§ THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA (Viscount CROSS)I hope your 169 Lordships will allow me to make a brief personal explanation. My attention has been called to a letter from Sir William Harcourt, addressed to Mr. Herbert Gladstone, in which he quotes the following passage from Mr. Forster's Life, and draws an argument from the statement therein made:—
At this time, it must be borne in mind, the Tory Party showed strong signs of a desire to conciliate the Irish Representatives. The Quarterly Review had been sneering at the arrests of suspects by the cartload. Sir John Hay had given Notice of a Motion condemning the Protection Act and the suspension of trial by jury; and Sir R. Cross, on the part of the official Conservatives, had notified his intention to move, as an Amendment to Sir John Hay's Motion, a Resolution in favour of the immediate release of Mr. Parnell and his fellow-Members. Ministers, who had been abused with such vehemence a few weeks before because they were supposed to be dealing with the Nationalist Party in Ireland with criminal leniency, now found that the Tory Party were prepared to attack them on the opposite ground.I cannot account for the mistake, made either by the editor or by Mr. Forster's own notes, as the Notice of Amendment there referred to was made by the late Mr. J. Kynaston Cross, then Liberal Member for Bolton, who was certainly not an official Representative of the Conservative Party, and not by myself. The argument founded on that statement, therefore, falls to the ground.