government, for it is participation in free civil life which is the safest and surest safeguard of civil age and of religions liberty. But, further, my right hon. Friend was, I think, unjust. It is true that my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant did use in that connection the word "cant." I do not for a moment say that everyone who has spoken on this question, or has given prominence to it, does so from any motive of cant. I am sure that very many in this House, and very many out of this House, honestly take a sincere interest in this question because of its importance from a public standpoint. But will it be denied that in connection with English Parties there has been a good deal of cant upon this subject; can it be denied that one Party after the other has tried to turn this clerical influence to account in its own political interest from time to time? The House was not so full as it is now when my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Edinburgh (Mr. Paul) was delivering that admirable and remarkable speech. He reminded us quite truly of some passages not of ancient history lint of very modern history as to the dealings with this clerical influence on the part of Political Parties. He referred to the story of the Papal Rescript and the events of that epoch, well characterized by my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, when he described the so-called, but, as I conceive, the miscalled Unionist Party, with one hand plucking the sleeve of Monsignor Per-
    1144
    sico, and with the other beating the Orange drum in Ulster. I would like, if the House will permit me, now to turn to the Amendment, and to one or two topics in connection with it. I think it the more necessary to do so because my right hon. Friend paid to that Amendment but very scant attention. It is a partnership Amendment. I believe it is the product of the joint wisdom of the so-called Liberal Unionist Party. It is an Amendment which applies not to the Meath elections merely, nor to them is it intended to be confined, but it applies to the whole of the elections that have taken place all over the Kingdom; and I believe if it were claimed we might have had some contributions from the experienced English and Scotch Members of something—I will not say in the same degree that took place in Meath, but certainly something of the same character. My hon. Friend the Member for West Belfast (Mr. Arnold-Forster) I have known for a good many years. I listened to his speech with attention, and I do not think he meant to mislead the House in any way; but I know his acquaintance with Ireland was begun at a very sad time, and when very tragic events were occurring there, and a bias seems to have been from that time given to his mind which has imparted to it a tone of exaggeration and prevented him from being able to look at any question in relation to Ireland without distortion. His speech was a demonstration of what I am saying; it was full of exaggeration—the broadest statements based on very slender facts. The first case he cited was that of an old man of 72 said to have been knocked down by a priest. Was not the law open to that man for protection and redress?
    MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN: No; not against a priest.
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: Yes, against the priest. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham says "not against the priest." Yes, against the priest. Is it only the speeches of the Irish Nationalist Member that the right hon. Gentleman studies. If he extends his vision he will see that priests, like other people, have their failings and their faults, and

    1145
    they get into Courts of Law, commit libels and assaults, and are made, as they ought to be made, amenable to the law like every other subject. The next point my hon. Friend referred to was a publication in a newspaper which I do not know, but which I think is called The Westmeath Nationalist. What did that reference prove? Just the opposite of what he desired to prove. His whole argument was directed to show that the law was not competent to deal with the evils in question. What was that case? That article was condemned as a contempt of Court, and for commenting upon the pending proceedings the editor was called up and sent to gaol.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER: He was fined, not sent to gaol.
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: Well, if not sent to gaol, he was fined; it is not material which. ["Oh, oh!] The point is, that he was punished and dealt with by the law as the Judges who administer that law thought right; and whether that person was sent to prison or fined, surely the hon. Member opposite, who interrupts me, must see it makes no difference to the argument. As I understood my hon. Friend, some rev. gentleman (Father Fahy, I think), also made some speech which was supposed to be intimidation of witnesses, and was sent to gaol for that.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER: He was committed for contempt; and sent to prison.
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: Again the law was vindicated and the offender against it punished. And, finally, we come to the day of the Election Petition itself, and we find that in that county so terrorised over a number of witnesses were found sufficient to satisfy the Judges that there had been widespread undue influence, and that, tribunal, one of its members being himself a Catholic Judge, did vindicate the law by sentence. I really think I am justified in saying—and I do not retract one word of what has fallen from me before—that while there were matters in that election condemnable, greatly to be reprehended, and properly to be put down by the law, yet there was a great deal of exaggeration, a great deal too much im-
    1146
    portance has been attributed to it, and, as I believe, attributed to it for political purposes. My right hon. Friend has cited one authority as to clerical influence. I will cite another, a pronouncement of the late Lord Fitzgerald while on the Bench, and I commend it to the House, because, while I have expressed my satisfaction at the result of the Meath Petition, I do not by that mean to say that I endorse all that has been said by the learned Judges in that Petition. In my judgment they dwelt upon some matters which I do not think came within the category of undue influence at all. This is what Lord Fitzgerald said—
    "The Catholic priest has, as he ought to have, great influence. His position, his sacred character, his superior education, and the identity of his interests with those a his flock ensure it to him, and that influence receives ten-fold force from the affection of his people, for it is almost always exerted for their welfare."
    He admits, amongst other things, it is the right and duty of the priests to point out to the elector the true line of moral conduct.
    COLONEL SANDYS: May I ask if the Ballot Act had been passed at that time?
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: The Ballot Act was not then existing, but the question is irrelevant. Now, Sir, my right hon. Friend must see that if it is the duty of the priest to point out the true line of moral conduct to the people, it must also be his duty in the last degree to point out where that line is traversed.
    SIR HENRY JAMES: If you read the Judgment you will see that it means they did not point that out.
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: That is a question, with great respect to my right hon. and learned Friend, which is not strictly to the point. But what was this Meath election, after all? Mr. Speaker, it was not a contest which was carried out in any sense between opposing religions. It was au election in which each or the candidates represented the same Political Party and I think the same religious belief, certainly differences of religion in no way entered into the contest. The Bishop and priests took one side in it—whether rightly

    1147
    or wrongly I do not stop to inquire, because it is not relevant to the argument. They did so for reasons which seemed to them admirable. They are entitled to their opinions. I think they exceeded their proper influence, but they were brought before a tribunal and set right, and the law has been vindicated. The true secret of the influence of the priests in Ireland is this: that up to recent years they were the only class in Ireland who could stand up as independent men and champion popular rights. It is the belief of the people that, though the priests make mistakes as all men do, that, though they may do reprehensible things, as all men do, their efforts are in the main unselfishly directed to the good of the country, as they are bound up with its interests. It has not been adequately recognised in this House that in the old troublous days of Secret Societies they were the power that set itself against them, and everyone who has hail to do with the government of Ireland must acknowledge how persistently they have striven to end that bane of social and political life in that country. If hon. Members understood this question, they would find, as pointed out by the hon. Member for West Belfast, that in Ireland the people have been influenced by the priests in the direction the people themselves wished to go. But when public sympathy has been opposed to the influence of the priests, that influence has not been sufficient to counteract the will of the people. I am not going to say any more about this election. I turn for a moment or two to the second part of the Amendment. Here we get to the real motive of the Amendment. His first object on rising was to discredit the Government of my right hon. Friend in Ireland by making the statement that there was not a loyal subject who had the least respect for him or the least faith in him. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Bordesley Division, and the hon. Member for South Tyrone, who has recently come back from a voyage or discovery, thinks that is right, and they have no respect for my right hon. Friend.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER: I did not use the words quoted by the right hon. Gentleman. I said "No confidence."
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: No confidence! Very well. No loyal subject can have confidence in my right hon. Friend. If, Mr. Speaker, there is one word more abused than another in Irish matters it is this word "loyal." Hon. Gentlemen should remember that the object of government is to content the body of those who are governed. It is not to buttress up a class; and if the object, of government is to content the body of the people, the Irish people will learn to respect—aye, have learned to respect—the right hon. Gentleman and his government of Ireland. Now, my hon. Friend the Mover of the Amendment suggests certain remedies for what he complains of. What are those remedies? He objects to the Chief Secretary exercising what he has called a dispensing power. He refers to the police. He says that a rebuff has been given to him such as no Minister ever before received. I do not know whether he understands the subject. The Chief Secretary is pursuing practically the same course as was pursued by his predecessors. If rebuff there be, it is a reline equally to a long series of Irish Ministers—going back even to the time or Thomas Drummond—a name still revered in Ireland. So much for that question of the dispensing power. Then my hon. Friend would disfranchise all illiterate voters.
    MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER: May I say, SIR—
    SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: I do not think you need trouble. My hon. Friend did not say disfranchise, he only meant it. He would deprive the illiterate voter of the means by which they are at present enabled to vote. ["No, no!"] Well, if that was not it, what was it he did say? Am I right? [Mr. ARNOLD-FORSTER assented.] Quite so; I am right. If not, the hon. Gentleman would correct me, and then he would reduce the representation of Ireland, south of the Boyne. And as far as I can understand, the hon. Gentleman Would in that reduction have a careful regard for the so-called Parnellite Party. The Nationalist Party, it appears, has a stronger hold on the country—and is more the Party of the country—than it has in the towns, It is stated that, as regards the

    1149
    bulk of the Nationalist Party, they have the representation of the country, and that they have the representation of Cork, Kilkenny, Limerick, and Galway, the Parnellite Party having Waterford, and Dublin. Now, Mr. Speaker, I will not trouble the House much longer. I will just make one comment on the concluding observations of my hon. Friend who moved the Amendment. He said what was wanted in Ireland—it was actually an anti-Home Rule speech—was a continuation of the Union. He did not use these words; but he told us what was wanted was a continuation of that healthy current of public opinion, blowing from this country, which keeps the air pure in Ireland. That current, Sir, has been blowing for well nigh a hundred years, and yet the atmosphere is anything but satisfactory, according to the views of my hon. Friend. I hate nothing more to say except to return thanks to the House for having heard rite with so much indulgence. I did not come down to this house to-night with the intention of taking part in this Debate. I submit to the judgment of the House that this Amendment is not brought forward for a legitimate purpose, or, that if it is brought forward for a legitimate purpose, it is not in its proper place. Its aim is to discredit beforehand the question of Home Rule, and I subunit, further, that it has been made the means of ventilating gross exaggerations—yes, gross exaggerations—upon the subject of clerical influence in Ireland, and that there is nothing in the circumstances of the Meath elections that has not been adequately dealt with by law, and that an unfounded conclusion will be arrived at by this House if it be induced to think that any exceptional course is demanded or required.
    *MR. JUSTIN MCCARTHY: I can promise the House that I shall not stand long between it and the forthcoming Division. I think it is hardly right this Debate should come to a conclusion without some expression of opinion on behalf of the Party with whom have the honour to act and whom I represent. We have had a very long and a very various kind of Debate. The speech of the right hon. Gentleman (Sir H. James) would furnish enough for a whole encyclopædia of literature
    1150
    and theology; but he said nothing—he did not suggest one single remedy for the class of evil which he deprecated. I heard a suggestion made by an hon. Member below me—that was, that the Catholics of Ireland should cultivate the friendship of the English people, and try to lift their national faith to a higher level. I hope the Irish people will try to oblige the hon. Gentleman, and raise their faith to the dignity of his friendship. The right hon. and learned Gentleman has made a perfect mountain out of these elections. Has not the law done already what the law was intended to do? If there was intimidation has it not been dealt with by law? If there was intimidation so great as was described, why were no persons convicted of it; and if the terror of priestly power was so great in these counties, why is it that the Party who were defeated before are so anxious to rush back—why are they so anxious to go back and fight the same fight in the same way, on the same ground, and on the same issues? There was nothing of the extensive intimidation that has been talked about so freely. When gentlemen opposite or on the Benches above the Gangway on this side speak of intimidation they speak as if there were intimidation all over the country, but they have no evidence in support of that. I want to say just a few words to describe the view which my friends and myself take of these proceedings. We are opposed to any kind or influence, spiritual or otherwise, being brought in the way of intimidation against any voter. We stand up for every man getting the full freedom that the Ballot was intended to give him. We admit that things were written and done and published at these elections to which we could not possibly give our approval, but we have heard here only one side. We have not heard anything of the terrorism exercised on the other side, and exercised in the most practical and substantial form. I do not know how the right hon. Gentleman opposite (Sir H. James) would propose getting rid of the influence, of the priest. It could not be done by Act of Parliament. That influence, I would say to tine House, has grown out of your system of government. There was a time when the Irish priest was the only friend the Irish

    1151
    peasant had to stand between him and class ascendancy. The influence of the priest is surrounded by historic memories, and the great heart of the Irish priesthood is always true and devoted to the Irish people, and, whatever laws may be made, that influence will continue, and its power for good will never diminish. I wish to say, for my own part and on behalf of those acting with me, that we do not approve of any intimidation, spiritual or lay, that could interfere with the power of any man in recording his vote.
    MR. T. HARRINGTONsaid, he could not allow the Division to be taken without saying one or two words in reference to the position of himself and his Party (the Parnellites) in reference to this Amendment. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Bury would not be surprised to hear that the Party to which he (Mr. Harrington) belonged viewed with extreme suspicion the interest which he took in this question, and therefore that they, against whom this system of intimidation was directed, and they who had the most reason to complain of the "cant," were not so forgetful of the interests of Ireland as to go into the Division Lobby with the right hon. Gentleman. He wished to point out that in the whole of these contests there was nothing—not one shred of evidence—to show that there was any sectarian feeling. The Attorney General had stated that they were all of the same religion, but he did not state what was a fact—that one of the candidates was a Protestant. They (the Parnellites) did not want to deprive anybody in Ireland of civil rights, much less to interfere with the priests of Ireland. But, so far as the influences applied in Meath were concerned, the remedy was that the Irish Catholics should understand their rights. Notwithstanding all that had been said, and all that had been done, they (the Parnellites) went within 82 of returning one of their men, and within a few hundreds of returning the other. He wished to state before sitting down that his Party would not take part in the Division. He, therefore, would not support the Amendment which had been proposed. Rather than give his vote in contradiction to the statement that clerical influence
    1152
    did prevail in these elections, he should decline—and he thought those who usually acted with him would also decline—to take part in the Division at
    Question put.
    The House divided:—Ayes 205; Noes 248.—(Division List, No. 8.)

MOTIONS.

  BUILDING LEASES (HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND) BILL.
  On Motion of Dr. MacGregor, Bill to alter and amend the Law relating to Leases for Building in the Highland Counties of Scotland, ordered to be brought in by Dr. MacGregor, Mr. Leng, and Mr. Angus Sutherland.
  Bill presented, and read first time. [Bill 195.]

  RAILWAY AND CANAL TRAFFIC (RESTRICTION OF CHARGES) BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. Young, Bill to restrict the Charges by Railway and other Companies for the conveyance of merchandise, ordered to be brought in by Mr. Young, Mr. M'Cartan, and Mr. Knox.
  Bill presented, and read first time. [Bill 196.]

  FIRE INQUESTS BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. Brookfield, Bill to provide for the holding of Fire inquests, ordered to be brought in by Mr. Brookfield, Mr. Noble, Mr. Marling, Mr. Pierpoint, and Mr. Boscawen.
  Bill presented, and read first time. [Bill 197.]

  SALE OF INTOXICATING LIQUORS TO CHILDREN BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. Conybeare, Bill to prohibit the Sale of Intoxicating Liquors to Children, ordered to be brought in by Mr. Conybeare, Mr. William Johnston, Mr. Peter M'Lagan, Mr. Murray Macdonald, Mr. Alfred Thomas, and Mr. Owen.
  Bill presented, and read first time. [Bill 198.]

  NOTICE OF ACCIDENTS BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. Burt, Bill for providing for notice of and inquiry into Accidents occurring in certain Employments and Industries, ordered to be brought in by Mr. Burt, Mr. Mundella, and Mr. Secretary Asquith.
  Bill presented, and read first time. [Bill 199.]
  House adjourned at twenty minutes after one o'clock till To-morrow.