THIRD READING.

HC Deb 07 August 1894 vol 28 cc269-363

Order for Third Reading read.

THE SOLICITOR GENERAL (Sir R. T. REID,&c.) Dumfries,

said, he would move to amend the title of the Bill by inserting after the word "(Ireland)" the words "Migration and," so as to make it read "The Evicted Tenants (Ireland) Migration and Arbitration Bill."

Amendment agreed to.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read the third time."—{Mr. J. Morley.)

MR. BRODRICK (Surrey, Guildford)

said, he rose to move that the Bill be read a third time that day three months. He had not risen at once, because he had hoped that the Chief Secretary, in moving the Third Reading of the Bill, would have given the House some means of judging to what extent the speech of the right hon. Member for Bodmin (Mr. Courtney) the other night had influenced the Government. Nobody having regard to the course of proceedings on the Bill could be surprised at a Motion for its rejection coming from the Opposition side of the House, though he very much regretted it should be necessary to make it. He should have been glad if the Chief Secretary, looking to the position in which they found themselves, had been able to make some communication to the House which would have placed them in possession of the most recent views of the Government. On the last occasion on which effective Debate on the Bill took place—for he entirely excluded the two or three days of discussion which the right hon. Gentleman had enjoyed without the presence of the Members of the Opposition—they had addressed to them by the Member for Bodmin an eloquent, well-weighed, and earnest appeal to save the Bill. That appeal was addressed to both sides of the House, but he would point out that it only affected the Government. If there was anything to be done towards saving the Bill it was not the Opposition who had to do it. The Opposition had never had any part or parcel in the Bill. They had nothing to do with its preparation, and they were not responsible for what was contained in it, and obviously, from their point of view, besides the compulsory clauses, the measure contained very much that was open to objection. On that point he would say something presently; but in referring to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin, he trusted he might be excused if he said a word on behalf of a body of gentlemen to whom he had addressed something that was more than the remonstrance and warning which he addressed to other Members of the House. The right hon. Gentleman, in the course of his speech, referred to what he called "a junta of irreconcilable landlords," on whom he laid practically the whole blame for the present difference between Parties in that House on this subject, and addressed to them what was more a scolding than a remonstrance. He said— We are in this situation, not only an respect to the Bill itself, but also as to the way it is conducted—that the true conduct ha passed from those who know to the less-informed as well as less responsible class of Members. Whereas we had the evidence and the testimony of people who had the conduct of tike Government in their hands on the one side, we have now on the other got a junta of irresponsible landlords putting their power on those who ought to resist them. Those words had been loudly cheered by all sides of the House, and he had no reason to think that how. Members in the least receded from those cheers. He did not think, in the circumstances, that it would have been very difficult to have arrived at some arrangement or compromise in connection with the subject. He (Mr. Brodrick) would not consent to sit down under the imputation that the Irish landlords or any other class of persons had dictated to the Opposition the course to be taken in regard to this Bill. If there had been any departure from sound policy, if there had been any falling back from good citizenship in this matter, if there had been any introduction of private interests, it was not on that side of the House. They must search for it in other quarters. If they wanted to appreciate the present position in which they stood that night—and he admitted it was a critical position—they must look back to the past history of this Bill. Why was it pressed upon them at this moment? It was pressed upon them by the Chief Secretary on the grounds of urgency and of expediency. But what were the facts with regard to this urgency? The hon. Member for Waterford made a speech to his constituents as early as August or September, 1892, in which he declared that it was the duty of the Government to call Parliament together in the autumn to deal with an Evicted Tenants Bill. Instead of doing that the Government appointed the Mathew Commission, which body, reported in February, 1893. In March, 1893, a measure was introduced by hon. Members below the Gangway to deal with the evicted tenants. That brought the subject into notice, and the Chief Secretary, with certain reservations, supported the Bill. Before the Question was put from the Chair on that occasion the hon. Member for Kerry rose in his place and explained in justification of the Closure Motion, which he (Mr. Brodrick) believed the hon. Member moved, that the matter was urgent. It was a matter, he said, which would affect large classes of tenants in Ireland, and which was so urgent that the House should not delay even for a few weeks dealing with it. There was no doubt what was the opinion as to urgency on the Benches below the Gangway; but was that opinion shared by the Chief Secretary and the Government? Parliament sat for 12 months after that, and not an effort was made to give effect to the strong feeling on the Benches below the Gangway by giving a day for the further discussion of the measure. Parish Councils were declared urgent, Employers' Liability was urgent, various other small measures to which days were devoted were urgent, but the question of evicted tenants in Ireland was not urgent, and did not assume urgency during the last Session of Parliament, which lasted up to March of the present year. Then they came to 1894. It was true that early in the Session—that was to say, on the 19th of April—the Chief Secretary introduced this Bill, but he gave them no idea of its urgency on that occasion. It took its place in the general scramble—with the Registration Bill, the Local Veto Bill, the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, and all the other Bills for which there was a scramble at the end of the Session. He would test the Chief Secretary's plea of urgency by what he considered an infallible test. The Finance Bill had precedence, but there was an interval of one week between the Committee stage and Report. What did the Government do in that week? All that week was given, for the first time in Parliamentary history at so early a period of the Session, to the discussion of Army Estimates, though at that time the Secretary of State for War had enough money to last him until October. On July 18 the Bill assumed a sudden urgency. Vigorous speeches had been made against it on the Second Reading, to which very little reply was given by Her Majesty's Government. Obvious defects in the measure were pointed out. The fact that it dealt with every householder in Ireland who had been evicted, as well as every landholder, was pointed out. No reply was forthcoming. The Chief Secretary shook his head, but he (Mr. Brodrick) would put it to him, had he attempted to justify the provisions of the Bill? The Bill was absolutely riddled by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Dublin University. ["Oh!"j Yes, everyone on the Benches below the Gangway knew that the Bill was absolutely riddled by the right hon. and learned Member.

An IRISH MEMBER: We are not fools.

MR. BRODRICK

said, there was not one Member sitting on the Benches below the Gangway who would not have risen to defend the Bill had he had a place on the Front Ministerial Bench after its condemnation by the Member for the University of Dublin. On the Committee stage they were allowed two nights, and then the Closure was rigidly enforced. Presented in this way he thought the case for urgency was an extraordinarily weak one. When they came to look at the scope of the Bill he could not help asking why, if the Chief Secretary had been in earnest in pressing upon the House this measure as vital to the peace and order of Ireland during the winter, he had not restricted the Bill within the narrowest limits which he thought were likely to attain his object in order to get it through Parliament. He had done nothing of the kind. Why during all these months did he not take some means of ascertaining the view of those without whose cooperation he could not expect to get this Bill through without a long struggle? The Member for Bodmin talked of compromise, but why was that not in the mind of the Chief Secretary months ago? Had any communication passed with this side of the House? Until the speech of that right hon. Gentleman no attempt at conciliation had been made with the Opposition in regard to this Bill. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin had said— He felt that it was desirable, urgent, and necessary to deal in some way with the cloud of evicted tenants who were found in a landless and workless condition near the places where they once dwelt and worked; and, to his mind, their necessity was an abiding evil. But was this Bill restricted to tenants who had been evicted? On the first night in Committee the Chief Secretary and the Law Officers were forced to confess that the Bill had been so drawn that every tenancy that had been determined during the last 15 years was one on which a tenant might claim reinstatement. It was possible under the Bill as it stood now—as it was presented to the House for Third Reading—that a tenant who had sold his holding for 20 years' purchase of his rent might claim to come back under the conditions imposed by the Bill.

MR. T. M. HEALY

He might claim the Bank of England, but would he be likely to get it?

MR. BRODRICK

said, that in the case he was referring to the thing was quite possible. What had the hon. and learned Member for Louth done last night? He moved an Amendment to empower the Commissioners to compensate an evicted tenant who had established himself in business and did not desire to leave it. The hon. Member said— There were not many cases of the kind he sought to meet by his Amendment, but there might be a few, in which the former tenant might have set up in business at a considerable distance away from the holding, having formed new relations, and might be willing to give up the goodwill of the holding on receiving a certain sum. Something ought to be given to a former tenant for his goodwill, even if he was not anxious to return to his old holding.

MR. T. M. HEALY

said, it was true he wished to provide for a few cases of widows and orphans. There would be a few people—a very few—who, on account of their position, might desire to receive a sum of money for the goodwill. He would point out that his proposal had not been accepted.

MR. BRODRICK

said, that that showed that the Bill as it stood was not a Bill for the reinstatement of evicted tenants, but that it amounted to a tenants' indemnification Bill. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary had still to justify his position in extending the operation of the Bill beyond the cases of landless and destitute people residing in Land League huts or other places in the vicinity of their old holdings—these being the people who had excited sympathy. These were the people for whom the Mathew Commission had regard. They had said that these people were kept out of holdings which landlords were often endeavouring against their own interest to cultivate, or which were going back into a state of nature. The Opposition had moved an Amendment to the effect that tenants who had left the country should not be included in the Bill. That was met by an indignant protest from the Chief Secretary, and the Bill was now left in such a way that a man who had been in America for 12 years might come back and claim to be reinstated. By this Bill good, bad, and indifferent tenants were placed on the same level. One of the worst delusions with regard to the measure was that it would punish landlords who were equally guilty with regard to the eviction of tenants. What he objected to was that it placed landlords of all classes upon the same footing. If a landlord had acted unreasonably he should not be surprised if by the Bill he was compelled to receive back an evicted tenant whether he liked it or not, but the Government compelled equally to consent to such a course the landlord who had acted reasonably. The Government tried to force landlords like the Marquess of Lansdowne and the hon. Member for South Hunts, against whom before the Plan of Campaign nothing was alleged, into the dock beside Lord Clanricarde. The argument of the National League was that if Lord Clanricarde had given fair reductions such as were given by other landlords they would not have enforced the Plan of Campaign against him. But that contention did not apply to the case of the hon. Member for South Hunts in the least degree.

MR. CONDON

That was a worse case.

MR. BRODRICK

said, there had never been a suggestion that there were cases of hardship on his estate, but, because of his conduct on behalf of other landlords, the National League thought it worth while to spend £70,000 in trying to reduce the hon. Member to submission, and they failed to do it. To say that what was sauce for Lord Clanricarde was sauce for other landlords in Ireland was a proposition he hardly thought the Chief Secretary would he prepared to uphold. With regard to the Arbitrators, he heard their names with the greatest astonishment. If anything could add to the dissatisfaction which was felt by those who wished to see this question settled on equitable grounds, it was that men had not been appointed who possessed the confidence of all Parties. He believed that by merely taking the Land Commission they would have taken men not only of high standing, but of judicial training, and who would have commanded respect. Mr. Piers White, he believed, was universally admitted to be an eminent Queen's Counsel. What his politics were he had not the least idea. [An Irish MEMBER: "He is a Unionist."] Mr. George Fottrell was a man of ability, but he certainly could not be described as a representative of the landlords. If they were not going to put the landlords' and tenants' position as a selection from the landlords and a selection from the tenants, on what possible ground did the Chief Secretary justify the appointment of Mr. Greer? Those who had read Mr. Greer's evidence before the Committee upstairs must be aware that there was not a single point on which Mr. Greer had a word to say on behalf of the landlords' side of the case. He should like to ask the Chief Secretary whether this gentleman was appointed before or after he delivered that evidence?

MR. J. MORLEY

I cannot remember for the moment.

MR. T. W. RUSSELL

I rise to a point of Order. I wish to ask if the hon. Member is in Order in commenting on evidence given by witnesses before a Committee which has not yet reported to the House?

* MR. SPEAKER

As the evidence has not been published, or any Report yet presented to the House, any reference to what passed before that Committee would be out of Order.

MR. BRODRICK

said, that the Chief Secretary would have an opportunity of justifying the appointment after the Committee had reported. All he (Mr. Brodrick) would say was that a person who had delivered himself strongly on one side or the other would not be likely to give satisfaction on the Commission. The status of these Arbitrators was to be entirely irresponsible. They were not like Judges, with a legal reputation to keep up. They were not like Members of the House or Ministers, who could be challenged in the House. They were not permanent, and, therefore, according to hon. Members below the Gangway, they were liable to be interfered with. Under the circumstances, he thought that at least the Commissioners should have been men of impartiality and recognised status. When the evidence taken before the Committee was compared with speeches delivered in the House Members would understand the feeling of the Opposition with regard to these appointments. He should not for a moment say that the rejection of the Bill, if the House would agree to its rejection, was not a critical measure. The course of events of the present Session, and the utterances of responsible Members, showed that, in some respects, the turning point in the Irish Question had been reached. If they rejected the Bill they had been promised from some quarters that agitation would take place in Ireland during the ensuing winter; but if they accepted the Bill, were they certain to be free from such agitation? The hon. Member for Waterford (Mr. J. E. Redmond) had declined to accept the Bill, and had treated it as an instalment and as incomplete. What was there to prevent the hon. Member, if the Bill were passed in its present shape, from going about Ireland throughout the winter exciting the minds of the tenants who were not to be reinstated because those who had taken their places refused to give way to them? He knew that it was said this Bill would be a timely concession to Irish grievances. He knew what followed on the rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill in 1880. Possibly hon. Members opposite were thinking of some similar result if this Bill were rejected. He would, however, remind them that after the Land Act of 1881 and the Arrears Act of 1882—a measure not very dissimilar from the present Bill—agitation proceeded merrily enough in Ireland. It was impossible to isolate this particular Bill and the difficulty it was intended to meet from the general land question in Ireland. The Committee upstairs had made it abundantly clear that in the opinion of a certain number of Members fresh legislation might be required on the land question, and the complete standstill at which the Purchase Act had arrived must present to many Members a subject for most serious consideration. If this Bill were accepted by all Parties as a final settlement, two questions would still remain open for future agitation. It was an almost appalling prospect that after 15 years of struggle and the passing of five great Laud Acts, after safeguards and concessions had been given which were unrivalled in any country in the world in regard to land legislation, and after exertions had been made in the House of Commons in reference to Irish laud legislation which were unparalleled in the history of any Legislative Assembly, even if this Bill were passed there would be left open two great questions on which the Nationalist Members had time after time expressed their intention of asking for fresh concessions. It seemed as if, even after the acceptance of this Bill, the House would still be on the threshold of its labours. On what grounds did the Nationalist Members ask the landlords to give a complete amnesty to those against whom they considered they had a valid grievance? He did not believe there was any irreconcilable spirit on the part of the landlords in this matter if they could, with justice to those whom they were bound to protect—namely, the tenants who had shown the courage in times of great trouble to stand out again inducements to dishonesty at no inconsiderable personal danger—if they could, with justice to these tenants, come to terms with the Nationalist Members, he trusted that no sense of injury and no feeling of personal bitterness, and no desire to snatch a petty triumph, would stand in the way. If, however, there was to be an amnesty it must be an amnesty on both sides. He, for one, would not be a party to an arrangement under which the landlords from a desire for peace were to accept as tenants men who had wronged them in the past, and men who would not be able to pay their rents in the future, unless the Nationalist Members would undertake that if any of those tenants who had occupied the evicted holdings declined to go out there should be an amnesty for them, that there should be no denunciations of them as land-grabbers, and no attempt to drive them from their holdings. Was there going to be an amnesty as regarded the Purchase Acts? Were hon. Members who wanted to give the tenants a right to come in and sell their interests tomorrow for as many years' purchase as they could get for them going to take off the embargo on purchase which he admitted had brought down the value of land from 17 years to 14 or 15 years purchase? Hon. Members still had ringing in their ears the words of the hon. Member for Mayo (Mr. Dillon)—namely, that when the Nationalist Members came out of the struggle they would remember who were the people's friends and who were the people's enemies, and they would deal out their rewards to the one and their punishments to the other. If the hon. Member still adhered to these words, with what face could he ask the House for an amnesty for those who had fallen in the struggle? Not a whisper had been heard from the Nationalist Benches which would encourage the landlords to make any concession whatever, nor had there been heard any assurances which would justify those who desired peace and order in Ireland to believe that a timely concession to the Nationalist Members would induce them to turn their forces in the direction of peace. The Opposition were asked to pass this Bill with all its imperfections, not having been allowed to discuss it, not having had one concession made to their views, and with the knowledge that those who pressed it forward did not consider it to be a complete settlement of the question. If the Government would consent to make the Bill voluntary it was certain that the whole Nationalist Party would go to Ireland saying that they had received half a loaf for breakfast, and that there was no reason why they should not have their dinner and their supper. He should not despair of settling this question, and the whole of the matters connected with Ireland and Irish land, if the Chief Secretary would not confuse the purpose of securing peace with that of conciliating his Irish forces. If the Chief Secretary would take up the three subjects of evicted tenants, purchase, and the settlement of doubts and difficulties which had arisen with regard to the interpretation of the Land Acts—if he would do this in the spirit of compromise and conciliation, and attempt to bring both parties together without having any idea of getting a Party advantage, he (Mr. Brodrick) did not believe that reasonable men would be found to have very extreme differences on the subject. When the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Midlothian (Mr. W. E. Gladstone) introduced the Arrears Bill he said that in the first place it was equitable, secondly it was safe, and lastly it would be effectual. Whether it was equitable he (Mr. Brodrick) did not know, but it certainly was not safe, and he doubted whether it had proved effectual. As to this Bill, he denied that it was equitable, he doubted whether it was safe, and he knew that every Irish Member in the House agreed in believing that it would prolong the difficulty. If the Government were going by this Bill to reverse the policy of successive Land Acts and to run counter to the pledges of successive Ministers, with the object of producing peace and order, they must do so apart from the idea of coercing a large minority in the House of Commons, and flinging down the gauntlet to a large majority in the other House. Peace could not be restored by jeering at the landlords as irreconcilable. It could only be brought about, if at all, by adopting a system of conciliation instead of compulsion and by appointing Arbitrators who were not political partisans. The question could not be settled by giving everything to one side and taking all from the other side. He trusted that the Chief Secretary for Ireland would give up these meanderings after a temporary majority, and would address himself to the Land question with determination and steadfastness to meet the question of how far peace could be secured in Ireland. He did not believe that if the right hon. Gentleman did this he would find himself met either by prejudice or by personal feeling on the Opposition side of the House. But assuredly if he clung to the provisions of this Bill and could not avoid re-kindling past discord and sowing the seeds of future disorder this measure, even if it were affirmed by Parliament, must result in the failure which was inherent in the principles embodied in it, and which the right hon. Gentleman himself had provoked by bringing the Bill forward without discussion, and pressing it through the House by measures which had never before been employed in regard to any measure submitted to the British Parliament.

Amendment proposed, to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day three months."—(Mr. Brodrick.)

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

MR. W. O'BRIEN (Cork)

The hon. Member for Guildford (Mr. Brodrick) thought it necessary to set out by declaring that the policy of the Opposition in regard to this Bill was not dictated by the landlords of Ireland. Well, Sir, if that be so, it seems rather a pity that a member of the landlord class in Ireland should have been selected to move the rejection of the Bill on the Third Reading, and that another Member of that class should have been selected to move its rejection on Second Reading, and to announce what would be its fate in another place. The hon. Member for Guildford taunted us with having confounded in the same category of Irish landlords the hon. Member for South Hunts (Mr. Smith-Barry), and Lord Clanricarde. Whose fault, Sir, is that? Why did the hon. Member deliberately ally himself, and combine with the exterminating landlords of Ireland? More than that, I am sorry to say that up to this hour there has been no repudiation of that connection. The hon. Member apparently adopted the association between the hon. Member for South Hunts and Lord Clanricarde. I ask the House to remember this fact: that not a single Irish landlord who has spoken in this Debate—so far, at all events—has said a single conciliatory word or a word of anything like a genuine and real concession. On the contrary; most of the speeches that have been made by Irish landlords in these Debates, I am sorry to say, have proved only too clearly that those gentlemen are just as vindictive and irreconcilable as ever. All the giving has been on one side. [Opposition laughter.] Certainly we have gone to the utmost possible lengths for peace, and we are willing to go to the utmost possible lengths for peace. We want no personal victory. The Member for Guildford has talked about amnesty. We have not concealed our desire for an amnesty as to the past on both sides. We cannot now speak as to the future. We are dealing with the past and the results of the past, and I venture to say that we are now, and we have always been, willing to go to any reasonable length or to make any reasonable sacrifice of personal or political feeling in order to create a genuine peace in Ireland, and a better feeling in Ireland, so that whatever changes may come hereafter in the law of Ireland, as of course they will come, they may be carried out in a peaceful and constitu- tional way, and that is all you have a right to demand from us. Even at this moment I venture to say that we would not stop at trifles if there was any genuine desire on the part of the Members of the Opposition to this Bill to make an adequate response to the memorable speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin (Mr. Courtney) the other night, or if there was any genuine declaration that the landlords meant peace, and that they would work this Bill in any honest way; I venture to say that up to the present moment we have had nothing except declarations of hostility and insult from the landlords. I am afraid our moderation has been only too great. It has been misunderstood by the House, and the landlords of Ireland have mistaken our desire for conciliation and peace among our fellow-countrymen for a sign of weakness and fear. I believe that the Irish people and their Representatives, instead of erring in the direction of harshness towards the Irish landlords, have erred rather in the direction of softness and good nature. We have laboured for the past two years with might and main to create a better state of feeling in Ireland, and to have the difference that must exist conducted with better temper and in a strictly constitutional way. What is the position with regard to this Bill? Here it is proposed not to do Irish landlords any injustice, but to hand over to them a quarter of a million of money which they could never otherwise hope to obtain; we offer them peace in the country on the one condition of forgetting and forgiving, on both sides, as to the past. But, no. These gentlemen think that the desire for peace on the part of the Irish Party means that we are afraid of them. They think that their opportunity has come for offering 200 Irish victims on the altar of landlord vengeance. That is their calculation, and with that object they are now willing deliberately to plunge the country into a condition of turmoil and disturbance, and to arouse passions before which I venture to remind them that they have flinched before, and before which you will find them crying out in panic and dismay ere six months are over. It has been so in the past, and it will be so in the future. The landlords, I am sorry to say, think that this is their opportunity. They knew that there were certain differences among Irish Nationalists. They knew that the Irish people were and are determined to co-operate to the utmost extent with the Chief Secretary and even to bear injustice rather than interfere with the process of pacification that is being carried on in Ireland. How did they take advantage of that opportunity? Did they show a single spark of anything like generous or patriotic feeling in Ireland during the past two years? On the contrary; I venture to say they utilised and availed themselves of the circumstances in order to extort more rack rents, or arrears of rack rents, and to establish more land-grabbers in Ireland than they had any power of doing at any time for the last 15 years. And now when the country is tranquillised and when they think that the power of the popular organisation is more or less relaxed, these gentlemen have conceived the brilliant idea of striking a last blow at the popular organisation by exterminating the evicted tenants, their calculation apparently being that if they could succeed in nothing else they could succeed in throwing the country again into a state of disturbance, and in that way attempt to discredit the ad ministration of the Chief Secretary. I venture to say that is a hateful work, worthy of the worst days of Irish land lordism, and in my humble opinion, at all events, it is very doubtful whether it is a wise policy, even from the point of view of the prettiest party wire-pullers. Irish Nationalists have their differences, no doubt, but so far as the mass of our people are concerned we are united as one man in detestation of land-grabbing and in the determination that these evicted tenants shall not be hounded down. It is just possible that the action of the landlords in this matter may have a certain influence in obliterating instead of increasing the differences among Irish Nationalists, because if men in another place carry out their treaty with the hon. and gallant Member for North Armagh——

COLONEL SAUNDERSON (Armagh, N.)

I beg the hon. Member's pardon. There is no treaty between me and the Members of another place. I know nothing whatever about the intentions of the House of Lords. I only stated my opinion.

MR. W. O'BRIEN

I hope that the hon. and gallant Member's friends in another place will reconsider their determination. At any rate, his announcement in this House was an extremely positive one. But whether there is any treaty or not, if gentlemen in another place throw out this Bill they will have created a crisis and a national emergency in which every man who has Irish blood in his veins will think of nothing but how he may best pay them back. The Leader of the Opposition has found that before; he will find it again. Some politicians apparently calculate that it would be a good Party policy for the Unionists in England to create a condition of disturbance in Ireland by throwing out this Bill. I do not pretend to be an authority upon that subject. But I do not think the Unionist Party found the policy of coercion so very profitable a policy to them at the polls at the last General Election. If it were otherwise, I do not know why they are not still on the Treasury Bench. Do they think that they will increase their popularity in England if, owing to the effects of their policy in throwing out this Bill, they have to return to the policy of naked coercion in Ireland, and if they have again to call in the removables and the gaolers, and possibly the hangman, to coerce a country which the Chief Secretary, by a different course of treatment, has brought at the present moment to be the most peaceful country in Europe? I do not pretend to be an authority as to what may happen in England, although I think we have solid reason for hoping and believing that among the English people and among Members of this House, and, indeed, I go further, and say that among very considerable sections of the Opposition in this House there is a deep and growing feeling of abhorrence at the miserable, petty, hateful work of holding down Ireland for ever by coercion. But I venture to say that, whether it be good policy or whether it be bad policy, or whatever may be its effects upon the state of Parties in this House, the Irish people are not going to lie down tamely and to abandon the evicted tenants to destruction at the hands of their cruel enemies. We have very nearly reached the limits of endurance of human nature. I do not think gentlemen in this House fully appreciate yet the magnitude of this question. But I am sorry to believe that they will before many months are over, for as my hon. Friend the Member for Louth said in his eloquent speech the other night— You are tugging at the very heart-strings of the Irish race, and you are raising passions which had far better be allowed to sink into oblivion. This is a question that is, comparatively speaking, a small and manageable question if it is dealt with in the way in which this Bill proposes to deal with it. But it is a very great and vital question if it is deliberately neglected—contrary, as I believe, and as I think is pretty well known, to the judgment of the best minds among the Opposition in this House, and neglected at the dictation of the worst and most rowdy section of the Irish landlords, men who have neither the courage to make war nor to make peace in anything like a thorough-going spirit, men who may laugh and be boisterous here to-night, but who before 12 months are over will come whining to this House to save them from the consequences of their own folly in rejecting this Bill. Does anybody doubt that that will be the result? If there is anything that is certain of the struggle of the last 15 years in Ireland it is this—that at every step and stage in this struggle we have been forced forward by the folly of the landlords and of their friends in another place. There is another certainty, and that is that every successive stage of that struggle has left the landlord class stripped more and more, thank God! of their evil and accursed power on Ireland. I have said that this question, if it were approached in the right spirit, is easily manageable, and I do not shirk the difficulties. No man who knows Ireland doubts that by some means or other you must induce land-grabbers to give up the farms that they have taken. That is one of the rudimentary facts of the Irish position. But it is not at all so formidable a job as hon. Gentlemen imagine. It is my firm belief that, if this Bill were passed and were worked in a reasonable and an amicable spirit, in an enormous number of cases land-grabbing in Ireland would disappear. It is only on three estates that there are genuine planters to any extent, and I belief there the difficulty will settle itself. If the proper constitutional redress is refused to us in this Parliament, and if we are thrown back again on the resources of public opinion in Ireland, I venture to say that public opinion in Ireland will settle this matter for itself without any trace of violence or outrage. Hon. Gentlemen labour under an error if they imagine, as is often offensively assumed in this House, that public opinion in Ireland cannot assert itself and make itself felt except through crime and outrage. On the contrary, public opinion in Ireland can exert itself as powerfully free of those forces as public opinion in England could do; for instance, just as when the Primrose dames want to exercise public opinion on a Radical tradesman, or when it is wanted to drive an obnoxious Wesleyan minister out of Hatfield, it can be done without open violence or moonlighting. The Irish feeling as to land-grabbing is at least as legitimate as any exercised by the Primrose dames, and is exercised in the same manner. ["Hear, hear!" and Opposition cheers. I repeat it, and I say that public opinion exercised in that manner you cannot put down, whether you call it boycotting or Hatfielding, or anything else. Lord Salisbury himself, in his famous speech at Newport, warned you that you could never put down the exercise of public opinion in that form. And to public opinion in that shape and form I venture to say that sooner or later the great majority of those persons who have taken evicted land in Ireland will be induced to surrender, with or without the inducements offered by this Bill. I doubt very much whether the landgrabbers will thank you for withdrawing that inducement. Certain hon. Members above the Gangway who assume to speak with authority on this question, have not hesitated to declare in so many words that they would go into armed rebellion rather than submit to certain legislation that might be passed by this House; yet, forsooth, these gentlemen pretend to be scandalized at the language we have used, and call it the language of menace. I might easily retort by a quotation from the speech of the hon. Member for the University of Dublin; but I and others had hoped that the necessity for strong language, of this or of any kind, on the part of Irish Members in this House had passed away for ever. I speak the feelings of every man of the Party to which I belong when I say that we participate in the fullest possible degree in the spirit which actuated the right hon. Member for Bodmin in his speech the other night—a speech memorable in the history of this Debate. It is not a matter of rejoicing to us—it is a matter of the deepest pain and anxiety to think that the whole edifice favourable to peace which the Chief Secretary has been laboriously building up in Ireland should be endangered, and perhaps overturned, by circumstances too strong for him and for us. But it is not our fault. Hon. Members may tell us, and treat us as if we were the persons who created outbreaks and discontent in Ireland, and as if we aroused those passions for our own purposes. Then they know little of what they talk about. If they only knew all the risks we have run—all the misrepresentations we have endured in trying to restrain our people, and in preaching peace and patience to our people, while the landlords were seeking to take advantage of these efforts, they would think differently. But circumstances may make it impossible for us to restrain our people further. We have the deepest sense of the dangers that lie before us; we perceive the possible difficulties, and we shall not fail to confront them if they arise. We are bound by every human tie to remember those thousands of helpless men, women, and children who are waiting by the roadside in Ireland—who have waited for justice with a patience that is never equalled, trusting in the sense of justice of this House. Yet what do we find? That a measure brought forward by the Government of this country to settle this trouble, a measure generally admitted to be indispensable to the public peace, endorsed by the vast majority of the Representatives of the people of England, and recommended by at least one foremost statesman—and, indeed, if rumour be true—two of the foremost statesmen on the Opposition side—is in danger of being frustrated at the instigation of a rump of the Orange landlord Party in Ireland—of men who dared not face the Mathew Commission, and who dare not now face a Court of Arbitrators, against whose impartiality not a word has been uttered until the hon. Member for Guildford spoke to-night. I am sorry to have to say it, but the simple policy of these landlords, as blurted out by the hon. Member for South Hunts, is to make "examples" of the evicted tenants. This is to be their vengeance on thousands of women and children. On the very first night of the Debate on this Bill the leader of the Orange landlords in Ireland—whether he spoke authoritatively or not I do not know—warned this House that all our Debate would be in vain, that whatever the Representatives of the people decided their decision would be overridden in another place, and to judge from The Times and other Unionist authorities the House of Lords is about to carry out that pronouncement. If that be so, all I can say is that we accept the issue, merely remarking that in all such encounters it is not the landlord class which is ultimately found to be the most powerful. But whatever suffering may come to both sides from such a state of things I can only say that there is no point on which our consciences are uneasy—that we have done all that men could do for peace, and that the responsibility of whatever may ensue will not rest with us, nor with the Government, nor with the House of Commons, but with those lords and landlords who deliberately shut their eyes and ears to every appeal for peace, and those English politicians who deliberately, for their own vile and petty Party purposes, aid and abet them.

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

said, he did know that he had ever spent a worse hour in the House of Commons than the last hour of this Debate. There was an idea at the opening of the Sitting that even yet there might be a chance of securing compromise and peace; but both sides had put up speakers, and had, he thought, effectually pre vented the slightest chance that there might have been of any arrangement being come to. The hon. Member for Guildford told the House that after 15 years of struggle and five Laud Acts there ought to be something like peace. Yes, the House of Commons had done a great deal for Ireland in those 15 years. He himself recognised the fact, and he represented men who were grateful for it. But what about the 80 preceding years? What did those 80 years mean and teach? The seats in that House, which were now filled by hon. Members opposite, were occupied by Irish Liberal landlords. The seat which be held was occupied by a Conservative landlord, and for those 80 years Irish landlordism had its own way. The house of the Irish tenant was generally built by himself; nearly every improvement on the soil was effected by the Irish tenant; the roads were made out of the county cess which he paid; and yet all this, which was morally the property of the Irish tenant, was legally the property of the Irish landlord under the laws passed by an Assembly in which the Irish landlords were supreme. Eighty years of such work as that the hon. Member for Guildford thought was compensated for sufficiently by 15 years of well-doing on the part of the British Parliament. There ought to be an end to that kind of talk. Fifteen years of well-doing did not suffice to wipe out of remembrance a century of absolute wrong-doing. The hon. Member for Guildford said that the agitation carried on by hon. Members opposite below the Gangway had resulted in reducing the price of land from 22 to 16 years' purchase. The hon. Member forgot one important thing—namely, the depreciation in agricultural values. What use was it for an Irish landlord to make a statement like that in the face of the facts regarding' British agriculture? He could tell the hon. Member—and the hon. Member knew it—for they had sat together upstairs for three months—that Irish landlords during the last 15 years had had their rents reduced by 20 per cent. But were the losses of British landlords measured by 20 per cent? No; they had lost, not 20, but 40 per cent., and there was no Land Act in England. The Land Acts had, in fact, been more of a protection to the Irish landlords than anything else. Nothing could be more hopeless than the speech of the hon. Member for Guildford. He was afraid that the Motion for the rejection of the Billon the Second Reading by one Irish landlord and a similar Motion on the Third Reading by another, would be very apt to be misunderstood out of doors. Now, he came to the speech of the hon. Member for Cork. Whatever the speech of the hon. Member for Guildford might have been, he feared the speech of the hon. Member for Cork had extinguished the slightest glimmer of hope that might have existed. His was a speech breathing war from beginning to end. There was not one conciliatory sentence in it from start to finish. If hon. Members opposite had desired a compromise, they had chosen the most unfortunate representative of compromise and of peace to set forth their views. He had told them quite plainly what they were to expect in Ireland if this Bill were rejected or if a compromise were not arrived at. They were to have the old dreary story once again; they were to have boycotting, and all human liberty was to be trampled out if the British Parliament could not be persuaded to endorse the views of a section of the Irish Members. [A NATIONALIST MEMBER: Your views also.] No; he was in favour of compromise, but he had never been able to support this Bill; he had voted against it already, and he was sorry to say he should have to vote against it again that night. Hon. Gentlemen opposite could not understand anyone desiring a compromise voting against a measure when he considered that it would be a bad and dangerous settlement. The Bill had been treated too much as if it were a Land Bill, but it was nothing of the kind. It was simply a Bill to undo the mischief which was done by the Plan of Campaign. From the outset the Plan of Campaign was a wicked and insane policy. The tenants whom the leaders of the Plan forced out of their holdings were in the enjoyment of legal rights conferred upon them by Parliament; they had an occupation right in the soil, and the right to sell that privilege, and yet they were forced out of their holdings in obedience to commands which were fatal both for them and for the country. Hon. Members who asked the British Parliament to put these men back into the position which they occupied before the leaders of the Plan of Campaign put them out of their holdings had no excuse for coming forward and demanding, as the hon. Member for Cork did, that they should be put back as a right. It could not possibly be granted as a right. He sympathised with the poor people who were out, and warmly desired a compromise by which they could be fairly and honestly restored, but he must tell the hon. Member for Cork, who demanded that these people whom he had duped and betrayed—[Nationalist cries of "Oh!"]—should be put back as a right, that that House was not likely to be influenced by a demand couched in language of that kind. It would have been in finitely wiser in the Nationalist Party if they had put up someone like the hon. Member for North Kerry, who understood the British House of Commons, to speak on behalf of the evicted tenants, instead of the man who had duped and betrayed them and put them out. [Nationalist cries of "Oh!"]

MR. W. O'BRIEN

I rise to Order, Mr. Speaker. Is the hon. Member in Order in accusing me of betraying these tenants? What does the hon. Member mean?

MR. T. W. RUSSELL

I will tell the hon. Member what I mean. I had in my mind especially the tenants in Tipperary, and I believe I am correct when I say that since the day when those poor people went out at the hon. Member's bidding he has never set his foot in the town. That is what I mean by betraying those tenants.

MR. W. O'BRIEN

Stick to your word now, or withdraw. I ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether the hon. Member is in Order?

* MR. SPEAKER

No unparliamentary expression reached my ears.

MR. T. W. RUSSELL

I have no desire to come into collision with the hon. Member.

MR. W. O'BRIEN

Withdraw, withdraw!

MR. T. W. RUSSELL

Mr. Speaker has just ruled that I have used no unparliamentary expression.

MR. W. O'BRIEN

If anybody accuses me of betraying anybody I will reply to him.

MR. SPEAKER

Order, order!

* MR. T. W. RUSSELL

said, what he was asserting was that this Bill was not a Land Bill in the ordinary sense of the word; it was simply a Bill to deal with the cases of a certain number of tenants who, unfortunately for themselves and the peace of the country, followed advice which they ought not to have followed, and surrendered interests which Parliament had conferred upon them. The Bill simply asked the British Parliament to undo the mischief that had been done, to put the people back, and to whitewash the Plan of Campaign. That was a plain issue, but not an issue to be forced upon the House at the point of the bayonet. What was the policy which he had a sincere desire to see carried out? The Plan of Campaign, as he had said, was a wicked and insane as well as an illegal policy; but when the Unionist Party consented to pass the 13th section of the Land Act of 1891 their position in respect of the Plan of Campaign changed greatly, for under that Act 84 of the worst Campaigners were re stored to their holdings on the Ponsonby estate. They were typical Campaigners. They had resisted the Sheriff; they had joined in the conspiracy to defraud Mr. Ponsonby; they were steeped to the lips in illegality; and yet the Unionist Party consented that these men should be put back, and provided facilities for that purpose. From that moment they abandoned the ground that connection with the Plan of Campaign was sufficient to bar the way to the reinstatement of a tenant. The organs of the Irish land lords found fault with him because he stood by that policy now. It was, however, a good policy when the Smith-Barry syndicate put money into their pockets, and why should it be a bad policy now? The head and front of his offending was that he remained where he stood in 1891, and that he was prepared even to extend the policy then accepted, and to make it more wide in its sweep. He should be told that a voluntary measure such as the 13th section of the Land Act of 1891 would fail as that provision failed. Well, he admitted the failure, but he would point out that there were influences n at work in 1891 which were not at work now. The hon. Member for East Mayo, he was sure, would admit that he did not look with much favour upon the 13th, section of the Act of 1891.

MR. J. DILLON (Mayo, E.)

said, he was glad to have an opportunity of explaining that matter. The hon. Member had the advantage in speaking of him more frequently than he (Mr. Dillon) spoke of him. The hon. Member had frequently charged him with having obstructed the operation of Clause 13 of the Act of 1891. He could assure the hon. Member that there was no truth, so far as he could remember, in that charge. As a matter of fact, it was undeniable that in the case of two Campaign estates in Ireland he largely assisted in the negotiations for a settlement, and, in one instance, a considerable amount of money was advanced from the national funds.

* MR. T. W. RUSSELL

said, he did not think that the hon. Member for East Mayo would deny that he had made speeches which were construed in Ireland as not being very much in favour of the 18th clause of the Act of 1891, in the course of which he had advised the people of Ireland not to be in a hurry to purchase under the provisions of the clause. But at that time there were influences at work that had now ceased to exist. The Plan of Campaign was alive at that time, but it was now dead, and he hoped that it would have no resurrection. The tenants were tired of it, the landlords were tired of it, and, in fact, everybody was tired of it. If this Bill could be transformed into a voluntary measure, he believed that 80 per cent, of the cases would be settled amicably between the landlords and the tenants without any compulsion at all. The other night the hon. and learned Member for Louth had taunted him across the floor of the House with the cry of "Clanricarde." All he could say was that if Lord Clanricarde stood out against a voluntary settlement under this Bill in the face of his brother landlords, Parliament would take care that one unreasonable man should not be allowed to disturb the peace of the country. He was afraid that the time had come when it was hopeless to attempt a compromise after what had been said. [Cries of "No!"] But now, even at this eleventh hour, he would entreat the Leaders on both sides of the House, and also the Irish Leaders, to try and do something towards enabling this sore to be healed, and so conduce to the preservation of that peace which they were all so glad to see was now prevalent in Ireland.

MR. WYNDHAM (Dover)

said, he did not know whether the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland was still quite sure that in this Bill he had hit upon the right plan for dealing with this difficulty. The right hon. Gentleman had heard speeches made from various quarters of the House. He wondered whether he would welcome as an ally the hon. Member for Cork. Could hon. Members be surprised that, when the Irish landlords were accused of being unjust and cruel to their tenants, those who valued their honour and their character for honesty should determine to fight this matter to the very last. He regretted the fatal failure of the Government to deal with this problem. He should vote against the Third Beading of this Bill with reluctance, but without the slightest hesitation. In his opinion, the measure as it now stood would increase instead of diminish the evil with which it was intended to cope. The difficulty -with regard to this question was that in Ireland it was impossible to offer this amnesty—this relief to the wounded soldiers of the land war—without tending to the renewal of such wars in the future. The Government had offered the House no middle course at all; they were told that they must either accept this Bill or have no Bill at all. Therefore, those who, like himself, were in favour of some extension of the 13th clause of the Act of 1891 were powerless to amend the Bill. The Government were open to the reproach that they had moved the Closure just at the moment when the alternative policies of compulsory reinstatement and voluntary purchase were about to come on for discussion. Why had not the Government allowed them to proceed for four hours longer with the Debate, in order that they might have decided that question? They would not then, at any rate, have wrecked the success of their own measure. The Opposition were entitled to vote against this measure because, in their judgment, it would prove a source of danger in the future, and only dealt with a portion, and not the whole, of the evil it was intended to remedy. The evicted tenants were not all fraudulent or bankrupt. If that were so, the Government would not dream of bringing in exceptional legislation, unless they were prepared to bring it in for the bankrupts of the whole of the United Kingdom. Some of them were the victims of the Plan of Campaign, and no one would refuse to grant them an amnesty. But whoever heard of an amnesty being granted until the conclusion of peace, and would it not be madness to grant it in the face of the declarations which had been made by hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway? Moreover, the evil with which the Bill proposed to deal was a diminishing one. The right hon. Gentle- man the Member for West Birmingham, in the course of the discussion on the Second Reading of the Bill, had pointed to the fact that the number of evicted tenants was now only 4,000. It might be contended upon all the grounds he had enumerated that the House would be justified in voting that no attempt at all should be made to deal with this question, because the danger of carrying out such legislation was so great and the advantage that would result from it would be so small, and that Ireland must trust to the ordinary and natural curative process which was found to be so effectual in other civilised countries. He, however, had not advocated such a policy of inactivity, and he had always spoken in favour of an attempt being made to deal with the difficulty. The number of tenants to be reinstated and the amount of money that that reinstatement would involve were, in his opinion, very small matters for consideration in comparison with the effect that the settlement of this question would have upon the public opinion of Ireland. In his view the state of things in Ireland would never be brought into a satisfactory condition unless a compromise was arrived at. That was his attitude; it was not one of non possumus by any means, and it never had been. They had to take the greatest care in the choice of the remedy they proposed for the evil they had to deal with. The Government, however, in the preparation of this Bill had taken no care whatever. They had roughly, without a moment's consideration, based their Bill upon the recommendations of the Mathew Commission. The Chief Secretary, however, had himself been foremost in deploring the fact that the Commission had taken evidence on one side only. How much better the Commission would have been able to judge of the policy of reinstatement if they had heard evidence on behalf of the landlords as well as on behalf of the tenants. So far from deciding between reinstatement and purchase, the Mathew Commission seemed to have drawn no distinction in their minds between the two policies. The Commission had put forward the idea that the policy of reinstatement had been sanctioned by Parliament when they passed the 13th clause of the Act of 1891. That sanction, however, did not contain one word about reinstatement, but advocated merely voluntary purchase. The Government borrowed this policy wholesale from the recommendations of the Mathew Commission, and then put forward this Bill on the plea of expediency. Was it possible that the policy of reinstatement could be put forward on the plea of expediency? Was it not obvious they must prove that injustice must have been done by the landlord, and was it not true that the Government themselves had set up a tribunal to decide whether the landlords had been just or unjust? That was not a policy of expediency but of retribution. With one voice the Government said they wished to heal a social sore, and yet at the same time they were advocating a policy which would lead to law-suits all over Ireland, and wherever a tenant was reinstated it would be looked upon as a punishment on the landlord for gross and callous cruelty in the management of his estate. They would make it a matter of personal honour for every single landlord to take advantage of provisions of the Bill and show cause why a tenant should not be reinstated. This policy of reinstatement was advocated, as a wholesale remedy, for the first time in the Report to which he had alluded. Even hon. Gentlemen from Ireland had not previously recommended it, except as a punishment to be inflicted upon recalcitrant landlords who would not sell. But now, like the rain of heaven, it was to fall alike upon the just and upon the unjust. If the Chief Secretary told him that it was not so because his tribunal would decide, and in the ease of the just landlord would not compel him to receive the tenant back, did not the right hon. Gentleman see in what dilemma he was landed? If the tribunal intervened to save the landlord from reinstatement because he was just, then it was evident the policy of the Government would only affect a comparatively small area in Ireland. This policy of wholesale reinstatement would either affect the just landlords or it would not. If the tribunal stepped in to save the just landlord, the Bill would not meet the difficulties, because in this very Report of the Mathew Commission, if hon. Members would turn to the 40th paragraph, they would see it stated— On the evidence brought before us we find that many landlords have given large and even generous abatements. The Commissioners were speaking of the landlords upon these 17 Plan of Campaign estates; therefore it followed that upon the very estates the Government wished to deal with there had been many cases in which the landlords had acted not only justly but generously. These landlords might fight: in fact, the Bill would force them to fight before this tribunal, and was it not certain that their tenants would not be reinstated? Suppose the Government attempted to enforce it, was not their policy ubiquitous, and if they failed to enforce it was it not abortive? Ho would venture, even now, to ask the Government to consider the alternative which they practically refused to argue in Committee, because, whether they inflicted injustice or failed to meet the case, their policy would not bring a message of peace; it would be an incitement to a renewal of hostilities. If they forced the landlord who had acted not only justly but generously to receive back a tenant to lose all the expenses he had legally incurred, what peace and harmony would they have? If, on the other hand, the case was so monstrous that no tribunal would force the laud-lord to reinstate the tenant, would not a continual agitation be kept up until further and more drastic legislation obtained the sanction of this House? This policy of reinstatement, he thought, stood condemned on this ground. He would ask the Government to consider whether the policy of purchase had not something to be said in its favour? By the policy of purchase he meant voluntary purchase, because compulsory purchase laboured under the main disabilities that he had indicated in the policy of reinstatement. Compulsory purchase would give, for one thing, a special advantage to those particular tenants which had long been denied to the bulk of the Irish tenants. On that ground alone he rejected compulsory purchase. But taking voluntary purchase, he knew of no argument which had been brought against it except the mere cuckoo cry that the 13th section of the Land Act had failed. The hon. Member for South Tyrone had dealt with one ground for that failure, and the two other grounds were that that section contained no adequate provision for dealing with the question of arrears and costs, and it left the two parties to approach each other. If they so extended the policy of the 13th section as to institute a tribunal which, whore it considered the sale of a whole estate was for the benefit of the locality, should fix the price and assess the amount it was prepared to give for arrears and costs and compensation for disturbance, and then left the three parties to take or leave their decision, he believed that would be operative in more cases than would be touched by the Bill, and that the three parties would only too gladly welcome their deliverance from the bitter legacy of ancient feuds.

MR. T. W. RUSSELL

During the speech I delivered a short time ago I used a term which I wish to recall. The expression I used was, "betrayed the tenants." I wish to recall the word "betrayed" I used it hastily.

Mr. W. O'BRIEN

was understood to accept the explanation.

MR. BODKIN (Roscommon, N.)

said, that there was no question that in some senses this, as had been said, was a small Bill. It dealt with a comparatively small sum of money, with a small number of men, and he thought he should be able to show that it was one of the most moderate Bills ever proposed, and, moreover, was one which, in his view, would confer benefits upon every class that it touched. It would benefit not merely the evicted, but the evictors, and even also the land-grabbers. Though it was a small Bill it was one of vital importance to the Irish people. It went straight home to their hearts; it touched a question' that had been ever present to them during the last two years, and from the settlement of which by that House they had been waiting with a painful patience. He thought that every Member of the House, if he would but speak from his heart, was honestly anxious that the poor evicted tenants should get back to their holdings. These men had waited for relief with a patience which was beyond all praise; and he believed that no one really wished that relief should be denied to them. Viewed from the side of humanity, this was a large question, as 4,000 tenants with their innocent wives and families were involved in the issue. The poor people had waited not only patiently, but crimelessly, trusting to Parliament to give them redress. What was the Bill? It was a moderate and equitable Bill, and, us he had said, it benefited every class that it touched. It was doubly blessed; it blessed him who gave and him who took. It was said by the hon. Member who moved its rejection that it was a Bill to pay criminal conspirators out of the plunder of a Church. He did not wish to be offensive to the landlord class, therefore he should not adopt the hon. Member's words. But who were the people who were to be paid by this Bill? The very class that the hon. Member for Guildford represented. Of this £250,000 almost the entire sum would pass into the pockets of the Irish landlords. If the hon. Member called them criminal conspirators that was no reason why he should follow the example. What was the grievance under which the Irish landlords laboured? They had at present on their hands derelict and evicted farms for which they were unable to find tenants. These farms were absolutely worthless to them and to the community. They had no hope of ever getting one penny of arrears of rent which were due by the evicted tenants, and what was the injustice which this Bill imposed upon them? What was the grievance of which they complained, for they always heard of this measure as one for the punishment of the Irish landlords? They would get back a tenant where before they had no hope of a tenant, and two full years' rent in addition, and, if they did not like that, they had purchase instead. Where was the grievance in asking the landlords to come under such a system of compulsory purchase? The Marquess of Londonderry had stated it as his opinion that the system of compulsory purchase should be extended to all the landlords in Ireland. This terrible Bill did no more than to apply to a limited section the powers which the Marquess of Londonderry was desirous should be applied to every landlord in Ireland. It did more. It gave to these landlords a power and privilege never before given to any other landlords in Ireland—namely, that of immediately receiving and retaining the one-fifth which every other landlord was obliged to leave in the hands of the Land Commission as security. Where was the evil to the landlord in all this? If the Bill were not adopted the farms would remain vacant, no rent would be received by the landlords, and he could find no other motives except malice and vindictiveness that induced the landlord to prefer the condition in which he was now, with his lands running waste and no prospect of their being tenanted, to the condition of getting a large purchase money or a solvent tenant, as he would get in the alternative given under the Bill. There were another class they were told must be considered—namely, the land-grabbers. He did not profess any special sympathy with them, but they were represented by their friends as models of all the virtues. The land-grabber, they were told, was a person to be hedged round with all kinds of care and tender precautions, and treated as tenderly as a geranium or an orchid. When they said that the land-grabber had acted within his legal rights they had said all that could be said in his favour. What were his special privileges and virtues? He would tell them. When the tenant and the landlord were at war—and everybody now admitted that the tenant had good reason for the action he took—the land-grabber stepped in from a more sordid motive of personal aggrandisement and seized the property of his neighbour. He could understand, and, to a certain extent, sympathise with a landlord who said he would stand by his class whether they were right or wrong; but what were the special considerations which should be extended to the man who from the most sordid motives of personal gain had deserted his own class? He thought if the land-grabber were fairly compensated, if he was not injured—as he believed he would not be—and if he was benefited, as he would be under this Bill, any more could not be asked in his behalf. The hon. Member for Tyrone would bear him out when he said that a very large number of these land-grabbers were only too anxious to get out of the position in which they were, apart from any violence or suggestion of violence on the part of their neighbours. The hon. Member for South Tyrone had told them that he planted the grabbers himself on the Brooke Estate as an act of war. He believed these particular grabbers were at the present time very nearly starved out, and they would be delighted if they could get the terms this Bill gave them of an honourable truce and treaty, and if they could go out with the honours of war—and perhaps some of the booty of war along with it—in their pockets. The land-grabbers would benefit by the Bill, and it was right to make it apply to all land-grabbers and to make it compulsory in their regard. The Bill gave the land-grabber the option of saying whether he would stay in or go out. It did not affect the public opinion of the district—no Bill could do that—but it gave him the legal option to stay in or go out. The vast majority of the land-grabbers were anxious to go out on receiving the compensation this Bill afforded them, and its rejection would deprive them of the opportunity they were so anxious to embrace. It was said that a voluntary Bill would settle this question, but he and the Party to which he belonged held a different opinion. But, after all, what did the difference between the two Parties amount to? Compulsion under this Bill only applied to cases in which compulsion was necessary. Suppose that the one man who refused to come before the tribunal set up by the Bill were the most noble the Marquess of Clanricarde. Was there a man in the House who would say that he was not a man to whom compulsion would fairly apply? The hon. Member for Tyrone had promised to back a Bill for that nobleman's expropriation, and he (Mr. Bodkin) and his hon. Friends merely asked that in a case in which the landlord had ruthlessly and cruelly exercised a power which an unjust law had given him the House of Commons should step in and adjust the balance. Surely that was a case in which compulsion might be fairly applied. Over 1,000 human souls—men, women, and children—dependent upon the will of Lord Clanricarde, had been evicted. He had made desolate a whole stretch of country, and the Irish Representatives might fairly ask the House to redress the wrong he had done. Not content with driving these men out of their holdings, he had deprived them of the shelter they had obtained, and the unfortunate tenants who had afforded them that shelter had in turn suffered—that being their only crime. Was that the man the House would protect from compulsion? On the Marquess of Clanricarde's estate alone there were over 200 families to whom gross injustice had been done, and each case demanded redress. Was such a man as that the kind of person over whom the House would extend its ægis? It had been urged that it was impossible for that House to do justice to the tenants unless they did some injustice to the landlords. Even if that were so, was it not a case in which they ought not to hesitate and— To do a great right, do a little wrong, And curb this cruel devil of his will. They were told that the House of Commons was merely a Debating Assembly for this purpose, and that whatever they might do was subject to the will of another place; that all their words and actions were to be revised and controlled by the Lords in the neighbouring building, who, whatever this House might choose to do, would throw out the Bill. At any rate, he hoped that they would not identify themselves in any way with those Members of the other House who would do all in their power to throw out the Bill. The people of Ireland had waited for two long years in the hope of conciliation, and during that long time the country had been absolutely quiet, law-abiding and peaceful; and they were proud indeed to be told that that result was due to the efforts of his Party. They had been told by the Unionist Members of the House that their proper course to pursue was to wait, and that as soon as they convinced the majority of the House of Commons of the reality of their grievances, those grievances would be redressed in a proper and constitutional way. Well, they had convinced the majority of the House of Commons, and the Imperial Government of the country had endorsed that opinion by bringing forward the present Bill. If the House of Lords threw out the Bill—as they were told it would—what answer were they to give to the Irish people after waiting patiently for two long years? Having patiently trusted the Imperial Parliament—"asking for bread, they would be given a stone," and told that there was no justice or redress for them from the House of Commons, because the veto was in the House of Lords, by whom the decision was to be given. If the Peers were to accept or reject Bills that were sent up to them just as they thought fit, then in reality Ireland would be governed, not by the Imperial Parliament at all, but by the House of Lords. Irish Members had been accused of starting an agitation throughout Ireland in order to benefit themselves. He scorned to answer so baseless an imputation. They had been accused of violence and of showing no conciliation. Were they expected to sit down tamely under such circumstances? Were they to say to the 4,000 people who looked to them for redress—"You may starve; you are to serve as examples and scarecrows; you are to have no help; the House of Commons will not assist you"? Their answer was that they had come to the House with one object alone, neglecting their own means of livelihood, and disregarding the home ties so dear to Irish hearts. They had done what they considered was their bounden duty towards their country, and in doing so had not counted the personal cost. If the Lords rejected the Bill the Irish Representatives would be again sent back to Ireland empty-handed, and in that case he could assure the House that the people of Ireland would not wait on quietly for another indefinite period, suffering in the meantime injustice and misery. Who could blame them? After the way their appeal for justice had been heard, would they not take the remedy into their own hands? He believed that the Irish people had a weapon still that would bring their cause to a triumphant issue, and the weapon that would win them the battle was strong, steady, and united agitation. That had been heretofore, and they were now told was still the only weapon by which even au instalment of justice could be wrung from the Imperial Parliament.

MR. CORBETT (Glasgow, Tradeston)

said, the hon. Members opposite must learn that a threatening attitude had no effect upon the British people, who in this, as in other matters, would go on their way dealing out justice between man and man, irrespective of any threats of violence which might be addressed to them. He confessed that he was much struck by some of the remarks of the hon. Member for Cork, who had said that it was necessary for the tenants of Ireland to get redress by one means or another, and that the pressure brought to bear upon the landlords and others in Ireland under the Plan of Campaign was very similar in its character to that brought to bear by political organisations and agitations in this country upon social questions. Those who had, like himself, visited Tipperary when it was under the directorship of the hon. Member for Cork and the hon. Member for East Mayo, knew that no parallel at all could be drawn with any political organisation in any part of England, Scotland, or elsewhere throughout the Empire. No British party had ever set spies outside, boycotted shops to follow people who purchased goods there and assault them and destroy the goods. No British party had ever compelled tenants to leave their own houses and shops and go into quarters built for them by a political league making themselves caretakers for the priests. It was useless for hon. Members opposite to appeal to British Radicals as if they had anything in common, and ask them to support a policy of degradation and tyranny. No one could be surprised that the Government had done their utmost to confine the discussion on the Bill within the narrowest limits, for it related to a subject upon which they were not likely to gain the sympathy of any hon. Members who represented English constituencies. When the real facts of the case became thoroughly exposed they could not hope to carry with them the sympathy of British electorates. Every Amendment moved and every Division taken would have the effect, therefore, of damaging this measure, by exposing its character more fully to the public at large. No Scotchman or Englishman if left to himself would have devised a proposal by which a landlord who had bought a property 10 years ago should I be obliged now to take back a tenant who had been evicted five years before he I became the owner. This measure could not be defended upon the ground that these tenants had been evicted under harder land laws than prevailed in other civilised countries. [Mr. BODKIN: Oh, oh!] Would the hon. Member name one civilised country where the land laws were more favourable to the tenants and the tenants were more secure against the landlords than Ireland? [Mr. BODKIN: England.] Well, he ventured to say if a proposal were made to assimilate the laud laws of Ireland to those of England the Irish tenants would have something to say to it, and the hon. Member for South Tyrone would be likely to oppose it very strongly in the interests of the tenants in his constituency. It was said that some laud-lords in Ireland had carried out their powers very harshly, and perhaps some of them might be said to have had a double dose of original sin. But even if it could be proved that some of the Irish landlords had carried out their powers in a very hard way, that would be no justification for punishing not only the landlord who had evicted, but the laud-lord who succeeded him in his title, as was done by this Bill. There was one element of this proposal which showed a good deal of insincerity in the attacks made by the present Government against the proposals of the late Unionist Administration. The danger of the land proposals of the late Government, it was contended, lay in British credit being used to enable Irish tenants to acquire their holdings, but the danger of the present measure arose from the fact that it was not for the benefit of the best kind of tenants. When the land purchase proposals of the late Government were before the House hon. Members said that serious risk was to be thrown on British taxpayers, because British credit was to be used for carrying out land purchase in Ireland. But now British credit was going to be used for carrying out purchases, not by the best, most deserving, and most solvent tenants in Ireland, who were the most likely to meet their obligations, but on behalf of those who either would not or could not pay the rents which had been fixed for them by the Laud Courts established for their protection. A proposal of this sort could not seriously be relied on to promote the interests of the peace of Ireland. They could not promote the interests of peace by enabling those who had openly defied the law to see they had been able to defeat the law; they could not secure against criminal conspiracy in the future by a surrender to the criminal conspirators of the past; and this Government could only secure peace in Ireland, as in all other parts of the world where British authority was exercised, by showing that they would never surrender to threats, never do injustice, but calmly go on their way, holding the balance evenly between man and man and doing justice to all.

MR. HARRINGTON (Dublin, Harbour)

said, the indignant language in reference to threats which had just been addressed to the House followed exactly the language used on a previous occasion. When the hon. Member stated that Parliament would never surrender to threats, he wondered what the hon. Member thought of the threats which were held out by the Representatives of Irish landlords on the Second Reading of the Bill. The main objection to the measure was that it introduced the principle of compulsion; but, practically speaking, there was very little compulsion in the Bill. Certainly, no compulsion was placed on the new tenant, who was master of the situation. If he objected to the proceedings they were at an end. Where a farm was in the hands of the landlord, or was lying derelict, the landlord was offered the option either of taking the evicted tenant back, or of selling to him. Where was the compulsion there if the evicted tenants were to be reinstated, or compensated, where objected to? According to the hon. Member for South Tyrone, the proposal of the Government had been brought forward for the purpose of dealing with the Plan of Campaign tenants. That was the whole tenour of the hon. Member's speech. But he would remind the House that those tenants were but a small proportion of the tenants who would come under the Hill. The Plan of Campaign was not started until Parliament had refused to do justice to the Irish tenants. On the question of compulsion he should like to have known what the right hon. Member for Bristol would have said if he had been present. He would ask hon. Members whether they had never heard of the pressure within the law which that right hon. Gentleman (Sir M. Hicks-Beach) thought it necessary to apply to certain Irish landlords? Was not that compulsion? If there was anything to regret in the administration of the present Chief Secretary it was that he had not dealt with the same determination as the right hon. Member for West Bristol had dealt with the landlords in Ireland. He must venture frankly to tell the Chief Secretary, for whom he had a great personal respect, that a great deal of the difficulty of the situation had been created by the manner in which he had given way to the landlord party in Ireland. Of course, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bristol would tell them that when he was Chief Secretary he never refused police for eviction duty, but he was most careful when an unreasonable landlord applied to him for protection, when he wanted to commence a campaign in Ireland, to tell the representative of the landlord that he was busy, and to call again. If the present Chief Secretary would tell the landlords who persisted in burning down the houses of their unfortunate tenantry in this ruthless work of eviction, when they applied for police protection for eviction duty, to call again, he would find them in a much better frame of mind to accept a moderate proposal. It had been said by many of the speakers in the House that many of the men who were going to be reinstated—in fact, they spoke as if the whole body were going to be reinstated—were the bad characters on the estate. On that point he would also like to have the opinion of a right hon. Member of the House who had experience—the Member for Bristol. When application was made to the right hon. Gentleman, before the Act of 1887, in reference to the very crisis they were dealing with in the speeches that night the right hon. Gentleman made inquiry into the circumstances of these evictions, and asked questions as to the rent, the valuation, the capability of the tenant to pay the rent, and he should like to have the valuable testimony of the right hon. Gentleman as to whether the people whom he endeavoured to keep in their farms were all bad characters. The hon. Member who had just addressed the House spoke of the difficulty created for the new tenant in Ireland by placing him in the position of having to refuse to sanction proceedings under this Act. That was no new difficulty created by this Bill, for the new tenant even now was constantly in the position of refusing to allow the reinstatement of the evicted tenant. What he complained of in regard to the Bill was that if the Chief Secretary, instead of this partial compulsion as applied to the landlord, applied the principle of compulsion in dealing with all cases, then hon. Gentlemen above the Gangway would have been glad to accept this small bit of compulsion. The Irish Members were not in favour of compulsion upon Irish landlords or anybody else if there was any other way of settling the question. They were interested in the peace of the country, and if they had an honest conviction in their minds that there was any means of settling this question by the voluntary principle they should be the first to adopt it. He noticed that hon. Members who stood up and declaimed against compulsion, and who pointed to it as the great blot on the Bill, incidentally came round to some man who was a leader in the Plan of Campaign, or a leader in politics in his district, and asked, "Will you throw this man back upon the landlord?" Was it reasonable to assume that in the case of men who had been in the thick of the fight that the landlords were likely voluntarily to reinstate them? They were not dealing with the better class of landlords; not with those who had shown forbearance and humanity, but with the men who rack-rented, who refused concessions, who refused to give to the tenants in 1886 the concessions wrung from them by the Land Act of 1887, and there was nothing in the history of these men, nothing in their relations with their tenants, which would justify them for one moment in expecting that this question could be settled if anything were left to the discretion and the voluntary action of these men.

MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER (Belfast, W.)

said, he did not pretend that his personal opinion on this matter was of any importance. But he represented to a certain extent a very large body of opinion which he felt was much more valuable than his own. He did not represent the landlord class, or any class directly interested in this question; and yet he had come to the conclusion that he must follow the example of the Member for South Tyrone, and vote against the Third Reading of the Bill. He had long thought there was a possible via media; he had said so from the beginning; but lie supposed now it was absolutely too late. What the Unionist Party had to complain of was that the Chief Secretary had treated the opponents of the Bill throughout as if they were enemies of the public peace. He thought the Bill might have had a real success if it had been made voluntary, but unfortunately no proposal in that direction would be received by the other side. It was said that the Opposition had given no reasons for their policy. But the Opposition had been given no opportunity of stating their arguments, and therefore it was unfair to say that they were to blame for not advancing arguments in support of their policy. It seemed to be supposed that this Bill was entirely an Irish Bill—that it dealt merely with Irish landlords and Irish tenants. The Bill, however, appealed to a totally different set of considerations. There were considerations in connection with this Bill which affected not only Irish landlords and tenants, but other classes of the community, and those considerations would have to be faced. He could assure the Chief Secretary that there was a genuine and legitimate opposition to this Bill from large classes of the community who were entitled to be heard. There were many who felt that there were duties incumbent upon a great State like this, and that those duties could never be disregarded. There were many who felt that there were propositions in the Bill at variance with what was right and honest in private and public life. The proposals in the Bill to legalise wrong and to make a new form of fraud a meritorious action would not be tolerated for a moment in private life; and to reward persons who had no claim except their successful resistance to the law was an insane thing in the interest of the State. There were many outside that House who regarded the Bill as contrary to the traditions of their national life, and who felt that if they gave their sanction to the Bill they would be doing violence to the best and most noble sentiments of their national life. He was moved by the speech of the hon. Member for Louth, but he must remind him that they had their feelings and their sense of honour as well as the hon. Member and his friends, and that they had duties to perform to those they represented. He felt it absolutely as a matter of duty on behalf of thousands of men and women in Ireland, and he was bound under no considerations whatever to recognise the violence to the great principles of honesty and fair dealing between man and man which he believed was inflicted by this Bill. Those were his sincere feelings; but, at the same time, he would like to know whether it was yet too late to give effect to a sentiment, which was far more general than some people imagined, in favour of compromise. His own earnest desire, even at this moment, was to see some settlement arrived at and an avenue of escape found from this administrative difficulty, which undoubtedly did exist in Ireland. He recognised the difficulty that existed in Ireland, and he should be honestly and truly glad if some solution could be arrived at which his sense of duty would allow him to support. If, even at the eleventh hour, the Bill could be so framed that unhappy evicted tenants could receive by the grace of Parliament that which they could not obtain as a right, he should be glad to accept it. But he could not on this question separate him- self from the Party to which he belonged. It was absolutely impossible for the Members of that Party to conceal their hatred and detestation of many things that had been done in Ireland; and they could never give their consent to a compulsory Bill of this kind, because they were convinced it would do grave wrong to many honest and honourable men.

MR. ROSS (Londonderry)

said, it had so often been urged in the course of the Debate that the opposition to the Bill came altogether from the landlord faction, and from a "junta of Irish landlords"—as the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin said—that he thought it well as the Representative of a borough to express his view, and the view of his constituents, with regard to the Bill. None of his constituents were directly affected by anything contained in the Bill, for he did not suppose there was a single landlord who had evicted a tenant or a single evicted tenant who would come under the Bill residing in his constituency; but they regarded the Bill as a serious matter for the peace of Ireland, and one that required their most careful consideration. He should be glad to agree with the principle of forget and forgive; to wipe out the past, and to let bygones be bygones; but in his view the permanent mischief that would be caused by the Bill would be 50 times greater than any temporary good that could be effected by it. But if he could have brought himself to support the Bill at all, the speech of the hon. Member for Cork to-night would have convinced him that it was his duty to vote against the Bill. For what did the House hear from the hon. Gentleman? Instead of the men at whose door the whole blame for this unfortunate state of affairs in Ireland was to be laid, acknowledging that perhaps they had acted in ignorance of the law, or in a spirit of great rashness, they had the founder of the Plan of Campaign defending, before the House, that movement, and threatening and insulting the landlords. That was the reply to the noble and touching speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin; that was the way that noble speech was received by the Nationalist Members. He would give the House some idea of the operations of the Plan of Campaign. It appeared that in the year 1890 the tenants on the Glensherrold Estate owed five years' arrears of rent, amounting to £2,600; and the landlord offered to wipe out all those arrears if the tenants would pay one year's rent, less 30 per cent., of £384. The Catholic Bishop of Limerick, Dr. O'Dwyer, a most eminent ecclesiastic, wrote to the parish priest at Glensherrold, strongly urging the people to accept the very favourable terms offered by the landlord. What happened? On the 11th of July, 1890, the hon. Member for Cork, the hon. Member for East Mayo, and the hon. Member for the Harbour Division of Dublin, went down to Limerick, and publicly denounced the Bishop for advising the tenants of the Glensherrold property to accept this offer of paying £384, and having £220 of arrears wiped off. The result was that the tenants refused the landlord's offer, and went in for the Plan of Campaign. And yet, in face of an event of that kind, those who opposed the Bill were charged with doing a very cruel thing to the evicted tenants. He believed there could be no Bill framed more calculated to demoralise the tenantry of Ireland. On the day that the Bill was passed, every honest tenant, who held his farm and complied with the law in the face of threats and sometimes of outrages perpetrated on him, would feel that he was a fool; while every rogue who had gone in for lawlessness would think himself a very clever fellow indeed. If those were the object-lessons the House intended to hold out to the very impressionable people of Ireland, it was a very black look-out for peace and order in Ireland. He believed that this Bill was an absolutely unprecedented Bill. Attempts had been made to trace some of its principles to the Land Act of 1881 and to the 13th section of the Land Act of 1887. That meant that when the Unionist Party in a case of emergency advanced to the extremest limit they could go and made a concession in the Act of 1887, that concession, instead of being accepted as a compromise, was made a platform from which totally new and serious demands were made. He disputed altogether the dangerous method of reasoning in which the hon. Member for South Tyrone had indulged, that the fact that the Unionist Party had passed the 13th section of the Act of 1887 under which 80 of the Ponsonby tenants had got back to their holdings was an argument in favour of the Bill. What was the principle of the Bill? The gentlemen called Arbitrators were to proceed, without any appeal, to reverse the decisions of the Superior Court of Ireland for the last 15 years. He and his colleagues from the North of Ireland represented a number of planters, or the descendants of planters, of a couple of centuries ago; and he had no doubt that tenants had been evicted to make room for them; and perhaps if the Bill were passed, it would be proposed to extend its principle to the English and Scotch settlers of Ulster. He was for a long time unable to persuade himself that the Bill had been drafted by any serious person. He could hardly imagine three gentlemen sitting down to consider what a bonâ fide case was; what were the circumstances of the district and the circumstances of the eviction; and the other mysterious reasons suggested by the Bill for the purpose of reinstating a tenant. Why, I those gentlemen were to be absolutely entrusted with powers that lie had never known to be entrusted before to a judicial or any other body in this Kingdom. It was said, "Trust those Arbitrators; they are three most respectable gentlemen." But there were some things that no person could be entrusted with. Were the Arbitrators to be allowed to put back every insolent tenant, every idler, every man who had drunk himself out of his farm since 1879? But when they appointed a lawyer of great eminence, assisted by two other eminent gentlemen, he gathered that it was intended that they should exercise some discretion, and consider who they were to admit, and who they were not to admit. why was there no guidance given to those gentlemen? Was the whole matter to be left to their whim? Was the assistance to be awarded according to merit, and were those tenants to be considered the most meritorious who had defended their houses with pitchforks and stones, and had broken the heads of the police? Was that to be the test of merit or the reverse? From the beginning of the Bill to the end there was not a line to guide the tribunal about to be appointed. lie fancied that if, in the course of their Roving Commission, the Commissioners rejected the claim of anyone, their lives would be very unenviable, and they would have to be provided with bullet-proof cuirasses. What struck him as most extraordinary in this matter was that there was not oven a pretence of finality about the Bill. He had beard English Radicals, one after the other, say that this was only the beginning, and that they would go on to further measures; so that they were to have, not merely an Evicted Tenants Bill, but an evicted tenants code, for the purpose of dealing with the question. With regard to the new tenants, an hon. Member had said that where conditional orders were made against them they would be influenced by moral suasion. Another hon. Member had said they would be influenced by a moral blunderbuss—a particularly unfortunate expression. If the hon. Member for Mayo went amongst the new tenants he would probably, starting with a preamble that no crime was to be permitted, make a speech to the effect that nobody was to deal with them and that they were to be isolated and left to manage as best they could. Would that be effective? He believed it would. It would be possible to reduce every one of the tenants, even assuming that no outrage was committed at all. It must be remembered that these new tenants were men to whom the credit of the nation was pledged. They entered into their farms at a time when an infamous conspiracy was being denounced by every lawyer in the Kingdom, and by others who had authority to speak on the subject of morality. Were these men now to be delivered over to the tender mercies of their enemies? Were they to be compelled to leave their farms notwithstanding all the labour bestowed on their cultivation? Hon. Members said the Bill would only affect the Irish landlords, whom they did not care for; but he would point out that it would affect the tenants a great deal more. The biggest landlord in Ireland was not the Marquess of Clanricarde, but the British taxpayer. He was becoming a bigger and bigger landlord every day, though he was only in receipt of a rent-charge which was terminable. And supposing at some future time an Irish political leader ordered that the installments to the State should not be paid, would the Government get men from the North of Ireland to take the holdings? They might call long and loud, but they would never get these men to come again. If there was to be any respect for law, the new tenants could not be abandoned. The hon. Member for East Mayo was very frank. He rarely concealed his opinions. In 1891, at Drogheda, he made some observations which were very instructive.

MR. DILLON

They appeared in The Times of this morning.

MR. ROSS

said, he was glad to hear that the hon. Member's sayings were so widely disseminated. The hon. Member had said it would be hopeless for any Irish political leader again to call on Irish tenants to make sacrifices for the cause if the Plan of Campaign tenants were left in the lurch. That was a strong statement. What did it mean? It meant that this measure was a political move for the purpose of advancing the political cause championed by the hon. Gentleman the Member for East Mayo. The Plan of Campaign had been defended on the ground of the excessive rents which had been charged, but it was no use saying that to people who lived in the country. Such a statement could not be made in regard to the Olphert Estate, which, perhaps, had had a larger number of these tenants upon it than any other estate. It was for a political purpose that the tenants had been driven out of their holdings; they had not gone because they were unable to pay the rent, and it would be a monstrous thing to compel the landlord to put them back against his will. Were they dealing with serious legislation? Would such a Bill be entertained in any other country in the world? It was more like the libretto of a comic opera than a piece of serious legislation. The return in triumph of the evicted tenants would be the glorification of lawlessness, showing men that they had only to struggle long enough in order to get the British Parliament into such a weak-headed condition that it would be prepared to whitewash offenders who had done any amount of mischief in Ireland. But he had something to say on the money question. It had been calmly assumed by some Irish Members that this money was their own. They said, "It is an Irish fund, and how could it be better spent than on these unfortunate people?" He did not deny that there was suffering amongst the evicted tenants, but they were not the only class who had suffered and were suffering in Ireland. If the evicted tenants had suffered, so had many artizans in Ireland who had never entered into any political plot or attempted to defraud any man; but Parliament could not make its legislation subservient to sentiment. It had been suggested that this was a subject for compromise, but it was clear that the Party below the Gangway did not desire a compromise. The truth was, the Bill was never intended to pass. If it had been, it would have been drawn in a more moderate spirit, in which case the Opposition would have been prepared to go a long way to meet it. But, as a matter of fact, this was only one of the many bubbles blown by the Government for their supporters to catch at. It was, perhaps, the greatest bubble of all, and no one would be very much surprised when it burst and resolved itself into its constituent elements of soap and water.

* MR. T. D. SULLIVAN (Donegal, W.)

said, this Bill had been very violently denounced by Irish landlords and by Irish lawyers. This House and the people of Great Britain ought to know by this time that Irish landlords and Irish lawyers were very bad advisers. He should like to know what Bill of relief or of reform to the people of Ireland was ever passed or proposed in that House that had not the opposition of Irish landlords and the Irish Tory lawyers? They had been told that night that five Land Bills had been passed within a limited space of time for the relief of the Irish people. Which of these five Bills was ever supported in that House by the Irish landlords or by the disinterested lawyers of the Tory Party? Not one. Every one of them in its time was opposed and denounced as the present healing and righteous measure was being denounced. He believed the character and nature of the proposals now before the House were pretty well understood by the House of Commons and the people of England. But why were these five Bills necessary? Because not one sufficient, complete, or satisfactory Land Bill had been passed or would be passed by the Parliament in those days, or had any chance of being passed by the House of Lords. Even when the Irish tenants had friends in the House of Commons the Bills were drawn up in such a way that they could be nothing but unsatisfactory and incomplete, because of the consciousness of the framers of them that peril and defeat awaited them in another place. All along in the Debate that had taken place on this Bill it appeared to be quietly assumed by its opponents that the evicted tenants were dishonest people, and that they had acted fraudulently as well as illegally. As to illegality he did not say much. There had been times in Ireland, and perhaps they would come again, when good men and honest men were bound in honour and in conscience to have very little regard for the letter of the law. He hoped those times would not come again; but was there a man in the House who could deny that such times did come in Ireland? If they committed acts which were considered illegal in Ireland, they did so from a sense of duty to their country, and if the occasion should arise again, the Irish people and their Representatives would be able to take action and do as they had done before. The hon. Members who spoke about five Land Bills knew very well the reason why the present Bill had to be introduced. A situation arose that had become intolerable, and which required that the state of things existing in Ireland should be revised. Everyone knew that there had been a fall in prices, bad seasons, and bad crops, and that the Irish people had been compelled to agitate again and again for revisions and remissions of rents. In England no such revision was necessary, because the English landlords had a higher sense of justice, and had more sympathy with their tenants, than the Irish landlords. In his (Mr. Sullivan's) constituency there were, and had been, a large number of evicted tenants. Were they to be stigmatised as rogues and frauds, and as dishonest men? He absolutely denied that any epithet of that character could properly be applied to them. They had been evicted for the non-payment of cruel and extortionate rents, against the payment of which they had been struggling for many a long and bitter year. How did they manage to pay those rents? Was it out of the produce of this soil? By no means. They made the rents by coming over to England and Scotland in the harvesting season, during which they worked, and in that way they earned what the Irish landlords afterwards claimed as rent. He had heard the word "robbery" applied to Irish tenants in the course of the Debate that night. He asserted that the epithet went appropriately the other way round. It had been proved beyond doubt by the decisions in the Land Courts, where the tenants got their rents reduced often by 15 and 20 per cent., that the landlords all along had been guilty of robbery, for such it was, even though they had the sanction of the law to exact those rents. He claimed for the evicted tenants of Donegal and of other parts of Ireland that they had borne this burden too long; that at last they were compelled to strike against it, for it was a duty they owed to their wives and their families and their class. Did not everybody know that if these men had not taken this strong measure they would have waited a long time before relief would have come to them from the House of Commons, or before the hearts of the Ulster landlords or the Ulster Tory lawyers would have been touched? He claimed for these tenants that they did not deserve the epithets that had been hurled at them. He claimed they were driven to the course they adopted not by the speeches of agitators, but by the hard and stern necessities of the case. Let no man tell him that any agitator in Ireland, no matter how eloquent he might be, had the power of inducing large masses of Irish people to act contrary to their own interests and their own knowledge and conception of what was requisite. The so-called "influence of the agitator" arose in this way—that he voiced the grievances and spoke the sentiments of the Irish people. If he did not do that, his eloquence would be wasted on the east wind or the west wind, as the case might be. There had been a real trouble and wrong at the bottom of all this long agitation, contention, and strife in Ireland, and he hoped the House of Commons would not be led away by appeals to sentiments of sympathy for the poor suffering Irish landlords. Amnesty was asked for these poor fellows. For how many years and generations had they been draining the heart's blood of the Irish people and making miserable the homes of Irish tenants, who were then taunted by English writers with their poverty and squalor P A most important question was at that moment awaiting settlement. The time was critical for the hopes of Ireland and the peace of the whole country, and he hoped the House of Commons would deal with the question promptly and generously, so that the Bill might not be lost. Some men were labouring to bring about that result, and it was no use attempting to pass off the blame of failure upon the Representatives of the Irish people, who were asked for humiliation before any promise of concession was made to them. They had heard something about a soap bubble from the last speaker. What sort of a bubble would it be if the Irish Members were to pledge themselves, as they had been asked to do, to accept this Bill as a complete pacification and settlement, in the sense and degree that not a word should ever more be said in Ireland, no matter how things might go, in favour of better terms for the Irish tenant farmers? The Irish Members were asked to make these protestations, but where was the security that if this were made a voluntary measure it would be availed of and accepted honestly and heartily by the Irish landlords? The way to deal with this question of the evicted tenants was in the spirit of the Bill as it had been brought before the House by Her Majesty's Government. It did not quite fulfil the desires or hopes of the Irish people, but no doubt it would have a healing effect. It would be attended with beneficial results and produce peace amongst the Irish people. He believed it would act as a blessing in the country that it would relieve suffering; that it would work not injustice, but justice, and that it would calm and cool in many an Irish heart the feelings which now, perhaps, existed there, and which might, he feared, be blown into flame if this measure were ignominiously rejected in the House of Commons or elsewhere, and if unhappily effect should be given to the opinions of the irreconcilables who had spoken from above the Gangway.

MR. AMBROSE (Middlesex, Harrow)

said, he must enter his protest against the Third Beading of the Bill, because he believed that instead of leading to the pacification of Ireland, it would tend in entirely the opposite direction. Not only would this be the case, but the measure would form a precedent for further legislation, which would tend to displace the conditions now existing between landlords and tenants. In his view, the measure in all its provisions violated the sanctity of contract. All our troubles in Ireland had arisen out of the fact that the Legislature had violated what should be the first principles of legislation there. Observations had been made from the other side of the House, and especially by the Chief Secretary, as to those who had taken up a non possumus attitude upon the Bill. He entered his protest against the anxiety which some hon. Gentlemen had shown to disclaim tin's attitude. Either the Bill was right or it was wrong. If it was right there ought to be no opposition to it, and if it was wrong why should they object to anyone attributing to them a non possumus attitude? If they made the Bill a thoroughly voluntary measure, and destroyed its compulsory provisions, then they might assume an attitude wholly different. For his own part, he should be perfectly open to consider a voluntary method of procedure if he thought it was calculated to relieve the difficulties of administration in Ireland. But then the question arose, what voluntary measure could possibly be devised which would satisfy the hon. Members behind him (the Irish Members)? They had evidence of what the notions of the hon. Gentlemen were with regard to what was voluntary, and they knew that they might have a nominally voluntary measure, hut that it might be one which would in effect be compulsory. An instance of the way in which misconception might arise upon this point arose in the case of the hon. Member for the Harbour Division of Dublin, who put it to the House that this really was a voluntary measure. The hon. Gentleman put to them the argument—where was the compulsion in a case where the landlord might choose, instead of accepting a man as a tenant, to have him as the purchaser of the farm, and insist upon his purchasing? An argument of that kind was really too much strain upon one's patience. A landlord had a rebellious tenant; he was evicted after a great deal of trouble, and the landlord got no rent; yet this man was to be replaced on the farm, with all the rights of a freeholder, and settle himself perhaps in the midst of an estate where he might give no end of trouble to the landlord, and oppose him in every possible way, and the landlord was held to be under no compulsion, merely because he could, if he choose, force the obnoxious tenant to purchase. The hon. Member for the Harbour Division might take exceptional views as to what was a voluntary proceeding, but if one had to take back a man expelled from an estate, and accept him as a purchaser at a price to be fixed "by hostile Commissioners, surely that was not a voluntary proceeding, but rather a shameful and wicked infliction on the landlord. The hon. Member said it was a voluntary feature of the Bill that the new tenant was not compelled to come out. He (Mr. Ambrose) granted that if the new tenant objected to give up his farm, the Arbitrators might say that they could not proceed further in the matter. But before they came to that, there was the fact to be considered that the evicted tenant had a right to petition, and if he petitioned, his petition came before the Commissioners, who had to decide whether he was a new tenant or an old tenant. They could imagine what would be likely to be the result of that. Again, the new tenant might be denounced as a grabber, and his life was not likely to be a happy one; and if he came into open Court, he would be simply exposing himself as a target for the Irish Land League. Landlords were entitled to consideration as much as any other class, and the House ought not to violate the first principles of legislation in destroying freedom of contract, but to respect their rights, and to afford them that justice which ever distinguished that House in its transactions. The hon. Gentleman the Member for Donegal seemed to grasp the position involved in the Bill as well as anybody. He said there were cases in which men who were true patriots were bound in honour and in conscience to act illegally. He (Mr. Ambrose) did not know how far hon. Gentlemen around him were actuated by those sentiments, but they were evidently on dangerous ground now. Whatever might be the-opinion of hon. Gentlemen, however, he regarded the principle as a dangerous one, and one which he must ask the House not to adopt. If there was one place in the Kingdom where justice ought to me maintained it was in that House, and the landlords were as much entitled to that justice as anybody else. The Chief Secretary had drawn attention to the difference between the English and the Irish tenant, and used it as an argument in favour of the Bill. He (Mr. Ambrose) took an entirely different view. The English tenant was bound by contract. He accepted his tenancy and was bound by his contract, and if he did not pay his rent he was not allowed to remain in possession, but must give up his farm to somebody who could and would pay the rent. That was a principle necessary to the proper cultivation of the soil. But by a whole series of Acts of Parliament the condition of the Irish tenant had been altogether altered, and he was now, owing to this legislation, in the condition of a part-owner of the farm. What was done by the Act of 1882, which he had only just looked into? There the struggle was for the "three f's"—free sale, fair rent, and fixity of tenure—and it was said that when the tenants had got that they could not be turned out by the landlords, and that so long as a tenant had these three he practically owned the property. In dealing with cases of that sort it was not like dealing with a man whom they could turn out of the tenancy upon six months' notice, expiring at the end of the year; they were not dealing with a man dependent solely upon the produce of the soil for the actual payment of the rent, because the interest of the tenant in the soil had become a property that would fetch on sale from 18 to 20 years' purchase, and sometimes as much as 22 years' purchase. In the majority of instances the tenant right and the tenant's interest would fetch a larger price than the land itself. The result was that in Ireland, where the Land Acts applied, the landlords were no longer landlords; they were mere rent-chargers, being placed in the position by virtue of an Act of Parliament. It was said upon the passing of the Act of 1882 that the landlord's rights should not be further interfered with; but how had Parliament kept faith with the landlords from that time? They had been still further encroaching on the landlords rights by first one Act and then another, until, by a final Act, even leaseholders were included, and the various tenants had had their rents reduced until they had become practically the owners of the property. When the hon. Member for Donegal talked of the reduction of these rents he (Mr. Ambrose) was struck with the inconsequential character of the observations the hon. Member made, though he had heard the same remarks made before many times. The remarks were, that because the Commissioners, or the Judges appointed to fix fair rents, as they were called, had considerably reduced the rents, had continued to reduce them according as the produce of the farm yielded one year less and another more, that each reduction that took place ac- cording to the hon. Member for Donegal, was a proof that the tenant was enormously rackrented. It was nothing of the kind. It might be that the Commissioners were justified; he did not impeach their decision, but he protested against it being said the tenants were enormously rackrented; it was nothing of the kind, it was only a carrying out of the Act of Parliament. If they had not had the rents reduced below the actual value of the property, would the tenant right, he asked, have fetched 18, 20, and even 22 years purchase? When hon. Members talked about rackrenting, especially after the Act of 1882, he replied that the fact that the tenant right would fetch these large sums was proof that the tenants were not over-rented. The effect of the policy of the Land Act and of the Acts carrying out the Land Act, had been to transfer a large portion of the interest from the landlord to the tenant, and to place them in a position wholly different to the position of any tenant in England, or in any other part of the civilised world. He challenged any hon. Gentleman to tell him of any country in the world where the tenants had been so favoured as had been the Irish tenants. Therefore, he accepted the view of the Chief Secretary when he said the position of the Irish tenant was not like that of the English tenant, and he held that that view was hostile to the Bill, and was hostile to the suggestion that there was any ground for the present measure. One point that occurred to him in regard to this was that this kind of thing was most damaging to the cultivation of the soil. ["Hear, hear!"] Yes, it was so, because instead of the tenant being stimulated to cultivate the soil in the best manner, and obtain from it the largest amount of produce, his aim was to neglect cultivation in order to show a small production against the time the revision of rents came round, so that he could again get the rent reduced. That, he maintained was destructive to the welfare of Ireland, and would be destructive to the welfare of every country. The policy of our laws should be to encourage thrift, to let people understand that when they took land they were under the obligation of paying the rent they had agreed to pay and which had been fixed by judicial tribunal, and that they were bound to produce from the farm the utmost it was capable of producing. That policy had been abandoned, and unthrifty cultivation had taken its place for the purpose of getting rents reduced at the period of revision and when those appeals were made to the Legislature which came regularly as every Parliament met. But what struck him as the most serious matter they had to grapple with was the fact that this demand for the reduction of rent had arisen, not because the tenants had found themselves unable to pay the rents that had been demanded, but because they had been made the subjects of a manifestation of judicial rents. ["Hear, hear!"] Yes, hon. Gentlemen behind him said "hear, hear"; he was glad they appreciated the point. No attempt had been made to produce before this House the case previously put forward before the Mathew Commission of lands lying uncultivated, of evicted tenants living in huts in the neighbourhood of those lands, practically preventing the cultivation of them, living in comparative starvation, suffering hunger and presenting a real case of distress. If and so far as there were cases of real distress, caused by an honest inability to pay the rents demanded, his hand would, be held up and his vote given in support of the Bill. Show him a real case of distress and he was not behind any man, he would yield to no man in the House, wherever he might sit, in his willingness to relieve it. But what evidence did he find of it in this case? He had seen none; none had been presented to the House, and none was presented before the Mathew Commission. What he found was that the whole thing was laid down as a scheme by Mr. Davitt, one of the ablest of the Irish leaders, as far back as 1880. The Bill proposed to deal with tenancies determined since 1879, a date which was about the commencement of the agitation, and they found that in 1880, in Kansas City, Mr. Davitt said they had declared an unceasing war against landlordism, not a war calling on their people to "shoulder the rifle and go out in the open field and settle the question agitating Ireland—though he was not opposed to-that provided he could see a chance of success—but a war against Irish landlordism, and by not paying any rent breaking down the English garrison in Ireland. In that, Mr. Davitt said, they were doing a proper work and were paving the way for that independence they desired to see; they were engaged in a peaceful revolution. The peaceful revolution these Irish leaders were engaged in was a land war that was to be worked out by a conspiracy for the nonpayment of rent. Not that they always went for an absolute non-payment of rent. That was explained by the hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), or one of the Irish Members; it was to be a process of graduation, to reduce the' rent from time to time until they had brought the rents down to a nominal amount. In the Report of the Special Commission the Commissioners referred to the fact that even Mr. Parnell boasted that, by virtue of the operation of the Laud League, rents had been considerably reduced, so that if a land purchase scheme came on it would be based on the rents of that time. The Commissioners found that the respondents, including all the members who were made parties at that time, Entered into a conspiracy, illegal both in its objects and in the means which were adopted, by a system of coercion and intimidation, to promote an agitation against the payment of agricultural rents for the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from the country the Irish landlords who were described as the English garrison. That was the finding of a tribunal that was appointed by virtue of an Act of Parliament, which passed the Second Heading with the assent of hon. Members of this House, a tribunal whose impartiality had not been questioned. Thus it was established that the agitation was started first by Mr. Davitt in 1880, and that the Irish Members meant to have an agitation for non-payment of rent, which should aid a political movement. Instead of its being a case of distress, it was a case of agitation for political purposes; and the Legislature ought to realise the fact that in proportion as it yielded to agitation of that kind it would be promoted and increased. Assuming that it was a case of distress, why should Ireland alone be dealt with? There was distress all over the agricultural districts of England. What had the agricultural labourers in England done not to be legislated for? Was Parliament to confine its charitable operations to the Irish tenants? One of the most painful points in connection with this Bill was that the fact could not be disguised that it was the reward for the support hon. Members from Ireland had given to the Government during the last two years. The Government were bound to introduce and press forward this Bill as a debt due to the Irish Members who had kept them in Office. Had the Government the slightest hope or belief that the Bill could pass, their conscience might have been strong enough to enable them to resist such an iniquitous measure. But if it should pass this House it was capable of doing a very considerable mischief, because by passing it through this House the Government endangered, and very seriously endangered, the peace and prosperity of Ireland. They were creating hopes in Ireland that could never be realised; they were teaching the lesson to the agitators and the evicted tenants that the way to get rewarded was to violate the law, to carry out the principle the hon. Member for Donegal had asked this House to recognise, to have no respect for legality, to pursue their illegal course and trust to hon. Members in this House to secure them indemnity. Not only was it an injury to Ireland, but was such a violation of the first principles of legislation as would make property and labour insecure, and would make every man feel there was no such thing as right to be expected from the House of Commons, or indeed from the Legislature.

MR. FLYNN (Cork, N.)

said, that in so far as the speech of the hon. Member who had just sat down was at all relevant it was an attack upon the land legislation of the past 15 years, and it was an eloquent, glowing, and inconsequent vindication of free trade, and they were asked why they should not do something for the English labourer. He had read somewhere, at some time or other, that when English agriculture was very prosperous and wheat was fetching 100s. a quarter, the English labourer was worse off then than he was to-day. Perhaps, in the light of an argument of that kind, they might be able to attach a proper value to the observations of the hon. Gentleman on this question of the evicted tenants. They had to deal with the question as it stood in Ireland at the present time, and this House, and another place, would act wisely if they accepted this very important Bill. All through these Debates one thing had particularly struck him, and that was the absolute disregard that was shown by hon. Members for Irish public opinion in connection with this important matter. Was Irish public opinion of no importance in connection with this matter? Irish public opinion was very strong upon the point, and it had been expressed, he might say, without a dissentient voice. Ireland pleaded for the reinstatement of these Irish evicted tenants. In the past this House and Parliament—he spoke in an historical sense—had often treated Irish public opinion in this way, and had had cause to rue it. Another place that had been referred to had often treated Irish public opinion with contempt and disregard; it did so in 1880 in rejecting the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, a very moderate Bill, a Bill that sought to protect the roof-trees of these destitute tenants; but were the Irish landlords any better off in consequence? His hon. Friend the Member for Cork City (Mr. W. O'Brien) was accused of using the language of threats. His hon. Friend did nothing of the kind; he showed that the Bill did not contain provisions of the alarming character the hon. Member for Guildford considered them to be. The hon. Member's threat, if they would so call it, was this: that if they rejected the Bill they would have no guarantee for the continuance of social order in Ireland. His hon. Friend did not threaten them; he said that if the Bill passed every Party Leader in Ireland—that all Irish Societies would do all that could be done to work it in an honest and workable manner. His hon. Friend did not use a threat, but used the language of warning. As the rejection of the Bill of 1880, and the rejection of the Bill of 1886, introduced by Mr. Parnell to deal with the question of arrears, were followed by agitation, the hon. Member warned them, as all the Irish Members warned them, of what was likely to happen if this Bill were rejected. They—the reckless, hard-hearted, excited, sometimes merciless agitators—did not wish to see these things; they did not wish to see the present peaceable condition of things disturbed; they invited the House to cut the ground from under their feet, and by giving this Bill to send a message of peace and social order to Ireland. The hon. Member for South Tyrone (Mr. T. W. Russell) described a responsible Member of this House as an arbitrator. The how. Member when he acted as arbitrator in the Committee upstairs never gave his vote for the tenant except on trivial Amendments, when he knew it would not hurt his own Party, and on such occasions the how. Member was the most independent of all independent men; but when it became a crucial question between landlord and tenant, when it was a question of principle between rack renting landlords and rack-rented impoverished tenants then they found that, no matter what the argument might be, the vote of the hon. Member for South Tyrone (Mr. T. W. Russell) was always found against the tenant for whom he professed to have so much sympathy. An effort had been made during the course of these discussions, both on the Second Reading and in Committee, to confine the effect of the Bill to Plan of Campaign tenants. There was no justification for this attitude in the history of the agrarian struggle in Ireland; there was no justification for it in connection with the present state of the evicted tenants or of the Irish landlords. Let no one suppose that a single Member amongst the Irish Party would withdraw his sympathy from the Plan of Compaign, but they did not base their claim for the Bill on the Plan of Campaign. This Bill would not be confined to Plan of Campaign tenants, but there were thousands of tenants outside the combination to whom, it was hoped, the measure would apply. 1879 was a year of terrible distress—of bad crops and low prices. How did those landlords who had been pelted with pitiless panegyric to-night regard that distress? They denied the distress; they denied the fall in prices, and laughed at it. On the Kenmare estate, though the agent admitted before the Cow per Commission that he had seen the tenants famished and blue with hunger, it was denied that there was any distress. A Bill was brought in by the Irish Members to deal with the matter, but Parliament rejected the warnings of the Representatives of the Irish people. Thousands of tenants Hocked to the Laud Court, but could not get their rents fixed. Some of them had to wait three, four, and five years before they could take advantage of the Land Act. In the meantime many of them were evicted, and to these the present Bill would come as a measure of relief, as they had been driven from their homesteads, and all their little property had been sacrificed. Me could not say how many tenants were evicted pending a settlement, but there must have been close on 2,000. These people were evicted owing to the tardy legislation of Parliament—being unable to get fair rents fixed and not being able to pay the rackrents demanded of them. It was a physical impossibility to deal with the large number of originating notices that went before the Courts. In his own constituency the Land League was started in the County of Cork in 1880. In the western portion of the county bordering on Kerry was a small estate consisting of two farms, the rents of which were £30 and £38 odd. The land was marshy and of that kind most affected by the low prices that prevailed in 1879 and 1880. The tenants on these farms were evicted for one year's rent, after they had taken steps to serve their originating notices. The farms were taken possession of by a grabber, and from that day to this lie had not paid his rent, and was not tilling the land properly. He was simply in possession as an example to people who would not do what the landlords desired them to do. There had been three policemen on these two farms. Each constable was supposed to represent £100 to the British taxpayer, so that the three constables would cost £300 a year, and that expenditure during 10 years would amount to £3,000. No doubt these grabbers, who in certain quarters were regarded as the salt of creation, would be glad to go out on receipt of fair compensation. If the land were given up in this case a saving to the taxpayer of £300 a year would be effected. The extraordinary statement had been made by the hon. Member for North Armagh that the average tenant was not evicted by the average landlord in Ireland unless he owed at least five years' rent. An examination of the Appendix G of the Mathew Commission showed that such was not the case. He had taken three counties from each of the four provinces of Ireland in order to ascertain what were the average arrears of the evicted tenants who were not connected with the Plan of Campaign. He found that in Antrim the tenants were evicted for an average of 1½ years' rent, in Armagh for an average of 2¾ years' rent, and in Cavan for an average of 2.15 years. In Carlow the average was 2.10, in Dublin it was 1.50, and in Kildare it was 1.90. In Galway the average was 2.35, in Roscommon it was 2.40, and in Sligo it was 3. In Clare it was 2.07, in Limerick 1.90, in Waterford 1.90, and in Cork 1.90. These figures effectually disposed of the remarks which Tory gentlemen were so fond of making—that the rent amounted to 4 or 5 years. In the case of the Plan of Campaign tenants the average was between 2 and 2½ years, and much of that included arrears. In Ireland the arrears had accumulated almost from generation to generation. In England the landlords frequently made remissions of perhaps 40 per cent, to the struggling agriculturists to meet, times of depression: but in Ireland, instead of making such remissions, the landlord would pile up the 40 per cent, as arrears, so that if ever they wanted to come down upon the tenants they could always bring the arrears against them. The opinion of the Irish people on this question of the evicted tenants could not be mistaken. For several years past, and especially since the present Government came into Office, Public Bodies all over the country who were interested in social order and peace in Ireland, and who could not be supposed to have any innate or inborn sympathy with dishonesty, had, with very few exceptions, passed resolutions in favour of the Bill. If there was one portion of the addresses and speeches of the Nationalist Members during the General Election of 1892 which gave more satisfaction than another, it was their declarations that they would do all in their power to bring before Parliament a Bill of this kind. Unionist speakers had often said that they could not grant Ireland Home Rule, but that they would grant what was fair and reasonable in regard to Irish internal affairs. This Bill was a teat of the genuineness of these declarations. To him, personally, wishing as he did for peace and order in Ireland, it had been a keen and bitter disappointment to find how the measure had been met. The Irish Representatives thought it all too little, but, such as it was, if it were to pass into law they would do all they could to recommend it to their people, and to make it work equitably as between landlord and tenant. There existed no power on earth—no power in Parliament, and no power in Birmingham or Manchester—that could prevent the Irish people giving expression to their feeling of dislike and detestation of the laud-grabber. If Ireland had been quiet in the past two years and more; if there had been no outbreak of disorder, it was because the people had exercised a phenomenal patience and put a restraint on themselves in connection with this burning question which he could not always guarantee they would do. If the House rejected a moderate measure of this kind that restraint would be withdrawn, and there was no power in this Parliament which could prevent public opinion being exercised in such a manner as would teach both landlords and new tenants that Irish public opinion was sorely and grievously dissatisfied with the condition of things that at present obtained. While there was yet time the House would do well to pass this Bill by a large majority. He would entreat the House not to repeat the mistake made by another Chamber in 1886, but to send this message of peace and reconciliation to Ireland, trusting that it would do good to the tenants, to the landlords, and to all who were interested in the prosperity of the country.

MR. DISRAELI (Cheshire, Altrincham)

said, the hon. Member who had just sat down had made a great point of Irish public opinion. In discussing a Bill of this kind, however, there was another public opinion to take into account, and that was English public opinion. Reference had been made to the tropical imagination of some Members of the House. He did not think that those who had listened to the Debate could fail to consider that that description applied to the imaginations of gentlemen below the Gangway. They had dealt with the Bill not as a subject for immediate and practical legislation, but as a subject for sentiment and for a great deal of hysterics. It was asked what guarantee was there, if this Bill was rejected, that there would be order in Ireland. If, however, the House passed the Bill, what guarantee was there that there would be order in Ireland, or that the measure would bring about that position of peace and security which the Nationalist Members promised? He himself saw no finality about the Bill. He only saw a most inadequate measure which was to take the place of the Bill, which, if it were brought forward at all, ought to be full and thorough. He wished to deal with the matter from the point of view of an English County Member. He thought that an English County Member and a small English landlord like himself had a right to enter into a question of this kind, which affected the agrarian credit of the whole country. What was Irish agrarian law to-day was English agrarian law tomorrow. There had been one speech from a Radical County Member, who had talked very glibly about Laud Courts and other subjects which arose out of the question of Irish land legislation. Those were matters which he thought must sometimes come within the sphere of English agriculture. It was only fair to ask what effect this measure would have upon the agriculture of this country? After all, there were more English agricultural Members in this House than there were Irish agricultural Members. Irish public opinion might be strongly in favour of this Bill, but he thought that English public opinion ought to be taken into account also, and that was strongly against the Bill. Supposing that after the success of the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien) in turning out the tenants of the hon. Member for South Hunts (Mr. Smith-Barry) in Tipperary he had gone down to the County of Cheshire, and had tried to bring out the tenants of the hon. Member for South Hunts in that county, and supposing those tenants had gone out, would an evicted tenants' question have been started in Cheshire? If so, would it have been possible to bring forward some local trust, say the Weaver Trust, for the reinstatement of the evicted tenants of the hon. Member for South Hunts? He thought that, in the first place, the Cheshire tenants would have laughed at the hon. Member for Cork; and even if they had gone out an evicted tenants question would never have been raised, because the evicted tenants would have gone by the board and other tenants, would have taken their places. He knew that all the evicted tenants in Ireland were not Plan of Campaign tenants, but still the House could not get over the fact that except for the Plan of Campaign this question would never have been brought forward. But for Plan of Campaign tenants, who were promised that they should lose nothing by going out, and who in many cases had lost everything, the House of Commons would never have been troubled with this Bill. The hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon) had stated that he had never prevented people in Ireland from taking advantage of the clemency which was held out to them by the exceptional agrarian laws of Ireland. But the most notable point of the speech of the hon. Member for Derry (Mr. Ross) was that in which he showed that the hon. Member for East Mayo had in one case prevented the tenants on a certain estate from taking advantage of the clemency of the Irish agrarian laws. English County Members could not close their eyes to the fact that this Bill would assist men who had gone out of their holdings knowing perfectly well that they could pay their rent. The Bill was brought in not only to whitewash the leaders of the Plan of Campaign, but to reinstate tenants who had been party to a conspiracy, and could have paid but had refused to do so. He did not say that all the evicted tenants were in this position; but all the provisions of this Bill were overshadowed by the fact that it was a Plan of Campaign Bill, and that it arose out of an unlawful conspiracy. This would be the first time in the history of Parliament, if this Bill passed, that the law of the League had become the law of the land. In considering the speech of the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien) Members could not forget that he had in a very large degree been the vehicle for a great deal of the distress that had been brought on the Irish tenants. It was too late now to resurrect the Plan of Campaign story, but when such a Bill was brought forward the hon. Member's connection with that organisation could not be forgotten. The hon. and learned Member for Haddington (Mr. Haldane), in his very able speech I on the Second Beading, asked the House to bury the hatchet. Never would the hatchet be buried until the Member for Cork and some of his friends had been buried also. [Nationalist cries of "Oh!"] He did not mean that they should be given their quietus, but that the House of Commons would never listen to a proposal for reinstating the evicted tenants until certain of the ring-loaders of the Plan of Campaign had withdrawn from the position they had taken up with regard to that organisation. He had no wish that this Bill should be turned into a question of compromise. He did not think that was a subject which would allow of discussion. The Bill would be a very bad example in the future not only in Ireland but in England, and would destroy all good feeling which should exist between land-f lords and tenants. On those grounds it? ought to be rejected.

MR. E. J. C. MORTON (Devonport)

trusted that no words which he might utter would tend to widen the breach between the two sides in this controversy. He would explain to hon. Members opposite, whose bitterness in this controversy was due to the fact, or rather I was intensified by the fact, that attacks had been made from time to time in the course of the Debate on Irish landlords, that the supporters of the Bill did not allude to the whole of the landlords of Ireland, but to those particular Irish landlords who would be affected by the Bill. He admitted cordially that a large proportion of the Irish landlords were not unkind or cruel landlords; but if they I took the tenants who had been evicted j since 1879, and who would claim under that Bill, he thought he should not be far wrong in saying that the landlords of those tenants were not men the like of whom could be found among the landlords of England. They had been engaged in this controversy over the Irish question for the past eight years in an acute form, and yet it would appear from the Debate that even now some Members had not mastered the elementary facts of the land question. He was particularly struck by the re- marks of the hon. Member for the Harrow Division and the hon. Member for the Tradeston Division of Glasgow. Both of those hon. Members stated that Ireland enjoyed a system of land laws more favourable to the tenants than I existed in any other country in the world. If they looked at the matter technically, or from a legal point of view, or as it appeared on paper, he admitted that that was true; but if they took account of the circumstances of the case in Ireland, the economic conditions of Ireland, the customs that had grown up in Ireland, and a series of unfortunate circumstances which confined the Irish people to the land, then they would see that the condition of the tenant in Ireland was worse than that of the tenant in any civilised country. The opponents of measures like the Bill before the House frequently compared the Irish farmer and the Irish land system with the English farmer and the English land system; but those hon. Gentlemen altogether forgot the fundamental difference between the two systems. Although there were land grievances in this country, those grievances, great as they were, only immediately and directly affected a minority of the people. The difference was that the people in Great Britain earned their living, not by tilling the land, but by engaging in other industries, while in Ireland the great mass of the people had no means of earning their daily bread except by agriculture. In Ireland there were next to no non-agricultural industries. The mass of the Irish people had no other methods of employment than agriculture. This Parliament in the last and the preceding century crushed out—and deliberately crushed out, as the Preambles of the Acts showed—the Irish industries which were started at the same time as the English industries, and the result was the Irish tenant was now absolutely under the heel of the landlord. Well, the first effect of that was that the Irish landlord never made permanent improvements like the English landlord, or like the English landlord paid for the permanent improvements made by the tenant. The Irish tenant, or his father before him, or his grandfather before him, reclaimed the land from the bog, gathered the stones to build his little hut; put up the shed for the cow or the pigstye; and his love for his little holding was so great—greater even than the Englishman's proverbial love for his home—that when the landlord said to him, "You must give up that holding unless you pay the rent I demand," the effect was that the tenant would promise to pay rent which he could not pay in order to avoid eviction and exile from Ireland, which he feared worse than death itself. That was the real basis of the land difficulty. The common history of eviction since 1879 was that the tenant had obtained a small portion of unproductive moorland, and by three or four years labour had reclaimed it, and that when the holding was of some value the landlord increased the rent—["No!"]—though he himself had not expended a sixpence on it. That was a common case.

MR. BRODRICK

What about the Land Act of 1881?

MR. E. J. C. MORTON

said, he was speaking of the beginning of the history of those holdings. He contended that the Irish landlord never had any claim at all to the rent. The English tenant knew that nine-tenths of the value of the holding which he took had been created by labour and capital not his own. Even the most extreme land nationaliser or Socialist had never contended that rent should not be paid in England. The only question was to whom the rent should be paid. But the Irish tenant knew that all the value of his holding had been created by himself, or his father and grandfather; and to ask him to pay rent on the value he had created himself was legalised robbery. Although he was not particularly fond of landlords as a class, he should say that it was a slander on the English landlord to compare him with the Irish landlords. When land-had been reclaimed by the tenant, the Irish landlord raised the rent of the holding.

MR. BRODRICK

Will the hon. Gentleman quote a case where the land-lord raised the rent on account of improvements made by the tenant, and; where eviction followed?

MR. E. J. C. MORTON

said, that every single case of eviction between 1879 and 1881 was an illustration of the statement.

MR. BRODRICK

Quote a case.

Mr. E. J. C. MORTON

said, he could quote hundreds of cases of evictions between 1879 and 1881, in which the value of the holdings wore made by the tenants; where the tenants were rack-rented on their own improvements, and then when bad times came, and could not meet those rents, were evicted. There was the case of Mrs. Ahearn on the Glensharrold estate. Her husband had sold all the stock on the farm to pay the rent on his own improvements under threat of eviction; then the furniture went, and finally the widow was turned out of the hare house. That was a sample of the iniquitous robbery of Irish tenants by Irish landlords. The Plan of Campaign was referred to. There were two methods of treating the Plan of Campaign by hon. Gentlemen opposite, which was very inconsistent. They were extremely angry with it on the one hand, while they called it a despicable failure on the other hand. Under just laws and under a Constitution where the people had the power to make their own laws this Plan of Campaign could not be possibly defended; but as it was the Plan of Campaign was the war of an unarmed people. That was its justification, and as to its justification from the point of view of success, it was adopted on nearly 100 estates, and it succeeded absolutely on 80 of them. Besides that, there were an enormous number of settlements made by landlords with the knowledge of the Plan of Campaign in their minds. He welcomed the Bill as the first step towards a reorganisation of the whole land system. It was objected that the Bill was vague and uncertain, and that the word "unreasonableness" as to the conduct of the landlord or the tenant in the case, which the Arbitrators had to take into account, which was used in the Bill, had no legal definition. That was an objection which came with an ill grace from a party whose leader, in almost the last act of his tenure of office, created the new crime of oppression by a County Council, without a word of definition. The conditions to be dealt with in Ireland were revolutionary in character, and altogether anomalous; and the only hope of an adequate settlement was by some such method as that which the Bill proposed. He did not see how they could deal with the difficulty if they were met with legal definitions at every turn. Of the Arbitrators, two were avowed opponents of Nationalist politics, and the third had, in his profession as a solicitor, probably represented the landlords in the Laud Courts more than any other solicitor in Ireland. It showed a strange want of faith in their own views on the part of hon. Members opposite to distrust the discretion of such a Commission. They had been asked to reject the Bill because hon. Members opposite had not been allowed to discuss it; but if it had not been for the magnificent display of their dignity, which they made by leaving the House in a body, and so creating a political strike, hon. Members might have been discussing the Committee stage of the Bill at this moment. The Tory Party invariably used the argument in regard to Ireland which he could only describe as "heads I win, tails you lose." When Ireland was quiet they said there was no demand for reform; and when Ireland was on the verge of rebellion they said they could not yield to force. It seemed to him that hon. Gentlemen opposite would consult the dignity not only of Parliament and of the country, but of their Party, if they seized upon this moment of peace and quiet in Ireland to effect a settlement of this question. But he doubted whether they would do so. Since the magnificent speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin there had been a talk of compromise, and hon. Members opposite had declared that they desired compromise if only they could get it. He trusted that the expressed desire for compromise was sincere. Within a few days they would know whether it was sincere or not. The Bill, after it had left that House, would have to run the gauntlet of another Institution which in recent years seemed to have become a portion of the family estate of the family to which the Leader of the Opposition belonged. At any rate, the right hon. Gentleman and his Party could in that Institution get any amendment they desired made the Bill, and if they were sincere in their desire for a compromise the Bill would return to the House altered and transfigured by the genius of the Opposition. But if they did not see the Bill again altered and transformed, then he did not think the Party opposite could claim that their expressed desire for compromise was sincere. He was sorry to know that the hon. and gallant Member for North Armagh, backed subsequently by the Leader of the Opposition, had declared that the Bill would not come back, but would be defeated and destroyed in another place by a majority consisting wholly of landlords, who represented nobody but themselves and safeguarded no interests but their own. He desired to place before the House the peculiar cruelty of the situation in this respect. In the eyes of all foreign nations, and in the eyes, he believed, of the majority of the English people, the treatment of Ireland by England in the past had been cruel treatment. In times past, when Lord Palmerston protested against the cruel oppressions of Austria in Italy, and the cruel oppression of Russia, in Poland, he was desired to look to England's treatment of Ireland. But that treatment was not inflicted by the people of England, but by her aristocratic rulers, without the knowledge or consent of the people. Now that the people had obtained power in the House of Commons they had determined that the blot upon their otherwise fair fame should be swept away; but the same aristocratic rulers came in and said the people should not be permitted to wipe out this foul blot from their fair fame. He had only one word more to say. This question had been declared by the greatest Leader that House had had in modern times to be an urgent one, and if the Bill was rejected by those who represented none but themselves, it would be one further step towards freeing the people in England as well as the people of Ireland from a domination which they held in contempt.

MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN

Sir, I had not intended to take any part in this discussion, but I am tempted to say a few words upon the speech to which we have just listened. Perhaps the hon. Member may be surprised that I attach so much importance to his speech, but it is, I venture to say, a typical speech. It is really an exact representation of what I may call the platform oratory of the Party to which the hon. Member belongs. There has not been, I venture to say, one single argument or sentence in the course of that speech which has been directed to this Bill before the House, and the whole speech has been—I should flatter the hon. Member if I called it an effort of the imagination—but an effort of memory, for it is a pure repetition of speeches which we have heard a hundred times before. If there was any argument in that speech it was an argument not in favour of this Bill, but against the payment of rent at all. The hon. Gentleman has told us in so many words that in Ireland the whole value of property has been made by the tenant, and that nothing whatever belongs to the landlord.

MR. E. J. C. MORTON

I expressly excluded myself from that interpretation. What I said was that I dealt first of all exclusively with the estates that would be affected by this Bill—that was the estates from which the tenants had been evicted since 1879. I stated that in the large majority of these cases that this was so.

MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN

That is all very well. I am going to test the accuracy of the hon. Gentleman before I sit down. In the meantime, it is with the general character of his speech that I desire to deal; and I want to call the attention of the House—aud to some extent of the people outside—to the fact that this is the rubbish with which it is sought to delude the electorate of this country. Why, Sir, anyone who listened to the hon. Gentleman, who talks about removing a blot from his fair fame by doing justice at this late hour to Ireland,. would imagine that we had done nothing during the last 15 years to redress the grievances of Ireland. I am not here to-deny that Ireland had grievances, as indeed had Scotland and England, and all parts of Her Majesty's dominions. This House exists, we know, to remove grievances; but for the last 15 years the greater part of our time has been spent solely in redressing the grievances of Ireland, and chiefly by the Party to which the hon. Member and I myself belong—the Liberal Party. Now, Sir, what is the position the hon. Member takes up? Does he mean to say that all this legislation—that all these successive Land Acts and other Acts passed for the benefit of Ireland have been of no effect, and that the grievances of Ireland remain exactly as they were? If that is his position, I would ask the House whether they think it worth while to go on any longer wasting our time in passing Acts which produce no result, either in securing the gratitude of the Irish people or their Representatives, or the satisfaction and contentment of the hon. Member, or in removing that blot from his fair fame which causes him so much anxiety and trouble. I say it was all very well before the great series of legislation which began in 1870 with the Land Act of the right hon. Member for Midlothian, and the Church Act, and which has been followed continuously by further legislation—it was all very well before that commenced to talk of the grievances of the Irish tenants, which undoubtedly at that time were greater than the grievances of the English tenantry; but to say that after all our efforts and continuous legislation exactly the same language is to be used, word for word, and year after year, which we heard about these complaints 25 years ago. is to say that we have been engaged in an absolutely useless task, or that the hon. Member has been asleep for the past 25 years while other people have been working. Now, I said that I would test the accuracy of the hon. Member. He has told the House, as probably he has told many audiences throughout the country, where, I have no doubt, he is popular, and where imagination is always appreciated—he has told the House that these tenants, hundreds and thousands of them, were people upon whom the landlords had raised the rent again and again, and who bad gone out from their holdings because they were unable to pay the rack-rents which the abominable injustice of the landlords had imposed upon them. All that, as the House knows, is absolutely impossible. What is the use of the great Laud Act of 1880, which protected the improvements of the tenants, and of the impartial Court set up in order to establish judicial rents, if these grievances still continue, as the hon. Gentleman in his crass ignorance seems to think? And then, Sir, in the middle of his impassioned harangue, my hon. Friend opposite (Mr. Brodrick) asked him for a case. Oh, that was a fatal inquiry. Gentlemen who speak like the hon. Member are not accustomed on platforms to be asked for cases. The hon. Member was taken aback. He thought for a moment, and said, "I will give you a case, a typical case." This is the typical case—the case the hon. Member has inquired into, and by this case let the hon. Member stand or fall. It is the case of Mrs. Ahearn of the Glensharold Estate. Oh, take pity for the widow and orphan who was cruelly evicted from her tenancy, in which, bear in mind, she had made every improvement; she had built the little cottage with stones which she had picked up out of the field—the field was all stones previously; she built her little cottage with the stones, and made the land, and then the cruel landlord came down on her and raised her rent again and again, evicted her, and turned her out by the roadside because she could not pay his extortionate rent. Sir, will the House believe that Mrs. Ahearn was not a tenant at all? Mrs. Ahearn's case was one of a class of cases which are not infrequent in Ireland. The land was the laud of Mr. Delmege; he had lived on the laud; he made the laud, improved it, put lime into it, and gave it all the value it possessed; and, having done this, he let the laud for grazing, and in order that Mrs. Ahearn and other people in her position should not be tenants he let the grazing in some cases for five or six months, and in the case of Mrs. Ahearn for 11 months. She never had a year's tenancy.

MR. E. J. C. MORTON

If this account is not pure imagination it must refer to a totally different case, because I know the case of Mrs. Ahearn. I have been over the holding, and at the time I saw it neither thou nor at any previous time had there been any grazing on the holding at all.

MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN

I will quote from Mr. T. W. Russell's work a description of the tenancy. It sets forth that Mrs. Kate Ahearn was never a tenant on the estate; that Mr. Delmege held the farm, known as the Cottage Farm, in his own possession; that he laid I out a considerable sum in improving the farm, drained and manured it, laid it out in separate fields, and let the laud to different people for grazing purposes. Michael Ahearn took four of those fields for 11 months at the rate of £10. After Ahearn died Mr. Delmege took the land, leaving the widow in the cottage, which I was greatly dilapidated, and for which she had not been asked to pay anything. She was offered the grazing of the land, but she wanted to be recognised as a tenant, which, of course, could not be done.

MR. E. J. C. MORTON

said, that this was not the same case.

MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN

I should think that it was not, when the facts come to be correctly stated. The hon. Member says he knows hundreds and thousands of such cases, and that he can quote them in this House. If he does, I have no doubt we shall be able to deal with them as we have dealt with the case he has given. But, Sir, all this is beside the question. [Mr. BODKIN: It is.] Yes, it is beside the question, and yet that is the stuff by which the agricultural population in the country are deluded by the hon. Member for Devonport. I have thought it worth while for once to ex pose him in his presence. Now, Sir, I will say a word or two about the Bill. This Bill was brought in in its present form by the Government with the object of dealing, as they said, with the social and administrative difficulty of Ireland. Upon the Second Beading of the Bill it was perfectly evident what line would be taken by the Opposition. The Government and hon. Members opposite knew perfectly well what they could and what they could not get. They might have had a Bill providing for a voluntary arrangement, in the nature of the 13th clause of the Act of 1891, greatly extended in its operation by the help of the large sum of money which the Government had at their disposal for the purpose of carrying it into effect. If they had wanted an arrangement of that kind, which by their own confession this evening would have provided for nine-tenths of the evicted tenants, they could have had it. I am not stating that on my own authority, for I know nothing about it, but I take those figures from the statement of the hon. Member for Cork. Why have not the Government endeavoured to secure that arrangement? Why, the moment they found that the Opposition were willing to assent to such an arrangement they closured the Debate on the Bill, with the result that it became impossible for such an arrangement to be arrived at. The Government themselves have prevented that amicable settlement from being: come to, and it is upon them that the responsibility for its not having been arrived at rests. The responsibility rests upon the Government in the first place, but in the second place it rests with hon. Members below the Gangway opposite. I am not blaming them for their action in the matter—they know their own interests best—but if they desired a settlement to be come to, nothing could have been easier than for them to have got up when they were in this House alone with the Government, and have given some intimation to that effect. But the hon. Members never made a sign. Let me state what is my position and that of those who think with me in this matter. We have not shown ourselves in the course of this Debate at all opposed to a settlement. We have all along pointed out that we were prepared to consider the case of the tenant who had left his holding owing to pressure, or to his having been deceived by the representations which had been made to him. We thought that such a tenant was worthy of our sympathy. Where we did not agree with the Government was in thinking that, for the purpose of settling this question, all principles of law and of justice were to be set aside. On the contrary, we thought that all the difficulty might be met without committing injustice. But we felt that there was one duty that was incumbent upon us to discharge—a duty that was oven greater than to show sympathy with the evicted tenants—and that was that justice in the first place should be done to the new tenants—to the men who had taken the land and had worked it at the risk of their lives. Nothing would induce us to abandon those men—we are not such cowards, as in the hope of securing future I peace and order in Ireland for ourselves, to betray the men who have trusted to British justice. In order to protect those men we sought to retain the veto of the landlords. What has the hon. Member for Cork said on this point to-night? The hon. Member had not the courage to state his meaning in plain language, but he threatened these men with what he described as "public opinion" in Ireland.

MR. W. O'BRIEN

I specified distinctly what I meant. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman knows the public opinion that has been brought to bear by t the Primrose dames on Radical opinion in England. I also mentioned the circumstances of the Wesleyan minister at Hatfield.

MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN

When did the Primrose dames mutilate cattle? When did the Primrose dames fire into houses? When did they drag the tenants out of their houses and place them against the walls and shoot them to death under the cowardly instigation of their advisers? And these men now get up and say that the tenants are under the influence and terrorism of the landlords, whom they denounce as being scarcely fit to live. Fortunately, the landlords are above these threats. After all, it is not they who have suffered most; it is the poor tenants, men of their own class, who have been shot down and brutally murdered. You dare not touch the landlords, and therefore it is that we desire to give them the real veto in order to enable them to protect I heir new tenants. That is the first thing that we say. The hon. Member said in the course of the Debate that this Parliament had never done anything; that at this late day the Government are trying to do something for them, but that little is obtained except under the pressure of disturbance in Ireland. I am afraid to some extent that is true; but let it not be true any longer. The hon. Member said two things, to both of which attention ought to be given. In the first place, this Parliament had acted too late. It is true. Let us act in time. Let us act when we are convinced of the justice of the cause. Let us act upon the merits of the case and without regard to threats of oppression. In the second place, he said that we only acted after pressure. The lesson we have to learn is never lot us act under pressure again, because the only result is to give encouragement to Members like the hon. Member for Cork to goon in their illegal proceedings, to raise conspiracies, and to extort from our fears what they have never claimed from our sense of justice. If it be true that justice demands this Bill, let us vote for it, but do not let us vote for it because of the threats of hon. Members opposite; let us see whether, even by a course of 20 years of resolute government, we cannot teach Irishmen to respect the law. I say let us judge this thing by its merits and on its merits. I have admitted there was a case made out for some of those tenants which might have been met, and if it has not been met the fault is the fault of hon. Members opposite and of the right hon. Gentleman on the Treasury Bench. It is not our fault. For our part, we have made our offer, and it has not been accepted; and I would rather not accept any compromise or any Bill than give once more an encouragement to violence, agitation, and dishonesty in Ireland.

[At this point Mr. DILLON and Mr. A. J. BALFOUR rose together for the purpose of continuing the discussion.]

MR. DILLON

Sir——

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Sir——[Loud cries of "Dillon!" from the Irish Benches.]

MR. T. M. HEALY

Two speeches on the same side.

* MR. SPEAKER

Order, order! that is a disgraceful expression. I will state to the House exactly what has happened. There is now only an hour left, and it is reasonable that the Leader of the Opposition should speak, to be followed by the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and if those two right hon. Gentlemen speak it would be impossible for any other Member to intervene, from lack of time. [Cries of "Adjourn !"] I am sure no one in the House wishes it more than myself. I can assure the House that is the only motive I had in calling on the right hon. Gentleman.

MR. DILLON

May I make a personal appeal to the right hon. Gentleman. I do think that, in view of the great interest which has been aroused in the House by the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, totally unexpected as it was, throwing charges across the floor of the House which touch our constituents, it is hard if no Member of the Irish Party is permitted to reply. I would be the last person in the House to suppose that you were actuated by any motives other than those of scrupulous firmness. I have experienced too much personal kindness than to suppose otherwise, but I would I appeal to you and to the Leader of the Opposition to allow some Member of the Irish Party to answer the speech of the right hon. Gentleman.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

It is impossible for me to ignore the appeal of the hon. Member; but he must see that we have a right to speak in this Debate. I am perfectly indifferent whether the hon. Member occupies the half-hour that remains or whether the Chief Secretary occupies it; but to allow the hon. Member and the Chief Secretary to divide the hour between them is asking more than I am inclined to concede. I should, of course, greatly prefer to follow an opponent than a friend, but it ought hardly to be expected that I should give up my right to speak before this Debate closes.

MR. DILLON

I should be sorry to ask the right hon. Gentleman to give up his right to speak; but I think the speech of the right hon. Gentleman opposite has created a new situation, and it is sufficiently important to have the Debate carried over until to-morrow, so that some arrangement can be made by which the voice of Ireland might be heard on a matter of vital interest to Irishmen. I would respectfully ask the Government to consent to adjourn the Debate either until to-morrow, or, better still, until Thursday night, so that the Leader of the Opposition should have an opportunity to reply.

* MR. SPEAKER

The hon. Member can speak next, and the Leader of the Opposition afterwards.

MR. DILLON

I would not take advantage of your kindness without stating that the subject is too grave for three speeches to be compressed into the space of an hour. I appeal to all hon. Members who consider the great gravity of interests we have at stake not to close the door of this important discussion until we clearly understand each other's minds, and until we see whether there are not some means of coming to an agreement. I again appeal to the Leader of the House to grant us an adjournment until Thursday, when it would be perfectly easy to close the Debate at the commencement of the proceedings.

MR. JUSTIN MCCARTHY

I strongly appeal to the Leader of the House to accept the suggestion made by my hon. Friend. It is wholly impos- sible that this Debate can be finished without an adjournment.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Not Thursday.

MR. JUSTIN M'CARTHY

It is impossible that the Debate can be concluded by 12 o'clock to-night. We ought to have fair time to reply to the charges brought against us by the right hon. Gentleman in the speech he has just delivered.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

May I ask you, Sir, whether it would not be possible to continue the Debate to-night for an hour beyond 12 o'clock?

* MR. SPEAKER

As 12 o'clock is the ordinary time for the termination of our proceedings I hardly like to take upon myself to say that we can set aside the Standing Order in the manner suggested.

MR. J. MORLEY

The demand of the hon. Member for Mayo comes upon mo with surprise; but the circumstances being what they are, and it being evidently quite impossible for the right hon. Gentleman opposite, to say nothing of the hon. Member for Mayo and myself, to exhaust what has to be said, the Government offer no objection to the adjournment of the Debate until to-morrow, but will on no account consent to a prolongation beyond to-morrow.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

By the leave of the House, I may say I think it is most inconvenient that the Debate should go over, and I am perfectly ready to give up my privilege to speak, and I think we may devote the next hour to listening to the hon. Member for Mayo and the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland.

MR. DILLON

I should be very sorry if the Leader of the Opposition adheres to that view, because it would lead one to believe that there is much seriousness in the offer which was thrown out as a challenge to us by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham. But when the Chief Secretary for Ireland says my claim to be heard on behalf of the Irish Party comes on him by surprise, my reply is that the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham came upon us by surprise, and we were under the impression that the right hon. Gentleman had decided not to intervene in the Debate. I do not in the least degree complain of his intervention. But although the opening sentences of his speech sounded something like the old times, towards the close of his speech he made some rather remarkable statements, with which I certainly feel that some Member of our Party is bound to deal. There was one sentence in the speech of the right hon. Gentleman which I think ought to be fixed in the attention and ought to command the careful consideration of every Member of this House. The right hon. Gentleman said the future of Ireland depends on the Irish people learning the lesson that not by violence and not by crime must they look to achieve their rights through legislation. I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman in that sentiment. It is a sentiment which I myself have frequently expressed in this House. What are the circumstances in which we now find ourselves? By the admission of the right hon. Member for West Birmingham, of the Leader of the Opposition and of all Parties, the people of Ireland for the last two or three years have been peaceful and quiet beyond all previous periods in their history. If the right hon. Gentleman believes that the future of Ireland depends upon teaching the people of Ireland that they will receive consideration and justice in this House when they are quiet and peaceable and law-abiding, and not when they are engaged in violence and agitation, or crime in that country, then I say now is the time and now the opportunity to do them justice when they have been patient, law-abiding, and quiet. The whole course of the policy of this House through generations of long years has been calculated to impress on the mind of every Irish peasant that he could obtain no hope of redress so long as he remained patient and law-abiding, and that it was only by violence and agitation that the grievances of Ireland could obtain my hearing in this Assembly. It is on that ground largely that we base our appeal to the House of Commons to consider this question in a different spirit to that which has been exhibited to-night. Ireland has been peaceable, patient, and law-abiding. Every responsible speaker has admitted that there exists a state of distress and grievance in Ireland which ought to be remedied, and yet we have seen the spirit in which that condition has been approached in this House, and we appear to be on the verge of a fresh and painful step in the history of that unhappy country which will be marked by the rejection of this Bill. If I were, so disposed I might enter into a war of recrimination with the right hon. Gentleman with reference to the observations he made on the speech of the hon. Member for Devonport; but, as he said, that is all beside the question. Are we at this hour of the day seriously engaged in discussing the question whether the Irish tenants have had grievances, and the Irish landlords have evicted harshly? That is an idle and futile discussion for this stage of the Bill. What we are engaged in discussing, or what we ought to be engaged in discussing, is whether any remedy can be applied to the said condition of things which exists in Ireland, and which every hon. Member admits exists in that country. What, after all, is the point of difference between the two sides of the House? Both Parties admit that there exists in Ireland a very great social evil which may lead to the gravest possible consequences. One Party say they would be willing to remedy that evil if a voluntary measure were accepted by us, and the Government of the day have introduced a Bill which proposes to remedy the evil by compulsion placed upon the landlord only, and not upon the new tenant, because there is no proposal for any compulsion with regard to the now tenant. Therefore, it now appears that the only point at issue between the two sides in this controversy is whether the Irish Party would accept a voluntary instead of a compulsory Bill, or whether the Government would adopt a voluntary instead of a compulsory Bill? The right hon. Member for West Birmingham stated that he and his Party had offered a voluntary measure for the settlement of this difficulty. Sir, I deny that. No such offer was ever made. The right hon. Gentleman is entirely wrong in stating that we were perfectly well aware such a Bill could be obtained. We have no such knowledge; we never had such knowledge, and allow me to point out this fact: This is a short Bill dealing with a very simple and limited matter, and we were two days in Debate in the Committee on this Bill before the Closure Resolution was proposed which is made a matter of such bitter complaint. A very simple Amendment omitting two lines in the first clause of this Bill would have turned it into a voluntary instead of a compulsory measure, and so far as I recollect no proposal to effect that change was made by any of the right hon. Gentleman's friends during those two days. The fact is, that two whole nights were occupied on the first two lines of this Bill, and we were never allowed to approach the question whether it was to be voluntary or compulsory. I want to know from the right hon. Gentleman himself is that a fair way of treating a question like this, on the solution of which the lives and happiness of a great many people depend? Make no mistake about that—even on the admission of the right hon. Gentleman himself—of a great many people who, even on the admission of the right hon. Gentleman himself, are perfectly innocent. Of course, we must think of the families of those persons. We must also remember the fact that the right hon. Gentleman contends that these people were driven by coercion and intimidation into these conspiracies. Then, if that is true, is he not all the more bound to come to their rescue now if they are unable to protect themselves? Therefore, I say it is not a fair and true description of the present situation for the right hon. Gentleman to charge us with having shown an irreconcilable spirit. What has been our position? The Government were bound, with all the information at their disposal and with a full sense of their responsibility, to bring before this House a measure which, according to the best of their judgment, would heal this trouble and do away with this social difficulty. After full inquiry they came to the conclusion that a voluntary measure would not in many cases effectually deal with the difficulty. I would ask hon. Members to recollect this fact: that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin in his speech admitted that he did not think it rational or logical to bring in a purely voluntary measure, leaving it thereby in the power, as he put it, of a few unreasonable landlords to nullify your measure and make the remedy an ineffectual one. The Government, in bringing in a compulsory measure, took the only course open to them, on their own responsibility, for the peace of Ireland. We likewise hold and believe I that it was only from a compulsory measure that we could look for an effectual V remedy. We ground that belief on our experience in Ireland in dealing with unreasonable landlords, and also on our experience of the working of Clause 13. It is not true or fair to say that we obstructed in any way the working of Clause 13, and it failed most signally to remedy the condition of things. That was the condition which existed when the Bill was introduced. The Government introduced a measure such as, in their judgment, would apply an effectual remedy to this disease, and I say it does not lie in the mouth of any Member of this House to say that we have refused a voluntary measure until that voluntary measure has been offered in a shape on which a judgment could be founded upon it. For my part, I greatly fear that a voluntary Bill would not lead to a settlement of the existing difficulty, but my view of that question would be largely modified if any declaration were to be made on behalf of the Irish landlords to the effect that they would facilitate a settlement under a voluntary measure. No doubt, if the hon. Member for South Hunts and other gentlemen who direct the action of the landlords in Ireland were to endeavour sincerely to make a voluntary plan work such a plan would work; but as long as those gentlemen maintain an irreconcilable attitude, what rational ground exists for hoping that a voluntary plan would be adequate to meet the necessities of the case? Our attitude, therefore, in respect of the modification of the Bill must necessarily depend largely upon the tone and temper displayed by the landlord party in this Assembly. The House is, I think, making a great and serious mistake in exhibiting so much anxiety to get rid of this Bill. Surely the Opposition are showing a sad and reprehensible disregard of responsibility when, amid jeers and laughter, they endeavour to hustle this Bill out of the House. How can any man hope that the Irish people will be reconciled to this Parliament and will look to it for justice and the recognition of their rights—how can any man entertain such a hope in view of the action of the Opposition in respect of this Bill? But even at the eleventh hour I have not abandoned all hope that some arrangement may be arrived at. The hon. Member for South Tyrone, in a speech showing a strong desire on his part to effect a settlement of this question, declared that both sides in Ireland were tired of the struggle. I agree with the hon. Member. Both sides in Ireland are, I believe, tired of this cruel struggle, which has been the fruitful parents of suffering and misery. It would be worthy of this House if, dismissing old, worn-out charges and recriminations—it being admitted, if you wish, that I am myself a criminal of the darkest dye—and approaching the question simply in the spirit of statesmen, you were to make one supreme effort to solve this great problem. The fortunes of innocent women and children are at stake, and if this Bill is rejected many people, I fear, who never joined the Plan of Campaign, will be condemned to lives of misery and possibly infamy. It is idle to ask us, as the hon. Gentleman who moved the rejection of the Bill did, whether we will give a pledge of finality. Finality in what? Has not the hon. Gentleman himself admitted in the Committee Room upstairs that there must be an Irish Land Bill next year? There cannot be finality on the question of Irish Land Laws, I am afraid, for some years to come. What there can be finality in—and this is a deep-seated conviction in my mind—is this: There can be finality in outrage and crime and class hatred in Ireland, and this you can effect by passing this healing measure of justice. What is the use of talking about the good effects of 20 years "firm government" in Ireland? We have had 90 years of firm government in that country. The right hon. Member for West Birmingham asked whether all our exertions are to go for nothing, and whether agitation is to go on after the Land Acts which have been passed. Nobody knows better than the right hon. Gentleman himself that those Land Acts have brought benefit to Ireland, that the bloody record of the past has been largely effaced and wiped out by the measures of justice which have been passed by the House. We can obtain no finality in human affairs. We cannot promise finality. But what I and my friends can, and do, now promise is that if the hand of reconciliation is held out to us, and if the Opposition show any generosity towards these poor people, we Irish Members on our part will meet them half-way, and will do our best to secure that the future course of reform in Ireland may be a peaceable course, and may be carried on by no other weapons than those used in this peaceful country.

MR. J. MORLEY

Mr. Speaker, I greatly regret that the House has not had the advantage of hearing the observations which the right hon. Gentleman opposite was expected to make on this Bill. No one more sincerely regrets it than I do, but I hope he will feel that it is proper for me, as the Minister in charge of this Bill, to make some observations. When the Debate opened to-night my hon. Friend the Member for the Guildford Division of Surrey, who knows a great deal about Irish affairs, said, and said truly, that, this Debate and this Bill marked a critical position in Irish affairs. He says that this Bill and this discussion mark—and he used very emphatic language—a turning point in the Irish Land Question. The hon. Member said that there I were three matters which he invited me 'to bring my mind to and to deal with—I first, purchase; second, the question of evicted tenants; and thirdly, that new Land Act—the Amendment of the various Land Acts—which he contemplates as an inevitable necessity. My hon. Friend must know that, in spite of the turn that it was attempted to give to an observation of mine as to my attitude towards the Irish landlords—he must know, from the line I took in 1886, that the Irish landlords have not had in me an irreconcilable foe. The hon. Member for the Harbour Division of Dublin, in his speech; to-night, said the Irish landlords had carried it a little too far, and he said they had no warmer friend than I. I do not accept that——

MR. HARRINGTON

I beg the right hon. Gentleman's pardon. I did not say anything at all of the kind. I said the landlords of Ireland could not I desire to have a warmer friend in Office, because if they had their political supporters in Office their political supporters would be able to bring pressure to bear upon them, which the right hon. Gentleman is not bringing, and apparently has no intention of bringing.

MR. J. MORLEY

The whole point of the hon. and learned Gentleman's argument was that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bristol (Sir M. Hicks-Beach) was a far harder foe of the Irish landlords than I am. [Mr. HARRINGTON: Hear, hear!] Well, I disclaim that compliment. At the same time, I think that remark was enough to have shown the hon. Member for Guildford that I have, at least, not shown a disposition to press the law against the Irish landlords, nor in the discussions upstairs or anywhere else have I even exhibited a desire to treat Irish landlords differently from any other citizens of this realm. Let us suppose that my hon. Friend is right, and that Ave are entering on a new chapter of agrarian legislation. I put it to him, and I put it to other gentlemen above the Gangway, whether there could be a more unfortunate way of turning over that new leaf than the spirit which has, in so many parts of this discussion, been shown by those who have taken upon themselves to speak for the Irish landlords? My hon. Friend who moved the rejection of the Bill said that there was a general desire for an accommodation, and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Birmingham declared that the same wish was present in his mind as that which was present in the minds of the hon. Member for South Tyrone, of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin, and of others who sit around them. What practical and effective evidence have we had of this desire for an accommodation? Has one single proposal been made—has one single proposal been laid before this House which the Government could have taken up, could have considered, and could have acted upon?

MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN

Yes; the Amendments which we were not allowed to discuss.

MR. J. MORLEY

My right hon. Friend refers to the Amendments, and he said in the course of his remarks that it was our resort to the Closure which had prevented that accommodation. Let us look at that for a moment. We were in Committee for two days on this Bill. In those two days 21 Amendments were disposed of—seven were disposed of by the Chairman's decision that they were out of Order, and we disposed of 14 effective Amendments. The Amendments left on the Paper were 350, and in whose names did those 350 Amendments stand? One stood in the name of a British Liberal, 26 in the names of Irish Nationalists, 119 in the names of Irish Unionists, and 186 in the names of British Unionists who have no special interest in Irish questions. [Cheers, and Opposition cries of "Oh!" and "Why not?"] Yes, I said gentlemen from England like the hon. Member for Preston, who had no special interest in Irish questions. Now, does my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham mean that conciliation has been prevented because we did not give time for the discussion of those 186 Amendments which were set down by British Members of Parliament?

MR. J. CHAMBEBLAIN

No, Sir; as my right hon. Friend has referred to me, I did not mean that by my interruption. What I did mean is that a number of Amendments put down in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Tyrone would have transformed the Bill into a voluntary Bill. We were not allowed to discuss them; but it was open to the Government if they' approved of them to have introduced them themselves, even if we were away.

MR. J. MORLEY

It is quite true that the hon. Member for Tyrone had put down a scheme of Amendments. But what was the object of it? It was to transform the Bill from a compulsory into a voluntary Bill; and, secondly, which is much more important, to transform it from a reinstatement scheme into a purchase scheme. The hon. Member for Dover had a precisely similar scheme on the Paper, and he said, "If you had given us four hours you could have discussed the whole of my proposal."

MR. WYNDHAM

No; I said you would have reached that point in the Bill.

MR. J. MORLEY

Yes; but when my right hon. Friend the Member for West Birmingham says there was no time for the discussion of these Amendments of the hon. Member for Dover and the hon. Member for South Tyrone he forgets that there were 35 hours left in which that scheme, which undoubtedly was the most important alternative to the Government proposal, could have been amply discussed. But my right hon. Friend and right hon. Gentlemen opposite thought for some reason, I know not what, that they could more usefully contribute to the passage of or to the amendment of this Bill or to the getting a fair hearing for alternate schemes, by what? By one of the most foolish, puerile manœuvres. It is quite true that Mr. Burke, Mr. Fox—great men—seceded, but these great men seceded for great objects. They seceded because they would have nothing to do with a policy they thought mistaken, but which, at all events, was a great policy, but they did not secede in a sulk because they would have only 35 hours instead of 45 hours in which to discuss a Bill. No, I hold to my description of that manœuvre, and I repeat it was one of the most puerile manœuvres ever heard of. My right hon. Friend the Member for West Birmingham talked about justice to the new tenants, and said, "We are not such cowards as to leave these new tenants to their fate." I maintain that I am just as much entitled as my right hon. Friend to disclaim cowardice, because, in spite of representations, I said these men should not be put out against their will. As to the proposal to turn the Bill into a voluntary measure, when I assumed a post of responsibility in the administration of Ireland two years ago I found that Section 13 had completely failed. I hope the House will not think me egotistical, but this has an important bearing on the question. So far as my inquiry went it failed, not because agitators induced Irish tenants not to avail themselves of its provisions, but because there was not time enough given and because voluntary purchase alone could not and cannot settle this question. I set to work and underwent a considerable amount of obloquy in this House and elsewhere for appointing a Commission to inquire into these facts which were forced upon me by social and administrative difficulties in the country. From that day down to this I have made the starting point of the evicted tenant policy to get, if possible, the goodwill of the landlords. It has been my aim and object to get the landlords to assent to some kind of plan which should reinstate these evicted tenants, or restore them, in some shape or other, and by voluntary means, if possible, to their holdings. Of course, any man would prefer a voluntary Bill if he persuaded himself that it would work, but if I had brought in a voluntary Bill everything that has happened has convinced me that the Bill would not have achieved the objects we all have at heart. All depends on whether the landlords would work the Bill. What reason had I for thinking they would consent to work a voluntary Bill? First of all, the Landlords' Convention, as soon as the Second Reading of the Bill approached, passed a series of hostile and strongly-worded resolutions with the words "iniquitous," "immoral," "unjust," and so forth. Secondly, I have heard the speech of the hon. Member for South Hunts (Mr. Smith-Barry), every word of which was one of antagonism to anything like a voluntary Bill; indeed, he went so far as to say that if I wanted to settle the evicted tenants question I had nothing to do but to get up and say that the Government would not stir one hair's breadth in the matter.

MR. SMITH-BARRY

What I said was that it was settling itself.

MR. J. MORLEY

Quite true, but that was non possumus. No one from any quarter of the House has said that the evicted tenants question was settling itself, or would settle itself, and the hon. Member for Guildford, who has moved the rejection of the Bill, himself admits, as he knows, that non possumus will not settle it or carry it any way towards a settlement. A third factor which has made me feel very doubtful about the success of a voluntary scheme was the preference for the Amendment of the lion, and gallant Member for North Armagh and the throwing over of the Amendment of the hon. Member for South Tyrone. I really ask the House to consider what chance a Minister could conceive himself of having a voluntary system work when the gentlemen on whose goodwill the working of it depended took up such a line as I have indicated, and which showed itself in the three symptoms or signs I have referred to. There was an Amendment standing in the name of the hon. and learned Member for the St. Stephen's Green Division of Dublin—which he did not more—to this effect, that at a certain; stage of the Bill—namely, the operation of the Bill, the landlord's consent should be necessary. What was that stage? The first proceeding is the petition, the second the conditional order by the Arbitrators, the third is the hearing of the parties in case the landlord objects, and the fourth is the order being made absolute. The hon. and learned Member for the St. Stephen's Green Division proposed that after petition, after the conditional order, after the hearing of the parties by the Arbitrators, and before the order was made absolute, the landlord's consent should be an indispensable precedent condition.

MR. W. KENNY

One of my earliest Amendments was that the petition presented by the petitioner should be with the consent of the landlord.

MR. J. MORLEY

That is an Amendment, of course, we could never have assented to. But the other Amendment interposing the landlord's consent at that stage which I have indicated, just before the blow fell, raised a point which might have been worthy of consideration. But it has not been mentioned in this night's Debate. In spite of all the talk of accommodation from that quarter of the House, in spite of the appeal made to the House in the noble and memorable speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin, which I venture to say—whatever may be thought of its purport—nobody who heard it will ever forget; in spite of that no proposal of any kind, no indication, has been thrown out to us that either that or any other proposal would be accepted as a final settlement of the difficulty dealt with by the Bill. On the contrary, it cannot be forgotten that the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for North Armagh, who moved the rejection of the Bill on the Second Reading, used most violent language, which precluded any kind of hope of accommodation or compromise. What did he say? He said, "You are going, out of the Church Fund, to reward the conspirators," or some such words, "and pay them the wages of iniquity." Was that the spirit of accommodation? What is much more important, the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition, in his speech, used words almost as unqualified. There was not one single syllable in that speech which seemed to open any door whatever for accommodation or for making the Bill workable in the opinion of gentlemen opposite.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I was waiting for Committee.

MR. J. MORLEY

His language did not indicate that he was waiting for the Committee stage at all. He was in a position—and the cheers of the hon. Member for South Hunts showed the same thing—of absolute non possumus, and from that position I do not know whether he has or has not departed. That is one of the reasons why I deplore we have not had the benefit of hearing him to-night, for I should have listened with a most eager curiosity to know whether he held out any hope of accommodation such as I have indicated. But, Sir, a very preposterous demand has been made on us. We are asked not only to assent to the change which I have described, but we are asked to give an unqualified assurance and declaration that after the Bill is made voluntary we shall never again upon any account, whatever may be done in Ireland, raise this question and bring forward any other proposal. If that is what is called accommodation or compromise, I repudiate it. I should not have brought in this Bill unless I had been persuaded that this matter was and is a social and administrative necessity. The hon. Member for East Mayo has assured the House that, so far as he and his friends are concerned, he will be willing, if a declaration were made by such a gentleman as the hon. Member for South Hunts, to assent to some compromise of the narrow, the restricted, and the strictly defined kind which I have just described to the House. As to the purchase scheme, which we are charged so heavily with neglecting, I will say that there is not one single transaction which can take place under this Bill which cannot be turned, at the sole option of the landlord, into a sale. It depends entirely upon the Irish landlords whether this is a purchase scheme from the very beginning. We had too much reason to apprehend that this Bill would not be dealt with argumentatively, because we wore told from the first by the hon. and gallant Member who moved the rejection of the Bill upon the Second Reading that whatever we did here the Bill would be thrown out in another place. The hon. and gallant Gentleman to-night has rather denied that lie said that.

COLONEL SAUNDERSON

I did not deny using the words. I said those words meant the opinion I expressed as to what would be the result when the Bill reached another place.

MR. J. MORLEY

The hon. and gallant Gentleman said, "If the Bill ever becomes law, which it will not," and then some hon. Gentleman called out "Why not?" and the lion, and gallant Gentleman rejoined, "Because it would be thrown out in the other House." The hon. and gallant Member made a prophecy more or less upon the merits or demerits of the Bill. He prophesied that the demerits were such that the wisdom of another place would not be aide to brook or tolerate such a proposal. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition went much further, because he argued that if this House discussed the Bill in a certain way the noble Lords in another place would throw out the Bill.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

If this House does not discuss it.

MR. J. MORLEY

The right hon. Gentleman's actual words were these— It is my opinion that by proceedings of this kind you make it absolutely certain and inevitable what fate is to await the Bill. And then, by way of a supplemental explanation, the right hon. Gentleman said— What I said was this—that the course this House has pursued in connection with this Resolution, and has pursued on previous occasions when the Lords have sent down Bills with Amendmemts, made it hardly open to doubt that they would be driven to reject this Bill. That is a very serious prophecy. It means that in another place they are to revise and regulate the Rules under which we choose to conduct our busi- ness, and if we do not conduct our business in a manner which will meet with their approval that then our Bills will be thrown out. They did not act upon that principle in connection with the Crimes Act. It comes, therefore, to this—that any bad Bill, as we think it, so bad that it is obstructed here or resisted here, and you are driven then to one of those large Closures by this resistance, that that Bill is perfectly safe in another place in spite of the method by which it was passed. But if a Liberal Administration or the majority of the House, at the time, have what they think a good Bill, then if it be obstructed—if you insist on my using that word—from that (the Opposition) quarter, that is to be a reason why; the Bill should be thrown out by the House of Lords. Gentlemen who have spoken from Ireland have referred to the quiet which now prevails in that country. It is undeniable that there is a greater and more profound tranquillity in Ireland than has prevailed for 20 years. When I took Office and felt it my duty to revoke the proclamations bringing the Crimes Act into force all sorts of prophecies were indulged in, and it was said I should soon repent what I had done. The result has completely justified my forecast and completely falsified the forecast of hon. Gentlemen opposite. I think I have a right to ask whether some credence ought not to be; attached to my forecast now? I wish to say, and I do so with a full sense; of responsibility for what I am saying, that I think the rejection of this Bill will l make the maintenance of the present tranquillity in Ireland very much more difficult than it now is. For my part I do not fear the responsibility of facing whatever may happen, but I do entreat this House, and I entreat all those in I another place who may know of what I am saying, not to make these wretched I Irish tenants the pawns in your Party game. The question, after all, is to be decided in the House where there is no direct chosen Representative of Irish nationalism; in the House where all the mischief has been done in dealing with previous remedial legislative efforts for Ireland, and the country will know, if evil results follow from the rejection of; this Bill, where the shame and the crime rest.

Question put.

The House divided:—Ayes 199; Noes 167.—(Division List, No. 213.)

Main Question put, and agreed to.

Bill road the third time, and passed.