Sitting of 13 February 1882

MINUTES.
NEW WRIT ISSUED—For the County of Meath, v. Alexander Martin Sullivan, esquire, Chiltern Hundreds.
STANDING COMMITTEE—Kitchen and Refreshment Rooms (House of Commons), appointed and nominated.
PUBLIC BILLS—Leave—Sunday Closing (Wales) Act (1881) Amendment, negatived.
Ordered—First Reading—Municipal Corporations [61]; Vagrancy✶ [62]; Local Government (Boundaries) [63]; Contagious Diseases Acts Repeal✶ [64]; Vice Royalty (Ireland) ✶ [65]; Agricultural Labourers'(lreland) ✶ [66]; Tithe Rent-charge✶ [67].

QUESTIONS.

  FISHERY PIERS AND HARBOURS (IRELAND)—COUNTY CLARE.
  MR. O'SHEAasked the Secretary to the Treasury, Whether the attention of Her Majesty's Government has been called to the inadequate protection

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  afforded to the lives, canoes, and gear of the sea fishermen of the county Clare, owing to the small number and unimproved state of the creeks and jetties on that dangerous coast; and, whether it is their intention to propose a vote adequate for the purpose of remedying the existing deficiencies?
  LORD FREDERICK CAVENDISH: My hon. Friend will remember that the special grant of £45,000 for fishery piers was made only on condition of the cessation of the ordinary grants. Notwithstanding this, a sum of nearly £17,000 has been inserted in the forthcoming Estimates for fishery piers and harbours to which grants have been promised, the regular annual grant being only £5,000. When the time comes for renewing the annual grants, the claims of the County Clare Fisheries will be considered, together with those of others; but I am unable to promise special consideration for any single district as distinguished from others.

  ARMY ORGANIZATION—OFFICERS OF MILITIA—UNIFORMS.
  EARL PERCYasked the Secretary of State for War, Whether he can make any allowance to officers of Militia to enable them to meet the expense consequent upon the assimilation of their uniform to that of the Line, in accordance with the hope he expressed last Session that he should be able to do so?
  MR. CHILDERS: Yes; we have arranged to make an allowance of £25 to Militia officers whose regiments have been converted into Rifles from ordinary Infantry, and vice versâ; and I hope that this will be quite satisfactory.

  CENTRAL ASIA—CONVENTION BETWEEN PERSIA AND ENGLAND.
  MR. ARTHUR ARNOLDasked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Whether he will lay upon the Table of the House the draft of a Convention with Persia, approved by Her Majesty's late Government, to which reference is made in the letter from the Government of India, signed by Lord Lytton, and dated 7th January 1880, in the following terms:—
  "Whereby Persia will be provisionally permitted to occupy Herat under sufficient guarantees for her good administration of it, and for
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  her adequate protection of British and Indian interests at that point, and with a special reservation of our right to occupy the place with British forces in certain eventualities?"
  SIR CHARLES W. DILKE: It would not be convenient, nor is it usual, to lay on the Table confidential documents such as that referred to in the hon. Member's Question.

  POST OFFICE—POSTAL DELIVERY IN CUMBERLAND.
  MR. WYNDHAMasked the Postmaster General, Whether it was his intention to give effect to any scheme for a better Postal Delivery throughout rural districts of Cumberland?
  MR. FAWCETT MR. FAWCETT, in reply, said, he had not heard any complaint on the subject. If the hon. Member would direct his attention to any cases in which improvement were needed he would consider them.

  PROTECTION OF PERSON AND PROPERTY (IRELAND) ACT, 1881—PRISONERS UNDER THE ACT.
  MR. REDMONDasked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, If it is true that prisoners detained under the Coercion Act in Naas Gaol are forbidden to shake hands with their visitors; whether Naas is the only Gaol in Ireland in which this rule exists; whether this rule has been made by directions of the Prisons Board, or by the authority of the governor; and, whether he will at once direct that it be no longer enforced?
  MR. W. E. FORSTER: In reply to the Question of the hon. Member, I may say that I had not heard of the rule he has mentioned. I have made inquiries, and I find that it is the case in Naas Gaol that prisoners are not permitted to shake hands but with their immediate relatives, and that at no other prison does the same rule exist. The rule appears to have been made under the direction of the Prisons Board in consequence of some abuse of the privilege. My own opinion is that the exceptional rule should not exist, and I will communicate with the Prisons Board on the subject.
  MR. REDMONDfurther asked, Whether it is a fact that Mr. Edward J. Hoare, at present detained under the Coercion Act in Naas Gaol, has been refused permission to see his own

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  medical attendant, although suffering from valvular disease of the heart; and, if so, upon what grounds such a refusal was made?
  MR. W. E. FORSTER, in reply, said, that Mr. Hoare had not been refused permission to see his medical attendant; but the surgeon of Naas Gaol having stated that he was not in danger, and that he considered a consultation unnecessary, no other medical gentleman had been called in. He had since further certified that there had been a considerable improvement in Mr. Hoare's health.
  MR. REDMONDalso asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Whether his attention has been called to complaints made by Mr. P. J. Gordon, a prisoner in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, as to his treatment by the medical attendant, Dr. Young; whether it is true that Mr. Gordon's leg was broken shortly before his term of imprisonment commenced, that he is still unable to walk except with the aid of crutches, and that he has been refused bandages and liniment by the medical attendant, who has declined to prescribe for him in any way; and, whether he will cause an investigation to be made into this matter?
  MR. W. E. FORSTER MR. W. E. FORSTER, in reply, said, it was true that this prisoner's leg had been broken; but it was not the fact that he had been refused bandages and liniment by the medical attendant. On the contrary, he had been supplied with them, and had been treated in every way properly, and allowed every consideration which the circumstances of the case demanded.

  LAND LOANS (IRELAND)—LAND ACT (IRELAND), 1881—SEC. 31.
  COLONEL COLTHURSTasked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Whether it is his intention to modify the conditions under which loans for land improvement can be obtained by occupiers of land in Ireland so as to enable a less sum than £100 to be borrowed, and also to enable holders rated under £20 to obtain loans?
  LOUD FREDERICK CAVENDISH: Sir, the 31st section of the Land Act, which, for the first time, authorizes advances from the Exchequer to occupiers on the security of their holdings, requires the Treasury to be satisfied
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  with the security for re-payment. The rules for giving effect to its provisions have been framed by the Treasury with great care, in order to secure, as far as possible, the success of an experiment to which the Government attaches great importance. With this object it was decided to adopt, in the first instance, the minimum of £100, as fixed by law, for similar advances to owners; but in consideration of the smaller value afforded by the security of the holding, it was deemed necessary to limit the advance to five times the annual value of the holding, as compared with seven times, which is the legal limit of an advance upon security of the fee simple. Should experience prove that it is possible effectually to provide against the difficulties and dangers to which these advances are undoubtedly exposed, while securing the important results for which Parliament authorized them, the limits which have been adopted experimentally may hereafter be altered.

  TREATY OF WASHINGTON, 1854—THE FORTUNE BAY FISHERY DISPUTE.
  SIR HENRY HOLLANDasked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Whether negotiations are going on for the settlement of the Fortune Bay, Newfoundland, Fishery question?
  SIR CHARLES W. DILKE: Her Majesty's Charge d'Affaires was instructed to request the United States Government to favour Her Majesty's Government with any suggestions they might have to offer with a view to avoid the recurrence of disputes between British and American fishermen similar to those which occurred at Fortune Bay; but no reply has yet been received from the United States Government.

  POLICE SUPERANNUATION (GREAT BRITAIN)—LEGISLATION.
  COLONEL ALEXANDERasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Whether he intends to introduce a Bill during the present Session providing a system of Superannuation for the Police in Great Britain?
  SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT: Yes, Sir. A scheme has been prepared, and I hope to introduce this Session a Bill founded upon it providing for superannuation for the police of Great Britain.

  PUBLICATION OF THE "FREETHINKER."
  MR. REDMONDasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Whether the Government have power by Law to seize and summarily suppress newspapers which they consider pernicious to public morals; and, if so, why that power is not exercised in the case of the "Freethinker" and other papers of that nature now published and circulated in England?
  SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT: I stated the other day the reasons why I did not consider it would be wise to proceed at present in this matter.
  MR. REDMOND: I would ask whether the Government has the power to seize and suppress such papers?
  SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT: That is a legal question, on which it would not be at all discreet that I should give an opinion.

  PROTECTION OF PERSON AND PROPERTY (IRELAND) ACT, 1881—RETURN OF EXPENSES OF ADMINISTRATION.
  LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILLasked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Whether he will lay upon the Table a Return showing the expenditure incurred on account of the administration of the Protection of Person and Property Act, on account of additional constabulary, and on account of the movements of constabulary, extra pay and allowances to constabulary, and on account of the movements of troops, extra pay and allowances to soldiers in connection with the enforcement of the Law, and with the protection of life and property in Ireland?
  LORD FREDERICK CAVENDISH: It would be very difficult to give an accurate Return of the expenditure referred to in the Question, and impossible to do so until the close of the financial year. I shall have to present at a very early date a Supplementary Estimate for the Irish Constabulary; and it will be the duty of the Government to give, during the discussion upon that Vote, any information in their power.
  LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: Will the noble Lord lay on the Table, at the close of the financial year, a Return of these particulars?
  LORD FREDERICK CAVENDISHsaid, that he did not believe such a Re-
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  turn could be accurately prepared, certainly not until after the close of the financial year. The best information in the possession of the Government would be given when the Supplementary Vote was before the House.
  LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: Will the noble Lord show by a Return the extra money that has been spent in Ireland upon these Services last year over former years?
  LORD FREDERICK CAVENDISH: The noble Lord will find all the information he requires in the Estimates.
  MR. GORST: Will the noble Lord state whether he proposes to give to the House, on the discussion of the Supplementary Estimate for the Irish Constabulary, a statement including the information as to the Naval and Military expenditure?
  LORD FREDERICK CAVENDISH: I will obtain what information I can from the War Office, so as to be able to give it to the hon. and learned Member during the discussion upon the Vote.

  IRELAND—THE DUBLIN METROPOLITAN POLICE—RETURN OF FINES AND PENALTIES.
  MR. DAWSONasked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, If he will lay upon the Table of the House, a Return showing the number of fines and reductions inflicted upon the rank and file of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, with a statement of the offences for which they were made and imposed; and, whether he will include in such Return the fund to which such fines and reductions in pay have been allocated?
  MR. W. E. FORSTERdeclined to grant the Return asked by the right hon. Member, as it related entirely to matters of detail and discipline connected with the force which it was not desirable to publish. With regard to the second part of the Question, he should inquire.

  SOUTH AFRICA—THE TRANSVAAL— CONVENTION WITH THE BOERS.
  MR. GORSTasked the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, Whether the consent of Her Majesty, as Suzerain of the Transvaal, was obtained by the Transvaal Government before a Boer force with three guns crossed the Convention Boundary and made war

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  Chief Montsioa; and, if not, whether Her Majesty's Government now see in this circumstance any reason to qualify their anticipations of the advantageous working of the Convention?
  MR. COURTNEY: The Question of the hon. and learned Member proceeds upon an erroneous assumption of the facts. The Transvaal Government did not obtain the consent of the Suzerain before a Boer force crossed the Frontier, because, our information leads us to believe, they tried what they could to prevent what has happened. On Friday, in answer to the hon. Member (Mr. R. N. Fowler), I said we had no official information respecting the fighting reported in Reuter's telegram; but I thought it was probably a continuation of the feud that has for some time been waged between Moshette and Montsioa, two Native Chiefs. Intelligence since received entirely confirms that opinion. These two Chiefs, whose head kraals are outside the Transvaal Frontier, have been for some time at war; and as far back as October the Transvaal Government issued a Proclamation forbidding their subjects to take part in the hostilities. General Joubert himself visited the Frontier, and placed men along it to enforce the Proclamation. Nevertheless, in November, Moshette had enlisted Boer auxiliaries, and when Montsioa attacked him some of these auxiliaries were killed. What happened in January was apparently the return attack, the Boer auxiliaries this time aiding Moshette to defeat Montsioa. The Resident at Pretoria has been instructed, through the High Commissioner, to express to the Transvaal Government the expectation that they will take effectual steps to maintain the neutrality of Transvaal territory, and to prevent Transvaal burghers from encroaching on Native territories beyond the Frontier.
  MR. GORST: I wish to ask whether the Chief now called Montsioa is the same Chief upon whom the Boers made war last year in order to punish him for his fidelity to the British during the Transvaal War?
  MR. COURTNEY: The same Chief was attacked last year, not by the Boers, but by Moshette with Boor auxiliaries.
  MR. GORST: Is Montsioa the same Chief with respect to whom an ultimatum was sent to the Transvaal Leaders last year by Sir Evelyn Wood?
  MR. COURTNEY: Perhaps the hon. and learned Gentleman will give Notice of the Question.

  POST OFFICE—THE PARCELS POST.
  MR. MONKasked the Postmaster General, Whether it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government, by legislation or otherwise, to remove the difficulties which have arisen in the introduction of the parcels post in this Country?
  MR. FAWCETT: I believe such great advantages would result from the establishment of a parcel post, that I can assure my hon. Friend that it is a great disappointment to me that we have not been able as yet to introduce such a post. During the last Session I had hoped that arrangements might have been adopted which would have enabled a parcel post to be almost immediately established. During the Recess the subject was again carefully considered by the Post Office; and I hope in the course of a week or two to submit to the Treasury certain proposals which may form the basis of fresh negotiations with the Railway Companies. If an arrangement is arrived at with the Railway Companies, it will be necessary to introduce a Bill to give it effect; and I can assure my hon. Friend that every effort shall be made to bring the Bill before the House as soon as possible.

  METROPOLIS—HYDE PARK—THE RANGER'S RESIDENCE.
  SIR HARRY VERNEYasked the First Commissioner of Works, Whether the house, premises, and land in Hyde Park, occupied by the late Deputy Ranger, are to be thrown open to the Park and appropriated to the public?
  MR. SHAW LEFEVRE: I communicated through the Press, a few days ago, that His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge had obtained the permission of the Queen to throw open for the use of the public the field and paddock attached to the Ranger's Lodge in Hyde Park. As the matter is entirely within the right of His Royal Highness, reserved by the Act of Parliament which vests the Park in the Commissioner of Works, I am sure the House will appreciate this act of liberality and consideration for the interest of the public.

  THE VATICAN—DIPLOMATIC INTERCOURSE —MR. ERRINGTON.
  SIR H. DRUMMOND WOLFFasked the Secretary of State for India, Whether any communications have taken place with the Papal See for arranging the terms on which the Pope intends to create additional vicars apostolic or other prelates of the Roman Catholic Church in India, and for treating the question as to whether such prelates, though exercising their functions in Her Majesty's dominions, are to be subject to the jurisdiction of the Portuguese Bishop of Goa; whether such communications with the Papal See have taken place at the instance of the Viceroy of India; and, whether any correspondence has taken place with the Viceroy respecting the appointment of such additional prelates; and, whether such correspondence can be laid upon the Table?
  THE MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON: No communication whatever with the Pope has taken place upon the subject. With regard to the latter part of the first branch of the Question, that has been a subject of controversy of very long standing indeed. In 1880 the Government of Bombay made some proposals on the subject, one of which was to this effect—
  "It would be well if Her Majesty's Government could in some way procure the consideration by the Holy See of the dissatisfaction which continues to prevail among those poor congregations who have, amid so many temptations, remained faithful to their religion."
  The Government of India, however, did not support that recommendation; and the views of the Secretary of State in Council on the subject were briefly stated in the following words:—
  "The Government do not interfere in the internal arrangements of the Church of Rome, beyond discharging the necessary duty of preserving peace and preventing civil wrong."
  If the hon. Member desires to move for any Correspondence on the subject, there will be no objection.
  Subsequently,
  MR. NORTHCOTEasked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, If Her Majesty's Government intend to lay any Papers relative to Mr. Erring-ton's recent visit to Rome upon the Table of the House?
  SIR CHARLES W. DILKE: As I have stated on two previous occasions
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  in the course of last week, Mr. Errington had no diplomatic official communication to make, and, therefore, no official Correspondence to produce.
  SIR H. DRUMMOND WOLFFasked whether Lord Granville did or did not address a letter to Mr. Errington, which Mr. Errington was to show to Cardinal Jacobini, so as to induce the Vatican to place confidence in any representations made by Mr. Errington to the Papal See?
  SIR CHARLES W. DILKE: Perhaps the hon. Member will give Notice of that Question.

  LAND ACT (IRELAND), 1881—THE SUB-COMMISSIONERS.
  MR. LEWISasked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, How many and which of the Sub-Commissioners under "The Land Act, 1881," have been appointed for seven years, and how many for any shorter periods of time?
  MR. W. E. FORSTER, in reply, said, that 12 of the Commissioners were appointed for seven years, the remaining 24 for one year certain, with the possibility, of course, of their continuing in office should the work of the Commission not be completed.

  ENGLAND AND TURKEY—AFFAIRS OF EGYPT—CORRESPONDENCE.
  MR. BOURKEasked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Whether he can lay upon the Table of the House the Correspondence which took place last autumn between Her Majesty's Government and the Government of the Sultan, with respect to the despatch of Commissioners to Egypt by His Majesty, and the Correspondence respecting the English and French men-of-war which proceeded to the Coast of Egypt at that time; and, the Despatches of Sir Edward Malet on this subject, as well as the Correspondence between Her Majesty's Government and the French Government with regard to these questions?
  SIR CHARLES W. DILKE: No, Sir; I am afraid these Papers must be covered by the statement which I made a few days ago, and which was also made in "another place," and accepted by the Leader of the Conservative Party

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  —namely, that it would not be advisable to lay these Papers on the Table at present.

  THE LICENSING LAWS—LEGISLATION.
  SIR WILFRID LAWSONasked the First Lord of the Treasury, Whether Her Majesty's Government contemplate proposing any alteration in the Licensing Laws during the present Session?
  MR. GLADSTONE: Her Majesty's Government have no intention to propose to the House a measure which may be termed a measure for the alteration of the Licensing Laws; but, as has already been made known, they do intend to introduce a measure at the earliest period in their power with respect to Local Government, and that measure will have certain bearings on the question of licensing. I hope that in the course of a short time—it must depend upon other circumstances when it can be introduced—the measure will be under the view of the hon. Member, and then he will be able to judge how far he considers it an answer to the Question.

  THE COBDEN CLUB PAPERS—"FREE TRADE v. FAIR TRADE; BY T. H. FARRER."
  EARL PERCYasked the First Lord of the Treasury, Whether his attention has been called to a treatise, entitled "Free Trade versus Fair Trade; by T. H. Farrer," recently circulated by the Cobden Club, in which the author, writing from the Board of Trade, says—
  "For the following pages I am alone responsible. They contain an attempt to illustrate established truths, and to expose exploded though not obsolete fallacies; but they trench so closely on the politics of the day, that I should have scarcely felt justified in writing them for publication without the encouragement of the President of the Board of Trade: "
  whether Mr. T. H. Farrer is the permanent Secretary to the Board of Trade; and, whether the Government give their sanction to the permanent officials in the Public Offices, in that capacity and from those offices, issuing treatises upon controversial political questions, and to their encouragement in so doing by the Heads of their Departments? He also inquired the Prime Minister's opinion on a passage in the work wherein the writer
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  argued that the cession of the Transvaal marked the progress of international morality.
  MR. GLADSTONE: With respect to the Question which the noble Lord has put upon the Notice Paper, I have considered it fully, and am quite prepared to answer it. With regard to the passage he has just quoted, I would rather have the opportunity of consulting the original work, in order to find in the context any explanation that there may be bearing upon it, before giving an answer. With respect to the original Question, I entirely accede, and so, I am sure, would my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade and all my Colleagues, to what appears to be the opinion of the noble Lord—namely, that criticisms upon controversial political questions ought not to proceed from the permanent officials. I have no doubt whatever that that is the general rule of the State; but I have communicated with my right hon. Friend, and he is of opinion, in which I am inclined to think he is correct, that this is really not to be brought under the category of controversial political questions. ["Oh!"] That is the opinion of my right hon. Friend, in which I concur. But I go a little further, and I would observe to the noble Lord that economical subjects have undoubtedly, according to the best of my recollection, as long as I have been in public life, whether rightly or wrongly, been treated as an exception to this general rule; and consequently, although Mr. Farrer, who has been a very able public servant, has himself called attention to these passages, yet I really believe that if he had not called attention to them he would have been acting within the lines of the action of his predecessor. I will give the House two instances which, though they happened long ago, are still fresh in my recollection. In 1841 I became Vice President of the Board of Trade, and at that time we had for one of the Joint Secretaries of the Board of Trade Mr. Macgregor, and, at the head of the Statistical Department of the Board of Trade, Mr. Porter. Now, the Government to which I had the honour to belong did not take Office for the purpose of promoting Free Trade, but rather in connection with opposite ideas. However, both Mr. Porter and Mr. Macgregor were, and had been, and con-

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  tinued to be, most active writers on behalf of Free Trade at large, and especially on behalf of the repeal of the Corn Laws.
  EARL PERCY: With the encouragement of the President of the Board of Trade?
  MR. GLADSTONE: No; the question is discouragement.
  EARL PERCY: I said encouragement.
  MR. GLADSTONE: I am not aware that my right hon. Friend encouraged; he did not discourage. It would have been odd, certainly, if Lord Ripon had encouraged these gentlemen to write against his own opinions; but there was no interference whatever with their own private opinions. But I remember also that Mr. M'Culloch, a gentleman of great ability and distinction, who likewise held a permanent office as head of the Stationery Department, wrote, when the New Tariff was introduced in 1842, in very high praise of the legislation of the Administration. Therefore, if I am correct in saying—and I believe I am correct—that these economical questions have never been excluded from the view of official men of that character and capacity, I am not prepared to say that we should make any new rule on the subject now.

  CUSTOMS AND EXCISE—WAREHOUSES.
  MR. BRYCEasked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Whether there is any ground for the statement that, in the scheme for the assimilation of the Custom House systems of warehousing, it is proposed that a merchant shall open at the central office a separate deposit account with each of the warehouses or stations where he has dealings, against which he will be allowed to draw when paying the duty on his goods; and, whether it is the case that such a merchant will have to send to each of the places when the work of clearing has to be performed?
  MR. J. HOLMS: By the scheme for assimilating the warehousing business of the Customs and Excise, a merchant will pay duty at the central office only, as at present, and in a manner similar to the existing practice. Under the proposed system of deposit accounts it will be quite optional on the part of the merchant to avail himself of it or
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  not, as may be most convenient to himself. The Government do not apprehend that, under the new system, there will be any necessity for the merchant or his representative to attend at the warehouse more frequently than at present. His business with the Customs will be transacted by the same means as his business with the proprietor of the warehouse; and as the officer and the accounts will be on the spot, there will be every opportunity for correcting errors and adjusting discrepancies, so as to facilitate the process of clearing. It is the desire of the Government to add to the convenience of trade; and if the proposed changes should be found by experience to require improvement, there will be no hesitation in making the necessary alterations.

  THE LAND COMMISSION (IRELAND)— THE SOLICITOR.—EXPLANATION.
  LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILLsaid, he should be grateful if the House would allow him to say a few words of personal explanation. His attention had been called to a telegram from Mr. Egan, denying the statement he (Lord Randolph Churchill) made on Friday, that Mr. Fottrell was the confidential solicitor to the Land League. He found that he was mistaken in having quoted Mr. Pigott as his authority for that statement, the fact being that his authority for it was a letter from Mr. Egan himself, in a correspondence having reference to the negotiations for the purchase of United Ireland. The letter was written by Mr. Egan on the 27th of September, 1880, and published, with other letters by Mr. Pigott, in The Freeman's Journal of December the 10th, 1881. In the letter in question Mr. Egan said—
  "My Dear Sir—Owing to the absence from town of Mr. Parnell we could not do anything to-day, but I have arranged a meeting to-night, when, I am sure, the matter will be closed. I have, in anticipation of the decision, put the matter in the hands of the confidential solicitor of the Land League, and I advise you that there should be no time lost in putting yourself in communication with him, &c."
  It would thus be seen that his authority for the statement that Mr. Fottrell had been confidential solicitor of the Land League was Mr. Egan himself, who contradicted him in that morning's Times.

  FOREIGN OFFICE—MR. GOSCHEN'S VISIT TO BERLIN.
  MR. W. H. JAMESasked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Whether there is any truth in the report that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon had been charged with an official mission in connection with his recent visit to Berlin?
  SIR CHARLES W. DILKE: There is no foundation whatever for the statement which my hon. Friend alludes to. The statement has appeared in various newspapers in this country for several days past; and yesterday it received, perhaps, more serious character by being mentioned in The Agence Russe. I may not only say that there is no foundation for the statement; but perhaps the House will bear with me while I relate a little incident. It so happened that my right hon. Friend met Lord Granville at a club the night before he started for Berlin, and my right hon. Friend having informed him of his intended journey. Lord Granville replied—"They will say that you have gone upon a mission." My right hon. Friend then very courteously offered to defer his journey, when Lord Granville replied that he could not, of course, put an end to a pleasant journey for the purpose of preventing idle rumours.

  RUSSIA—PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
  BARON HENRY DE WORMS, as he understood there was little probability of the adjourned debate on the Address closing that night, appealed to the Prime Minister to secure him an early day for bringing forward the Motion, of which he had given Notice, respecting the outrages and persecution suffered by the Jews in Russia.
  MR. GLADSTONE: It is impossible for me, at present, to come under any obligation whatever towards any hon. Member in regard to offering facilities for bringing forward Motions. We think it our duty, except in a matter of absolute necessity, to look exclusively, as far as we are concerned, to bringing the House into a condition to deal at once, and as a whole, with the question of Procedure. We do not wish the discussion of that matter to be interrupted by the consideration of any subject with regard to which we have any option as to its introduction.

ORDER OF THE DAY.

  ADDRESS IN ANSWER TO HER MAJESTY'S MOST GRACIOUS SPEECH.
  ADJOURNED DEBATE. [FIFTH NIGHT.]
  Order read, for resuming Adjourned Debate on Amendment proposed to Question [7th February]—[See page 133.]
  And which Amendment was,
  At the end thereof, to add the words:—"Humbly to assure Your Majesty that this House regards with grave concern the action of the Executive in Ireland, whereby the liberties of Members of this House have been outraged, and the performance of their constitutional duties rendered impossible; whereby hundreds of Your Majesty's subjects in Ireland are detained in prison without trial or the right of Habeas Corpus, many of them on the alleged suspicion of offences for which, even if duly tried and found guilty, they could not have been subjected to punishment as severe as that which they have already undergone; whereby the lawful organisation of the Irish tenantry has been arbitrarily suppressed at a most critical moment, when its maintenance was essential to the due protection of their legal rights, while the organisation of the Irish landlords against those rights has been encouraged and supported; whereby ladies engaged in the work of public charity have been threatened, harassed, and imprisoned under obsolete statutes and on nominal pretexts; whereby the liberty of the Press has been illegally interfered with, the right of free speech, of public meeting, and of lawful constitutional agitation has been abrogated; whereby innocent persons have been killed and wounded by the armed forces of the Crown; whereby the verdicts of coroners' juries, incriminating the agents of the Executive, have been disregarded; whereby large districts of the Country have been placed under a system of quasi-martial Law; whereby rewards have been offered by the Government for secret information as to crimes to be committed, tending to the demoralisation of the people and the creation of perjured evidence against innocent persons; which action generally has caused in the minds of the people of Ireland a profound distrust of the execution of the Law; and humbly to assure Your Majesty that an immediate abandonment of all coercive measures, and the establishment of constitutional government in Ireland, with full recognition of the rights and liberties of the Irish people, are essentially necessary for the peace and prosperity of that realm and of the United Kingdom."—(Mr. Justin M'Carthy.)
  Question again proposed, "That those words be there added."
  Debate resumed.
  MR. PLUNKET: When the debate on the Address was adjourned on Fri-

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  day night the Solicitor General for Ireland had just concluded his speech; and it is my first duty, in resuming the debate this evening—and it is a very pleasant duty—to congratulate my hon. and learned Friend and the House upon his first address within these walls, and to assure him that, the longer he remains amongst us, and the more we know of him, the more welcome will he be. In the observations which I shall ask leave to address to the House, I have no intention of criticizing the action which Her Majesty's Government have thought it necessary to take, within the last few months, for the purpose of preserving law and order in Ireland. I can well realize how grave is the responsibility and how great the difficulty of their task; and I rejoice to think that they can find some signs of hope and improvement in the condition of that country. But, on the other hand, we should be most unwise to deceive ourselves into a spirit of too great confidence by such symptoms of improvement as the Government have been able to suggest to the House, because we must remember the conditions under which that degree of improvement has been obtained. It is a melancholy fact that the gaols of Ireland are now pretty nearly' full of those who were lately, and who, if they were not in gaol, would probably still be, the leaders of a violent agitation. It is too true that it has been necessary, in many instances, to suppress public meetings on the subject which has lately convulsed the country. It is too true that it has been necessary to seize newspapers, at the out ports, I believe, and in the towns, wherever they could be seized. A large army is now, I may say, encamped in Ireland, and the law-abiding and peaceful subjects of the Queen require the constant protection of the authorities for the safety of their lives and the preservation of their liberty. Under these circumstances, it behaves us not to be led away from the exigencies of the occasion by those symptoms of improvement—though we must all rejoice at them—which have been brought before us by the Government. But although it is no part of my intention to offer any criticisms on the present conduct of the Government, I shall take leave to express my opinion freely upon their former policy, and it is my duty to bring before the House the sufferings
  506
  and wrongs of those who are my constituents. It is obvious to anyone how great is the contrast between the state of affairs which I have described and that which prevailed only two years ago in Ireland, when we were told, on high authority, that in Ireland there was a wonderful absence of crime and outrage, and, at all events, an apparent calm in that country. It is obvious that great responsibility must rest somewhere for the change which has taken place. At first sight one would say it rested upon the Government who had charge of the country during the time that that great revolution was at work. Let me review, for a few moments, very briefly, some of the arguments which have been used by the friends and advocates of the Ministry for the purpose of shifting or sharing the blame or responsibility for what has happened. In the first place, it has been said that the Conservative Government had no policy but that of coercion, and that they refused to do anything to remedy the grievances under which Ireland was suffering. Above all, they would not inquire into the Land Question. Well, Sir, as to the Conservative Party having no policy except that of coercion, I merely would call the attention of the House to this fact. When they came into Office there was on the Statute Book one of the strongest Acts of coercion which had been passed for many and many a year; and when they quitted Office they left on the Statute Book one of the mildest measures of prevention that had been known for nearly a century. Next, it is said that the Conservative Party would do nothing in the way of remedial legislation. Before this charge is fastened upon the late Conservative Government, let me recall the state of affairs that existed when they came into power in regard to this question of remedying the wrongs of Ireland. The House remembers that, in 1868, the present Prime Minister received his great majority for the express purpose of dealing with the state of that country. In 1869 the Irish Church Act was passed; in 1870, the Land Act. The Prime Minister then paused for a while, and in 1873 he came forward again with the University Bill. I remember hearing, with great pleasure, the right hon. Gentleman say, in recommending the University Bill in 1873, these words—

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  "As we have begun, so let us persevere, even to the end, and with firm and resolute hand—let us efface from the law and the practice of the country the last—for I believe it is the last—of the religious and social grievances of Ireland."—[3 Hansard, ccxiv. 1863.]
  We know, shortly after that, the Bill was lost and the Liberal Government defeated. In the following year the Ministry resigned. Is it true that the Government of Lord Beaconsfield did nothing to remedy this last of the religious and social grievances of Ireland? They did carry a University Bill; not only that, but they supplemented it by an Intermediate Education Bill; and it is some satisfaction to know that, amidst all the confusion, and violence, and controversy which now rage in Ireland, the feeling is one of almost complete unanimity that those two Acts are working to the satisfaction, and I hope for the future benefit, of the people of Ireland. Then it is said that the Conservative Government declined to have anything to do with the Land Question, or to inquire into the land grievances. Now, how did that stand? The Land Act of 1870 had been only four years in operation. It is quite true that when proposals were made by Irish Members of the Liberal Party to introduce an altogether different system of land tenure, they were resisted by the Government of Lord Beaconsfield; but were they not equally resisted by those hon. and right hon. Gentlemen who are now on the front Bench opposite? I remember very well that the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India (the Marquess of Hartington), when it was proposed to have a Committee to inquire into the Land Question of Ireland, said he would not consent to the institution of such a Committee—
  "If it were supposed by the people of Ireland that it was intended to be the prelude to legislation on new principles, for the purpose of establishing fixity of tenure and re-valuation of rent."
  That seems very strange now! But I do not twit the noble Lord with inconsistency. I only wish to say that there was no greater alacrity to inquire into the Land Question on the part of hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite than there was on the part of the Conservative Government. When the agricultural depression did bring the Land Question to the front, the Government of Lord Beaconsfield issued a Royal Commission for the purpose of inquiring into
  508
  that question, both in England and Ireland, and that Commission was actually sitting when the Government went out of Office. It is not true, therefore, that we had no policy but coercion, or that we refused to do anything to remedy the grievances of Ireland. It is not true that we neglected to inquire into the Land Question. But then a totally different and opposite set of excuses is put forward. It is said that the late Government was not sufficiently coercive, that their Peace Preservation Bill was insufficient, and that when the present Government came into Office it was impossible for them to do anything, because there was no time to renew the Peace Preservation Act, and because, as the Prime Minister said, they could not have trusted the Conservative Opposition in case they had proposed legislation at that time.
  MR. GLADSTONE: I did not say that. I said nothing of the kind.
  MR. PLUNKET: I think I am not misrepresenting the Prime Minister when I say so.
  MR. GLADSTONE: I made no reference of the kind whatever.
  MR. PLUNKET: I have not got the quotation with me; but the Prime Minister said that there was no time for the purpose of carrying such a Bill after the General Election, and that, even if they had determined to bring in such a measure, he was by no means confident of the attitude of the Opposition. [Mr. GLADSTONE: I did not say that.] Then I must have misunderstood the right hon. Gentleman. Whether the Peace Preservation Act, which had been in force before, would have been sufficient or not, if maintained and firmly enforced, it is difficult now to say. I know that the late Government were pledged to avail themselves of that Act, and, if necessary, to make it stronger; and I know that when the present Government came into Office they did not re-new it; that after they had left the country without that Act for a year they came back and demanded its re-enactment, and that, by the mouth of the Home Secretary, they admitted that they had made an experiment in dropping the Act, and that that experiment had failed. Under the late Government the Land League began its work; but it was at that time confined to a small area, and had not developed itself fully. As time, however, went on, it did develop itself

  509
  fully, and when Lord Beaconsfield was in Office he recognized the gravity of the crisis. He pointed out that the old Irish difficulty had entered on a new phase, and he warned the country of the danger that it carried with it. He staked his reputation and the fate of his Government upon the necessity of acting calmly, patiently, but firmly, and without any concession whatever to the new agitation which had arisen. The present Government came into Office, and they chose to adopt the exactly opposite policy. They took an optimist view of the situation, and said there was no longer any necessity at all for this coercive legislation, and that they would trust to the people. And yet, after a time had passed away, they had been obliged to take measures of coercion 10 times stronger than had been sufficient for the previous Government. Sir, there cannot be a doubt that the responsibility for the policy adopted by the present Government, be it for good or for evil, is theirs and theirs alone. I do not propose to follow my right hon. and learned Friend and Colleague (Mr. Gibson) through his able analysis of the policy pursued by the Government. He grappled with it at four different points in the history of this agitation. He showed how opportunities had arisen for dealing strongly and effectively with it, and how these opportunities had been neglected by the Government. I shall merely refer to what was said by the Solicitor General for Ireland by way of answer to my right hon. and learned Friend. He professed to deal with two only of the charges made on this subject. He took up the accusation that there had been no proclamation issued in January; and he said—"Of course, we might have issued a proclamation; but what would have been the use of it before the Government obtained exceptional powers, and when the people knew that without these exceptional powers the Government could not arrest anybody who was a member of the Land League?" If, however, that proclamation had been issued, not only might it have had the effect of deterring people who were afterwards drawn into the agitation; but it would have been perfectly possible in that case to proscribe and break up meetings of the character which had been pointed to by the Chief Secretary as the immediate causes of outrages. They could have
  510
  seized any documents connected with the conspiracy, and could, in fact, have exercised all those rights at Common Law which ever since they have been exercising with considerable vigour. In reply to the second charge of my right hon. and learned Friend, which was that after the Government had obtained the exceptional powers they did not proceed to put them into force against the leaders of the conspiracy, the Solicitor General for Ireland said that many of the objects of the Land League were perfectly legal. I know that that is an argument that has been used by a Cabinet Minister in defence of the policy of permitting the Land League to grow up to its present dimensions. That is the doctrine which I am afraid has more than once paralyzed the arm of the Executive in Ireland. The Solicitor General for Ireland must have known perfectly well that a trial had taken place in December and January of the leaders of the conspiracy; and, assuming that the charges then made against them by the Government were true, it was not for the Government afterwards to say that it was a question whether some of the objects of the League were legitimate or not. What was the result of that course of action on the part of the Government? Mr. Parnell had been indicted because he was considered the leading and most formidable person in that conspiracy, with the object and intention, if judgment went against him, that he should be punished; but afterwards, when the Government got full power to deal with him, they did not do so. What other conviction could be forced on the minds of the people of Ireland, except that the Government were not really in earnest in the course they were apparently taking? My right hon. and learned Friend pointed out that there was another explanation for the course taken by the Government. They must have been influenced by the doctrine promulgated by a Cabinet Minister whom I am glad to see in his place (Mr. Chamberlain), and who, I hope, will this evening give us a true and full account of those observations of his which have been interpreted as conveying a meaning of a very extraordinary kind. I read with the greatest care the speech of that Minister, and the impression which this part of his speech left on my mind was this—that he thought it was a fair, constitu-

  511
  tional, and politic thing to abstain from strong measures against the Leaders of the Land League, upon the ground that if the agitation had been interfered with—or, to use his own expression, "stifled"—the great reforms which he desired could not have been carried out. His policy was, I understand, this—that to enable him to carry his object over the heads of political opponents in either House of Parliament who might not be willing to accept a strong Land Bill, he was ready to stay the arm of the Executive in Ireland, lest that agitation should be stifled which he thought necessary to insure a strong measure. I will not discuss the ethics of that doctrine from a Constitutional point of view, more especially as he may disown it; but I wish to point out some of the consequences that flowed from the undoubted fact that the agitation was permitted to proceed and to reach the importance and extent which it has now attained. At that time Mr. Parnell and his associates were preaching the doctrines, with scarcely a shade of difference, that are now so fervently denounced by the Prime Minister; and by holding out great bribes to the people and by a system of terrorism they obtained the mastery over the minds of the people. They were consolidating their power and perfecting the machinery of the conspiracy; and so it was that after the leaders were taken away from the agitation it was found that the conspiracy could go on very well for some time by itself. Mr. Parnell was asked by a person who interviewed him in Kilmainham Prison whether he believed that the people would persevere in the "no rent" policy; and, with characteristic coolness, he replied—"Well, they have had so much practice during the last few months that I think it probable that, to a great extent, they will persevere." That is exactly what was going on during this long period, and this is what we complain of; for it is this that has obliged the Government to take such strong and drastic measures as are a humiliation and shame to every Irishman, and a subject of severe criticism upon the Government of the country. Two very important consequences followed this long delay in dealing with the agitation. In the first place, the conspiracy had grown so strong that when the coercive mea-
  512
  sures were vigorously applied they for some time seemed to fail to have any effect on the conspiracy. Another consequence followed from this delay. When the measure of conciliation came—when the Land Act was brought into force—it was found that the expectations of the people were so much excited—that they had been so much influenced and demoralized by the teachings and hopes held out to them by the. agitators—that even the great concessions contained in that Act seemed to them inadequate, and at first, as a general rule, they sullenly refused it. The Act by force of which the tribunals for fixing fair rents were established required beyond any other legislation the calmest and most peaceable atmosphere in which its effects should have been developed. Nothing could be more delicate and difficult than the task with which the Commissioners were intrusted in fixing a fair rent between landlord and tenant. They were given that task without any principles to guide them; and one would think that such a task should be performed, as it were, in a vacuum, where there should be no friction at all. On the other hand, they found the people so excited and the landlords and their friends so terrorized, that up to the present time it had been absolutely impossible to administer that part of the Land Act fairly and in what might be called a normal condition. The Solicitor General for Ireland, in dealing with the Sub-Commissioners, appeared to be rather indignant that any suggestion should be made that there had been unfairness in their appointment, or that they were persons who would wilfully go wrong in their decisions. That was not the charge at all. The charge was that they were partizans. My right hon. and learned Friend (Mr. Gibson) cited the case of Messrs. Morrison and Weir. Mr. Morrison presided at one of the election meetings of the Solicitor General for Ireland; and I will here say that though I deeply regret the course taken by my hon. and learned Friend in that contest, I do not now intend to enter into it, but will leave public opinion to decide on the controversy. Mr. Morrison, at that meeting, said—
  "The Irish Land Act of 1870 was a very fair one if it had got fair play, but it did not. Nearly every landlord and agent in the county, with a few honourable exceptions, assailed it in

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  every possible way. Even many of the Judges in the Land Courts allowed their associations, ideas, and sympathies—I will not say wilfully—to deflect their decisions from a fair and liberal interpretation of the Act. The amended Act of 1881 I consider a splendid one, so far as it goes. Some things are left out which I think should have been in. It is very elastic, more so than any other in existence; and, if fairly administered, should satisfy every reasonable man in the country."
  From these words the landlords may, I should say, expect a very liberal interpretation of the Act from that gentleman. I will call attention to another matter. The hon. and gallant Member for the County of Cork (Colonel Colthurst) said, the other night, that the Sub-Commissioners in the county of Cork were giving the greatest satisfaction to everybody, including the landlords, and especially that his own relative, Sir George Colthurst, was satisfied. Now, I knew that Sir George Colthurst was not at all satisfied, and I was a little surprised to hear that statement. I hold in my hand a letter from him, in which he says—
  "I see my uncle alluded to me as having witnessed their (the Sub-Commissioners') operations. It is a pity he should quote what I said without going on to finish it. I told him that they had certainly, in inspecting the farms where I accompanied them, taken considerable pains, but that it was impossible to expect them to decide fairly. Rice is a Poor Law Guardian in the Kanturk Union, and has a large farm in the Union. O'Keefe's farm is close to Kilcrea station in the Cork Union. I do not know how any fair-minded man can justify the action of the Government handing over the landlords of Cork to be tried by two tenant farmers."
  COLONEL COLTHURST: What I stated was that my relative was satisfied with the manner in which the Sub-Commissioners had gone over the farms; and the words he used, not to me, but to Mr. Reeves, were that they had taken all the pains that any men possibly could, but he could not say whether they would decide rightly.
  MR. PLUNKET: I am glad I have been able to set this matter right; but in a matter of this kind, where the issue is between landlord and tenant, it is rather hard that it should be decided by a jury of farmers. The Solicitor General for Ireland said it was nonsense to suppose that terrorism was exercised over the Sub-Commissioners' Courts. In happy and peaceful Ulster that may be the case; but from the South and West of Ireland I have heard a very
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  different story. I have heard that the excitement about these Courts is intense; that every decision given in favour of the landlords is met with sounds of discontent of the most unpleasant description, and every decision in favour of the tenant with a loud murmur of applause like the sound of the sea. In Kilmallock, one of these Commissioners was holding his Court 10 miles from his own farm, and the town was in such a condition that there were two additional constabulary barracks in it, and an agent coming in to give evidence had to be protected by the police. The third Commissioner, who sits with the two farmers to whom I have referred, is Mr. Reeves, a well-known member of the Irish Bar. He is an old friend of mine, and probably his appointment, so far as his antecedents are concerned, is the appointment of the whole number which is the least open to criticism. I will read a sentence from what Mr. Reeves says in the case of "Power, tenant, v. Murrough, landlord." He said—
  "The evidence given on behalf of the tenant was barbarous, and perfectly ridiculous. William Dalton, agent to the property, deposed that he had applied to several valuators to value the land, and they had all refused. He was, therefore, unable to produce evidence with regard to the value of the farm. Mr. Atkinson.—And you object to give evidence as to the value yourself?—Witness.—I do. The Chairman.—It is a lamentable state of things to have this proved. The tenant comes in with an absurd valuation, and then we find that no gentleman in this county is ready to value the lands. It is a strange thing."
  In another instance Mr. Reeves was trying to settle a case on the estate of Mr. M'Carthy O'Leary, J.P. The labourers interfered, and said no settlement should be come to unless their claim was considered. Mr. Reeves said—
  "The tenants get enormous reductions in their rents, and they seem to be unwilling to give the labourers any share of the benefits they get."
  [Mr. W. E. FORSTER: What is the date of that?] I am reading from The Freeman's Journal of Saturday, February 4th. From what I have heard and read on this subject I can confirm this testimony as to the unwillingness of the tenants to deal fairly by the labourers, so that the two classes of landlords and labourers are made to suffer in order

  515
  that the one class of tenants may be benefited. Another point of inquiry is, what has been the character of the decisions of these Sub-Commissioners? The Land Act was undoubtedly passed with the avowed object of relieving exceptional cases of hardship. It ought, therefore, to have been administered in a broad spirit. Injustice ought to have been remedied, and there ought to have been some principle of general action. For instance, old rents willingly paid should not be touched. But it was said that the cases which, as yet, had come up for consideration had occurred on small estates where landlords had been obliged to screw up their rents. If that were so, some element of hope would still remain for landlords. Unfortunately it is not so. I have made inquiries, and I hold in my hand a list of some 40 or 50 landlords who have been brought to the Court. When I mention some of their names it will be seen that they are the owners neither of small estates nor of estates likely to be badly managed. There is Lord Enniskillen, the Earl of Antrim, the Earl of Egmont, Sir Richard Palmer, and others. I am told that the percentage of reduction on these estates has been 23·2 that being as nearly as possible the average reduction made by the Sub-Commissioners. That part of the case, therefore, in support of the Sub-Commissioners is not borne out by facts. Then, as to the case of old rents. Have they been respected? In a table which I have here, and which, in the absence of a Government Return, has been obtained from authority which I can trust, I find a number of rents tabulated in the ratio of their reduction. There are 19 cases of rent fixed prior to 1840, in which the average reduction is 22·1; rents fixed between 1840 and 1850, average reduction 19·0; between 1850 and 1860, average reduction, 25·3. Hence, so far as one can judge, it does not make much difference whether an estate is large or small, whether the landlord is good or bad, or whether the rents have been old rents or recently fixed.
  MR. W. E. FORSTER: I should be obliged if the right hon. and learned Gentleman would give me the names of the cases to which he refers, so that we may verify them before the discussion closes.
  MR. PLUNKET: What, then, is the practical result of these proceedings? I
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  beg particularly to call the attention of the House to this matter, because the Government have taken great credit and expressed great satisfaction at the circumstance that a great many settlements of rent are taking place out of Court that have not been decided by the Sub-Commissioners at all. Certainly, if these settlements were voluntarily made, without pressure on the one side or the other, that would be a consummation devoutly to be wished for. But, observe the position. I am now going to describe the circumstances of landlords whom I myself know, or have personally heard of. Take the case of a man entirely depending on his income from land. For the last two or three years he has probably received very little rent, or none at all. He has had no other source of income. He has been obliged to borrow to meet his family charges, his general outgoings, life insurances, and everything else. He has overdrawn his account at the bank, and he does not know where to lay his hand on a £50 note. His tenantry may come to him and say—"We'll pay you up the arrears, or some of them, if you will agree to settle the rent out of Court, and get the sanction of the Court." What is the position of the landlord under those circumstances? If he proposes to contest the case he must make preparation. He requires to procure witnesses, and to incur the consequent expense. If he goes into Court it is almost a certainty that his rent will be considerably reduced, and if reduced ever so little he has to pay, at least, his own costs. If you are obliged to litigate with 40 or 50 tenants and to pay costs in each case, it becomes a serious consideration. Perhaps, indeed, when a man has gone to all the preliminary expenses, the Sub-Commissioners may pass away from the place and leave the matter unsettled. Is that, I ask the House, a settlement not really obtained under duress? I venture to submit that if this is to go on—if the Sub-Commissioners are to go about reducing the rents submitted to them on an average of 22 or 23 per cent—if landlords are obliged either to submit to such decisions, or to settle out of Court—will not the result be really a reduction of the rental of Ireland to the extent of 22 or 23 per cent? This question is very important, because when the Act was passed through Parliament, and claims of compensation

  517
  were put forward on behalf of the landlords, one of the arguments used was that no injury would happen to that class, but if any special injury were proved hereafter, that would be a case to be considered. It was further said, if there were to be a wholesale reduction of the rents of Ireland—say, down to Griffith's valuation—that also would be a case for consideration. What difference exists, I ask, between rents reduced either by the Court or by the compulsory settlements which I have described out of Court? If any difference exists, it is this—that it would be far less expensive to the landlords if the reduction had been made at once by a clause of an Act of Parliament. The Prime Minister on this subject of compensation used the following remarkable words on the 22nd of July, when the Land Act was passing through Parliament:—
  "I do not hesitate to say that if it can he shown, on clear and definite experience at the present time, that there is a probability, or if after experience should prove that, in fact, ruin and heavy loss is likely to be, or has been, brought upon any class in Ireland by the direct effect of this legislation, that is a question which we ought to look very directly in the face."
  Again, he said—
  "My opinion at that time was that the operation of the Bill in many eases would have the effect of raising the rental and thereby creating discontent."
  The Prime Minister went on to say—
  "I quite agree that if Parliament were to pass a. law providing that rents in Ireland should be universally reduced to Griffith's valuation generally, that would be a fair case for compensation."—[3 Hansard, cclxiii. 1694–1696.]
  To my mind, it is actually the same whether you do this by the words of an Act or by appointing Sub-Commissioners who are to settle the rentals of the country on a wholly new standard, so as to reduce rents by an average of 22 or 23 per cent all round. If the case I have stated should be substantiated hereafter by the official record—and I know of my own knowledge that the questions I have stated are true in many cases—and all this has been done for high political purposes of State—unless compensation be granted to the landlords, no words will be too strong to describe the injustice that will have been done to them. The words used by the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister in relation to a different matter would be very
  518
  properly applied to the state of things, and they might be described as "public plunder." The degree of this compulsory reduction makes no difference. In the famous old story, when a certain personage desired to make friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness, he called to his debtors, and said to one who owed 100 measures of oil, "Take thy pen and write 50;" and to another who owed 100 measures of corn, "Take thy pen and write 80." After all, it was only a question of degree; and whether 50 per cent or 20 per cent was remitted it would take a good deal of casuistry to distinguish between the loss sustained by the person whose property was reduced, or the responsibility of him who thus should transfer property to another which was not his to give. The Government have pointed to the great signs of improvement which they say are discernible in the present state of Ireland. I greatly rejoice that they are able to find such grounds for hope; and I must say that the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant has stated those grounds of hope most fairly and moderately. I am afraid, however, that we have not yet thoroughly estimated the evil worked by those last two years of agitation, because those matters which have been referred to are, after all, only signs upon the surface. If we consider what has been going on underneath—what wild work has been done in the minds and consciences of the people—no one who knows the state of Ireland at the present time will take, without considerable qualification, those symptoms of improvement which have been exhibited to us by the Government. Let me cite a few illustrative facts. In the first place, remember that even if the Government should now succeed in breaking down the strength and influence of the Land League, even if rents should come to be paid fairly, during these good years, what do you think will happen when bad seasons come again, and a new agitation is set on foot, having for its object "prairie value" and "Home Rule," or, perhaps, "no rent" and "separation?" Will not those people who have enjoyed the license of the last two years remember the time when no rent was paid at all, and money poured in from America, and when at last such splendid results were achieved by their organization? Observe what is taking place in Ireland now. Great towns are conferring

  519
  their freedom, and are vieing to honour the men denounced by the Government, and who are now in prison. Is not that a significant sign? And even when a gallant struggle was made by several dissentients in those Town Councils, on an appeal to the municipal constituencies, the majority was changed, and these honours were granted. Look at the Coroners' Inquests in agrarian cases. They have had to be brought up to the Court of Queen's Bench in Dublin to be quashed. But there is a worse sign than these, and one which I notice with great regret—namely, the effect produced on the religious feelings of the people of Ireland, who are famed, and justly famed, for their devotion to their religion and the ministers of that religion. Mr. Justice Fitzgerald, referring to a rev. gentleman, whose name I do not care to mention, says—
  "He (the Judge) was strongly in favour of maintaining the just influence of the clergy in all its vigour; but one of the things which struck him with the gravest apprehension was that he feared that influence was undermined, and that with it religion was receiving a shock from which it might never recover. He also feared that the old courage of the Catholic priests was passing away—a courage that did not fear to denounce outrage, or to take active measures to bring the perpetrators of crime to justice."
  I will call attention to one other circumstance which has impressed itself on my mind. The House is familiar with the circumstances of the terrible murder committed on the shores of Lough Mask. The details of the case, painful as they are, throw a light upon the state of the feeling of the people in that part of the country which is most alarming. This poor man of 74 years was known to me, he was popular in the office he exercised, so much so that on the day when the crime was committed he was offered and refused an escort. He had been employed in giving relief to the people in the time of distress. Yet this old man in the middle of the day vanished, and it is believed was murdered in the most cold-blooded and terrible manner. There was no blundering about the execution. There was a bullet wound in the forehead, another at the back of the head, and one at each ear. He must have been held down and scientifically murdered, and then he was taken away and cast into Lough Mask. Many men in that neighbourhood must know all about it, but not one has uttered a pro-
  520
  test, not one comes forward to give evidence. This is not a case where the tenants have had hardships to endure. The tenants have not paid rent for three years, and in the distressed period they had been provided with food by the landlord, who had never asked for repayment. Two years ago I remember speaking in this House when the agitation was beginning, and pointing to the dangers, and predicting the bloodshed to which it would certainly lead. I described the scene of a landlord going down to a distressed village, and promising support to the people, then on the verge of starvation. I spoke of the gratitude, of the blessings, of the tears of those famished villagers. On the estate of the same landlord, and by the same people, within 100 yards of that village, this terrible drama was enacted. These people were comparatively cheerful and light-hearted before this mischievous and terrible agitation began. But within two years they have been plied with all those tremenduous inducements by which the standard of right and wrong in a people is removed, and the consequences which you now see are summed up in the awful words, "the demoralization of the people." I now, lastly, with a view to information, refer to a speech which I heard on this subject last Thursday night. There was a Motion before the House, brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Tipperary (Mr. P. J. Smyth) in one of the most charming and fascinating speeches which the House has heard for many a day. He told us of the glory and of the shame of the old Irish House of Commons. With his emotion caused by the contemplation of both these historical scenes I deeply sympathized, and I agree with much that my hon. Friend said. My hon. Friend speaks too seldom in this House, and his utterances come to us like the relic of a forgotten art, the echo of an old song. You can see that his love for his country still lingers, though his hope is dead. The Old Repealer—if he will allow me to call him so—made his Motion, and was seconded by the hon. Member for Mayo (Mr. O'Connor Power)—an association somewhat strange, as on the last occasion when the Repeal Motion was before the House, the hon. Member for Tipperary denounced the Motion for Home Rule which the hon. Member for

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  Mayo was supporting. There was nothing real or practical about the whole performance and we, thought that the incident was at an end, when the Prime Minister got up and made a speech which has been interpreted variously by various persons. I must say that it did strike me as a repetition of what the Prime Minister is reported to have said in Mid Lothian, and, I believe, at the Guildhall. [Mr. GLADSTONE: And also in this House.] I have not had the pleasure of hearing the right hon. Gentleman make such a speech in this House, nor have I read any record of such a speech; but, of course, if he says so it is so. The Prime Minister in this particular speech, as I understand it, said that if only a plan could be presented to the House involving a separate Representative Institution in Ireland, and connected with the Imperial Parliament here, that was a measure which he was very willing to consider in a most favourable manner. I may, of course, be quite wrong in the construction I place on his words; but, as far as it went, the description tallied entirely with the Motions which used to be brought forward in the late Parliament by Mr. Isaac Butt. But those Motions were not then met in this spirit.
  MR. GLADSTONE: The question was always dealt with in the same way by me.
  MR. PLUNKET: I have read the report of what was said by the right hon. Gentleman on the Motion of the hon. Member for Cork County (Mr. Shaw); but I do not think the views expressed in it are the same. I want, then, to know whether this question is to be considered an open one or not? Anybody who reads the speeches delivered on that occasion by the noble Marquess the Secretary of State for India, and still more by the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, will see plainly enough what they thought. The Chief Secretary refused to assent to the grant of a Committee of Inquiry into this subject, because he said that would be making an open question of this Home Rule proposition. Is encouragement, then, really to be given to this agitation? It was not only on myself that the effect was produced by the Premier's speech; but it was gladly accepted by such an advanced politician as the hon. Member for Sligo (Mr. Sexton), who covered the
  522
  Prime Minister with gratitude and compliment, and took it as a new and happy departure. I will only say that, whether the Prime Minister is or is not now more in favour of Home Rule than he was in the last Parliament, it is evident he has made a speech which has been interpreted in this House and in Ireland generally to mean that he is. Now, all that we want is a clear understanding as to whether there is really an invitation for Home Rule excitement and agitation in Ireland or not. I would remind the House that any such movement as that must necessarily tend in a separatist direction, however well it may be guarded. I would call the attention of the House to what a great authority—the present Lord Derby—has said with regard to this subject—namely, that however you may guard such a proposal, still it will be taken advantage of for purposes you never intended—that the one hand you releise will be used to untie the other, and that, at last, it must lead on to separation. But, then, remember also that a great change has come over the spirit of the Irish people within the last few years, especially within the last two years. An agitation now for such a purpose will not be of the same character as it formerly was. It would, no doubt, receive support in money and in dollars from sources which were not open to previous agitations of that kind. The Irish people have learnt within the last few years to look much more to America than to England for their close alliance and for their future. [Mr. BIGGAR: Hear, hear!] That sentiment, I observe, is cheered by a Member of the Party to which I have been alluding. The closeness of the connection and alliance between the Irish in America and the Irish in Ireland has grown perpetually. Not only has there always been a great friendship and kindness between them, but there has, of late, been substantial assistance given by the former for political purposes in Ireland. That is growing every day; and you must know that you will have to count with this in the future, and that a powerful influence—American influence—will be brought to bear upon any such agitation or movement in Ireland. For these reasons I trust that, whatever the Prime Minister may think fit to say on this subject, he will leave no doubt or uncertainty in the public mind of Ireland.

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  Either the question is to be an open one, or it is not. I have to thank the House for the indulgence they have shown. I can assure the hon. Member for Sligo, who calls me a soldier of an alien garrison, and says that we are always on the alert to discourage any movement designed to promote the interests of Ireland, that I have no such feeling. On the alert I hope we shall always be with regard to such a movement as that to which, unfortunately, he has, with great ability, lent his aid; but for all other purposes, whatever they may be, which relate to the good of our common country, I can tell him that "the English garrison," if e will allow me to say so, are as true Irishmen as he is. Although I am speaking in this Imperial Parliament, I am an Irishman to the back-bone, born, educated, and having lived the greater part of my life in Ireland—much longer than many a Member who sits on those—Home Rule—Benches now. I do not say that as a taunt; but for the purpose of adding that it is our earnest hope and our strongest wish that peace, which has been now so shaken between the different classes in Ireland, may be restored, and that "the English garrison" may be permitted to live with our fellow-citizens in peace and friendship. I, for one, even at this sad time for Ireland—even in this dark hour of her misery and shame—am proud to acknowledge that she is my country.
  MR. CHAMBERLAIN: I am very-sensible, Sir, of the great difficulty of the task which I have undertaken in venturing to claim the attention of the House after the speech which has just been delivered by so practised a master of debate as the right hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. Plunket); and I feel it is a strong additional ground for consideration that I have to follow one to whom the House is so glad always to listen. I was glad to find, at the commencement of his remarks, that he did not intend to offer any criticism on the present and actual conduct of the Government; and in fact, I think it has become abundantly evident in the course of the debate that, at all events, with regard to the recent action of the Government taken since October 20, there is an overwhelming majority of the House in accordance with the Government in respect thereto; and therefore, while I
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  quite understand the opposition of a minority of the House, and especially that of hon. Members from Ireland, yet I feel that, without any disrespect to them, I shall best consult the convenience of the House if I pass over that part of his speech, as to which I feel it would be quite impossible for me to add anything to what has been already said by my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Chief Secretary for Ireland. The right hon. and learned Gentleman went on to complain of the accusation which he says has been made by some person or other that the Conservative Party at the present junture has no policy for Ireland but that of coercion, and that accusation he indignantly repudiated; but the grounds for his repudiation appear to me insufficient. One was, that at a time of peace and tranquillity the late Government suffered the renewal of the Peace Preservation Act in a different and milder form to the previously adopted one, very much, let me say, in deference to the representations of hon. Members from this side of the House. The other was that the same Government had passed a Bill dealing with University Education. But, after all, this is beside the question, and has nothing to do with the charge made against the Conservative Party. That charge is, that at the present moment, when social disorder has arisen to a great height—and this social disorder is based on long-standing agrarian discontent—admittedly forming a just cause of grievance—that in this case the Conservative Party have no remedy to suggest but this—coercion, and more coercion; coercion more and more vigorously applied. What is the answer of the right hon. and learned Gentleman to the accusation? That the late Government appointed a Commission to inquire into the cause of agricultural distress. It was not to inquire into the Land Question, but generally into that of agricultural distress. [Mr. PLUNKET: It embraced Ireland.] No doubt, it embraced Ireland, as it embraced other parts of the United Kingdom; but it was never intended to deal with the real question at issue—the special grievance of the country. More than that, I say that Commissions under Conservative Governments have always been recognized by us as being their way of shelving a difficulty. We also

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  appointed a Commission, but we legislated immediately upon receiving its Report. Now I pass on from that part of the subject to consider what appears to be the contention of my right hon. and learned Friend, as it was previously the contention of his right hon. and learned Colleague in the representation of the University of Dublin, that the Government have in some way or another, at a time which has not been very clearly defined, left undone something, it has not been very distinctly specified what, which would have conduced to the immediate pacification of Ireland, and which might, perhaps, have rendered unnecessary the more stringent and drastic measures we have been compelled to take. I should like to say one word as to the spirit with which these charges are offered to the House. Certainly, I have no complaint to make to the tone and temper of my right hon. and learned Friend's speech. I am quite sure that the House generally, and hon. Members on this side of it, would be perfectly willing to admit the justice of the claim made on the second night of the debate by the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition (Sir Stafford Northcote), who said he hoped he had shown no spirit of factiousness, nor any desire to embarrass the Government. But I think I am justified in contrasting the tone and temper of these right hon. and learned Gentlemen, and of the debate in this House, with the speeches which have been made during the last few months with regard to the same subject. Why, in these speeches no stone has been left unturned which could possibly discredit the Government, which could possibly embarrass the Executive in the difficult and delicate task which they had undertaken to perform. No misrepresentation has been too gross, no charge has been too monstrous to be hurled against the devoted heads of the Ministry in reference to their policy in Ireland. We have been told, amongst other things in this way, that we have been paltering with rebellion, and that we have suffered crime and outrage to go unchecked and unpunished for Party purposes. ["Hear, hear!"] Quite so. I understand those cheers. Those statements are adopted by hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite. Do they think charges of that kind are likely to strengthen the hands of the Executive?
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  We are further told that the policy of the Government differs only in degree from the policy of the government of the Land League, and from the policy of the "no rent" manifesto; and it has been suggested that this difference is so slight, that the Prime Minister might very well be called on to change places with Mr. Parnell in Kilmainham. Is that legitimate criticism—that criticism which is altogether free from the suspicion of factious motives, which the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition so justly, in his own case, disclaims? Lastly, when the Government made, the other day, what I may call a supreme exertion, when, by the act of the Cabinet as a whole, for which every Minister of the Cabinet is responsible, they decided—reluctantly, I am ready and glad to admit—that the time had come when they were bound to act by arresting the Leaders of the Land League, and by suppressing the agitation—then we were told in the country that our action was due entirely to the personal irritation of the Prime Minister, who had been worsted in argument by the hon. Member whom the Government had found it necessary to shut up. [Mr. BIGGAR: Hear, hear!] I can understand how those charges can be lightly made; but I cannot understand that anybody with a sense of responsibility at all can give his support to them, or fail to see that, at all events, they are not likely to impress the Irish people with a sense of the gravity of the crisis, or with the judicial and national importance of the steps which the Government have felt it their duty to take. What I want to ask is, why does not the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition, or either of the hon. and right hon. Gentlemen who have spoken for the other side of the House, adopt those statements made by their supporters in the country? Was it because, as the right hon. Gentleman had told them, with some little degree of pathos, that some of his supporters consider he is too deficient in "go;" or is it because, as I rather prefer to believe, his sense of fairness, which we have always gladly and gratefully recognized, has prevented him, and compelled him to dissociate himself from such exaggerated and such venomous statements? What is the exact nature of the indictment presented against the Government?

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  There is, as I have said, some little obscurity as to the time at which it is said we ought to have proceeded, and difference of opinion as to the action which it is alleged we ought to have taken. As regards the time, the right hon. and learned Gentleman opposite (Mr. Plunket) has referred, in the first place, to the neglect of the Government to renew the Peace Preservation Act. Again and again it has been pointed out that, even if we desired to renew that Act, it was absolutely impossible, with the opposition it was certain to excite, to have renewed it before the old Act expired. ["Oh, oh!"] Hon. Members opposite had had some experience of the opposition Protection Acts met with in this House. Can they seriously believe that the renewal of the Peace Preservation Act would have been obtained from the House in so short a time as three weeks? I beg pardon; I am reminded by my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland that 10 days only was the actual available time for passing the measure. That was all the time that the late Administration, by their action, left to the present Government in order to pass the Act which they now say was absolutely necessary for the peace of Ireland. There were other times at which it is said we exhibited neglect. The junior Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) mentioned three particular occasions. The first was January, 1881, when the State Trials had failed; the second was whilst coercion was under discussion in the House, which was, I believe, in February, and not March, as stated by the right hon. and learned Gentleman; and the third was the month of March or April, after the Coercion Act had passed, but before the Land Act became law. It will be evident that the right hon. and learned Gentleman gives us a choice of time; but I think we might fairly ask him, in the first place, to select one of the times as that on which he would prefer to stand, because I see he is in some little doubt in the matter. Is it January, February, or April in which the Government ought to have acted? He says—"There may have been some ground for delay in January, in order to see the effect of the protective measures, and whether it would be necessary to issue a proclamation; but where is your justification for not doing
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  it in the month of March?" It would be perfectly unreasonable to take the Government to task for not doing in January or February what the right hon. and learned Gentleman himself says there might have been some ground for neglecting to do. It seems to me, therefore, that no serious charge can be established against us out of the mouth of the right hon. and learned Gentleman until March. I next go to the kind of action he says we ought to have taken. It was to have issued a proclamation. Had it been issued in January or February, before we obtained power from Parliament under the Protection of Person and Property Act, it must have been a mere brutum fulmen. We could not at that time have proceeded to the arrest of the Leaders of the organization; but he evidently did not intend that we should proceed to such extremities as that, for he says—
  "That it is as clear as that two and two make four that the warning of such a proclamation would have been sufficient."
  I propose to answer the right hon. and learned Gentleman out of the mouth of his Leader. What does the right hon. Baronet (Sir Stafford Northcote) say? When he was referring to the wish that I had expressed at Liverpool that the passing of the Coercion Acts would have been taken as an effectual warning by the disorderly and disloyal classes in Ireland, he said—
  "Now it is that hoping that warning would be effective that constitutes the danger. The holding out threats, and not acting upon them, is about the most dangerous policy that can be pursued."
  I think that is extremely wise; but it applies in infinitely greater force to the advice proffered to us by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin, If we had adopted his advice and threatened the people of Ireland in a proclamation, with the knowledge in their minds and ours that we could not follow it up by any effective measures, then, indeed, there would have been reason for saying that would have constituted a danger. I find, however, some little obscurity in what the right hon. and learned Gentleman has said, and what has subsequently been said by his Colleague, in reference to the action which should have been taken. The right hon. and learned Gentleman's Colleague in the

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  representation of the University of Dublin (Mr. Plunket) evidently had it in view to follow up a proclamation by other measures, for he suggested, in the earlier part of his speech, that we need not have arrested the Leaders of the Land League, but that we might have broken up their organization by searching for documents and proclaiming the meetings. In the latter portion of the speech of the junior Member for the University of Dublin, he also made an observation which is very different from those I have just been considering. He refers to the steps which we took on the 20th of October, and to the statement which, he says, was made by the Prime Minister, that the Land League had been driven to desperation. Now, I think there has been some mistake about this matter, and that what the Prime Minister really did say was that the Land Act had driven the Land League to desperation; but the right hon. and learned Gentleman appears to think what drove the Land League to desperation was the arrest of the Leaders of the organization and the suppression of the League; and he goes on to say—"My argument has been all through, why was not the Land League driven to desperation long before?" If the right hon. and learned Gentleman will pardon me, that was not his argument all through, because, in the earlier part of his speech, he suggested much milder measures; but, taking his speech in connection with what was said on the same subject by the hon. Member for Leitrim (Mr. Tottenham), who told us that in everything we had done we had been too late, and that the steps we had taken ought to have been taken many months before they actually were—I think I may assume that the meaning of all this is that, in the opinion of right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite, we ought to have arrested the Leaders and ought to have suppressed the Land League very much earlier than we did. ["Hear, hear!"] That is, at all events, a definite accusation—one which it is possible to meet. Now, as the first of the suggested dates on which it is contended we ought to have arrested the Leaders of the Land League and suppressed that organization is immediately after the failure of the State Trials, I say that at that time we had no power, and we had no right, to do so.
  MR. GIBSON: I never said you should have suppressed the Land League in January, though, under Common Law powers, you could have proclaimed it.
  MR. CHAMBERLAIN: I endeavoured to follow the right hon. and learned Gentleman's argument, but I failed to discover the exact time in which the various forms of action he suggests should have been taken. I do not attribute to him any desire that the Government should have taken this extreme course in January, 1881; but when the hon. Member for Leitrim says it ought to have been taken many months before October, I am bound to show that such action would not have been right or possible. I take January and February, and not many months before October. What the Government did in January, 1881, at the time the hon. Member says we were inactive, was to appeal to the ordinary law against what we thought constituted an illegal conspiracy. We failed, no doubt, because we were unable to obtain a verdict in Ireland. Surely, then, it would have been a most arbitrary and improper thing for the Government, the moment we had failed when appealing to the ordinary law, to take immediately the law into our own hands, and, by some extraordinary and exceptional measures, such as has been suggested, obtain a result which we were unable to obtain from the law to which we had appealed. I contend that after the failure of that trial we were bound to wait for some fresh evidence of guilt and of danger resulting from the organization before we proceeded to take other and further action. I come now to the month of April, which is clearly the most critical period for this discussion, the time when the Coercion Act had passed, but before the Land Bill had become law. Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman suggest that we ought then to have arrested the Leaders of the Land League and suppressed the organization? If he does, or anyone else, I say in reply that that would have been a breach of faith on the part of the Government with the House of Commons and with the country. In the course of the debates on the Protection of Life and Property Bill, there was certainly no concealment of the intentions of the Government. The Prime

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  Minister made a speech, having been directly appealed to by one of the Members for Ireland, and from which the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill) quoted several paragraphs the other night, and in which the Prime Minister said there was no intention on the part of the Government to proceed against any but the actual perpetrators or abettors of outrage, and that there was no intention at the time to interfere with the liberty or even the license of discussion. A similar statement, confirming and even extending that declaration, was made by my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland. ["Oh, oh!"] If right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite disapproved at the time of the intentions which were so plainly expressed, why did not they not get up and say so? I have looked through the debates, and I have not been able to find one single expression of disapproval or protest after those statements were made. The speech of the Prime Minister was made on the 28th January, and on the 4th February I find a speech—the first delivered subsequently—by the junior Member for Dublin University. It was a very admirable speech; but it does not contain one word of objection to the view which had been expressed by the Prime Minister as being held by the Government as to their obligations in connection with the Protection of Life and Property Act. I allege, therefore, that the Members of the Party opposite by their silence gave assent to the view which was taken by the Government. I will go further than that—some Members of the Party were not silent, and I think I can quote some who have given absolutely confirmatory support to our contention. The noble Lord the Member for Woodstock has influence deservedly great with his Party, and everything he says is entitled to the greatest possible attention. He made a speech on Friday last in which occurred a passage which, I confess, I read with the greatest surprise and astonishment, and which is so memorable as to deserve repetition. "The Government," he said, "were always proclaiming themselves as superior to the ordinary frailties of human nature, and he supposed they could not be expected to use the Coercion Act as similar Acts have always been used."
  LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: That is an entirely incorrect report. I said that the Government had claimed that they would not use the Coercion Act as former Acts had been used. The Times reporter does not pay me the same attention he does the distinguished luminaries on the Front Bench opposite.
  MR. CHAMBERLAIN: I do not know whether the noble Lord will dispute the remaining part of the quotation, which was the plum of the pudding. I read from The Times, and the noble Lord is reported to have gone on to say that "a Coercion Act was aimed at unscrupulous persons, and, from the necessity of the case, must always be used unscrupulously." [Lord RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: Yes, I did say that.] I am glad to hear that some part of the report is correct, and that the noble Lord admits that was his contention. If the noble Lord were in Ireland, I am not certain but that he might not be reasonably suspected of being a person who is inciting other persons—to wit, the Ministers of the Crown—to commit a breach of the law; and I think, if evidence of intimidation were wanted, we might find it in the concluding portion of the speech, in which he threatened us with the vengeance of the constituencies. He thinks we exhibited a strained sense of morality, because we did not use the law unscrupulously—that is illegally—and the noble Lord has a supporter in the person of the hon. Member for Cavan (Mr. Biggar).
  LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: The right hon. Gentleman is wholly mistaken, and is misrepresenting, unintentionally, no doubt, what I said. What I did say was, that the Government had used the Coercion Act unscrupulously on two or three occasions.
  MR. CHAMBERLAIN: There is not a trace of any statement of the kind in the report in any of the papers. But I am particularly anxious to deal only with those portions of the noble Lord's speeches which he admits he uttered. He admits that he said that, from the necessities of the case, the Coercion Act must always be used unscrupulously, and it formed part of his argument that the Government were to blame. Owing to this absurd morality, for which the noble Lord professes a high and noble scorn, they had been prevented from using the Coercion Acts unscrupulously.

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  If we are to be accused of not being unscrupulous enough to please the noble Lord, that is an accusation which we must be content to bear; but if that were the view of the noble Lord, why did he not express it on the debates on the Coercion Act? [Lord RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: I did.] Then he must be as badly reported by Hansard as by The Times newspaper, for I cannot see a trace of it in his speech; but I do find something that does bear quite a contrary interpretation. On February 4, 1881, he is reported to have said—
  "He did not think it necessary to bring accusations against the principal members of the Land League, though, no doubt, some of the more obscure members of the body had spoken wildly, and even wickedly; but there was no doubt that the Land League, by its operations, had got the mind of the Irish people into such a state of commotion and excitement, that the darker and wilder spirits, under cover of that excitement, perpetrated crimes and established a reign of terror."—[3 Hansard, cclxiii. 193–4.]
  That was exactly the position of the Government at that time. They believed that, whilst there was no ground to bring accusations against the principal members of the Land League, under cover of excitement crimes were being perpetrated by the more obscure and wilder spirits which made it necessary to pass the Bill. It is therefore apparent that the accusation of the noble Lord and the junior Member for the University of Dublin, that the Government was to blame for not doing in April what they afterwards did, is an afterthought entirely. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin quoted from the speech I delivered at Liverpool, and I must say, if he will allow me, that it is really a pleasure to be criticized by him. He reminds one of the directions given by Izaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler, for baiting a hook with a live frog—
  "Put your hook in Ms mouth and out of his gills, and tie his leg to the wire with a fine thread, and, in doing so, use him tenderly as if you loved him."
  The right hon. and learned Gentleman is so kindly in his criticism, and so fair and humorous, that vivisection at his hands is really an agreeable experience. There is another point on which I may say he contrasts fairly with some of our other opponents, because, when he does
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  quote, he quotes accurately. I wish I could say the same of others on his side of the House, for there is one other speech to which I wish to refer. The junior Member for Exeter (Mr. H. S. Northcote), whom I am glad to see in his place, is reported, at the Exeter Conservative Working Men's Union, to have said—
  "Mr. Chamberlain admits the Government suffered brutal murders and warnings to continue in order to pass a confiscatory Land Bill."
  I hope the hon. Member has been misreported.
  MR. H. S. NORTHCOTE: I will explain when the right hon. Gentleman has concluded his remarks.
  MR. CHAMBERLAIN: Whether he is misreported or not, I give to that statement, so worded, the most unqualified and absolute denial. Not only did I never admit anything of the kind; but I said in so many words absolutely the reverse. I said that the Government would not and could not tolerate outrage of any kind as an instrument for effecting political objects, and that the existence of outrage was throughout the ground and justification of the action of the Government. I call upon the hon. Gentleman in his place either to inform the House that he has been misreported, or to prove his statement; or, if he cannot do that, to offer some apology for having, as I suppose unintentionally, misrepresented me; and I pass back to the speech of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson). What is the passage on which he relies in my speech? It is—"To have stifled the agitation at this time (in April) would have been to prevent reform;" and he paraphrases it by saying—"For agitation read Land League, and for reform read Land Act." I might point out that there is a real distinction between the paraphrase and the original; but I do not want to dwell upon that, and I will, as fairly conveying my meaning, accept the paraphrase—"To have stifled the Land League at this time would have been to have prevented the passing of the Land Act." That professes to be a statement of fact. Now, is it true or false? [Cries of "True!"] Is it true? If there is any doubt about it, I will quote the statement of the right hon. and learned

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  Gentleman himself. He says, in the previous part of his speech—
  "If Ireland had been quiet, and there had been no agitation, does anyone doubt that many of the clauses of the Land Act would never have been passed?"
  I do not know exactly what he means by that. If he means that if Ireland had been quiet these clauses would not have been proposed by the Government, he is mistaken. If he means they would not have been passed by the House of Commons, I think he is wrong; but if he means that, though passed by the House of Commons, they would have been unceremoniously kicked out by the House of Lords, I can only say that he has better information of what would have been the course of that House than I can possibly have. Granting the fact, was the fact one which ought in any way to have influenced the decision of the Government at that time? Here I come to a point in which I think the right hon. and learned Gentleman and his right hon. and learned Colleague in the representation of Dublin University have misinterpreted my meaning. I did not say—I did not mean to say—that the Government had suffered agitation in order to pass the Land Bill. What I said was that if the agitation had been stifled, and if, in consequence, the Land Act had not been passed, no reform would have been possible. To have taken a course of that kind without, at the same time, remedying the injustice of which the agitation was the voice, would have been taking a course fraught with danger and disaster. In reference to that, the right hon. and learned Gentleman makes another quotation from my speech—that I said that "If we had suppressed the agitation at this time, the tenants would have had no organization to fall back upon." But he omitted to point out the conclusion which I drew, and which was that in that case the tenant would have despaired of redress, and would have found they had no alternative but to join secret societies, with all that that involves, or perhaps have broken out into rebellion, which could only have been suppressed at a cost of bloodshed which every humane man could only have looked upon with pain and regret. Is it not the fact that such a course would have been attended with danger? I ask him to inquire of his constituents and friends from Ulster what do they
  536
  think would have been the consequence of suppressing the Land League, the only organization which the tenants had, and at the same time refusing them any remedial measures? I do not doubt, from what passed at recent Elections, and from the declaration of Conservative candidates in Ulster, that the strain would be too great even for the loyalty of Ulster. [Cries of "No, no!"] Yes; the event I have described of the suppression of the Land League, and the refusal at the same time of all redress, would have been followed practically by the surrender of Ulster, through its going over to the party of disloyalty and disorder. I wish very much that the two right hon. and learned Gentlemen whose speeches I have been criticizing had dealt with one part of the subject, which is only conspicuous by its absence. The right hon. and learned Gentleman who last sat down (Mr. Plunket) has shown on this occasion and on many others very keen appreciation of the difficulties of the landlords of Ireland. I wish he had shown also some appreciation of the difficulties of the tenants. The right hon. and learned Gentleman spoke of the claims, the powerful claims, which the landlords would have upon the consideration of this House when they asked for compensation. He referred to a speech by the Prime Minister, in which as I understood, the Prime Minister said that if rents were arbitrarily reduced by legislation to Griffith's valuation—or, I. suppose, to anything else—there would have been established a claim for compensation. But that is something actually quite different to what we say has been the case. The rents have not been—["Oh, oh!"]—that is our opinion—arbitrarily reduced. All that has been taken from the landlords by legislation is the right to exact an unfair rent, and that is a right for the loss of which the House would, I think, be very slow to grant compensation. The working of the Land Act, so far as it has gone, has thrown a great light upon the condition of the tenants. It has been said, and I believe it is true, that it is in accordance with all probability that only the worst cases have been brought to the cognizance of the Commissioners; but, be that so "or not, it is evident that there is a vast number of cases in all parts of Ireland in which, according to the judgment of the Sub-Commissioners, rents have been

  537
  exacted more than 23 per cent above what could be fairly claimed. Both the right hon. and learned Gentlemen who have spoken contest the justice of these decisions, and suggest what is altogether an indefensible conclusion—namely, that there has been some sort of common agreement—I would almost call it collusion—between the members of the Sub-Commissions, so that they could bring out absolutely the average result of a 23 per cent reduction. Well, now, if the reduction in every individual case had been almost exactly 23, 22, or 21 per cent, then I could understand the suspicion that the Sub-Commissioners had gone to work with the foregone conclusion, and had not taken into account the separate circumstances of each case. But what are the facts? You find in every case in every one of these Commissions that the variations in rent are extraordinary—that the reductions are, I think, from 60 per cent as the maximum, down to 5 per cent or nothing. What the right hon. and learned Gentlemen appear to be imputing to the Sub-Commissioners is what I am certain they did not intend to impute—a most deliberate and complicated fraud; for they suggest that all these varieties of rent had been made by the Sub-Commissioners, of course, to throw dust in the eyes of the people, while all along it was ingeniously arranged by a complicated arithmetical calculation that in every case they should bring out a 23 per cent reduction, which was to be the object of the Sub-Commissioners. Is it not more reasonable to suppose that, the conditions being on the average the same in all parts of the country, the results also are the same wherever a sufficient number of cases are taken to eliminate the effect of exceptions and variations? But I do not rely on the decisions of the Sub - Commissioners. Some of the cases have been carried on appeal to the Chief Commissioners, and the right hon. and learned Gentlemen did not suggest the same sort of charges against the Chief Commissioners that they had thought themselves entitled to suggest against the Sub-Commissioners. But in these cases of appeal, so far as they have gone, the decisions of the Sub-Commissioners have been substantially maintained. I believe, further, that the valuators appointed by the Chief Commissioners valued the
  538
  land on the average below the rents fixed by the Sub-Commissioners. But that is not all. The evidence in favour of the view taken by the Sub-Commissioners is really cumulative, because we have the evidence of the agreements out of Court, and I believe those agreements have, on the whole, exceeded the 23 per cent reduction made by the Sub-Commissioners themselves. Not only so, but some of the parties have gone to the County Court Judges, where the reductions appear to have been very much the same. Lastly, you have the evidence of land agents called into Court by the landlords themselves, as if they were their own witnesses, and confirming in many cases the subsequent decisions of the Court. This evidence, then, I say, not taking any part by itself, but taking the whole of it, must carry the conviction to most reasonable people that, at all events, rack-renting in Ireland has prevailed very extensively, and, I will say for myself, much more extensively than I had any idea of at the time the Land Act was passed. If we had known that at the time, surely it would have been the strongest support we could have had in favour of the Act. If there were more cases of injustice than was supposed, and if the evil was more grievous than was supposed, all the more occasion for the measure which we recommended. But now I ask the House to consider what it is the right hon. and learned Gentleman has been suggesting. He has been suggesting that the Government, in April last, should have said to these rack-rented tenants all over Ireland—to these numberless persons, the subjects of a proved and admitted grievance—"Go on paying the exorbitant rents levied on you for we know not how many years, suffer eviction, meaning as it does ruin, possibly starvation and death, if you are unable to pay these rents; you shall be denied all expression of your discontent, and the only organized agitation which, according to the admission of the right hon. and learned Gentleman himself, is, at all events, a powerful influence in favour of reform, that organization shall be violently suppressed." It was one thing to attempt, as the Government did, to put down individual acts of lawlessness; but it would have been altogether a different thing to attempt to put down free dis-

  539
  cussion and agitation for reform. I admit that we have not acted unscrupulously; and if we have incurred the blame of the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock, all I can say is that we must be content to bear it. But I go a great deal further, and I say we have acted throughout most reluctantly in this matter, and only under the deepest sense of necessity and urgency. So far from thinking we had a right to use these exceptional powers unscrupulously, we thought that all along we were bound to exhaust every alternative before proceeding to extremities at all. I may say that if we had done otherwise—if we had taken the course which is now suggested for the first time, and against the better judgment, as I believe, of the right hon. and learned Gentleman at the time of which he is speaking—if we had taken this extreme course in April last, I believe public opinion, which has hitherto supported the Government, would have been withdrawn, and withdrawn rightly, from any confidence in our policy. In conclusion, I say, as my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland has done before me, that the best justification of our policy is that the combined action of the Government, the remedial measures, coupled with the repression of disorder and crime, are working together, and are proceeding successfully. The noble Lord the Member for Woodstock says there is no previous instance of a Coercion Act having been passed which has not at first caused a decrease of crime, and he seemed to challenge us to produce an instance to the contrary. I call to mind the well-known proverb about evil communications, and I am afraid the noble Lord has been keeping company not favourable to historical accuracy. But I can assure him, however, that there are many instances in their history in which Coercion Acts have not been immediately successful in accomplishing their objects. I will take two as being sufficient for the present purpose. In 1847, in consequence of an increase of 68 per cent, the Government had to announce to Parliament the necessity for a Crime and Outrage Act, and that Act was introduced and passed in the same Session. It was perfectly ineffectual for its purpose. In 1848 the Government had to come again, and say that a
  540
  system of terror prevailed which they described in language similar to that which had been employed in reference to the recent state of the country; and in 1848 the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended. The suspension lasted till the 1st September, 1849. Well, what was the effect of it upon agrarian outrages? In 1847, before the suspension, there were 620; in 1848, the first year of the suspension, they had risen to 795; in 1849, the last year of the suspension, they had risen again to 957. Well, then, in 1866, the Habeas Corpus was suspended on 1st December, and it continued suspended till 10th May, 1869. I have a Return of the agrarian outrages; but agrarian crime was not then the kind of crime with which the Government had chiefly to deal; but, taking agrarian crime, there were for 1866, before the suspension, 87 outrages; for the three years subsequent, 123, 160, and 767. The indictable offences specially returned were 1,964 in the first of those periods, and that rose to 2,021, 2,548, and 3,153 in the three succeeding years. Well, Sir, that is sufficient to show, at all events, whatever may be the effect of Coercion Acts—they are not always remedial—that this is not the first occasion in which they have failed to produce the result that has been hoped for. Why are we to assume that any different result ought to have been arrived at in the present case? I would call your attention to a Report of a Select Committee of the House of Lords upon the Jury Laws of Ireland brought in last Session. The noble Lords who sat on that Committee were thoroughly well acquainted with the state of Ireland and with its history. One portion of their Report is to the effect that the social disorder is so deep-seated there that they had no right reasonably to anticipate any immediate return of peace. We have no right to expect impossibilities; but I do say that the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) the other night most fairly acknowledged that the signs on the whole are favourable; and I think he was right in saying that we should not, on the one hand, be over sanguine, but that, on the other hand, it would be foolish and unwise to despair. The course which the Government thought it their duty to adopt has not tended to our per-

  541
  sonal advantage, nor has it probably tended to strengthen our Party position. By our remedial measures we have incurred, as we knew we should incur, the hostility of what has been called "The English garrison in Ireland;" by our efforts to protect life and property we have evoked, as we knew we should evoke, the bitter and vehement opposition of many Irish Members, and. of a large section of the Irish population in this country. Well, Sir, I am not entitled to stand here and assume that every act of the Government has been throughout the course of this protracted and difficult and critical time wise and just and right; but I do say we have honestly endeavoured to do our duty and to steer an even course between extremes, and that I believe in my conscience that, in the main and on the whole, our policy has been just and right and necessary, and that it will, after a reasonable lapse of time, contribute to restore in Ireland the peace and tranquillity of which it stands so much in need and upon which alone the property and the welfare of its people can be established.
  MR. H. S. NORTHCOTEsaid, he claimed the indulgence of the House for a moment, in order to respond to the personal appeal which the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade had made to him. The right hon. Gentleman had not given him the name of the newspaper from which he had made a quotation from his speech at Exeter; but he (Mr. H. S. Northcote) would admit that he did say substantially that, to judge from the right hon. Gentleman's remarks at Liverpool, the Government had tolerated a state of disorder and outrage in Ireland, and that they had allowed that state of things to go on apparently for the sake of passing their Land Act. He supposed that the right hon. Gentleman did not think that he (Mr. H. S. Northcote) had accused him personally of approving or conniving at such outrages; but he had felt, judging from his speech, that the Government had shown criminal laxity in dealing with such outrages for the sake of passing their Land Act. He was not in the habit of using strong language against his opponents outside of the House, and he would not have spoken as he had done if he had not felt very strongly on that matter, The ground of
  542
  his serious charge against the Government was that up to the moment he read the right hon. Gentleman's speech he had been fully under the impression that hon. Gentlemen on both sides of the House equally disapproved of the objects of the Land League, and that the main difference between them was that the Government thought that the object of the League would be best combated by the application of mild measures of repression and by the Land Act, whereas hon. Gentlemen on his side, and he frankly confessed that he was one of them, would have applied more stringent measures of coercion. But he had believed that both Parties were equally sincere in their detestation of the objects of the Land League, and in their desire to suppress them by the one method or the other. When, however, he read the speech made by the right hon. Gentleman in October, it appeared to him that it materially altered the position of the Government towards the Land League, and towards things in Ireland during the past year or two. The right hon. Gentleman was reported to have said in Liverpool that to have stifled the Land League in its origin would have been to have prevented reform. That was a direct admission that it had long been in the power of the Government to have stifled the Land League if they had felt so disposed. He (Mr. H. S. Northcote) contended, however, that the Government had throughout shown their inability to do anything of the kind, and at least up to October they had distinctly failed to do so. Then the right hon. Gentleman went on to say that the original objects of the Land League were legal and even praiseworthy. Now, according to his reading of the matter, the original object of the Land League was to obtain a reduction of rents, which might, perhaps, in itself be a legal and constitutional object; but it was not right to try to obtain that object by illegal means. In his judgment, assuming the legality of the object of a reduction of rents, the means by which the Land League or its supporters sought to attain it were distinctly illegal; and the Government had from the beginning ample indications and notice of its views, and of the means it was intended to employ.
  MR. CHAMBERLAINsaid, the hon. Member must have read an incorrect re-

  543
  port. He had spoken of the avowed objects of the Land League, and he had said that the examination into a bad system and the reform of an unjust law, the objects in question, were objects legal and even praiseworthy.
  MR. H. S. NORTHCOTEsaid, his contention was that, even assuming they were so, they became illegal by the very fact of the methods pursued for attaining them. He spoke without notes; but he thought it would be in the recollection of the House that as long ago as August, 1880, the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. John Dillon) made a speech which was commented upon in the House, and in which he said that cattle turned out on a vacant farm, from which the tenant had been evicted, would not be likely to have a very good time of it. Subsequently, in a speech made in the House, that hon. Member also said that if he were a farmer, and a man, or a body of men, came to evict him, if he possessed a rifle he would shoot the man and as many of the body of men as he could. That was a distinct indication from a very prominent Leader of the Irish Party as to the means that would be employed in Ireland to carry out those objects which the right hon. Gentleman said were fair and legal. Again, he remembered that the hon. Member for Wexford (Mr. Healy) stated that he was not an advocate of the "single drop of blood" policy. He also recollected a speech in which the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell) described the practice of "Boycotting" without expressing disapproval of it. At Liverpool the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade mildly characterized "Boycotting" as "a reprehensible practice."
  MR. CHAMBERLAINsaid, that he had not referred to "Boycotting" at not Liverpool, and that he had used the expression "reprehensible practice."
  MR. H. S. NORTHCOTEsaid, that, in that case, he begged pardon, as he must have been misinformed. A pamphlet had been sent to him, giving those words within inverted commas. As, however, they were disclaimed, he now apologized for this particular expression; but he still thought the Government had failed in their duty at a critical juncture, and he could not hesitate to condemn their policy in the most unequivocal terms.
  MR. MARUMsaid, it was not his intention to enter into the contention in which the two rival Parties indulged with regard to this question. He should rather prefer to look at the condition of the country at present, and to contrast it with periods not far remote in their history. According to official figures, it appeared that there were at the present moment 1,250,000 acres of land in Ireland under cereal cultivation less than there were 30 or 40 years ago; or, if they took the system of rotation practised in that country, they might put it down that in rough numbers there were 4,000,000 acres of land less under scientific husbandry than 40 years ago. If he calculated the loss of population with that and capitalized the result of both, he would produce a total that would be perfectly astounding. It was said—and he would partly admit—that in a degree they had, for the lesser yield of cereals caused by this change in the cultivation of the country, obtained an equivalent in the shape of butter, pork, beef, mutton, and other gross products; but he was sorry to say that that by no means compensated for the loss suffered, for the entire falling-off of stock in Ireland, as shown by official sources, amounted to something like 60,000,000. If they calculated both of these losses, they would find that the result had amounted to little short of beggary to both landlord and tenant. That melancholy state of things he attributed to the system pursued for the last 30 years, and not to any inherent fault of their own. The system pursued by England towards Ireland had culminated in the present distress. He would not go back so far as 80 years, as he might do, to the evil effects of that system—to the period from 1815 to 1840, when Protection prevailed, or to the subsequent period of Free Trade—but he would come at once to the first remedial legislation attempted in Ireland in 1870 and 1881. The chief objection to the remedial legislation of 1881 was in the absence of adequate provisions for dealings with arrears of rent. The clauses directed towards that object were almost, if not wholly, inoperative, and hence arose the disorder, the agitation, and disturbance now prevailing. Nor could that fact be considered anything to be wondered at, for he might refer to statistics showing the eviction of 17,000 human beings from

  545
  this cause within a comparatively short period; but that would not at all disclose the real state of the country. Adjoining his place was the townland of Ballyphelan, upon which the tenants were at present in a state of suspense, not knowing whether to sow their lands or not, the tenancies having been purchased by the landlords. Near it was another townland, a tenant on which some time ago showed him an ejectment for six years' arrears of rent. That looked rather alarming; but when they found that the six years' arrears had been made out of balances which had been allowed to hang over for nearly 30 years they would form a different opinion of the matter. Lord Ashbrook had wisely given his tenants a reduction, but Lord Orkney had given none. Mr. Arthur Kavanagh, of Ballyraggett, had thought it proper to give 17½ per cent to his tenants. He did not deny that some tenants who could pay held back their rents, for there were always rogues to be found in the world; but he utterly denied that that applied to the vast majority of the Irish tenantry. He could assure the House that the rents in many cases were exorbitant, and the Land Act gave no assistance. He would give the House some experience of his own. In the townland of Connihy, in his own immediate neighbourhood, several tenants were under process of eviction upon tenancy sales. About a fortnight ago, when the first sales of their tenancies were held in Kilkenny, he reported to them the position they would be in if they parted with possession, and asked them why they did not look upon the amount of arrears as a fine, pay it, and avail themselves of the benefit of the provisions of the Land Act; but their reply was that their experience of the decisions that had been given in cases upon an adjoining estate were of such a character that they could not fairly go into Court. He wished hon. Gentlemen who so freely censured the action of the Sub-Commissioners knew the views of the tenantry in the North and South of Ireland upon the subject. In proof of it he would ask the attention of hon. Members to the meeting held in Belfast recently, at which the cold farmers of the North expressed in a well-known resolution utter dissatisfaction with the manner in which the Sub-Commissioners dealt with their rents. That resolution,
  546
  which was passed by the cold and calculating Northerners, and not by the more ardent and excitable men of the South, asserted that after a careful weighing of the recent decisions of the Land Courts, they were forced to the conclusion that the Land Courts had not adequately protected the tenants, that they had made too small an allowance for the interests of the tenants, and that an adequate recognition of their claims was the only real stimulus for capital, labour, and skill expended upon the soil. This was a deliberate statement made by the meeting; and he would ask the House whether it was not a fact that the competition which the Irish farmer had to meet was a severe one? In America they had a virgin soil, machines which took the place of labour competing with an old soil which did not admit of the use of machines, and all that had to be set off against those advantages were the freight and the carriage. And this was a mere nothing; in fact, the prairies of America, as cattle-raising districts, were in the position of town parks to the great centres of population. The question for the House was not that which the Ministry and the Opposition had been debating—namely, whether rents had, by the action of the Sub-Commissioners, been raised or lowered. The true question was, not whether the rents had been lowered or not, but what rent could the land pay. He was sorry the Chief Secretary for Ireland had adopted a sort of apologetic tone for the Sub-Commissioners, saying that, after all, the rents had not been so high, and that they ought not to have been reduced. Though himself a landlord, and with connections entirely among that class, yet he must submit to the inevitable; the landlords could only expect a fair rent, and more than that they could not hope to obtain. Ulster had unmistakably proclaimed that rents were not being sufficiently lowered there. The tenants of the South were equally dissatisfied, as might be gathered from the terms of a letter from the Very Rev. Dr. Meehan in reference to some decided cases. A holding belonging to a man named Cleary was reduced from £2 17 s. 6d. to £2 6s. 8d; but on another farm of the same character, belonging to Mrs. Hurley, the rent was not sufficiently reduced, it being £3 11 s. an acre. The Very Rev. Dr. Meehan wrote—

  547
  "No judgment has given so much dissatisfaction, as no decision has staggered public confidence so much in the competency of the land tribunal, as the case of Ellen Hurley. The landlord even did not expect it. Since it has become known in the country hundreds of tenant farmers have made a vow never to go near the Land Court."
  To attempt, therefore, to treat the action of the Sub-Commissioners as going too far was absurd. As a practical agriculturist, he could say that in the South of Ireland, at least, rents had not yet been sufficiently lowered. It was a dangerous policy for the landlords not to be satisfied with moderate rents; and he warned the House that unless rents were reduced to a moderate level, and a fair margin allowed for bad seasons, an agitation would be raised even against judicial rents, which would render the state of things more difficult than ever for the Government. He gave this warning to the Government and also to the landlords, that the latter might not be too greedy. With regard to the indiscriminate suppression of the Land League, he assumed from the speeches of Ministers that the Government had a very considerable knowledge of the agitation that had been going on for some years. He wished them to understand that some few years ago the Tenants' Defence Association, founded by the late Mr. Butt, of which he (Mr. Marum) was a member, became amalgamated with the Land League, on the understanding that the programme should be fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale, in addition to peasant proprietary. He mentioned that to show that the programme of the League was not "no rent." Some time after this amalgamation, he himself presided over a land meeting, and handed a resolution in favour of the "three F's" to Mr. Parnell, who supported it. There were present 10 Members of the Irish Party, including the hon. Member for Sligo (Mr. Sexton). It was maligning the Land League to say that one of its principles had not been the payment of a fair rent. No doubt, upon the incarceration of certain gentlemen who found themselves aggrieved a "no rent" manifesto was issued; but what he desired to enforce was that fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale entered into the programme of the Land League. He did not think the Government recognized the exact position of the tenantry of Ireland. The position
  548
  of the country was far more serious than they seemed to think, but the landlords, he believed, had some knowledge of it. The numerous sales of tenancies throughout the country illustrated the tenants' deplorable condition, and what feature of it was more alarming than the large extent of the arrears? For his own part, he thought, and, in fact, had written a letter suggesting, that bankruptcy powers should have been conferred on the Commissioners, so that by striking a dividend in the case of arrears they might have freed the tenants from the shopkeepers, the money-lenders, and others to whom at present they were hopelessly indebted. There might, of course, be some tenants who could but would not pay their obligations, but the great majority were really unable to do so.
  MR. BLENNERHASSETTsaid, he regretted that, in the interesting speech of his hon. Friend who preceded him (Mr. Marum), he had not heard a more generous acknowledgment of the great measure which had fulfilled the hopes his hon. Friend and himself and others had been so long contending for in the great cause of land reform. He might also be permitted to express some regret that, although his hon. Friend stated that a fair rent was part of the programme of the Land League, he did not express more fully the great change that had taken place in the programme of that association, and the effect brought about by the publication of the "no rent" manifesto. He earnestly urged upon the attention of Government the point his hon. Friend put before them with regard to arrears. He believed the question of arrears was one of very great importance; and although, no doubt, there were a great many instances in which rents were not paid, owing to political influence and the operation of the advice of the Leaders of public opinion in Ireland at the pre-sent time, there were also many cases in which arrears had accumulated in bad years which the tenants were really unable to discharge; and he thought that hon. Members representing all shades of opinion in the House would welcome with great satisfaction any scheme that would relieve those tenants from their liabilities, and allow this question of arrears to be set at rest. He must say, speaking as an Irishman

  549
  representing an Irish constituency, that these Party questions, which formed the principal feature in the present debate, were insignificant compared with the position in which their country was placed at present. He rose for the purpose of performing a plain duty—that was to say, frankly, and clearly, and plainly, and honestly, what he thought were the circumstances in which their country was placed. In any remarks he might make, he deprecated any intention of giving pain or acting discourteously towards his fellow-countrymen opposite, and asked them to believe that he could not say anything which would pain them that would not also pain himself. The great and real question before them was whether they should or should not support the Amendment of the hon. Member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy). He (Mr. Blennerhassett) ventured to say that in the form which he had placed it upon the Paper, the hon. Member had brought a series of charges against Her Majesty's Ministry, some of whom had been associated with great political services to Ireland. [Laughter.] The hon. Member for Cavan (Mr. Biggar) might laugh; but posterity would be in no doubt as to its verdict on this point. Some of the charges contained in the Amendment were so grave that, if true, the right hon. Gentlemen the Ministers of the Crown would be not merely not fit to sit in that House, but scarcely fit to live in this world at all. There had been one part of the speech of the hon. Member for Longford—a Gentleman of whom he desired to speak as one of whom all Irishmen ought to be proud, and who had won for himself a great position in literature—than which there could, he (Mr. Blennerhassett) believed, be no stronger proof of the demoralization which had affected the author of The History of Our Own Times. His name and reputation had suffered greatly by the charge he had brought against the Prime Minister—that the right hon. Gentleman had taken the grave step of imprisoning three Members of Parliament, not from any sense of public duty, but rather from a feeling of personal malice. The late Mr. Isaac Butt, for whom he (Mr. Blennerhassett) had the greatest admiration, had spoken of the Prime Minister, and had said that he had written his name with a pencil of
  550
  light on the page of Irish history. However, passing from these personal matters, the question was—Was it or was it not their duty to support the Amendment of the hon. Member for Longford, an Amendment which that hon. Gentleman had taken great pains to render as objectionable and offensive as possible? The broad question was—Did the Government deserve censure, or did they not, for the course they had pursued in applying coercive legislation to Ireland? If they deserved censure, he should not have envied the feeling of any Irishman who did not record his opinion to that effect. He was unable, however, to give such an opinion, for he believed if those coercive measures had not been passed and carried into effect, a greater and more enduring calamity would have happened to the people of Ireland. He believed that without that exceptional legislation it would have been impossible to deal with the system of "Boycotting." He believed that without exceptional measures it would have been impossible to have had a fair trial of that remedial measure upon which to a large extent the future prosperity and happiness of the people of Ireland depended. Another question had been raised in the House—namely, whether the Government had deserved censure for not having used their exceptional powers earlier and more severely? It was easy to be wise after the event; but there was one thing which, for his part, he would ever joyfully record, and that was the hesitation the Government exhibited in making application for these powers, and the forbearance which they had shown after they had got them. His right hon. Friend the Lord Mayor of Dublin (Mr. Dawson) had read them the other evening a great theological lecture with regard to the "no rent" manifesto, and had given them a good deal of information as to the views of the fathers of the Church. Well, the House had received the lecture with some amusement; but it seemed to him (Mr. Blennerhassett) to be anything but amusing to find a Gentleman holding such a high position attempting to justify the anti-rent manifesto in that House. He thought it was due to the reputation of his country, as the right hon. Gentleman had given vent to that theological opinion about the anti-rent manifesto, to

  551
  remind him that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin had not been slow to express his opinion upon the subject, condemning the document in the strongest terms. The hon. Member for New Ross (Mr. Redmond) had attempted more seriously to defend the "no rent" manifesto, and described it as a policy of suspension of payment until the Government came back to constitutional action. But the unconstitutional action of which the hon. Member complained was not under the control of the Irish landlords. The hon. Member had also said a great deal about ladies and about chivalrous conduct. He (Mr. Blennerhassett) wanted to ask him where was the chivalry of reducing to the brink of starvation, through want of their incomes in consequence of the non-payment of their rent, perfectly harmless Irish ladies who had nothing to do with that for which the hon. Gentleman desired to adopt a policy of retaliation? Was the hon. Member prepared to support the policy of the Communists, who retaliated by putting the Archbishop of Paris to death? He thought it was quite time they should have an end to all the foolish and absurd talk about the landlords of Ireland. He had never been an advocate for maintaining the undue privileges of landlords. He was one of those Irish Members referred to who, year after year, brought forward and advocated measures which the Irish landlords had been opposed to, but which had since been accepted. In Ireland they had a class placed, by a variety of circumstances, in a position which it was bad for the country that they should occupy, and changes had been necessary which would bring considerable suffering upon that class. But the landlords of Ireland were not worse than any other class. They were not worse than the tenants; and he should like to know how many tenants would refuse to be landlords if they could. But the more serious part of the speech of the hon. Member for New Ross was that in which he expressed a hope that the people would abide by the advice of their Leaders and pay no rent. Had the hon. Member considered the consequence of his advice to the poor peasants who might be influenced by his counsels? They had heard from the Prime Minister, in the course of the debate, what the opinion of the Duke of Wel-
  552
  lington was of a complete and absolute strike against rents in Ireland. No one who knew Ireland could have any apprehension of a complete and absolute strike against rents, but a partial strike was possible. The hon. Member had spoken of names muttered with a curse. He should be sorry to think that the hon. Member's name should be so muttered, because he believed that the hon. Member really loved his country. But in time to come it might happen that those who had given the Irish farmers advice which might cause them to be driven from their homes might have their names muttered with a curse. The policy of the Leaders of the agitation was marked by two leading characteristics—insincerity and a low tone of public morality. It was marked by insincerity because their real were different from their ostensible objects, and by a low tone of morality because in their pursuit of their ends they had adopted methods which would make the Irish people incapable of enjoying freedom and not worthy of it. That that was so was evidenced by the speech of Mr. Parnell at Dungarvan, in which he stated that his opposition to the "no rent" doctrine was grounded on the fact that it would alienate the priests from them, and create disunion in the ranks, and not because it was dishonest or unprincipled in itself. By that policy the capital which might develop the resources of the country had been frightened away. His hon. Friend who moved the first Amendment to the Address (Mr. P. J. Smyth) had spoken a very memorable but painful sentence, coming from one of his experience, when he said that the public life of Ireland was lower to-day than it had ever been before in his recollection. Lately a project had been started for the holding of an exhibition to develop the industries of Ireland, and that project had been defeated by the same policy. [Cries of "No, no!" and "It is going on!"] He should heartily rejoice at the success of any project for its revival; but he should say that the project for the holding of an exhibition as it now stood occupied a very different position from that which it did before. Another blow, though a small one, was the interference with fox-hunting—a sport which put money into the pockets of farmers, and gave considerable employment to saddlers and others. He

  553
  feared that it would be easier to put down hunting than to revive it. Then, again, to pass to another matter, the House was on the eve of changes which would unquestionably diminish the rights of minorities, and those changes had been brought about, or, at least, the necessity for them had been demonstrated, by the infatuated action of the Representatives of a country whose Representatives would always be a minority. The consequence was that the gulf between England and Ireland had been perceptibly widened, and feelings of the most deplorable animosity had been stirred up. He did not hesitate to say that the policy of obstruction had alienated from Ireland much of the growing sympathy of liberal and enlightened Englishmen with the true grievances of Ireland. It had driven away from the ranks of the National Party in Ireland many tried and trusted Irishmen who had worked for years for Irish objects. [Mr. GRAY: Name?] The hon. Member called upon him to name. It would be easy to give names, and if the hon. Member followed him, he might tell the House whether he thought there were not many Irishmen who loved their country as deeply and truly as he did, who found themselves unable to co-operate with the efforts of the so-called National Party in Ireland. Let no one imagine that the sufferers by this policy were only the men who composed the small and unpopular class of Irish landlords. From such a policy the whole Irish people suffered, and none more severely than those whose livelihood depended on their daily work. The poor were the chief victims of the troubles and the disturbances amid which all had to live. In his address to the Grand Jury at Cork, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald had said—
  "I have not had before me during the present protracted sittings a single case of outrage upon one of the upper class. We have had no case of a gentleman's life being attempted, or one aristocrat being threatened in any way. They have been one and all outrages on the poor and humble, and I have indeed felt for those unfortunate people living in houses on the mountain side and away from all succour. And what was worse than all was that their homes were unsafe, and there was no protection for them. We have had no other serious cases save attacks on the poor."
  Need he point out at what time and under what circumstances had the policy which
  554
  led to these deplorable results been adopted? It had been adopted at a time when a great remedial measure, probably the greatest remedial measure ever passed for Ireland, had just become law, and when it was most essential that a condition of calm and tranquillity should prevail in the country. Still, he believed that, when the passions and agitations of to-day were remembered only as a bad dream, the great Act of last Session would be regarded as the basis of the people's prosperity. Hon. Members opposite were consistent in all things. What was their policy towards the Land Act while it was passing through the House? There was not a single one of them—the Irish Members—who did not attempt to injure and discredit it. [Mr. T. D. SULLIVAN: Who improved it?] They did not, for they dared not vote against it; therefore, instead of doing that, they walked out of the House in a body on a most critical occasion rather than support the Government, and ever since they had done everything possible to defeat and destroy it. As for the operation of the Act, it was his opinion, from what he had himself seen, that the Commissioners spared no pains to come to just decisions. That, at any rate, was his experience of the Commissioners who had visited his part of the country, and every reasonable man in that part of the country would be of opinion that in their decisions substantial justice had been done. Apart from those cases in which rents were to a large extent fictitious, no doubt, considerable reductions had been made; but if no reduction at all were necessary the Land Act would stand self-condemned, and the arguments of land reformers during the past 10 years must have been worthless. He believed the rental of the country had been considerably too high; but he protested against blaming the landlords as they were blamed for that fact. He believed the rental had been forced up inevitably by circumstances which he had pointed out to the House on former occasions. No doubt, great changes like this pressed very severely upon a number of individuals who acted on the reasonable expectations created by past policy. He did not, however, think the demand for compensation urged on their behalf tenable. He did not think it just that the people of this country

  555
  should be asked to pay the enormous compensation which would be necessary to those landlords who had been receiving rents which were above the fair rents of the land. At the same time, he might point out that a large number of persons who used only their legal rights had now been placed in a position of great difficulty, and had in some cases been brought to actual ruin. Many of the smaller landlords, whose estates were so heavily encumbered that they had only a small margin left to live upon, would be ruined by reductions of 28 or 30 per cent in their rents; and he confessed that, while he thought there was no tenable claim for Parliamentary compensation, he must express a hope that if the Government could see their way they would adopt some reasonable means of affording relief to those who were placed in such an exceptional position. He did not despair of the future of Ireland. He thought there was a strong feeling amongst the majority of the Irish people that anarchy and disorder must cease. This feeling was not confined to the poor people living in towns whose industry had been ruined by the disturbance of the country, but it was growing among the solvent farmers and the struggling tradesmen; and he had great reliance in these difficulties upon what he had never doubted—namely, the kindly warm feelings which, at bottom, were in the hearts of the Irish people. He (Mr. Blennerhasset) did not prophesy immediate prosperity; many years must pass away before the effects of the present ordeal could entirely disappear; and in the meantime Her Majesty's Government must be looked to for just laws and a firm Executive. There were reforms that were needed; but, to a great extent, the law had been made just, and it must be obeyed. Those reforms would in due time come; but for the real and permanent improvement in the state of Ireland, Irishmen must remember they had to look mainly to themselves. Each of them might contribute to this result by doing his work in life steadfastly and fearlessly, by avoiding all foolish exaggeration and frothy excitement, and exhibiting that moral courage, an essential element of that true patriotism which refused to sacrifice for temporary popularity the true and permanent interests of the country.
  MR. BARRYsaid, he did not intend to follow his hon. Friend through the series of charges which he had made against the popular Irish Party. The Party, no doubt, would survive his attack. But he must strongly contradict the assertion of his hon. Friend, that when the Land Bill was going through the House a kind of obstruction was offered to it by the Irish Party. He protested against that statement, because he remembered most distinctly that on two occasions when the Land Bill was in considerable jeopardy it was absolutely saved by the votes of the advanced Irish Party. Totally apart from the consideration of the striking omission from the Queen's Speech of the mention of any measure for Ireland, he held it to be the duty of the Irish Party to challenge and condemn the criminal policy of Her Majesty's Government in Ireland, and to show that the sanction of the House to the vicious policy was obtained upon representations which were untrue, and upon professions which were false and flagrant. He was fully aware that such was the docility of the Liberal Party that any measure introduced by Her Majesty's Government, even if it were for the destruction of the Irish race, would have had their unqualified support. In the Recess the statement had often been made by Liberal Members that they were bitterly opposed to coercion, that only their faith in the Government permitted them to accept it, and that the only justification for the policy would be its success. But the statistics laid upon the Table of the House last week would prove to Her Majesty's Government that the condition of Ireland was very much worse at present than at the passing of the Act. This showed the truth of the assertion he and others had made over and over again that when the Constitution would be suspended, and the Leaders of the people put into prison, the only restraining influences upon those people would have been removed, and that the result would be a terrible increase in crime. The statistics he had referred to proved that they were right. When the Chief Secretary introduced the Coercion Bill, he described the popular cause as supported by a few noisy, unscrupulous agitators, backed up by the worst elements of society. He described the Land League as an association for terrorizing and in-

  557
  timidating the people. He told them that the great mass of the Irish people would hail with joy any means that would emancipate them from the terrible thraldom of the Land League. It would be fairer to the right hon. Gentleman that, in making a charge against him, he should quote his precise words. Speaking in the House on the 24th January, the right hon. Gentleman said—
  "The men who plan and perpetrate the outrages I have referred to are men without whose help the speeches of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon), or the hon. Member for Cavan (Mr. Biggar) would be harmless exhortations and vapouring. It is these men who have struck terror into the minds of the people in the districts in which their operations have been carried on. And what must we do? We must strike terror into them, and outrages will then be stopped, persons and property will be protected, and liberty secured. We must arrest these criminals. We do not arrest them now, because we cannot do so. They have made themselves safe by the enormity of their crimes and the power which those crimes have enabled them to acquire. Because of the intimidation which they have spread throughout the neighbourhood around them, they commit crimes with impunity, and they know they would be foolish to fear the law, when no man dare give evidence against them. It is not that the police do not know who those village tyrants are. The police know perfectly well who plan and perpetrate these outrages, and the perpetrators are perfectly aware of the fact that they are known. These may be divided into three categories. There are first, those who remain of the old Ribbon and secret societies of former days; and in the second place, there are a large number of persons who have taken advantage of the present condition of the country, not so much as caring about the Land Question, but as hoping that trouble will come of it, and in order to promote their own particular views in regard to the government of Ireland; and in the third place, there are a large number of men who are the mauvais sujets of their neighbourhood."—[3 Hansard, cclvii. 1226.]
  The Chief Secretary indicated very clearly in that statement the class of people who were responsibe for the outrages in Ireland. It was upon the grounds that he had thus so clearly set forth that the House passed the Coercion Bill into law. Then the country looked out for the arrest of the criminals so clearly described. But weeks passed over, and yet the dissolute ruffians and the village tyrants, who were "so well known to the police," must have been at large, for not a single arrest was made. At length, by the murmurs of the Opposition Press, and the expressions of surprise in the
  558
  Liberal Press, the Government were driven to do something, and an onslaught was made, not upon the worst members of society, but upon some of the most respectable men in Ireland—upon Town Commissioners, Poor Law Guardians—men standing high in the estimation of their fellow-countrymen. He contended that the Government went beyond the intention of the Coercion Act, when they proceeded to arrest men belonging to the most respectable classes in Ireland. It soon became clear that the Government had blundered frightfully. Something like 200 men were soon in prison. When the Bill was before the House, the Prime Minister and other Members of the Cabinet declared that the Government had no intention of using the Coercion Act against the Land League. He (Mr. Barry) frankly confessed that he had never believed in the professions of Her Majesty's Government. That Government was composed of landlords and recreant Radicals, whose real intention was to suppress the popular organization. In bringing in their Land Bill they really meant to strike down the organization of the tenants, and what had happened since proved that his view of the matter was substantially correct. Up to that period the doctrine disseminated by the Land League was the doctrine of "fair rents," which were defined as Griffith's valuation. ["No, no!"] The hon. Member for Galway County, he observed, dissented.
  MR. MITCHELL HENRYsaid, the principle of the Land League speakers was to "pay what you please to the landlord after you have paid your own debts and done everything else you want to do for yourself."
  MR. BARRYdistinctly denied the statement. He had a clear recollection of attending several meetings at the time, when the popular cry was "Griffith's valuation." He challenged the hon. Member for Galway County to bring forward a proof of his statement. Popular ballads were written about Griffith's valuation. You could not go to a public meeting in Ireland without seeing inscribed on banners, "Pair rents!" "Griffith's valuation!" He had seen men coming to the meetings with bands round their hats bearing "Griffith's valuation;" and he often found it a very great annoyance to be interrupted in the middle of his speeches

  559
  with shouts for "Griffith's valuation." It was a matter so plain and palpable that he was surprised that the hon. Member should have fallen into such an error. There seemed to be a singular irony in the fact that this doctrine and principle preached by the Land League, and described by the Prime Minister as a principle of public plunder, had in nearly every case yet decided been confirmed and endorsed by the judicial tribunals which were called into existence by the right hon. Gentleman's Land Act. They had made their awards upon Griffith's valuation, and in some other cases they had gone very considerably beyond it. He remembered only two important declarations which went beyond Griffith's valuation. The first was made by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who, speaking on the second reading of the Land Bill, stated that nine-tenths of the improvements on the land in Ireland were the improvements of the tenants; and a little later on, in the same speech, the right hon. Gentleman said—"If you remove the improvements of the tenants there will be nothing left but the prairie value," an expression which had since become historical. The principle asserted in that declaration was embodied in Healy's Clause, which distinctly laid down that, in fixing the fair rent of a farm, no notice should be taken of the tenant's improvements. The second declaration was made by his hon. Friend the Member for Cork City, at a meeting in his own constituency, after the close of last Session. There his hon. Friend made use of that phrase "prairie value," which had entailed upon him such serious consequences, although he was only quoting an expression used by the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Two gentlemen, who had since been imprisoned in Kilmainham, said something on one occasion about "no rent" at a meeting in Ireland. When, however, the reports of their speeches reached London his hon. Friend the Member for the City of Cork wrote to each of the gentlemen in question, censuring, in the strongest terms, the cry they were raising for "no rent." The Premier, in his speech at Leeds, assumed that the test cases then in course of preparation were so many shams and mockeries. The fact was, that four estates were chosen by the
  560
  Land League from which to select test cases. They were Mr. Bence Jones's estate, the Gaiter estates in Tipperary, and the estates of the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Kenmare. Mr. Bence Jones's estate was, according to his own admission, highly rented, and the Gaiter estates were also notorious for rack-renting. But the other two were equally well known as fairly and moderately rented—neither too high nor too low. The Prime Minister's statement, therefore, at Leeds that the test cases of the Land League were mere shams and delusions, as taken exclusively from the most excessively rack-rented properties, was altogether misleading. It was not the case, as the Prime Minister had said, that the Land League had attempted their utmost to defeat and destroy the Act; on the contrary, they honestly and sincerely tried to give it a fair trial, and to test its effect in a scientific manner. It was no wonder the Prime Minister created a great sensation by his statements, and his statements made it very difficult for an Irish Member to speak calmly on the subject, inasmuch as they all had intimate friends or relatives who had been imprisoned by the Government without any charge brought against them and without evidence, and as all the ordinary rights and comforts of life had been taken away, meetings suppressed, letters opened, and an incessant police supervision exercised. He did not blame the police, who wore only acting within the lines laid down by the Government. He had observed that no restraint was imposed upon public speakers so long as they confined their attacks to the landlords; but as soon as a word was said against the Government, or in particular against the Prime Minister, the police intervened. His hon. Friend the Member for Carlow was thus openly permitted to hold a meeting on giving an undertaking to the police not to speak against Mr. Gladstone or the Executive Government. The whole of the country, or at least three provinces of it, were absolutely at the will and disposal of the right hon. Gentleman. The fact was, that from the first the Government had committed the fatal error of mistaking a universal rising of the people for the agitation of a small number of demagogues. That mistake had destroyed their popularity and prestige as a Liberal Government, and was

  561
  imperilling and would shortly bring to an end their own existence as a Government. In conclusion, he asserted that such blundering incapacity as to confound and mistake a great and almost unparalleled national feeling for a passing burst of petty faction would have procured in any other country the instant dismissal of the Government with every mark of opprobrium.
  MR. T. A. DICKSONsaid, he had listened during this debate with painful attention to the attacks upon the Land Act and its administration by the occupants of the Opposition Benches. It seemed to him that the course adopted by the Conservative Party after the Land Act of 1870 was passed was to be again repeated in connection with the Act of 1881. From this it was to him very clear that during the past 10 years the Conservative Party had learned very little, and did not yet comprehend the magnitude of the crisis through which Ireland was passing. What was the sum and substance of the speeches to which they had listened during the past three or four days in this debate? It was simply that hon. Gentlemen opposite believed that coercion was the greatest blessing that Ireland could have, and that the administration of the Land Act was a curse, and the only remedy they proposed to bring about peace in Ireland was a more severe administration of coercive measures, and no administration of the Land Act. The views held by Conservatives in the House, however, with respect to the value of that Act, were not always shared by Conservatives outside, for such men as Colonel Knox, formerly a Member, and the Marquess of Hamilton, during the Tyrone Election, had borne testimony in its favour. Hon. Members opposite said that they accepted the Land Act. No doubt, they did accept it in the abstract, but did not want its administration, and would be quite satisfied if the Government would give the Assistant Commissioners instructions not to reduce the rents, and tell the tenant farmers of Ireland to be satisfied with their position. The Land Act had been passed to remedy great and crying evils, not only the rack-renting which confiscated the tenant's improvements, but to fix fair rents; and if it failed in reducing rents, the Land Act of 1881 would be as far off settling
  562
  the Irish Land Question as the Act of 1870. He had no hesitation in saying that the blame for the condition of Ireland rested not on the present Government, but with the late Administration. He had had the honour of a seat in the House from 1874 to 1880, and during that time the most moderate demands made in connection with Ulster Tenant-right, or Tenant-right for Ireland, had been rejected with contempt. He could say that the Conservatives during those years had done nothing in connection with Land Reform. No doubt but on March 3rd the Conservatives passed the second reading of the Ulster Tenant-right Bill; but on Wednesday, March 8th, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer gave Notice of a Dissolution. If the moderate demands made by the late Mr. Butt, and by the North of Ireland Members, had been conceded in time, the great crisis which was now happily passing away would never have arrived, or would, at least, have been in a mitigated form. With reference to the attacks on the Sub-Commissioners, it was not his place to defend them, nor was it necessary to do so, unless specific charges were made against them. He had spent more time in sitting in the Land Court in Ulster than any other Member in the House, and had gone from town to town with the Court in order to gain experience. He could tell the House that he had never heard evidence given by any landlord or any valuator which attempted for one moment to justify the present rents, and in many cases after the landlord had sent his valuator over the land the landlord had declined to be his own witness to say what a fair rent was. As a consequence, the Land Court had been left without evidence as to what a fair rent was beyond the tenant's testimony and their own judgment. If the Commissioners had attempted to give full effect to what was known as Healy's Clause, the rents of Ireland would be fixed on a far different scale. The right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) had said that even the old rents had not been respected. He (Mr. Dickson) would give them a case as regarded the old rents on, which tenants had asked for a fair rent to be fixed. Their witnesses gave evidence to show that the tenants who had

  563
  served notice for a fair rent in their own neighbourhood were paying 50 per cent more than they themselves were paying, and yet that old rent had been fixed 40 years ago. He would ask, as regarded the question of compensation, who was to be compensated? Assuredly it was the landlord who charged only a fair and moderate rent, and not the rack-renter, now losing the rent imposed in many cases to meet interest on mortgages and family arrangements. The main defects of the Land Act were, in his opinion—first, the provision dealing with arrears of rent was totally insufficient; and, secondly, the faults of administration. He believed there could be no real settlement of the Irish Land Question until those arrears had been fully dealt with. The number of Sub-Commissioners ought to be doubled, and Griffith's Valuation should be adopted as a temporary basis until a judicial rent was fixed. He was unable to vote for the Amendment of the hon. Member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy); but, at the same time, that would not prevent him from speaking against the policy of coercion, which he looked upon as the worst possible remedy for Ireland. If coercion had been a remedy for that country she would long since have been cured. He regretted that the "suspects" were not liberated on the very day on which the Land Bill received the Royal Assent. There were then but 134 more or less obscure men in custody. Their liberation would have been followed by the best results, and the National Convention of the Land League, when it met, would have been deprived of its chief grievance. He believed that the application of Coercion Acts were disastrous to the permanent peace of his country. When the Protection of Person and Property Act expired next September, about 1,500 prisoners would have passed through the portals of Irish prisons. He wished the House to understand in this connection that arrest under the Coercion Act was no disgrace in Ireland, but, on the contrary, was in many districts regarded as an honour. When those 1,500 prisoners had returned to their homes what would be the gain? There was not one of them who would not become the centre of a new agitation, so that coercion would simply ripen the country for a further and speedier suspension of con-
  564
  stitutional government. He had been often told that coercion suppressed crime. That might be true, but crime was also the offspring of coercion. The Prime Minister alluded with satisfaction to the vindication of the law in County Cork, where the greatest blow was struck against crime and disorder, in the arrest and conviction of Connell and his gang; but that was accomplished by a firm and bold administration of the Common Law, and not by the application of the Coercion Act. He believed and maintained that a firm application of the Common Law would in the long run cope successfully with any difficulty in Ireland. There was not a single person arrested under the Coercion Act in the county he represented, and he was proud to say that the people of that county had not stained their hands by agrarian crime. He yielded to no Member on that side of the House in his attachment to Liberal principles and to the Liberal Party, and his sole object in denouncing coercion was to impress on the Government the radical necessity that existed for a complete alteration in the administration of affairs in Ireland. There was a wide gap between Dublin Castle and the demands of the hon. Member for Tipperary; but between these two extremes lay, in his opinion, the solution of the Irish Question. In conclusion, he could only hope that the fertile brain of the Prime Minister would devise some plan which would strike at the root of the evil in Ireland, and deliver her from the humility of repressive measures which so disgraced English Government in the 19th century.
  LORD GEORGE HAMILTONsaid, he wished to point out a constitutional innovation in the Speech from the Throne. Anyone who had taken the trouble of reading the four paragraphs relating to Ireland could only arrive at the conclusion that for the first time in the history of the House of Commons, the House itself was made responsible for administrative and executive duties. The paragraphs stated the condition of Ireland at the time, and went on to say that the country showed signs of improvement, and encouraged the hope "that the course you had pursued would be rewarded with the happy results so much to be desired." This was a most serious innovation. What did the

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  House understand by "you?" He presumed that no one desired to make himself responsible for the present condition of Ireland, but the Speech clearly made hon. Gentlemen responsible for the discharge of the executive functions of the Government in that country. If, on the contrary, the paragraph applied to legislative functions, then the only meaning was that the Government were about to again ask the House to revise the Land Laws and pass a new Coercion Act, which was the course pursued by the House last year with reference to Ireland. The President of the Board of Trade had expressed a doubt as to what was meant by the criticisms of the Opposition in connection with the delay which took place before the suppression of the Land League was begun. The right hon. Gentleman had said that the Opposition had no right to criticize them unless they could put their finger upon the exact time at which, in their opinion, certain things ought to have been done or others ought to have been refrained from. The right hon. Gentleman had also spoken at great length of a speech delivered by him at Liverpool. He had not, however, told the House what he actually said on the occasion, but contented himself with explaining what he did not say and what he did not mean to say. Now, he had the right hon. Gentleman's speech in his pocket, and he proposed to repeat what the right hon. Gentleman did really say at the time that speech was made. The President of the Board of Trade, like many other people, believed that the blows the Government had struck at the Land League had crushed it, and therefore that he might safely inform his hearers what were the motives of the inaction of the Government during the 18 preceding months. The statements of the right hon. Gentleman, as a responsible Minister, appeared to him so incredible that he read his speech in several newspapers to see if the reports coincided. They did, and there could be no doubt whatever about the right hon. Gentleman's language. The issue which the right hon. Gentleman placed before that extremely Radical body known as the Birmingham Caucus was contained in the following words:—
  "In the judgment that you are called upon to give time is an essential element. I have to show you that we have acted neither too soon
  566
  nor too late. If we have delayed too long we have committed an error which may be fatal. If we have acted too soon we have committed what I don't hesitate to say is a political crime. I think you will see that I have endeavoured to put before you a plain issue, and that I do not shirk the responsibility which rests upon every Member of the Government, and upon everyone who supports them."
  He (Lord George Hamilton) was ready to admit that the most practised speaker might, even in a speech which he had prepared, incorrectly express himself, or say something which, on reflection, he would be ready to explain away; but when a man made a long speech, and through that speech from beginning to end one idea predominated, when that idea was expressed positively as well as negatively, categorically as well as hypothetically, the man who made such a speech could no more deny that paramount idea than he could his own identity—there could hardly be a mistake. The tenour of the right hon. Gentleman's speech from beginning to end was this—that the Government deliberately restrained their hands from suppressing the Land League, because the agitation carried on by that organization assisted the Government in passing the Land Bill. At the same Birmingham meeting, the President of the Board of Trade alluded to the Land Laws as "a long-standing grievance." The long-standing grievance was the Land Act of 1870; and, therefore, that which prevented the Government from restoring law and order was the Land Act of 1870, although that measure was considered by the Prime Minister at the time to be final. That was certainly an awkward precedent, for there was no reason why similar tactics might not be arrived at for the overthrow of the Act of 1881. The President of the Board of Trade went on to say that if the Land League had adhered to its original objects there would have been no agitation in the United Kingdom more deserving of sympathy. Those objects, said the President of the Board of Trade, were legal and even praiseworthy.
  MR. CHAMBERLAINrose to draw the noble Lord's attention to the conclusion—an important part of the speech—where, after a statement of facts, he said that under those circumstances they—the tenants—would be driven to seek redress by acts of secret violence.
  LORD GEORGE HAMILTONadmitted there might be outrages in such

  567
  a case. In the same speech the right hon. Gentleman proceeded to say that, of course it was no secret that in the minds of the Leaders of the agitation there were other objects of a totally different character, but so long as they pursued their avowed objects they were perfectly in the right. The secret object, however, he said, was to inflame the grievance, not to remove it, and to use it as a basis for securing national independence. Now, that was the organization which the Government had declined to stifle, because they feared they would have Parliamentary difficulty in passing the Land Bill. That the Land League was used by the Government as a lever for passing the Land Bill was the only interpretation which could be put upon the speech of the President of the Board of Trade at Liverpool. What did other Members of the Government say? The Home Secretary described the Land League in language so strong that he (Lord George Hamilton) hardly liked to read it. The Prime Minister described it as an organization whose steps were dogged with crime, and the Government persecuted it in November, 1880, as a criminal conspiracy. The Home Secretary, speaking of the Land League, said—
  "It is my firm conviction that the Land League is conducted in such a manner that it is only carrying on Fenianism in another form."
  That speech was made just five weeks before the address of the President of the Board of Trade was delivered. He was not going to say who was right—the Home Secretary in describing the Land League as Fenianism, whose object was disintegration, or the President of the Board of Trade in describing the objects of the Land League as legal and praiseworthy; but he wished to call the attention of the House to this, that the President of the Board of Trade never opened his mouth on either the Coercion Bill or the Land Bill, but allowed his Colleagues one after another in that House to attribute criminal motives to the Land League, although he now told the country that the reason why the Government did not exercise their power to stop such an organization was that without the aid of the Land League they could not pass the Land Bill. That was so grave a statement that he hoped an explanation would be given. If the Land League had been utilized in the
  568
  way the right hon. Gentleman said it had, then the Government were guilty of an act of treachery in imprisoning the Land Leaguers after they had served their purpose. If the Land League was a criminal organization, then it was the duty of the Government, without delay, to have imprisoned its members, If, on the other hand, the Land League was not a criminal organization, why did the right hon. Gentleman get up and ask for additional powers in Ireland? The delay, with its frightful consequences, was the result of a deliberate policy of the Government. Many hon. Gentlemen had spoken in the House with personal knowledge of different parts of Ireland. He could speak of a county of which he had personal knowledge. Sixteen months ago, or a little more, when the Bill for Compensation for Disturbance was under consideration in the House, the Prime Minister admitted that in certain parts of Ireland they were within a measurable distance of civil war. But there was one county in Ireland to which constant and favourable reference was made by different Members of Her Majesty's Government, and that was County Donegal. Donegal, in area, in population, in race, in the poverty of its inhabitants, and in the privations through which they had really passed, was similar to Mayo. Outrage was rife in Mayo, and a general state of disturbance existed there. County Donegal was quiet from one end to the other. What said the Chief Secretary, the present Lord Chancellor, and the Prime Minister? They said that Donegal had tenant-right, and that there was no tenant-right in Mayo, and that if tenant-right were given to Mayo it would be as quiet as Donegal. They had passed a Bill last Session conferring tenant-right in Mayo similar to that in Donegal, and they had passed a Bill with enormous coercive powers for the suppression of outrage. Mayo and Donegal were now, therefore, in a similar position; but it was Donegal which had descended to the level of Mayo, and not Mayo which had risen to the height of Donegal. His reason for saying that was this. During last summer the Land League, finding that the Government was not prepared to make use of the powers intrusted to them, sent able emissaries throughout the country, and Land League branches were founded in

  569
  every village in the West and South. The Chief Secretary knew that there was now no county where the payment of rent was more resisted than in Donegal. The reason was that the Government would not stifle agitation because they wanted to pass the Land Bill. A county which before was noted for its quietude was now, by the remissness of the Government, ruled by the unwritten law of the Land League. They had heard a great many complaints with reference to the landlords. How were the Donegal landlords treated? Many of them were poor men who could not make the reduction in rents which they were asked, and if they had made the reduction when they were asked by the Land League they would justly have been open to the accusation of making improper concessions to agitation. Many of those men risked their lives in the endeavour to do their duty. In response to the appeal made by the Prime Minister, in October, at Leeds, they met together under the presidency of the Duke of Abercorn, and a deplorable account was given of the condition of Donegal. It was true that in certain parts there was not much outrage, but in many districts there was not a farmer who could hire a labourer to perform any of the ordinary avocations of life except with the sanction of the Land League. If anyone were courageous enough to resist this organization, by a judiciously planned outrage submission through terror was enforced. The magistrates met and passed a number of resolutions, to the effect that it was absolutely essential that means should be taken to suppress the circulation of seditious newspapers. The Chief Secretary acting, as he was bound to say, he always did, with the greatest courtesy, acknowledged the receipt of the resolutions. He did not wish to say anything to add to the difficulties of his administration, for the duties of a Chief Secretary were by no means pleasant ones. If some Member of the Irish Party were to hold that Office for a few months he would soon find that his Colleagues were not easy to deal with. The Chief Secretary performed very painful duties at a very critical period. Although it was their duty on that side of the House to criticize the conduct of the right hon. Gentleman, yet his belief was
  570
  that if he had been allowed his own way from the first Ireland would now be in a different position from what it was. All throughout this crisis, not only the Chief Secretary, but all the members of his family, showed to the threats and intimidations showered upon them a courageous indifference. The Chief Secretary acknowledged these resolutions, but a different spirit was displayed towards them by the English Government. The Attorney General for England rushed down to Bristol, and at once described this meeting of magistrates as a meeting of Tory magnates. He expressed his sense of the absurdity of the suggestions they made—
  "Those ignorant people with a man who had twice been Lord Lieutenant had actually suggested that the Government should suppres the circulation of newspapers! Did not the Duke of Abercorn know that they had no power to stop the circulation of newspapers?"
  Since that period newspapers had been suppressed; and, no doubt, the hon. and learned Gentleman would be able to show that a suggestion emanating from Tory magnates was both illegal and absurd, but that when that suggestion became the act of a Government of which he was a Member it was at once legal and necessary. It was not only in the matter of outrage and disorder that harm had been wrought, but in many other ways. In the first place, the farmers were forced into an organization which, if properly protected, they would not have joined. Secondly, an enormous number of Roman Catholic priests had been forced to join this organization. An instance occurred at the last Cork Assizes of the effect of the Government neglecting to make use of their powers. A Roman Catholic priest, Father Stewart, came forward as a witness in a certain case. He said that he had been a member of the Land League, but the moment the Government proclaimed its illegality he left the organization, and subsequently denounced it from the altar. He displayed great courage, and he believed he had been threatened. But there were many other Roman Catholic priests who had not the courage of Father Stewart. They had been forced into the organization, and, in his opinion, one of the greatest disadvantages from the delay of the Government had been that so many members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and clergy had been

  571
  forced to join the Land League, and had not had the courage afterwards to leave it. It was well known what great powers on behalf of law and order that Church wielded throughout Ireland, and the Government, by their inaction, lost control over this powerful instrument for the restoration of law and order. But there was something even more serious behind. For his part he had never been able to understand how 12 or 13 able men, such as those composing the present Cabinet, could have had the inconceivable folly to allow this organization to spread and root itself throughout the country. "Was it not obvious that the Land League would equally agitate against the Land Act of 1881 unless it was entirely in accordance with their ideas? But their ideas were denounced by the Prime Minister as schemes of public plunder. One result of allowing the organization to spread must have been evident—namely, that it would be as much directed against the Land Act of 1881 as against that of 1870. A great deal of credit had been taken by various Members of the Government for the effective operation of the Land Act. The Land Act as now administered was not the Land Act as it was passed by Government. The Prime Minister was very much annoyed at certain observations made by Lord Salisbury, as to the difference between himself and the hon. Member for Cork City. [Mr. GLADSTONE: I beg your pardon; I never said a word about it.] He wished to point out to the Prime Minister that the exact difference between himself and the Land League was about 16 months 13 days. That was all. He would show how that was. When the Land League was agitating in November, 1880, their cry was that rents should be revised by Griffith's valuation. If he were not mistaken, one of the counts of the indictment in the State prosecution was for endeavouring to persuade tenants to pay Griffith's valuation instead of their present rents. The Prime Minister denounced those views as public plunder. He said—"I am bound to say that it passes my ability to distinguish them from schemes of public plunder;" and, speaking at Leeds on the 7th of October, 1881, he said—
  "Mr. Parnell told the people of Ireland they ought not to pay the rents they had covenanted
  572
  to pay, but that, whether able or unable, they were under no obligation to pay their rents; but that they must pay rent according to the scale set down in Griffith's valuation. That was a valuation much below the proper value, and one framed for an entirely different purpose."
  He then denounced the doctrine as public plunder. What he wanted to point out was that the views which, when professed by the Land League, were denounced by the Prime Minister as public plunder, were, when executed by the Commissioners under the Land Act, declared to be just and proper. He would in a very few words show why the Laud Act was not interpreted as they expected it would be. It was a most dangerous experiment, because, for the first time, so far as he knew, in the history of any civilized Legislature, a certain number of unknown persons were appointed to value—quite independent of its market value—the article land. It was quite clear that, in order successfully to carry out this most dangerous experiment, two conditions were essential. The first was, that perfectly impartial men should be appointed to administer the Act; and the second, that the state and condition of the country should be such as to enable a fair administration and interpretation of the Act to take place. When the Land Act first came into operation every Liberal newspaper in England suggested that, through the means of the Land Act, Ireland would be pacified. The papers called upon the Sub-Commissioners to do their duty. The Sub-Commissioners knew that there was only one thing that they could do which would give satisfaction, and that was to reduce rents. Unhesitatingly he would say that the reduction of rent was far greater than it would have been if the country had not been in such a disturbed condition. In this country the Judges publicly admitted that their decisions were influenced by the condition of the wealthy; and when outrage was rife and disturbance was general, they stated that their sentences were influenced and guided by those circumstances. Then these Sub-Commissioners were, many of them, men of strong partizan views. It seemed almost inevitable that, when so many Sub-Commissioners had been appointed, some of their decisions should be open to question; and although, under ordinary circumstances, he should say that Her Majesty's Government

  573
  were not responsible for the action of the Sub-Commissioners, yet, looking at the fact that these decisions were the result of the condition of the country, and that the Government was responsible for that condition, he felt bound to say the Government were to a great extent responsible for those decisions. The Solicitor General for Ireland and the President of the Board of Trade had asserted that the rents in Ireland were higher than they ought to have been; but there was not the slightest evidence of that. The reductions of rent were greater than had been anticipated, and that was owing to the Commissioners having taken a lower view of what constituted a fair rent than was anticipated. They had been told, when the Land Bill was passing through that House, that the only object of the Government was to place tenants in Ireland on as good a footing as they were on in England; but it was perfectly immaterial what kind of landlord came into Court, whether an indulgent landlord or otherwise, a reduction of his rents took place. The Prime Minister pointed out that it was too soon to judge of the Land Act, because, although a few hundred cases had been decided, still there were many thousands to come before the Court; but it was in consequence of the decisions that had already been given, comprising, as they did, every conceivable variety or diversity of case, that tenants were flocking by tens of thousands into the Land Courts. He would give a specimen of the way in which the Act worked. Some people thought it improper that the London Companies should hold land in the North of Ireland; still they were regarded as the most indulgent landlords in Ireland. But, after these decisions of the Sub-Commissioners, the tenants of one of these Companies—the Drapers' Company—held a meeting, at which they arrived at the determination not to accept a less reduction than 6s. 8d. in the pound, and that unless this was granted they would go into the Land Courts and ask the Commissioners to adjust the rents. Then the case of the Irish landlords was this, and it was a very strong case., They had been induced to support Her Majesty's Government on two conditions—first, that the Government would, at all risks and hazards, maintain order in Ireland; and, secondly, that whatever alteration the Government made in the
  574
  Land Laws of Ireland, they would in no way accept a doctrine which they had denounced as a doctrine of public plunder. They now, however, found that both these conditions had been reversed, and that a Land Act had been passed with the assistance of the Land League, and interpreted by the Land Commission in a sense agreeable to that of members of the Land League, and contrary to the interpretation put upon it by Members of the Government. Many reductions of rent had taken place under Healy's Clause. When that clause was under the discussion of the House, the Government put an interpretation upon it, and certain additional words were inserted in the clause, in order that the interpretation adopted by the Government might appear beyond any possibility of doubt; but the Commissioners now adopted or sanctioned a different interpretation, and it was in consequence of that departure that they were slowly drifting into the celebrated "prairie value." The question naturally arose, how all this was to be stopped? Last year, many hon. Gentlemen on the other side of the House expressed their surprise at the ease with which Mr. Parnell instructed the Irish people in the doctrine of public plunder; but he was bound to say the Government had made very rapid progress in this doctrine themselves. Take the President of the Board of Trade. There was not a Member of the Government who had not been ready to make a Parliamentary affidavit to the fact that no reduction of rent would take place, and that there would be no claim by landlords for compensation; but now the Land Act was described as a splendid gift to the tenants. The President of the Board of Trade described with precision the amount of the gift—namely, the rents of the Irish landlords had been reduced by £4,000,000 per annum, which, capitalized at 25 years' purchase, would be represented by a sum of £100,000,000. He, moreover, contended that, on account of the great amount of the reduction which had thus taken place, no compensation ought to be paid. What was that but an application of the doctrine of public plunder? Thus they had the spectacle of the President of the Board of Trade of this country contending that, because the landlords had been mulcted to that enormous extent, it was ridiculous

  575
  to give compensation. It was all very well to accuse the Land League of preaching the doctrine of public plunder; but no doctrine of public plunder could be more distinct than that laid down by the President of the Board of Trade. If the Land Act was, as it had been said to be, a success in the North of Ireland, it was mainly because it was interpreted in a sense contrary to that which the Government had adopted. The interpretation that had been adopted was really Mr. Healy's, and it was to him that the credit of it was due. Then they were told that there were the Central Commissioners, to whom appeals would go up, and then all would be set right. He did not believe, in the present state of things in Ireland, that the Central Commissioners would dare to reverse the decisions of the Sub-Commissioners. They had absolute discretion and power how to interpret the Act, and it was impossible that those gentlemen should be altogether uninfluenced by the state of affairs existing in Ireland, because they must know that after the expectations which the Land League had been encouraged to raise from one end of that country to the other, the disappointment of those expectations would be fraught with dangerous consequences. The Prime Minister had appealed to the Opposition to support him in the critical position of affairs in Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman had addressed them, as he always did, in eloquent and fervid language; but, unfortunately, an incident had occurred which turned the most pathetic part of his speech into a mockery. At the time of the Election in the City of Westminster, a Member of the very Government whose Head appealed to them to suppress their Party differences and to support the Ministry, was using his utmost persuasions to induce Mr. John Morley to stand as a candidate for Westminster. Mr. John Morley was, unquestionably, a very able man; but it was notorious that he was a consistent opponent of the Government on their Irish policy, and it was because he opposed coercion and thought the Land Act did not go far enough that it was thought he would secure the Irish vote if he stood for Westminster. ["No, no!"] Were hon. Gentlemen not aware that when Mr. John Morley declined to become a candidate no other Liberal came forward, because there was no
  576
  other man on that side who could gain the Irish vote? If, then, the Prime Minister wished to get the support of the Opposition in that crisis, he must prevent his agents from putting forward candidates whose opposition to his Irish policy might secure the Irish vote. He was obliged to the House for so kindly according him its attention. He had made strong statements; but no one would deny that he had given authentic evidence in support of them. The Prime Minister had many ardent friends, who naturally admired his great qualities, because, although he had now passed three score years and ten, he was gifted with an energy and a vigour which men of half his years might well envy. The right hon. Gentleman must sometimes ask himself what would be the opinion of posterity on his latest work. History would have to record these two uncontroverted facts. That at a great political crisis in the history of this nation the right hon. Gentleman deliberately made political capital out of the prescience of his great rival, Lord Beaconsfield, who warned the country as to the condition of Ireland. The Liberal Party in consequence obtained many thousands of Irish votes at the Elections. It would further have to be related by the historian that, although having a greater majority behind him than any Prime Minister in this century, the present Government had so managed the affairs of Ireland that within 18 months after its accession to Office the only forces discernible in that country were those of coercion, outrage, and spoliation. It would also have to be recorded that the secret of the failure of the Government was that throughout its career it thought more of the unity of its Party than of the salvation of Ireland. The better instincts of the Prime Minister must suggest to him that he had some nobler function to perform than to be a mere elastic band to hold together the disjointed Members of a disunited Party. Let him give some pledge that he was in earnest, not by words, but by deeds. Let him say that, at all hazards and even, it might be, at the risk of possibly losing from his Cabinet the President of the Board of Trade, he would maintain law and order in Ireland and arrest spoliation. Let him get up and say that the speech which the President of the Board of Trade made at Liverpool was

  577
  one that he utterly disapproved, and that any man who said it was justifiable to use a criminal organization for Parliamentary purposes was not worthy of being an English Minister. Then he believed that the Prime Minister would meet from all loyalists, even from those who were compelled to use the plainest language as to his past policy, such a support as would alone now enable him successfully to stem the torrent of sedition, outrage, and spoliation which for the last 18 months has been sweeping over Ireland.
  MR. SHAW LEFEVREsaid, that the noble Lord and his Predecessors in the debate on his Bench had divided their attacks upon the Government under two main heads. He did not understand the noble Lord to have attacked them for their measures of coercion during the last few months, but rather for not having adopted coercion sooner, and carried out their repressive measures earlier. The noble Lord and his Colleagues had also attacked them for the administration of the Land Act. Now, he would endeavour to deal with the last of those criticisms first. He had not understood the noble Lord to follow the example of many speakers of his Party in assailing the principle of the Land Act. The noble Lord, no doubt, felt the responsibility he would incur if he returned to Office; but he had attacked the administration of the Land Act by the Sub-Commissioners. He had asserted that the Land Act, as administered by the Sub-Commissioners, was not the Land Act of the Government, that the Sub - Commissioners were partizan officials, and that the Land Act had resulted in public plunder. Now, he would venture to ask right hon. Gentlemen opposite whether that was the only lesson which they had learned from all the cases which had come before the Sub - Commissioners; because, if that were so, he thought that they were living in a fool's paradise. There was distinct evidence before the country that it was curing and remedying immense evils, although it was not possible at that moment to give a final opinion on the subject. Looking broadly and substantially at their work, he believed it was established that their proceedings had already disclosed an amount of rack-renting far greater than was expected in that House. For his own part, he looked
  578
  back with some satisfaction to the fact that he was not one of those who minimized the probable effect of the Land Act upon rents. From a careful study of the evidence of the two Royal Commissions, and with some knowledge of parts of Ireland, he had come to the conclusion that the cases of rack-renting and of appropriation of tenants' improvements by raising of rents were numerous. He was held up to reproof for this by a noble Duke in "another place;" and in the single case which he referred to the Duke, having obtained a contradiction from the landowner concerned, came to the conclusion that there was no proof of any such cases. His answer was that until a judicial investigation could be held, before which disputed facts could be tested, it was necessary to trust to general evidence. A judicial investigation had now been held in almost every county of Ireland, and the result was that the number of cases in which rack-renting had prevailed was very remarkable, and that full justification had been proved for the Act of last Session. Two remarkable points had come out of the inquiry—the one was the very large number of cases in which land agents and surveyors appealed to by the landlords had themselves come before the Court and admitted that the rents were too high and ought to be reduced; and the other was that the rack-renting was often not of recent date, imposed by purchasers under the Landed Estates Court, but was of ancient date—of 40 or 50 years' duration—during which the tenants had lived a life of hardship, penury, and suffering. He would give an illustration of these. Fifteen tenants came before one of the Sub - Commissions in Queen's County. Evidence was given by four valuers on behalf of the landlords that, in their opinion, the rents were too high by an average of 25 per cent, varying from 8 per cent to 65 per cent. The rents had been paid, during the recollection of tenants, for 40 or 50 years. The Court reduced the rents 30 per cent, or 5 per cent below the average of the landlords' own valuers. Five cases came before the Sub-Commissioners in Downpatrick. The aggregate rent was £134, and the valuation £95. It was proved that the tenants were in a state of pauperism, and had borrowed at 20 per cent to pay rent. The landlord himself admitted that the

  579
  tenants had been over-rented since 1865. The agent also stated that the rents were too high, and that the tenants could not pay them and obtain a living. The judicial rent was fixed at £95. In Lord Arran's cases it was proved that he had raised the rents 25 per cent whenever there was a change, irrespective of any rights or interest of the tenants. In another case in Downpatrick the valuation of eight tenants was £94, and the rent £154, or 50 per cent above the valuation. Mr. Murphy, a land agent who valued for the Court, said the land had greatly deteriorated, and attributed it to the excessive rents the tenants had been trying to pay. He said the tenants could not pay the existing rents and cultivate their farms, and he went on to say there must have been a wonderful amount of industry exerted for a tenant to live upon such lands at all and pay such rents. In two other cases, the landlord, bearing a name well-known—Lord Claud Hamilton—admitted that the rents should be substantially reduced. They were purchased in 1866 by a sub-agent to the Duke of Abercorn, who raised their rents and re-sold to Lord Claud Hamilton. The Court then reduced the rents to the point they were at in 1861. He could multiply such cases indefinitely. Indeed, every variety of wrong which was commented on by the Bessborough Commission had been proved to the hilt—rent raised on tenant's improvements; rent raised by wholesale, because the landlord wanted money; rent raised under threats of eviction. If it were the fact, as he understood, that the rate of wages had risen considerably in Ireland of late years, it was only right and proper that the small farmers, who were virtually labourers, should share in the rise. That explained why, notwithstanding that there should have been a rise in the price of some of the products of the land, there should have been no corresponding rise in rent, or even a diminution. He thought the Commissioners had, therefore, acted justly in making a general reduction of rents in the case of small holdings. In the South and West of Ireland, as was shown by the Richmond Commission, rents were mainly assessed upon such a high level that no margin whatever was left for bad seasons; and that he held to be a wrong principle altogether, to which the action of the Commissioners had only
  580
  added a very necessary corrective. Looking broadly at the proceedings of the Sub-Commissioners, he ventured to say that those gentlemen had brought out a state of things which that House generally was not aware of, and that not only had they not done injustice, but that they had rectified injustice. The knowledge of these facts enabled them to arrive at a juster appreciation, and possibly at a less harsh judgment, than they otherwise would do, of the events of the past three years. The noble Lord opposite (Lord George Hamilton) and the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Plunket) appeared to have totally forgotten that the Land League agitation began at the period when they were themselves in Office. The right hon. and learned Gentleman confined his observations to the last two years of the agitation; but he must surely be aware that the Land League agitation began at least nine months before the late Government went out of Office. [Mr. PLUNKET: I said so.] He (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) had carefully followed the speech, and the right hon. and learned Gentleman appeared totally to have ignored that fact. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman intended to say so, certainly he did not. He (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) was glad, however, to hear from the right hon. and learned Gentleman that he did admit that the Land League commenced its agitation nine months before the late Government went out of Office. Now, what was the cause of that? He believed that it arose in this way. The two years prior to 1879 were years of great suffering for the Irish peasantry, and the small tenants had been deeply affected by the bad seasons. The distress culminated in 1879. The small tenants were reduced to the lowest depths of poverty, and had no expectation of being able to pay their rent. He was bound to repeat again what he had more than once stated before in that House—that the Irish landlords, mainly through ignorance, were, generally speaking, not aware of the state to which the other tenants had been reduced, and they did not meet the emergency as they ought to have done by making a reduction or remission of rent. It was in this state of things that the Land League presented itself to the Irish tenants, and it presented itself to those tenants as their saviour.

  581
  It raised money for them, and endeavoured to arouse public opinion in regard to the reduction of rent. That, he believed, was the origin of the Land League, and if it had continued to do that work there would have been no reason to complain of it; but it soon went further and developed its programme. At the beginning the Land League consisted of men who admitted that they cared little about the Land Question, but a great deal about ulterior objects. ["No, no!" from the Home Rule Members.] Did hon. Members opposite object to that statement? He would repeat that that became the main object of the Land League, and he made the statement upon the authority of Mr. Parnell himself that there were ulterior objects in view. ["No, no!"] He (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) did not say what those ulterior objects were.
  MR. DAWSON: They were the same as those of the Prime Minister.
  MR. SHAW LEFEVREsaid, he had no wish to enter into a controversy with the right hon. Gentleman on this point. It was sufficient for his object to say that Mr. Parnell did not care about the Land Question. [Cries of "No, no!"] Mr. Parnell distinctly stated that he would not take off his coat for that, if he had not had ulterior objects in view. ["No, no!"] He would leave hon. Members to explain by-and-bye. What he (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) meant to say now was that there had been a progress made in the principles of the Land League.
  MR. O'DONNELLsaid, he rose to Order. Was not the right hon. Gentleman bound to quote accurately the language of an absent Member? The statement of the right hon. Gentleman was a very gross misrepresentation, doubtless innocently made, but a gross misrepresentation of what Mr. Parnell said. He would ask the right hon. Gentleman if Mr. Parnell did not distinctly say that he was working for Home Rule?
  MR. SHAW LEFEVREsaid, he had no recollection of the hon. Member for the City of Cork having used the expression "Home Rule" in that sense; but he distinctly recollected the hon. Gentleman saying that he never would have taken off his coat for the Land Question, if it had not been for ulterior objects. What he wished to point out was that the principles of the
  582
  Land League had been progressive, and that they were continually progressive. Whereas, in the first instance, the Land League was presented to the tenants as a means of getting through the difficulties of bad seasons, subsequently the Leaders of the Land League adopted much wider principles, and from that time they were continually pressing on and putting forward other and stronger views. The noble Lord complained of the Government for not adopting coercion sooner; but he ventured to ask the noble Lord, if it was so important to nip the agitation in the bud, and so essential that the Land League should be prevented from obtaining the confidence of the tenants and spreading itself all over the land, how was it that the Government to which the noble Lord himself belonged took no steps, during the nine months they were in Office, to interfere? He had pointed out already that the Land League came into existence at least nine months before the late Government left Office, and it was before they left Office that the Land League really announced those wider principles of confiscation to which so much allusion had been made. If he were not misinformed, no less than 200 meetings of the Land League were held before the late Government went out of Office; outrages by hundreds had been committed; and all the leading principles of the Land League were put forward to the public and well ascertained. He could quote, if necessary, numerous speeches made by Mr. Parnell and other members of the Land League at that time which showed clearly that the Government of that day must have had before them every information and knowledge as to the real principles of the Land League, such as they were known to be now. He ventured, therefore, to ask the noble Lord why it was that the Government of which he was so distinguished a Member did not at a much earlier stage take measures to put down the Land League, if it were possible to do so? It was far more important in their case, because the noble Lord and the right hon. and learned Gentleman opposite the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Plunket) would admit that their Government had presented no measure of a remedial character in regard to the land. The right hon. and learned Gen-

  583
  tleman the Member for the University of Dublin appeared anxious to show that his Government had some ulterior expectation of being able to deal with that question, and he stated that they had commenced a careful consideration and investigation of the subject; but the right hon. and learned Gentleman forgot to say that the Government of which he was a Member had refused to legislate upon that part of the subject.
  MR. PLUNKETsaid, that, on the contrary, they had proposed to do so.
  MR. SHAW LEFEVRErepeated, that they had declined to do so. In the Session of 1879, at his instance, the House of Commons unanimously passed a Resolution calling upon the Government to legislate upon the subject. When the Session of 1880 commenced and the Government were asked what their intentions were in regard to the Resolution, they had no proposition to make. He distinctly recollected that they made no promise of any kind with reference to the subject; and he held the right hon. and learned Gentleman himself responsible in a great measure for this policy, because he (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) had for two years previously sat with the right hon. and learned Gentleman upon the Committee which inquired into this very subject, and during the whole of that time the right hon. and learned Gentleman did everything in his power to prevent any conclusion being arrived at by the Committee, although they were constantly pressing him upon the subject, and although they advised him and his Government to legislate in that direction. Instead of accepting that advice, the right hon. and learned Gentleman used all his efforts to postpone legislation. He (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) was, therefore, justified in saying that there was no expectation whatever of legislation upon any part of the Land Question from the late Government; and it was all the more important, therefore, if they thought that coercive measures were necessary against the Land League, that they should then have been carried out. He did not, however, think it wise to bandy charges against Members of the late Government as to whether coercion was too soon or too late. He did not himself make any charge against the late Government that they did not nip the Land League in the bud at an earlier period; and probably the same
  584
  reasons influenced them in coming to that conclusion as those which influenced the present Government in not dealing with the question at an earlier period. The truth was that, in resorting to coertion at all, any Government must necessarily be placed upon the horns of a dilemma. They were either too soon or too late. If they had adopted coercive measures earlier, there were many Members among the Tory Party who would have been equally ready to attack the Government for having been too soon. His (Mr. Shaw Lefevre's) belief was that when the conduct of the Government was reviewed by can did and independent persons there would only be one conclusion arrived at—namely, that the original Coercion Act of last Session, and the stronger measures adopted in the month of October, were taken at the right time, having regard to the necessities of the occasion, and having regard, also, to the public opinion of the country. It would not have been wise to have forced either of these measures at an earlier period. Hon. Members opposite taunted the Government with having, by the passing of the Land Act, led to agitation. He totally denied the assertion; and he thought it could be shown that the Land Act was due, not to agitation, but to a Constitutional pressure in Ireland brought to bear in a legitimate manner upon the Government of this country in the General Election of 1880. Hon. Members opposite must recollect that in the Election of 1880 there was throughout the whole of Ireland—in Ulster as well as in every other part—a universal demand for Land Reform; and it would have been impossible for any Government, whether Tory or Liberal, to refuse that demand. He believed he would not be contradicted when he said that not a single Tory Member was returned from Ulster who was not pledged to a reform of the Land Laws—at least, as wide as the Act of last Session. He, therefore, contended that the Land Act of last Session was not due to agitation, but was the legitimate answer, on the part of the Government, to the demand made at the General Election. They had again been taunted with the fact that the Land Act was a failure, and that it had not cured agitation. Anybody who expected that the great agitation which existed during the last two or three years would all at once have been cured, and put a stops

  585
  to, and set at rest by the Land Act of last Session, must have had a very imperfect knowledge of history and human nature. How were they to expect that hon. Gentlemen who had. been engaged in the Land League agitation were all at once to subside into obscurity, and disappear after the passing of the Act? It seemed to him impossible to expect that. The more reasonable expectation was that the agitators would increase their demands in consequence of the passing of that Act, with a view to prevent themselves being silenced and sinking into obscurity. Hon. Members must recollect that, immediately after the passing of the Land Act, the demands of the Land League were increased tenfold. Their programme was immediately altered, and instead of demanding, as they had hitherto done, he would not say a moderate, but some reduction of rent, they went in for the total abolition of landlordism. ["No, no!"] Did hon. Gentlemen opposite object to that?
  MR. DAWSON: Certainly. Has the right hon. Gentleman ever seen the programme?
  MR. SHAW LEFEVREsaid, he could quote from a hundred passages in Land League speeches to show that the proposal was the total abolition of landlordism. He would remind the right hon. Gentleman that when Mr. Parnell went down to the Derry and Tyrone Elections he magnified his demands fivefold; and, speaking there, he said that whereas up to that time he had succeeded in getting a reduction of rent by £2,000,000 per annum, he hoped in future to reduce rents not by £2,000,000, but to £2,000,000. The hon. Member for the City of Cork pointed out that the Land League had succeeded in its programme of reducing rents from £17,000,000 to £15,000,000; and, instead of reducing them by £2,000,000 more, he hoped to see them reduced to £2,000,000. The hon. Member, therefore, increased his demand from £2,000,000 to £13,000,000, and proposed to reduce rents from £17,000,000 to £2,000,000 a-year. [Mr. BARRY: To prairie value.] In the whole history of agitation there had never been anything, within his recollection, more immoral, or more flagitious, than this change of front on the part of Mr. Parnell and the Leaders of the Land League after the passing of the Land Act—a measure which, although it might not
  586
  go as far as they wished, nevertheless went a long way in the direction of giving justice. Under such circumstances, to go to the country and demand the confiscation of the landlords' property from £17,000,000 down to £2,000,000 was one of the most shameful acts in the history of agitation. ["Oh!"] He did not think that hon. Members opposite would, at all events, deny his facts. It was in consequence of the renewed agitation, and in consequence of the outrages which accompanied it, and which were connected with it, that the arrest of the Land Leaguers was decided upon; and if any doubt existed in the mind of anybody as to the expediency and propriety of the arrests of these Gentlemen, it must have been set at rest by the issue of the "no rent" manifesto. A document of that kind was altogether without parallel in the previous history of Europe. Personally he knew nothing more scandalous, nothing more audacious, than the issue from the prison of Kilmainham in which these Gentlemen were lodged of the "no rent" manifesto. Indeed, there was something Hibernian in telling the tenants to pay no rent until those who invited them were released from prison. A more audacious or gigantic act of robbery was never advocated by the leaders of any agitation. It was at once an act of confiscation and an assumption of the powers of the Government. He hoped that hon. Gentlemen would not suppose, from the comments he felt it his duty to make, that he was at all unfriendly to Irish tenants. He had never been indifferent to the question of the Irish tenants and the land; and in his previous speeches, both in that House and elsewhere, he had not lost an opportunity of saying a word on their behalf. He looked back with some satisfaction to the fact that he had raised the question of the reform of the Irish Land Laws, and the necessity of strong measures for the purpose of creating a peasant proprietary in Ireland, before even any Irish Member had mooted the question in that House. He took no credit to himself for that fact; and he only alluded to it for the purpose of emphasizing what he now desired to say, and in the hope that it might carry conviction to the minds of the Irish peasants, even in the most remote cabins of the country, as to the convictions and feelings of those who were most

  587
  friendly disposed towards them in England. What he wished to say was that in his humble judgment there was no measure the Government ought not to resort to in order to defeat the operation of the "no rent" manifesto. For his part, he would be prepared to use all the force of the Empire for the purpose of protecting the landlords of Ireland against this usurpation of their rights. If it were necessary—he hoped it would not be so—any amount of force ought to be used for the purpose of defeating the projects of those who issued the "no rent" manifesto, and he sincrely hoped they would be defeated. He had listened with much astonishment to the speech made by the hon. Member for New Ross (Mr. Redmond) the other night, in which the hon. Member ventured to justify the issue of the "no rent" manifesto. He trusted that the Irish tenants would turn a deaf ear to the advice tendered to them by their Leaders. If the hon. Member for New Ross had made the speech he had delivered in that House at any public meeting in Ireland it would certainly have subjected him to arrest, ["No, no!"] He was certain that such extraordinary statements would have subjected the hon. Member to the ordinary Criminal Law of the country, quite apart from the Coercion Act, because the incitement of the tenants of Ireland not to pay rent was undoubtedly a criminal offence which could be dealt with by the Common Law of the country. He had no hesitation in saying that, under the Privileges of Parliament, the hon. Member had committed a crime against the law of his country. He had certainly listened to the speech of the hon. Member with astonishment. The hon. Member went on to say that the "no rent" manifesto had been successful, and that the tenants in Ireland were not paying their rents to the extent his right hon. Friend (Mr. W. E. Forster) imagined. Now, he (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) believed that one of the chief signs of improvement at the present time was not so much the decrease in the number of outrages—and there had been a small decrease—but in the disposition displayed by the tenants to pay their rents in spite of the issue of the manifesto. No doubt, the decrease in the number of outrages was in itself a good sign; but the fact that rents were being more and more collected was
  588
  even a better one. It was true that throughout a great part of Ireland out of Ulster the tenants in the first instance showed a disposition to act in accordance with the manifesto, and in some parts they were still hovering between the law of the country and the law of the League. Not many days ago he was visiting Ireland, and he had occasion to stay for a short time in one of the worst parts of the country. He was bound to say that the general state of things was even worse than he had anticipated—worse certainly in one sense, that there was a far greater separation between classes than formerly. The landlord and his agent and the tenants were far more isolated now than they were a few years ago. But even in the worst parts of Ireland he found that rents were gradually being collected, and his conviction was that any landlord who pressed firmly and bravely for his rights—[Mr. SEXTON: Arrears of rack rent]—any. landlord who pressed his rights, was just in his demands, and did not ask for too large an amount of arrears, would succeed in obtaining his rents. Unfortunately, for many reasons, the landlords in many parts of Ireland were supine, and were not enforcing their rights. [Laughter from, the Irish Members.] Hon. Members might laugh, but that was really so. Personally, he thought there was nothing of greater importance than that the landlords of Ireland should press their rights firmly and bravely, but with justice and moderation. At no time was it of greater importance that there should be co-operation among the landlords in this respect. He did not say that they should press for the whole of the arrears, but it was only fair and right that they should press for their rents. He believed that the Government were able and willing to protect them, and with this protection, and with co-operation on their part, the main difficulty of the situation would be overcome. That main difficulty at this moment was the collection of rents; and if this difficulty ceased outrages would also cease, because the sole motive for outrage at this moment was the indisposition to pay rents. He, therefore, believed that it was wise and proper for the Government to protect them in the collection of rents, and that it was wise and proper also for the landlords to put in force all their powers to collect them,

  589
  always provided that they did it with justice and moderation. He would only detain the House for a short time longer, simply to comment upon the speech of the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin, and the criticism he had passed upon the action of the Government. It was not sufficient that he and his late Colleagues should criticize minute points in the policy of the Government during the last two years; but it was necessary that they should promulgate, for the guidance of their own supporters, some general line of policy for the future. If the House was to judge from speeches made by Members of the Conservative Party during the Recess, the Opposition had, and could have, no common policy upon the subject of Ireland. The right hon. Member for North Lincolnshire (Mr. J. Lowther) took his seat after denouncing the Land Act of last Session as an Act of spoliation and robbery. On the other hand, the Tory candidates for Derry and Tyrone spoke of it as the charter of the tenant farmers of Ireland, and complained that it did not go far enough. On the other hand, the successful candidate for North Durham (Sir George Elliot) obtained his seat by denouncing coercion, and contending that the time had come when the "suspects" should be released from prison. Indeed, he said he should vote for a Motion to that effect. On the other hand, right hon. Gentlemen opposite were blaming the Government for not having carried coercion further. A scientific friend of his had lately invented a method of arriving at the average type of a particular class of people, by superimposing photographs one upon another until he arrived at a portrait from which all individual eccentricities were removed. He ventured to suggest that they should apply this process to the portraits or speeches of the right hon. Gentlemen opposite, and the leading Members of the Conservative Party. He would ask them to superimpose the speeches of the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill) upon the speeches of the right hon. Member for North Lincolnshire (Mr. J. Lowther), and above those the speeches they had heard in the House that day. What would be the result of this common average portrait of the Conservative Leaders and of their Party, even with the throwing in of the
  590
  speeches of the hon. Baronet the Member for North Durham (Sir George Elliot) and the Ulster Tory candidates? He ventured to say that it would result in a blurred image, in which no distinct policy whatever, with regard to Ireland, would be left. So far as he could judge from some of the speeches made by right hon. Gentlemen opposite and their leading supporters, they had no definite or distinct policy for the future government of Ireland; while, on the other hand, as everybody knew, the present Government had a distinct policy which they had been carrying out for the last two years, and were ready to carry out in future. They were prepared to maintain the principles of the Land Act of last Session, to use every effort in their power to restore order in Ireland, to maintain the peace, and to protect the just rights of the landlords in collecting their rents. They were also prepared to develop the principles of local government as far as they were consistent with the maintenance of the Imperial power; and in that way, although the policy of the Prime Minister might not earn the gratitude and support of some of the hon. Members from Ireland, his right hon. Friend was justified in hoping that at an early date the result of that policy would be the restoration of peace and prosperity to the social system of Ireland.
  MR. GRAYsaid, a more unjustifiable, and, to borrow the words of the right hon. Gentleman, a more audacious, not to say a more immoral, attack upon absent and defenceless men than that which the right hon. Gentleman had just made upon his hon. Friend the Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) he had certainly not heard in the course of the debate, nor in the speeches delivered during the Recess. The right hon. Gentleman, when charging an absent man with making a proposition which, in his opinion, amounted to something like sedition—a proposition for the separation of the two countries—did not think it worth while to quote the exact words of the hon. Member. Fortunately, he (Mr. Gray) had the quotation, and he would read it to the House. When taxed with an inaccuracy which was a very serious one, especially when the person charged was not present to answer the accusation, and when told that the hon. Member for the

  591
  City of Cork had not advocated separation, but merely Home Rule, the right hon. Gentleman said he did not think there was any difference between them.
  MR. SHAW LEFEVRE: I did not say that. I said it was immaterial to my argument whether it was the one or the other. What I was pointing out was that he did not care about the Land Question, but that he was struggling for an ulterior object. What that object was made no difference to my argument.
  MR. GRAY MR. GRAY, continuing, said, the right hon. Gentleman gave the statement of the hon. Member for the City of Cork as a justification for the hon. Member's arrest, although his Leader had stated only three or four days ago that if a scheme of Home Rule compatible with the integrity of the Empire were proposed, it would be a subject for the serious consideration of the House.
  MR. SHAW LEFEVRE: I never stated that it was the justification for the arrest of Mr. Parnell. I gave a totally different reason.
  MR. GRAYsaid, the right hon. Gentleman gave a different reason subsequently, which was that the hon. Member for the City of Cork had renewed the agitation, and that, therefore, he was arrested.
  MR. SHAW LEFEVRE: I did not say that.
  MR. GRAYsaid, he had written down the words of the right hon. Gentleman, and what the right hon. Gentleman said was that it was in consequence of the renewed agitation that the arrests were made. Therefore, according to a right hon. Gentleman who professed to be one of the warmest advocates of the Irish tenants that the Treasury Bench possessed, it was the renewed agitation which afforded the justification for the arrests. He (Mr. Gray) would give the exact words of the hon. Member for the City of Cork, because they were of some importance in view of the accusation now made against him. The hon. Member for the City of Cork, in his celebrated speech at Galway, said—
  "I would not have taken off my coat and gone to this work if I had not known that we were laying the foundation in this movement for the regeneration of our legislative independence."
  The right hon. Gentleman did not think it worth while, in making his charges
  592
  against an absent man, to quote with accuracy the remarks of Mr. Parnell. He (Mr. Gray) certainly thought that Members of the Government ought to be more careful in regard to their facts before they made reckless accusations against the hon. Member for the City of Cork, especially when they knew that he was not present to answer them, and it was difficult for his Friends, even by consulting newspaper files, to deal satisfactorily with them. The right hon. Gentleman further stated, as a justification for the arrests, that the later programme of the Land League was a change of front, veering round to the total abolition of landlordism. Now, with regard to the programme of the Land League, it never changed from the beginning to the end, from the first day of its foundation. From the commencement its programme was the total abolition of landlordism. That was fully set forth as its policy, and it was the ground upon which it was attacked by the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government, and all those who had followed his lead in denouncing it. But there were many ways of abolishing landlordism, and Michael Davitt, at present in prison, proposed a measure for abolishing it By purchasing the landlords' interest. He laid it down that an average of 20 years' purchase upon the Government valuation would be a fair price for the State to give to the landlords as compensation for their total abolition; and he (Mr. Gray) had yet to learn that there was anything illegal, or improper, or immoral, or even flagitious, to use the words of the right hon. Gentleman, in such a proposition. On the contrary, it appeared to him to be an exceedingly reasonable and practical proposal, and at least one that could be supported by argument. He had been much struck by the words with which the right hon. Gentleman closed his speech. He was astonished that the three or four right hon. Gentlemen who, within the last few days, had spoken from the Treasury Bench had taken no notice whatever of the serious charge made against the Government by the hon. Member for Portarlington (Mr. Fitzpatrick). That hon. Member stated that, within the last few months, the Government had strongly urged the Irish landlords to exercise in the most determined and in the "bravest" manner

  593
  their powers against their tenants; and, further, that they had urged a particular method of exercising these powers—not by isolated or individual action, but by uniting in districts, and proceeding to sweep such districts clear, and thus strike terror into the tenantry. He was certainly astonished that no Member of the Government had taken any notice of the charge. Two or three Members of the Government had spoken since it was made; but neither the President of the Board of Trade (Mr. Chamberlain), nor the Solicitor General for Ireland (Mr. Porter), who made a remarkably able speech, noticed it—the most important assertion yet made in regard to the attitude of the Government towards Ireland. But the right hon. Gentleman the First Commissioner of Works (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) was either not so reticent or not so discreet as the other Members of the Government who had preceded him in the debate. The right hon. Gentleman said the first thing for the Irish landlords to do was bravely to assert their rights—or, in other words, bravely to evict their tenants. This advice had not been publicly given, but it was said to have been given secretly by the Government within the last two months; and it would appear that the landlords had been utilizing the advice, because the number of evictions had doubled. [An hon. MEMBER: NO.] Yes; the number of evictions had doubled, and, doubtless, the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the First Commissioner of Works would have its due effect, and the landlords of Ireland would be even still more brave in future. But the right hon. Gentleman did not venture to give the logical conclusion of his argument. He told the House the landlords should be just as well as brave, and that they should not exact all the arrears due to them. And why not? For what reason should they not exact them? The House was told that the landlords were poor—the noble Lord (Lord George Hamilton) said many of them were on the verge of bankruptcy—all the old relations between landlord and tenant were said to be done away with; and, if the landlords were to stand upon their legal rights, why should they not exact the last penny of these arrears? Were the Government prepared to say at what percentage of the landlords' claim they would draw the line and refuse to
  594
  assist them in asserting their rights by force? Were they ready to give an armed force to protect the landlords in collecting the arrears of rack rents? The right hon. Gentleman stopped short at that point, which he (Mr. Gray) thought was scarcely logical. He ventured to say that if the hon. Member for Tyrone (Mr. Dickson) had uttered the words in Ireland which he had just made use of in his speech in that House, he, too, would find himself an inmate of Kilmainham, not, perhaps, under the Common Law, as a speaker had suggested that the hon. Member for Wexford should be imprisoned, but under the coercion régime of the Government. He (Mr. Dickson) had told the House that if Mr. Healy's clause were properly administered, it would result in a far greater and more sweeping reduction of rent in Ireland than that which had been effected by the Sub-Commissioners. If hon. Members examined the speeches of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), they would find that this was precisely what had been said by him in terms, and that it was the whole basis of what had been urged against him by the Prime Minister, the President of the Board of Trade, and the right hon. Gentleman who had just sat down—all of whom said that the hon. Member for the City of Cork contemplated the immoral proposition of reducing the rental of Ireland from £17,000,000 to £2,000,000. But he never said that the Land Act would do this. It was not Mr. Parnell who invented the term "prairie value." The credit of that phrase, and of the theory in connection with which it was made use of, was justly due to the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. John Bright). So much in the nature of vague attack had been made upon the hon. Member for the City of Cork, and so much confusion had been created with reference to his speeches, that he desired to quote his exact words in this connection. Speaking at the Convention, Mr. Parnell was endeavouring to point out the precise effect of Mr. Healy's clause; and he proceeded to show what in justice it should do by going back as far as possible and securing to the tenants, as far as it could be secured, the entire value of the unexhausted improvements effected by

  595
  them, and showing, at the same time, that the presumption in favour of the tenants only extended back about 20 years from 1870. He (Mr. Gray) would not go into the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881; but he believed that the effect of them read together was that the presumption in favour of tenants' improvements only went back 30 years from the present time; and the hon. Member for Cork City, speaking at the Convention on the 15th September last, said—
  "And as this condition follows the Act of 1881, the result is that the tenant, in order to obtain exemption from rent in respect of improvements made further hack than this period of years, will have to prove those improvements. Now, it is perfectly impossible for him to do so; and one of the improvements that we shall have to contend for in the shape of legislative reform will be that the presumption in respect of past improvements—improvements further back than this period of 30 years—shall be changed."
  It was upon this that the Prime Minister had justified the arrest of the hon. Member for Cork City—because he proposed to secure such improvements to the tenants, not by a policy of rapine, supported by intimidation, as was alleged, but, as he himself said, by "legislative reform." This was the crime for which the hon. Member for Cork City was at that moment in Kilmainham, and for which the Prime. Minister, with all his eloquence, denounced him at Leeds. It was the misrepresentation of that proposition of his by the Prime Minister which had caused the news of his arrest to be received with such ringing cheers by the audience at the Guildhall. The hon. Member for Cork City was quoting from a speech delivered during the passage of the recent Act by the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. John Bright), who said—
  "If all that the tenants have done were swept off the soil, and all that the landlords have done were left upon it, the land would he as bare of house, and barn, fences, and cultivation, as it was in pre-historic times It would be as bare as an American prairie, where the Indian now roams, and where the White man has never trod."
  And, still quoting the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, he went on to say—
  "I say I believe, and I think I am within the mark, that nine-tenths, excluding the towns, of course, of all that is to be seen on the farm land in Ireland, the houses, barns, fences, and whatever you call cultivation, or freeing land from the wilderness, have been placed there by the
  596
  abours of the tenantry of Ireland, and not at the expense of the landlords."—[3 Hansard, cclxi. 105–6.]
  The hon. Member for Cork City said—
  "This Land Act, which Mr. Bright and his Government have just passed, hands over about one-tenth of the improvements to the tenant, and it leaves the remaining nine-tenths to the landlords. It will be our duty to struggle"
  —not, as the Prime Minister alleged, by intimidation, but as the hon. Member for Cork City said—
  "Until the Legislature of Great Britain has sanctioned the restoration of this nine-tenths of the valuable improvements of which Mr. John Bright spoke in his speech."
  He (Mr. Gray) asked how, with the knowledge of these statements which the Prime Minister possessed, the right hon. Gentleman could contend that the hon. Member for Cork City desired to secure this transfer of nine-tenths of the improvements from the landlord to the tenant by rapine, intimidation, and outrage? The hon. Member had stated, as distinctly as words could do, that his policy was one of urging upon the Legislature to carry out this reform. He (Mr. Gray) granted that the views of the hon. Member for Cork City had enlarged on the question of Irish land; that at one time he insisted only upon Griffith's valuation; but when he had been educated by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster he adopted the doctrines of the right hon. Gentleman, and said that they must endeavour to secure that this property, which a Member of the Government had declared to be the property of the tenantry, should be restored to them. That was the head and front of his offending. Now, the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland, in the elaborate speech which he delivered two or three nights ago, quoted the hon. Member for Cork City as saying that he aimed at abolishing rents in Ireland. That statement in. one sense was perfectly true; but if he aimed at abolishing rents for all time, without compensation to those who now received them, he would have been open to the strongest reprobation. Whether he would then come within the scope of the Coercion Act was quite another thing. For his part, he (Mr. Gray) thought he would not, because that was not intended to be one of the offences which would subject a man to imprisonment under that Act. In all the speeches he had heard from Members of the Government,

  597
  the real question had been involved in confusion. The speeches made by the hon. Member for Cork City pointed out what he considered to be the abstract justice and the extent of the reforms to be agitated for in a Constitutional manner until they obtained the acceptance of that House; but when they were urged against him by the Government, it was made to appear as if he wanted to secure those reforms by force. After making a long series of charges of that kind, which occupied nearly an hour in its delivery, against the hon. Member and against the Land League, the Chief Secretary for Ireland wound up, to his (Mr. Gray's) amazement, by saying that, much as he lamented those things, they would not justify the arrests. But the matter they were discussing at the time was the arrests; and without meaning to give offence, because there was nothing to be gained by bandying hard words, he was bound to say that it was not quite straight on the part of the right hon. Gentleman to make an attack against the entire policy of men who were not there to defend themselves, to quote their speeches and to say that they were very wrong, but still that they were not sufficient justification for their imprisonment. He maintained that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland ought not to have prejudiced the case of hon. Members in prison by quoting their speeches, if he was not prepared to show that they were a justification of their arrests, because the question was, whether, within the limits of the Act and within the limits of the pledges he had given, the right hon. Gentleman was justified in imprisoning those Gentlemen? The fact was, the real and notorious cause of the arrest of these Gentlemen at that particular moment was that the Government believed that if they were allowed to remain at largo they would paralyze the working of the Land Act. And this was stated almost in terms by the Prime Minister at Leeds, where he denounced the proposals of the hon. Member for Cork City to test the Irish Land Act. As much misapprehension existed with reference to those proposals to test the Land Act as existed with reference to the views of the hon. Member for Cork City as to a reduction of rents to £2,000,000. The Government themselves were desirous that the
  598
  tenantry and landlords of Ireland should test the Act for themselves, and not use it all at once, because they foresaw that if the great bulk of the tenants rushed into the Courts, they would become blocked and business rendered impossible. It was precisely to avoid that state of things, and a collapse which would be injurious alike to the tenants and landlords, that the test cases were proposed by the hon. Member for Cork City; and as these had been fully explained by the hon. Member for Wicklow (Mr. W. J. Corbet), he should not go over them again. But what were the reasons for urging on the Irish tenants to test the Act, and not rush into Court until they knew precisely what the effect of their doing so would be? Why, the hon. Member for Cork City urged upon them the great danger to which they were exposed in accepting the statutory term of 15 years, and he said that the causes which had worked so marvellous a depreciation during the last three years in England might continue. He stated that there was great danger of American competition reducing the value of Irish land still further, and he warned the Irish tenants that in accepting what was, in fact, a lease for 15 years, they were tying their hands at a critical and dangerous time; that a man who accepted the statutory term was pinned to a certain rent, and his whole property was pledged to pay it, no matter how much the value might go down during the next 15 years. This the hon. Member pointed out very clearly and unmistakably at the Convention. Another of the hon. Member's reasons for testing the Act was, as he also stated at the Convention, the enormous expense to the tenants of Ireland of going into Court, which many of them would be unable to bear. And he pointed out that if certain average test cases were selected in various localities—not cases of rack-renting or low rents only, but cases that would give a correct idea of the general working of the Act—that then the landlord and the tenant, having ascertained what a fair average of the decisions of the Court would be, would themselves, without the expense of going into Court, come to an agreement as to the future rents between them. At Dungarvan he urged that very plainly, where he said, on the 5th October last—
  "The Executive considered that when they had obtained a decision from the Court in regard

  599
  to these cases they would, in the first place, have secured that the Court would have fixed the rent at as low a standard as they could possibly induce the Court so to fix the rent; and, secondly, they would have shown each farmer in that branch, by making a test casein his own immediate vicinity, what the Court would do in his case, what level the Court would fix rent at in his case if he himself applied to the Court. The farmer would, therefore, be in a position to judge for himself as to whether the level of the rent, which would be fixed by the Court in this case, would be satisfactory to him or not. If the level of the rent so fixed was likely to be satisfactory to him, he would be able, in combination with other tenants, to go to his landlord and say—'We will pay you this rent and not any more;' and he would be able to obtain from the landlord his farm at that rent without going into Court at all."
  Was it immoral to propose this in order to ascertain what the general action of the Courts would be, in order that rents should be fixed upon such a basis, and to avoid the serious danger to the tenant of being tied to a statutory term of 15 years, during which time property might become greatly reduced in value? To his mind there was nothing immoral in that proposal. Again, the hon. Member for Cork City had been attacked in emphatic language by various Members of the House for not having denounced outrages in Ireland as strongly as they thought he ought to have done. It was perfectly true that he had not denounced those outrages as frequently as Members of the Government, because his desire was not to add fuel to the fire raging in England, by giving excuses for the exaggerations of the English Press. But the hon. Member had denounced them, and in his speech at Galway, on the 24th of October, he lamented them, not only because they were repugnant to his feelings, but because they injured the cause with which he was associated. No one would believe that the Government would be able to carry out their policy of coercion, but for the exaggerated accounts of the outrages which had taken place. The hon. Member, on the occasion referred to, said—
  "Your chairman has deprecated assassination and violence as being unnecessary to win your cause, and very properly and justly deprecated them. At all the land meetings which have been held up to the time when extra police were planted down in the county of Mayo, I also took care to join in that condemnation. But I utterly refuse further to allow any credence to be attached to the charges which have been made against us and our people to the English people by the English Press, by in future depre-
  600
  cating outrage and crime which do not and have not existed. And if it were otherwise, I say that the conduct of the Government themselves in violating the engagement on which we gave them the Votes for the Constabulary, after seven nights' debate, and in sending those extra police into the famine-stricken counties of Mayo, Galway, and Kerry, disentitles them to my advocacy in assisting to uphold an unjust and infamous law."
  The hon. Member for Cork City abstained from denouncing the outrages for a specific reason, which was morally defensible—namely, that he should thereby be lending countenance to the allegations of the Government, and that his statements would be utilized by the English Press and the Government for their legislative proposals. It had been said that the hon. Member for Cork City had always opposed the Land Act, that he opposed it during its passage through the House, and that he endeavoured to destroy its very life after it had passed. The President of the Board of Trade (Mr. Chamberlain), whom he (Mr. Gray) should have thought would have been more correct in his statements, had said that, as also had the Prime Minister. It had been shown again and again that at critical stages of the Land Act those who saved it were the hon. Member and his Friends. When a division was taken on the Amendment of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Heneage), where would the Government have been if it had not been for the hon. Member for Cork City and his followers? Why, not only would the Land Act have been lost, but the Government would have been lost also; and the acknowledgment they had received from the Government for thus supporting them, and, in fact, passing the Land Act for them, had been the denunciation to which he had referred, and the imprisonment of the hon. Member and some of his followers. Although it had been asserted again and again that the hon. Member (Mr. Parnell) would not accept the Act, and that he wished to strangle and destroy it at the Dublin Convention, he distinctly stated that the Act should be tested before the tenants rushed indiscriminately into the Court. He said—
  "We should be assuming an unreasonable position in the eyes of the world, and, I venture to think, in our own eyes also, if we refused to test the measure."
  Again, the hon. Member said—

  601
  "There is the Act—it is the law of the land; and we have to deal with it to the best advantage."
  That was all he was aiming at—that was all the Convention was aiming at—to endeavour, by the use of every legal argument that the best advocates could bring forward, and by the use of every legitimate pressure, to get the Act fairly and properly tested in the interest of the tenants. That was to say, the hon. Member for Cork City had advocated putting pressure on the Land Commissioners to induce them to favour the lowest standard of rent possible, and to show them the necessity of doing that which the hon. Member for Tyrone had said they had not done—namely, carry out Healy's Clause in its entirety. The hon. Member for Cork City urged that the tenants should organize their case. What had the landlords done? They had organized their case; but they had not been denounced for it. They had been allowed to join together into an association, and to employ the best legal ability for testing cases in groups, and for inducing the Commissioners to fix the highest possible rent. Not only had the landlords not been denounced for this, but the Government had distinctly encouraged them. The hon. Member for Cork City had been imprisoned for doing precisely that which the landlords had done—and perfectly reasonably and legitimately done. He (Mr. Gray) had been very much astonished at the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade—in fact, so much did it surprise him, that he had not felt inclined to wait to hear its conclusion. The right hon. Gentleman—whom he should have thought would have been the very first to defend the Government from a charge of having carried out a most stringent measure of coercion in a most stringent manner—said he did not feel called upon to defend the Government from that charge, but had risen to defend it from the attacks of Conservatives, who said that sufficient coercion had not been used. When he (Mr. Gray) heard the right hon. Gentleman make that announcement, he did not care to remain to hear such a defence from such a quarter. But he had heard one expression of the right hon. Gentleman which had struck him (Mr. Gray) very much. The Government, it would
  602
  be in the recollection of the House, took a great deal of credit to themselves last year for having made no attempt to revive the Peace Preservation Act. They had said they had confidence in the Irish people; they wished to strike off the last shackle from Ireland; and, therefore, would not renew the Act which the former Chief Secretary for Ireland had in the box. The President of the Board of Trade, the moment he rose, justified the Government for not having renewed the Act, and on what ground, forsooth? Not because of any objection they had to coercion, but because there was not time to pass it through the House. After that, what became of the protests of Her Majesty's Government of their confidence in the Irish people—what became of their protests and their liberal declarations, when they themselves stated that they had not introduced coercion for want of time? Was it not an acknowledgment that their whole attitude had been a sham? The President of the Board of Trade made a speech at Liverpool—a speech which now, after a degree of hesitation—after a very considerable degree of hesitation—he had swallowed in its entirety; and in the course of that speech the right hon. Gentleman had said that at one time the cry was for fair rents, which, it was said, was all that was required; but that directly the Land Act was passed, which was to secure fair rents, the cry was abandoned, and that of "no rent" was substituted. Now, was that the fact, or was it not? If it was not, what were they to think of a Member of the Government speaking in such a reckless manner in justification of the imprisonment of Gentlemen who were not able to answer either by letter or word of mouth? When were these Gentlemen arrested? On October 13, and the "no rent" cry was raised on October 18. Why was that cry raised? Not because of the arrest of three or four individuals, as had been wrongly asserted, but because the Government had deliberately adopted the policy of arresting all the Leaders on whom they could lay their hands—not by issuing a Proclamation declaring the Land League to be illegal, but of arresting all the Land League Leaders. On October 6—two days before the speech of the Prime Minister, and five days before his own arrest—the hon. Member

  603
  for the City of Cork, speaking at Dungarvan, said the Land League from the commencement had refused to recommend the tenant farmers to pay no rent at all. This was long after the passing of the Land Act, which became law towards the latter end of August. On October 13, as he (Mr. Gray) had said, the hon. Member for the City of Cork was arrested, and on October 26 the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade, speaking, he supposed, with a due sense of the responsibility of his utterances, with a full knowledge that his speech would be circulated where the hon. Member's statements would never be heard, said that immediately the Land Act was passed the cry of "fair rents" was abandoned, and the "no rent" cry was substituted. He (Mr. Gray) hoped some Member of the Government would tell them what justification there was for that assertion? In the same way the Prime Minister, speaking at Liverpool, had said the doctrine was that there was a rental of £ 17,000,000 in Ireland, and that out of that only £2,000,000 ought to be paid. How, asked the right hon. Gentleman, was this rapine to be carried into effect? and he answered himself by saying—Why, by intimidation and outrage. He (Mr. Gray) could quote scores of passages in which the Leaders of the Land League had said that they simply wished to carry out the doctrines of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. John Bright)—that they wished to proceed, not by intimidation, but by legitimate agitation. The hon. Member for the City of Cork had said that he never expected very much from the Land Act; but that it was to be judged by its results. He said—
  "What we should continue to agitate for is to secure that the doctrines which have been laid down by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster shall by a Liberal Parliament be passed into law."
  Then as to the justification of the hon. Member's arrest. They might denounce his doctrines as being immoral, impracticable, and as being—to use the Prime Minister's words—"subversive doctrines" or "revolutionary"—revolutionary in the sense of a serious change—but until it was shown that the Land League was prepared to carry them out by illegal means, the Government could not justify their action of endeavouring
  604
  to put down these doctrines by imprisonment. The present Attorney General had said he had anticipated that not one man would be arrested under the Coercion Act. Let the Government bear in mind that they had permitted these doctrines to be preached from 1,000 platforms in Ireland for three years, and that it was only when the hon. Member for the City of Cork announced not only that he held these opinions, but that he would advise the tenants to abstain from an indiscriminate use of the Land Act, that they discovered the enormity of the doctrines. The Chief Secretary for Ireland had stated plainly that it was in consequence of the renewed agitation that the arrests were made. The right hon. Gentleman had given them a very subtle treatise on the law which, the right hon. Gentleman thought, after three years' consideration by his Law Officer, enabled him to arrest these Gentlemen. The right hon. Gentleman said he had discovered, after careful consideration, and after the Land League had announced that they were not going to make indiscriminate use of the Land Act, that speeches made at a public meeting, although not calculated immediately to provoke a breach of the peace, if they were likely to lead to a breach of the peace 12 months hence or 100 miles away, they were legally incitements to violence justifying the arrest, on reasonable suspicion, of those who uttered them. He would ask this—Would that doctrine be tolerated for one moment in England? Why, scores of speeches were made in that House which were eminently calculated to lead to breaches of the peace in that sense. For instance, speeches on reform were made there, and if, two years afterwards, in consequence of agitation for Reform, the railings of Hyde Park were torn down, if the doctrine of the Chief Secretary for Ireland were to be acted upon, those who made speeches in the House in favour of Reform would be responsible for that outrage. That doctrine was only advanced within the last few months to meet the necessities of the case. He had not heard any Member of the Legal Profession even on the Government side of the House attempt to support it, and he was not sure that the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), if he were

  605
  consulted on the subject, would justify it as a legal axiom on which he would stake his legal reputation. The Chief Secretary for Ireland had endeavoured to justify the arrest of Members of Parliament not by what they had done themselves, but by what Father Sheehy and The Irish World had said in America, by what some priest had said down in the country, and by what the hon. Member for Wexford was reported in some newspaper to have stated. Was that not an attempt to revive, in its most odious form, the odious theory of constructive conspiracy. The Chief Secretary for Ireland had given them pledges upon his honour that he intended to carry out the Coercion Act in a certain spirit; and he had not told them, when he asked them to pass it, that he intended under it to apply the doctrine of constructive conspiracy—that he intended to hold men responsible not for what they did themselves, but for what others did, when they were members of a lawful organization. This was a most violent straining of a most unjust theory. For the future it would not be safe for any individual to belong to the most innocent organization, because, though every act of his might be lawful, he would be held responsible for the acts of his colleagues of which he might disapprove. It was most unfair for the Chief Secretary for Ireland to quote against the hon. Member for the City of Cork speeches made in America, articles in newspapers over which the imprisoned Members had no kind of control, and advertisements which had appeared two months after the imprisonment, of which those Members could know nothing, and the "no rent" manifesto that also was published after the imprisonment—it was unfair for the right hon. Gentleman to point to these things rather than show that these particular individuals either committed outrage, aided and abetted outrage, or incited to outrage. In the whole of his lengthy speech the right hon. Gentleman did not give one scintilla of justification for the assertion that any of the imprisoned Members committed outrage, incited to outrage, or abetted outrage. The right hon. Gentleman thought it very ungenerous that the imprisonment of the hon. Member for Cork City and his Colleagues should in any measure be attributed to pique on the part of the Prime Minister in consequence of his
  606
  having been worsted in a verbal argument, and indulged in a very strong panegyric of his right hon. Friend. Then the right hon. Gentleman had also indulged in a panegyric of his right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland—both, no doubt, deserved from the respective points of view of the two right hon. Gentlemen; but they reminded him (Mr. Gray) of the vulgar adage—"You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." He honestly believed that throughout the Chief Secretary for Ireland had done his very best with the sole desire of pacifying the country, and conscientiously doing his duty under difficulties. But, from the point of view of the Irish Members, it had been his misfortune rather than his fault that he had invariably done the wrong thing at the wrong time, and the result had been to bring Ireland into her present lamentable condition. The right hon. Gentleman was no nearer to crushing the Land League than he had previously been, and no nearer making the country more contented with his rule than he was before he arrested the "suspects." There was an ingrained conviction in the Irish mind that the people were subjected by the Government of the right hon. Gentleman to gross injustice. That was their belief, rightly or wrongly; and he thought rightly. So far as anything on the face of the facts within public knowledge was concerned—so far as the Irish public was concerned—the right hon. Gentleman might have taken all the presidents and secretaries of all the branches of the Land League, and put them into a hat, and drawn out 400 or 600 names haphazard; for no principle could be discovered upon which the "suspects" had been arrested or released. He had heard it stated as a joke that the right hon. Gentleman had agreed to release a certain number of men per mouth, and that the names of the men, with the exception of the hon. Members for Cork City, Tipperary, and Roscommon, were put into a hat and drawn. He (Mr. Gray) did not mean to pretend that that was true; but so far as the Irish people were concerned, and so far as they could comprehend anything as to the motives which affected him, the right hon. Gentleman might as well be acting purely haphazard. A gentleman j in his (Mr. Gray's) own county had been arrested and then released; but why that

  607
  gentleman had been arrested he could not comprehend. He was suspected by the Land League of being lukewarm, and was not in good odour with the League. Yet, because he paid his rent, he was selected by the right hon. Gentleman and put into prison. He thought the hon. Member for Cork City had a right to complain, not only of the manner in which he had been misrepresented, but of the manner in which efforts had been made to prejudice him in England by raising, in Government speeches, issues which were utterly outside the question, and so to excite hostility to him. In his celebrated Leeds oration, the Prime Minister adduced as one of the grounds of complaint against the hon. Member that he had recommended that English goods should be "Boycotted" by the Irish people, and that French or German goods should be used instead. That might have been a wise or a foolish observation on the part of the hon. Member; but while it was eminently calculated to excite the ire of a Leeds audience, and those connected with the woollen manufacture might have been expected to view it with special disfavour, he (Mr. Gray) failed to see how it was a ground for the arrest of the hon. Member. In the same way, a casual observation of the hon. Member for Cork City, that the Salford explosion was a practical joke, was completely misrepresented by the Prime Minister, and was represented as if the hon. Member had considered that an attempt to blowup a public building would be in the nature of a practical joke. Those who heard the speech of the hon. Member were not likely to misunderstand his meaning. The whole affair seemed so ridiculous—almost as ridiculous as the stained letter which the right hon. Gentleman received the other day, and which was represented as a serious outrage, but was a practical joke played by some Trinity College students—some of the constituents of the right hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. Plunket) who had delivered so eloquent a speech a few minutes ago. The Salford business really appeared to be as absurd as the stained letter, and the hon. Member so used it. But the Prime Minister endeavoured to use it to show that the hon. Member for Cork City treated an attempt to blow up buildings as a mere joke; and it was by such means as these that
  608
  he raised the Leeds audience to a pitch of indignation, and led them to think that the arrest of the hon. Member was a necessity. He (Mr. Gray) did not think these tactics were worthy of the Prime Minister, or of the Chief Secretary for Ireland. The Prime Minister had stated that it was the object of the hon. Member for Cork City to "march through rapine to the disintegration of the Empire;" and yet in the speech which the Chief Secretary for Ireland had quoted the other night, it was shown that the hon. Member for Cork City had said the history of the past showed that Ireland must fight within the lines of the Constitution. The Prime Minister should have produced something more than assertion when he attributed those words to the hon. Member. He should have recollected that he had all the resources of the Crown at his disposal, while the only resource the hon. Member for Cork City had was argument, and the right hon. Gentleman should not have put into his mouth words which he never used and intentions which he never had. It was perfectly notorious that during the progress of the Land League agitation the theory of the agitation was to avoid all use of force; to avoid active resistance to the Government or its forces in any way; to avoid the use of arms, and to carry its objects by agitation and passive resistance. The whole efforts of the Land League Leaders were to keep the people in bounds; to induce them to submit to the wretched state under which they then laboured, and prosecute peaceful efforts to remedy it. Every popular leader in Ireland, from the days of O'Connell, had said that resistance to the Government by force, although under certain circumstances it might be morally justified, would not be justified in view of the fact that it would be hopeless. The late Prime Minister had said, in words that would never die, that the natural remedy for the condition of Ireland was revolution; and if Mr. Disraeli was justified in using those words, he (Mr. Gray) did not see why other men should not use them. But Mr. Disraeli had said that the people of Ireland were debarred from that remedy in consequence of the superior power of England; and that was what the hon. Member for Cork City, and other Leaders of the Land League had urged.

  609
  The doctrine of the Land League was to carry its object by passive resistance and Constitutional agitation; while the doctrine of the Fenians was that that was hopeless, and armed revolution was the only hope of regeneration for the Irish people. As to the assertion that the Land League tried to carry out their objects by force, the supporters of the policy of the Government did not adduce any facts to show that that was so. But there was no doubt whatever that, while these arguments might be adduced in the House as the ostensible justification of the arrests, it was notorious out-of-doors, in England as well as in Ireland, that the real reason of these arrests was that the Leaders of the League were supposed to be endeavouring to defeat the Land Act. It must never be forgotten that the Land Act was purely permissive, and that the Prime Minister stated that he only expected a few tenants to avail themselves of it, as it was optional with them. The Government had broken up the Land League; but what was the result so far as the Act was concerned? They had 70,000 cases in the Courts, and how would they get them out of it? The hon. Member for Tyrone (Mr. Dickson) had said it would take five or six years to clear the cases in his county; but in the present state of things it would take 50 or 60 years to clear the country of the present cases alone. The Government said the Act should pacify the country; but what benefit had it conferred, except on some few hundreds of the tenants? A few hundred cases had been settled, and in a few hundred cases rents had been reduced; but, without speaking of those who had held aloof from the Act, and considering those who had gone to the Court, what benefit had the Act conferred on them? They were still liable to rack rents, and there was no definite prospect of their being able to utilize the advantages which the Land Act professed to confer on them. The Chief Secretary for Ireland had not attempted to deal with that question, or to say how his Act, which was to be a panacea for all the evils of Ireland, was to work. Suppose that all worked harmoniously so far as the tenants were concerned, how was the machine to be driven? There were 70,000 cases, and the landlords had a notion that by fighting to the last they might get better terms than by yielding
  610
  to the Sub-Commissioners. What machinery could be devised to deal with these cases? If the Government were in a position to retrace their policy they might be inclined to accept that of the Land League to have test cases instead of having the Court blocked. The Government had brought this state of things upon themselves, and it was their duty to state how they would get out of it. If there were a provision in the Act that the statutory term should date, not from the settlement, but from the date of the application, there might have been an inducement to the landlords to consent to reductions, and so there might have been some escape from the block; but the Government had insisted on the date being the date of settlement, and so they had held out an inducement to the landlords to keep out of Court. The landlords would not give up rack-renting until they were obliged to do so, and would say—"Why should I bid 'the old gentleman 'good morning before I meet him, or reduce my rents before I get the decision of the Court?" Therefore, there was a premium on the refusal by the landlords to reduce their rents. As to the Amendment of the hon. Member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy), one of the charges was that the prisoners whom the Government had imprisoned would, if tried and found guilty, not have been subject to so heavy a punishment as the Government had inflicted upon them on bare suspicion. The Act of 1875 provided for acts of intimidation a maximum of three months' imprisonment, or £20 penalty; but no one could suppose that any man, for the crime of inciting tenants not to pay rack rents, would receive, if convicted, a sentence of three months' imprisonment. But the imprisoned Members were subjected to a heavier penalty on mere suspicion. But what had the right hon. Gentleman said? He said—"We can fall back on the White-boy Act." It was a pretty spectacle to find a leading Member of a Liberal Government justifying the principle of imprisonment under the Whiteboy Act of William IV. They had abolished the system of flogging in the Army and Navy, and the only persons for whom they now reserved the punishment, though they did not use it, were Irish political prisoners. He was sure if the right hon. Gentleman had

  611
  thought two years ago that he would have been obliged to defend the Whiteboy Act, he would have thought once, twice, and thrice before he would have accepted Office, which, in his heart, he must find, under such circumstances, most odious. The right hon. Gentleman had said very little indeed in regard to the attempt to suppress the Ladies' Land League throughout the country; and he had not said one word in regard to the extraordinary Circular or Proclamation issued by Colonel Hillier in reference to that League. The peculiarity in reference to the breaking up of the Ladies' Land League was this—that notwithstanding the offensive and Jesuitical—he used the word Jesuitical in the commonly accepted sense—Proclamation of Colonel Hillier, the central organization of the Ladies' Land League had held regular weekly meetings in defiance of the right hon. Gentleman, and in order to see whether he would, in the face of public opinion, venture upon the illegal act of dispersing those assemblies. He had not ventured upon it; but down in the country where public opinion was not strong, and where it was difficult to expose the facts, the meetings of the Ladies' League, held for precisely the same purpose as those of the Central League, had been dispersed by the police without any justification, without affording any means of redress, and sometimes in a most offensive manner to the persons assembled. Rather than enter into a quasi-acknowledgment of an offence, which they were required to do by magistrates asking them to find bail, some of the ladies, with that heroism which had characterized them in this struggle, preferred to go to prison, and then the right hon. Gentleman completely abandoned his policy. He had ceased to worry them; he had ceased to arrest ladies engaged in charity; in fact, he had left both the central and local organizations alone; notwithstanding the fact, which had been asserted and not denied, that to strike terror into the League he had actually had one gaol cleared of its male inmates and prepared for the reception of 200 or 300 ladies. When he found that that threat had no effect, he abandoned his policy, and he ceased to arrest women. The right hon. Gentleman, or the right hon. and learned Attor-
  612
  ney General for Ireland, ought to give them some explanation of this attack upon women engaged in charitable work; the Government ought to say why it was commenced, and especially why it was abandoned. If it was right in the beginning it ought to have been persevered with further. The right hon. Gentleman had not attempted to say one single word in justification of his suppression of the newspaper, United Ireland. He (Mr. Gray) confessed he took a peculiar interest in that question, because, being himself connected with the Irish Press, he was very curious to know how far the right hon. Gentleman was going in the suppression of the Press, and because, although he had always evinced a determined hostility to the policy of the right hon. Gentleman, he had no wish to figure as a martyr in this respect. He would like to hear what legal justification the Chief Secretary for Ireland had for his action concerning the Press. It was not sufficient for the right hon. Gentleman to say that legal proceedings had been instituted by the proprietors of that journal; and, therefore, he would not say anything about the matter. That was not a dignified or proper course for the right hon. Gentleman to adopt, and hon. Members were entitled to ask under what Statute he seized United Ireland; under what Statute Government officials pursued boys in the street, and took property from them without paying them for it; under what Statute hundreds and thousands of the copies of the paper were seized in England without any knowledge whatever as to whether the particular issue might contain seditious matter or not, but simply because it had the title United Ireland. He did not think the right hon. Gentleman was entitled to ride off on the plea or excuse that legal proceedings had been commenced. He had a vivid recollection of certain proceedings which were taken against the noble Marquess (the Marquess of Hartington) in regard to certain alleged illegal action he took in connection with the Phoenix Park riots. It would be remembered that by a system of legal ingenuity, which was certainly not creditable to the Government, and by the force of the public purse, the noble Marquess was able to prolong those proceedings until he beggared the plaintiff and prevented the matter coming to

  613
  an issue. If the same kind of tactics were to be pursued in this case, the Members of the House would have no explanation whatever of the conduct of the Government in regard to this newspaper for two or three years to come, when, possibly, the present Ministers would be sitting in Opposition, and then explanation would be of no consequence. He did not think the Government were treating the House respectfully, and he did not consider they were taking a courageous course. When they took violent action they ought to state what the justification was. As far as he had been able to ascertain—and he had taken legal opinion on the question for his own protection, because he did not know how soon the right hon. Gentleman might try his hand upon him—the Government had no legal justification at all. If a newspaper contained seditious matter, the Government might be right in seizing that particular copy, if they were prepared to follow up the seizure with a prosecution of those responsible for the publication; but he was not aware of any Statute whatever enabling them to suppress a newspaper in toto, regardless of whether it might contain seditious matter or not. The right hon. Gentleman had not explained another matter which certainly required some explanation. In two or three cases Coroners' juries in Ireland had found verdicts of wilful murder against agents of the Crown who had been concerned in the homicide of certain individuals in that country. In all those cases, through the action of the Crown officials, some legal technical objection had been taken to those verdicts, and no proceedings in the nature of a prosecution had been taken against the policemen and others against whom juries of their fellow-countrymen had found verdicts of wilful murder. Whenever a verdict had been found against a policeman, or any other person in the employ of the Government, for killing a humble peasant, the Crown had simply ignored the whole matter. The Government might or might not have been justified in taking a course which, on the face of it, was eminently calculated to destroy confidence in the administration of justice in Ireland; but if they were justified in taking that course they ought to give some explanations of the reasons which actuated
  614
  them. Another charge made in the Amendment was that large districts of the country had been placed under a system of quasi-martial law. The right hon. Gentleman had gone out of his way to praise one of the quasi-military governors or administrators of the country. He said that Ireland owed a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Clifford Lloyd for the manner in which he had administered the affairs of the district under his control. They knew how Mr. Clifford Lloyd got on in Belfast, it was the subject of a long discussion in the House; they knew how he got on in Limerick; and to-day they saw from The Times how he was acting in the district now assigned to him. The right hon. Gentleman denounced in strong language the practice of "Boycotting," or exclusive dealing. He said it was very wrong and very cruel; but he was not prepared to say it was illegal. It appeared that a certain Mrs. Moroney had proved herself obnoxious, and certain shopkeepers in the little town in which she lived had "Boycotted" her, had refused to supply her with goods; and that was precisely the case which might be very cruel, which morally might be very unjustifiable, but which the right hon. Gentleman would not undertake to say was illegal. The Times of that day said Mr. Clifford Lloyd had had the shopkeepers before him, and had given them three days to select whether they would supply Mrs. Moroney with goods or not. If not, he (Mr. Gray) presumed, they would be put in prison. That was the alternative. He would like to know whether that was conduct which entitled Mr. Clifford Lloyd to the thanks of the people of Ireland; and whether the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary considered that a justifiable exercise of the Coercion Act? Another matter requiring explanation was the Circular signed by Colonel Hillier, and offering rewards varying from £20 to £100 for information of crimes about to be committed. Now, in the Amendment it was asserted that that Circular was a most iniquitous document. They believed it was calculated to induce people to create crimes for the purpose of securing the rewards; and more especially so, as the Circular stated that under no circumstances would the person giving the information have his name disclosed or be in any way brought

  615
  before the public, that the information would be kept absolutely private and confidential, and that the greater the crime the greater the reward. The right hon. Gentleman had passed that over as an incident unworthy of notice; but it was a very remarkable fact that in less than a fortnight after the publication of that Circular a wonderful conspiracy was discovered in Dublin. Nothing less than an arsenal of Fenian arms of the newest pattern was discovered. It was blazened forth that this was a Fenian plot into which the Land League had developed; but its history was of a most extraordinary character. The Crown Prosecutor, when urging that the men who had. been arrested should be sent for trial, indulged in hints of disclosures of a fearful character which were to be made on a subsequent occasion. The next day he made a speech still hinting at the disclosures; but on the third day, when it became a question whether the prisoners should be committed for trial, he did not turn up at all. And after alarm had been sufficiently excited in England, and after, he presumed, the £100 reward had been paid for this wonderful discovery, what did the Crown do? They consented to the discharge of the prisoners, they totally abandoned the case, they acknowledged that the whole thing was a sham, and they dropped the matter as they would drop something that was too hot for them. This was the class of case calculated to be created by the Circular of the Constabulary, offering large rewards for information of crimes to be committed. What was more calculated to encourage that class of prejured informers which, unfortunately, disgraced Ireland than the prospect of rewards such as those offered by the Government? He would give the House one instance of the police management in Ireland. He was present at the meeting held in the Rotunda in Dublin the day after the arrest of his hon. Friend (Mr. Parnell) and the other Members of Parliament. It was a very warm meeting, no doubt, and very strong language was indulged in by himself and the other speakers in reference to the arrests; but the proceedings were of the most orderly character. There was an orderly crowd in the room, and a still larger crowd unable to obtain admission. The doors were closed, and he was requested to raise one of the windows
  616
  and inform the crowd that if they remained quiet they would be addressed, in a very few minutes, by some of the speakers. An intimation was forthwith conveyed to him that he would not be permitted to address the crowd, that no person would be even allowed to advise the crowd to disperse, and that if a window was raised and anyone attempted to speak to the people the police would charge the crowd. Now, during the two subsequent days to that, Dublin was treated by the police and military as if it was in a state of siege without the remotest justification. The people were perfectly quiet and orderly; there was a great deal of excitement which, by the action of the police, might easily have degenerated into a riot; but if any riot had occurred, the police, acting under the instructions of the right hon. Gentleman, would, undoubtedly, have been responsible. So strongly did the Corporation of Dublin, who were the only representatives of the people who could speak on such a matter, feel that a riot was calculated to be provoked by the action of the Executive, that they went down to the right hon. Gentleman and urged him to moderate the zeal of those under his control. The right hon. Gentleman met them in a very curt manner—he was never discourteous—and dismissed them, telling them it was no business of theirs. But the result of the right hon. Gentleman's action was to concentrate the police in two or three streets, and to worry, annoy, and provoke the people. He left the remainder of the city defenceless, with the result that a number of idle lads, inclined to indulge their youthful propensities, ran about the streets breaking the lamps and windows. The Representatives of the City of Dublin, who had nothing to do with the peace of the city, had, however, to pay a good many thousand pounds for the damage caused by the action of the right hon. Gentleman. When the public mind was most excited the police, under the control of the right hon. Gentleman, indulged in a course of conduct which he did not hesitate to assert would, if pursued in any town in England, have provoked a riot, and which was very nearly provoking a riot with great bloodshed in Dublin. If more important matters did not occupy his attention, he thought it would be worth while

  617
  for the right hon. Gentleman to state, now the excitement was over, what mysterious and secret information he had to justify the assumption that a breach of the peace was contemplated. As far as he (Mr. Gray) was able to ascertain, no breach of the peace was contemplated, or would have occurred, if the police had attended to their duty. A constable named Hackett had sworn an information before a magistrate that he had been ordered to attack peaceful inoffensive people. If that information was false, he could be prosecuted for perjury. But no notice was taken of the matter. The right hon. Gentleman considered a simple written answer from a member of the Police Force in regard to a matter of which he had no personal cognizance, but upon which he obtained his information from Reports received from other persons, as a sufficient answer to a sworn information. Hackett reiterated his statements, and demanded an investigation. The result was that he lost his place, was refused an investigation, and no satisfaction had ever been given to him. He asked the Government how they imagined that the present state of affairs in Ireland was going to end? Did they think that the organization of people was going to be broken, and their determination, whatever it might be, was going to be shaken by the action of the right hon. Gentleman in imprisoning 500 "suspects?" The experience of the last few months ought to tell him that, far from the spirit of the Irish people being broken, it was more determined than it ever was; and if Her Majesty's Government decided upon keeping the hon. Member for Cork City and his fellow-prisoners in Kilmainham until the Land League withdrew the "no rent" manifesto, they might keep them there until the crack of doom. Did the Government not realize that these men would only be embittered by a sense of injustice engendered in consequence of their having been incarcerated upon false and frivolous charges? Did they think that Ireland was always going to be governed by the sword; or did they calculate upon the effect that would be produced by the reversal of such a policy when the time came that it must be reversed? He had never joined in the personal denunciations of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland. He
  618
  was ready to express his own conviction that the right hon. Gentleman had made a personal sacrifice in going to Ireland. ["No, no!"] At any rate, that was his individual belief; and he did not wish to ignore the services which the right hon. Gentleman had rendered to Ireland years ago at the time of the Famine. He did not think that those services ought to be forgotten. He believed that the right hon. Gentleman went to Ireland with the best intentions. [Mr. BIGGAR: Certainly not.] He believed that the right hon. Gentleman was not received with as much consideration when he went as he might have expected; but he believed that within a very short period the right hon. Gentleman allowed himself to succumb to those influences which induced every Chief Secretary for Ireland, no matter what his views were, when he went to Ireland, to do as his Predecessors had done, when he got within the fatal circle of Dublin Castle. The right hon. Gentleman had now committed acts of tyranny unsurpassed by any of his Predecessors; and he must not wonder if the Irish people, smarting under a sense of injustice, felt extremely indignant with him. They would be less than human if, knowing that he was responsible, and knowing his antecedents, they did not feel indignant that he should have lent himself to a course of conduct of so autocratic and tyrannical a character. It was only reasonable that they should condemn in the strongest manner possible the policy he had adopted; and if he was determined to persevere with that policy, if he was really convinced that there was no other policy for Ireland, then, if he had the interests of Ireland at heart, although in so doing he might make some sacrifice of dignity, the best course he could adopt for Ireland would be to resign a position in which he found himself unable to discharge his duty in a manner satisfactory to himself or satisfactorily to the people over whom he had been placed, and for which he had proved himself unfit.
  Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Debate be now adjourned."—(Mr. Sexton.)
  THE MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON: I do not rise for the purpose of opposing the Motion for the adjournment of the debate, but simply for the purpose of

  619
  giving Notice that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will, to-morrow, at half-past 4, make the following Motion:—
  ''That the Notices of Motions he postponed until after the Order of the Day for resuming the Adjourned Debate on the Motion for an Address to Her Majesty."
  Perhaps hon. Members will agree with me that the time has now arrived when we ought to come to some agreement as to the time when the debate is to be terminated. It is not, perhaps, possible to arrive at such an understanding now; but I believe that many hon. Members are under the impression that the debate will be concluded to-morrow. It would, therefore, be advantageous if such an understanding were accepted.
  MR. REDMONDwished to avail himself of the opportunity which the Motion for adjourning the debate afforded him of making an explanation upon a personal matter. He understood that the right hon. Gentleman the First Commissioner of Works (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) charged him with having made, under cover of the Privileges of the House, statements which he dared not have made in Ireland. He wished to say that if the right hon. Gentleman who made that charge was acquainted with him (Mr. Redmond), he would know that he was not in the habit of making any statement in that House which he was not prepared to make in Ireland. The statement to which the right hon. Gentleman took exception was a statement which he (Mr. Redmond) had made in reference to the "no rent" manifesto. Now, before that manifesto was issued—indeed, on the very night of the arrest of his hon. Friend (Mr. Parnell)—he attended a meeting of the Land League in Wexford; and on that occasion he made a speech, which was reported in The Freeman's Journal, and which, no doubt, the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland read, in which he deliberately stated that it was the duty of the people of Ireland, in view of the arrest of their Leaders, to strike against the payment of rent until Mr. Parnell was released. More than that, on two separate and distinct occasions subsequently he repeated that advice. The advice had been reported, and he was happy to say that it had been taken, and was being
  620
  acted upon by the men to whom he addressed it.
  Question put, and agreed to.
  Debate further adjourned till To-morrow.

MOTIONS.

  MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS BILL.
  MOTION FOR LEAVE.
  MR. HIBBERT MR. HIBBERT, in moving for leave to bring in a Bill for consolidating enactments relating to Municipal Corporations in England and Wales, said, the Bill was identical with one introduced in the House of Lords last year by the Lord Chancellor. It was a mere Consolidation Bill, having for its object the consolidation of several Acts of Parliament. If it were found that any of the provisions of the Bill required amendment, and the Amendments were of an important character, he proposed to give Notice of them before introducing them into the Bill. If, however, any other Amendments of a substantial nature were brought forward by other hon. Members, he should be compelled to oppose them. He proposed to put down the Committee for that day fortnight.
  Motion made, and Question,
  "That leave he given to bring in a Bill for consolidating enactments relating to Municipal Corporations in England and Wales,"—(Mr. Hibbert,)
  —put, and agreed to.
  Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. HIBBERT and Secretary Sir WILLIAM HARCOURT.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 61.]

KITCHEN AND REFRESHMENT ROOMS (HOUSE OF COMMONS).

  APPOINTMENT AND NOMINATION OF SELECT COMMITTEE.
  SIR WILLIAM HART DYKE, in moving the appointment of the Kitchen and Refreshment Rooms (House of Commons) Select Committee for the present Session, said, he noticed an Amendment down in the form of an Instruction to the Committee in reference to certain entertainments given in the Dining Room by the Corporation of London, in accordance with immemorial usage, on the

  621
  occasion of presenting Petitions by the Sheriffs of London. He had only to say in regard to that matter that, so far as he was concerned, he accepted the Instruction in this respect, that it be considered by the Committee on an early day after its meeting. He could not say what the result of the consideration of the subject by the Committee would be; and he could only say that he had acted as the Chairman of the Committee now for some years, and had partaken of almost every dissipation that the House had been involved in, except dining with the Sheriffs. He had never partaken of their hospitality.
  MR. W. H. JAMESsaid, he did not wish to enter into the matter on general grounds; but complaints had been very frequently made to him and other hon. Members as to the inconvenience that arose to individual Members and Officers of the House, who found it impossible to have dinner properly served on the nights when these entertainments were given. He had always been met with the statement that the entertainments were given according to ancient usage; but there was some inaccuracy in that, as for a long time the House of Commons had no Dining Room. It was difficult to find out how the custom crept in.
  Motion agreed to.
  Ordered, That a Standing Committee be appointed to control the arrangements of the Kitchen and.Refreshment Rooms, in the department of the Serjeant at Arms attending this House:—Mr. MAURICE BROOKS, Sir WILLIAM DIKE, Mr. HENRY EDWARDS, Sir EDMUND FILMER, Sir GABRIEL GOLDNEY, Mr. GUEST, Sir ARTHUR HAYTER, Lord KENSINGTON, Mr. MONK, Mr. MUNTZ, Mr. RICHARD POWER, Lord HENRY THYNNE, Sir HENRY WOLFE, and Captain O'SHEA:—Three to he the quorum.—(Sir William Hart Dyke.)
  Instruction to the Committee to inquire and report whether it is desirable to continue the use of the House of Commons' dining room for the purpose of entertainments given by the Corporation of London, in accordance with immemorial usage, on the occasion of presenting Petitions by the Sheriffs to the House.—(Mr. Walter James.)

LOCAL GOVERNMENT (BOUNDARIES) BILL.

  MOTION FOR LEAVE.
  Motion made, and Question proposed,
  "That leave be given to bring in a Bill for the alteration of the Areas of Local Government in certain cases, and for the re-arrangement of Boundaries."—(Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice.)
  MR. CALLAN: I object, Sir.
  MR. SPEAKER: This Notice has appeared a second day on the Paper, therefore the hon. Member cannot object.
  Question put, and agreed to.
  Bill ordered to be brought in by Lord EDMOND FITZMAURICE, Mr. PELL, Mr. HOWARD, and Mr. YORKE.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 63.]

SUNDAY CLOSING (WALES) ACT (1881) AMENDMENT BILL.

  MOTION FOR LEAVE.
  Motion made, and Question proposed,
  "That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend 'The Sunday Closing (Wales) Act, 1881.'"—(Mr Warton.)
  MR. EVANS WILLIAMS, in opposing the Motion, said, he believed it was usual, by the courtesy of the House, to allow Bills to be introduced into the House of Commons without discussion, but there were well-known exceptions; and surely in the case of the hon. and learned Member for Bridport (Mr. Warton), who had asked leave to bring in this measure, there were good reasons for a departure from that practice. He (Mr. Evans Williams) did not, at that moment, know exactly how many Bills the hon. and learned Member had blocked in the course of the last Session of Parliament; but, looking at the Notice Paper, he found that he had blocked the introduction of three Bills for that evening alone. It was a matter of surprise, under the circumstances, to find that the introduction of this Bill had not been already blocked; but probably the hon. Member for Northampton (Mr. Labouchere), for good reasons of his own, had withdrawn the opposition to it of which he had given Notice. There was, in addition to the reason he had given for opposing the measure, another ground upon which leave should not be given for its introduction—namely, that the Act which it proposed to amend had not yet come into force; and the reason why it had not was solely due to the action of the hon. and learned Gentleman opposite, who now proposed to amend it. Owing to that action, the third reading of the Welsh Sunday Closing Act was postponed to the end of last Session, after it had been passed on the second reading by an over-

  623
  whelming majority; and that was because he had put down a blocking Notice against the third reading. He did this, although he had not been able to get 20 Members to vote with him against the second reading, and did not even divide against the third reading. Now, he (Mr. Evans Williams) submitted that to amend an Act perfectly well understood, and which had not yet been tried, was bad on the face of it; but that, nevertheless, was the purpose of this Bill. He had heard that the object was to limit its operation to small country places in Wales, and to do away with it altogether in the large towns. He was perfectly impartial in his opposition to this measure, because he had himself voted for a clause last Session which would have had that effect, and was the only Member from the Principality who had done so; but that had been deliberately decided otherwise then. He submitted that, for the reasons assigned, the House should not assent to the introduction of the Bill, and hoped it would emphatically reject it.
  MR. DILLWYNsaid, he should support his hon. Friend (Mr. Evans Williams) in opposing the Motion of the hon. and learned Member for Bridport (Mr. Warton). Speaking with full knowledge, he was quite sure that public feeling was against the Bill in the large town which he had the honour to represent.
  MR. WARTONsaid, he wished to say a few words with regard to the somewhat unexpected opposition made to his proposal to amend the Act of last year. He said the opposition was unexpected, because one of the reasons put forward by the hon. Member opposite, who had proposed its rejection, was of a very extraordinary character—namely, that because his (Mr. Warton's) discretion and sense of duty had led him to oppose many Radical measures, leave should not be given to bring in the Bill. He did not think that resentments dwelt in heavenly minds, still less did he expect to meet with them in the breasts of Welsh Members. But he also had a grievance, as well as the hon. Member who had spoken of the late period of last Session at which the Act was passed. The fact was, it would not have been passed at all if the undertaking given by the Premier had been observed; and the reason why it did pass was that a Saturday at the end of the Session was
  624
  an inconvenient day, on which blocking did not apply. The hon. Gentleman had told the House that he had heard what was the object of the Bill. That was perfectly correct. He heard it from the very best authority in the Smoking Room of the House, when he (Mr. Warton) communicated to him its purport in the most confiding and friendly spirit; and the hon. Gentleman, so far as he could judge, seemed rather to agree with it than otherwise. That he should now offer the Bill this extraordinary opposition he would only say had taken him (Mr. Warton) completely by surprise. As to the statement that the Act was not yet in operation, that was no fault of his. It was the fault of those who could not draw their own Bill, and he had told the Welsh Members at the time that they did not know what its effect would be. It was, then, no reason why this Bill should not be brought in, that because, owing to the terms in which the Act of last year was drawn, it had not come into force. The fact was that, in the advocacy of that measure, certain statements were made, that not only the moral population of Wales, but even the wicked publicans themselves wanted, by a large majority, to have a Bill of the kind. But he should be able to show, when he had the opportunity of giving the figures, that in one important place in Wales—to wit, the town of Cardiff—no less than 290 publicans were opposed to it; and that was a fact he desired to bring before the House in answer to those representations. The object of the Bill was to exempt from the operation of the Sunday Closing Act towns and watering places of importance in Wales, where people constantly arriving, unless the Act of last year were amended, would find themselves deprived of the means of obtaining liquor for no crime of their own. It was, therefore, with a due regard to the interest of the people of Wales that he asked for the support of their Representatives in bringing forward this Bill.
  SIR HENRY FLETCHERsaid, he had last Session supported the Bill upon this subject introduced by the hon. and learned Member for Launceston (Sir Hardinge Giffard), and he should now support the Motion of the hon. and learned Member for Bridport.
  MR. HIBBERTsaid, he should vote for the introduction of the Bill in the

  625
  usual course. He wished, however, to state that he had a distinct recollection, and he might add good authority, for saying that no pledge such as had been alluded to by the hon. and learned Member for Bridport had been given.
  Question put.
  The House divided:—Ayes 18; Noes 51: Majority 33.—(Div. List, No. 7.)

  VAGRANCY BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. PELL, Bill to amend "The Pauper Inmates' Discharge and Regulation Act, 1871," ordered to be brought in by Mr. PELL, Mr. JOHN TALIBOT, Mr. BRYCE, Mr. CHOPPER, and Mr. JOHN HOLLOND.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 62.]

  CONTAGIOUS DISEASES ACTS REPEAL BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. STANSFELD, Bill to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, ordered to be brought in by Mr. STANSFELD, Mr. WILLIAM FOWLER, Mr. HENRY H. FOWLER, Mr. JOSEPH COWEN, and Mr. P. A. TAYLOR.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 64.]

  VICE ROYALTY (IRELAND) BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. RICHARD POWER, Bill to make certain provisions dealing with the Irish Vice Royalty, ordered to be brought in by Mr. RICHARD POWER, Mr. REDMOND, Mr. METGE, and Mr. LEAMY.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 65.]

  AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS (IRELAND) BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. METGE, Bill to amend the provisions of "The Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881," relating to Agricultural Labourers, ordered to be brought in by Mr. METGE, Mr. RICHARD POWER, Mr. CALLAN, and Mr. REDMOND.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 66.]

  TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL.
  On Motion of Mr. STANLEY LEIGHTON, Bill for the abolition of the present remedy by distress for the recovery of Tithe Rent-charge, ordered to be brought in by Mr. STANLEY LEIGHTON, Mr. CROPPER, Mr. PELL, and Mr. BULWER.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 67.]
  House adjourned at a quarter after Two o'clock.

IRISH LAND COMMISSION.

  MOTION FOR RETURNS.
  LORD ORANMORE AND BROWNE, in moving for various Returns in connection with the Land Commission, said, he felt he owed an extra apology to their Lordships for bringing this question before them, as there had been already a short discussion on the matter, and there was likely to be another at the end of the week; but as he saw that their Lordships' time was not much occupied, and that there were few other occasions, unless when there were more able speakers to address them, he took advantage of the opportunity of the occasion of moving for some Papers to express to their Lordships and to the public some views with regard to the measure. He was told that some of these Returns had been granted, though, for some reason, they were not yet printed, and also that his Notice was informal. But as the rules under the Act required that the gentlemen appointed as Sub-Commissioners should have a practical knowledge of the value of land in Ireland, their Lordships and the public had a right to know in what manner the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant had ascertained that they possessed the necessary qualifications. If a fair rent was to be ascertained, it was desirable that the Sub-Commissioners should possess a practical acquaintance with the value of land in Ireland; but he thought that a practical knowledge of the value of the land of a whole country was a thing which it would be very difficult to attain, and he doubted whether one individual possessed such an extensive knowledge. The Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant stated that he had had interviews with the Sub-Commissioners, but that he had given them no instructions, and that it would be highly improper for him to do so. But if the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant gave them no instructions, it was the duty of the Chief Commissioner to give them some. As Parliament refused to lay down any
  478
  basis of valuation, and no instructions were given them, then these gentlemen had to discharge their duties according to their own fancy or caprice. As to their capabilities, he would not offer any criticism, because they would be tested probably before the Commission to be appointed—at least, some examination would be made as to what basis they acted upon. He was of opinion—and the Lord Privy Seal admitted it the other night—that the Commissioners had no possible choice except to begin on the valuation which already existed. They must have taken as their starting point Griffith's Valuation to ascertain what was a fair rent; but they should have considered under what circumstances that valuation had been made, and the circumstances at the present time. There was no less than 60 per cent increase in value in the ordinary products of the land, and that should be considered in fixing the fair rent. The valuation made by a glimpse at each holding, especially small tenants' holdings, where generally not an acre had been dug or ploughed since the crop was taken out, only exposed the law to ridicule. The majority of cases before the Land Courts dealt with small holdings of about 10 acres, divided into 10 fields; and it was impossible for the Commissioners to give the time necessary to go over each of these properly and make a satisfactory valuation. Again, it was quite unjust to take Griffith's Valuation as the criterion of rent without remembering that it was made for taxation, not for rent; that Sir Richard Griffith based it on the price of agricultural produce at the time it was made; that the increase in value of all such produce was very large, and that he stated that a large percentage should be added in estimating rent. Besides, there were no railways at the time. Land near railways, near towns and villages where great fairs were held, had an artificial value, though, of course, in a much less degree than building-land, and, save in considerable towns, the Sub-Commissioners had ignored these circumstances. The standard, therefore, taken by the Sub-Commissioners for fair rents—namely, the Ordnance value less possible tenants' improvements, ignoring all these circumstances, was, on the face of it, unjust and unfair. The noble Lord (Lord Carlingford) said the land-

  479
  lords, in many districts, were quite satisfied with the decisions of the Courts. Well, he supposed the rich landlords did not care to spend all their lives in litigation with their tenants in appealing to the higher Courts on points of law; and as to the poorer landowners, he was sure their Lordships did not know the unfortunate position they were in. Many of them were unable to appear before the Court on account of the expense, which averaged £10, including valuation and costs. The Government could hardly expect, where all the circumstances were considered, to secure the confidence of the Irish landlords or their friends; and they could hardly be aware of the number of men, women, and children—law-abiding people, against whose character nothing could be said—who would be utterly ruined by the unfortunate measure, carried out as it was likely to be, judging by precedent and examples. A few words as to valuing land on the "live and thrive" principle. The Lord Privy Seal ignored this; the Chief Secretary for Ireland accepted it. If it was the duty of Government to see that every subject could live and thrive, it was a Herculean task. There were said to be 250,000 people in this Metropolis who rose every morning not knowing where they could get their breakfast. Here was plenty of employment for the Home Secretary. But in this theory the fallacy, so far as regarded the small tenant in Ireland, lay in the fact that he did not live or depend on his holding of land. Commonly he was a migratory labourer; half his time was spent working in Great Britain, and he commonly returned to Ireland with from £ 10 to £20 in his pocket. If the "live and thrive "theory was to prevail, the Commissioners would have to consider all the ways and means of the tenant in order to assess a fair rent. He believed that on the "live and thrive "principle, in ordinary years, a small holder in Ireland was better off than an under-gardener in Kensington Gardens. The latter earned 21 s. a-week, out of which he had to pay 6s. 6d. a-week for his lodging; while the small tenant in Ireland had generally a three-roomed house, and seven acres of land and free turbary for about 2s. 6d. a - week. He had a Question on the Paper—namely, to ask Her Majesty's Government whether
  480
  the gentleman who now holds the appointment of Solicitor to the Land Commission in Ireland was previously Solicitor of the Land League? Report said that the Solicitor to the Land Commission had resigned; but he did not know whether that was so or not. He did not wish to speak disrespectfully of any member of the Commission; but he asserted that if Mr. Fottrell really had been the solicitor usually employed by the managers of the Land League, he was not a proper person to make Solicitor to the Land Court. With respect to the unlucky pamphlet entitled How to become the Owner of your Farm, it seemed strange that Mr. Godley should have sanctioned its issue and yet have remained unaware of its contents. Mr. Godley was considered an excellent business man; but excellent men of business were not in the habit of tendering their sanction to the circulation of documents without knowing what those documents contained. It was said that the pamphlet was published without the approbation of the high officials. Justice O'Hagan must have had some idea that the pamphlet was to be issued.
  LORD CARLINGFORDsaid, Justice O'Hagan had stated that he was unaware of the publication of the pamphlet.
  LORD ORANMORE AND BROWNEsaid, he did not doubt the honour of Justice O'Hagan; but there was every reason to believe that his Lordship knew something about the matter. The whole story was very remarkable, and was not rendered less so by the official explanations. Indeed, it was not easy to avoid the suspicion that Mr. Fottrell had been made the scapegoat for the sins of his superiors. All things considered, he could not imagine that the Government expected the landlords to repose much confidence in the Land Court. Perhaps they did not know how many owners of property in Ireland had been utterly ruined by the administration of their Act. And not only the interested opponents and victims of the measure, but also dispassionate critics at home and abroad, had condemned its principles and its probable effect. The French Temps, for instance, regarded the Act as a socialistic measure of spoliation and expropriation, and a step towards the equalization of

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  property. Lord Derby, one of the ablest of the English critics of the Act, after clearly demonstrating that all the remedial measures passed had been concessions extorted by agrarian violence and crime, had said that the only reason for his vote in its favour was his expectation that it might prevent the alienation of the Northern Irish from English rule. In his speech at Liverpool, however, Lord Derby had asked what the Irish landowners would do if they were left face to face with the Irish people. That was much the same as to ask what would happen to Londoners if the police were suddenly withdrawn. It seemed to him that the possible abdication of its duties by the Government was a very singular argument for a remedial measure. The situation of affairs which followed the passing of the Land Act was this. Mr. Parnell was aware that if he did not make violent speeches the American subscriptions would fall off; and as the Government was able, under the Coercion Bill, to prevent him stopping the operation of the Act, he seized the opportunity of being made a martyr, with the prospect of being ready for action when the Coercion Act had lapsed. The same course was taken in 1870, when the Land Act was accompanied by coercive laws in some respects more stringent than the present Act. Then crime increased as coercion diminished; and, no doubt, this experience would be repeated, as the Prime Minister would again have to bid for the Irish vote. The Premier was eager to establish local government in Ireland, and to consider how a separate Parliament could be established with safety to Imperial interests. What was to be the result for the unfortunate people of Ireland? He predicted that the result of measures of this description would be the delivery of Ireland up to a state of violence and anarchy such as rarely or ever existed, he supposed, since the great French Revolution. Even now there would have been an absolute dissolution of society if it had not been for the Coercion Act and the Army. When the Coercion Act expired, the Land League would re-assert itself, and anarchy and bloodshed would pursue their course unchecked. The noble Lord concluded by moving for the Returns of which he had given Notice.
  Moved, That there be laid before this House—
  "A Return of names of Sub-Commissioners appointed under Land Act (Ireland), 1881; with explanation in each case of what means were taken by the Lord Lieutenant to ascertain that the person appointed possessed 'a practical acquaintance with the value of land in Ireland,' as required by 10th section of General Rules and Orders made in accordance with section 50. of said Act:
  "Also, A Return showing in what cases Commissioners or Sub-Commissioners under Irish Land Act, 1881, have availed themselves of the power contained in clause 37, section 6, and also in clause 48, section 4, of said Act, of directing an independent valuer to report, &c. as to value of holding:
  "A Return of all cases tried before Commissioners or Sub-Commissioners under Irish Land Act of 1881 settling fair rent; showing the old rent, the Ordnance value, the acreage, and judicial rent of each holding; showing separately all cases adjudicated on at each sitting of Sub-Commissioners or Assistant Barrister in each town; also the time (if any) spent by Sub-Commissioners or Sub-Commissioner in such locality during such sitting in visiting in person the holdings, as contemplated in 20th Rule made by Commissioners under 50th clause of Irish Land Act:
  "Also, A Statement of the profession or occupation followed by Sub - Commissioners during twelve months previous to their appointment."—(The Lord Oranmore and Browne.)
  LORD CARLINGFORDsaid, he did not complain of the Returns being moved for, although the noble Lord appeared to have anticipated that he would do so. Nor did he complain of the statement of the noble Lord's views on a variety of Irish topics, beyond saying that the noble Lord had not given the slightest hint that such a statement was to be made, or that there would be anything more than a formal Motion for unopposed Returns. Their Lordships would agree with him that it would be more convenient that he should reserve anything he had to say about the working of the Irish Land Act until the subject was brought forward in a more regular way, as it would be in a day or two. This course would be the more convenient, as the noble Lord had, besides commenting on some observations he made last week, devoted a large part of his speech to criticizing the views of the Earl of Derby, who was not present. Therefore, with all respect for the noble Lord, he would confine himself to the matter of the Returns. An important portion of them had been already laid on the Table, and would soon be in their Lordships' hands. These were

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  the Returns relating to the cases tried. The information asked for in the first part of the Motion was hardly subject-matter for a Return. No doubt the Chief Secretary for Ireland would be prepared to explain that he made private inquiries in the ordinary way to satisfy himself as to the knowledge and qualifications of the gentlemen appointed; but that was not information that could be embodied in the columns of a Return. With that exception, he should be glad to give the information asked for. As a portion of it had been already supplied, he would amend the form of the Return, so as to make it describe the supplementary information to be granted. As to the noble Lord's Question, he informed the House the other day that Mr. Fottrell, the Solicitor to the Land Commission, had sent in his resignation, and it had been accepted by the Commission, so that he was no longer Solicitor to the Commission; but the reply to the present Question was that he had not previously been the Solicitor to the Land League.
  THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: Upon no occasion the Solicitor for the Land League.
  LORD CARLINGFORDsaid, that he had made inquiry with regard to the statement that had appeared in the newspapers, and found that Mr. Fottrell was, upon one occasion, employed by Mr. Parnell and some other persons in connection with the purchase of a newspaper which subsequently became United Ireland; but that fact was not known when he was appointed Solicitor to the Land Commission. If what the noble Lord said meant anything, it meant that the Government and their Lordships were not to believe Mr. Godley, the Secretary of the Land Commission, on his word, or Mr. Justice O'Hagan on his word. The noble Lord said he had no doubt that Mr. Justice O'Hagan was an honourable man. What the noble Lord's idea of an honourable man was he did not know; but he left it to the noble Lord to reconcile those two statements. It appeared to him that the noble Lord was determined not to believe the assertion upon his word of this honourable man. The Government had not the slightest shadow of doubt as to the absolute and literal truth of the statements made by the Land Commissioners and by Mr. Godley as to their
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  entire ignorance of the contents of the pamphlet when it was issued, and as to the truth of the assertion that the moment they discovered the nature of its contents they stopped its further issue. In the great pressure of work it was possible that a mistake might be committed by the most honourable and the most efficient public servants, among whom Mr. Godley must be reckoned. Mr. Godley had tendered his resignation; but the Land Commission did not deem it their duty to accept it.
  LORD DUNSANYsaid, he was glad to hear that Mr. Fottrell was no longer connected with the Land Commission, because, from the information which had reached him, there was reason to suppose that he was himself the author of the letters on which the pamphlet was founded; and, assuming this, its own internal evidence showed that the writer was deeply imbued with the principles of the Land League. He did not speak with any personal feeling against Mr. Fottrell. He was very glad, in one sense, that the circumstance had occurred, because it had led to the lifting up of one corner of the curtain, and had allowed them to have a little peep into the Land Court. They had a glimpse of a full-length portrait of the Land Court Solicitor. His features were not pleasant; and he hoped they would have, at some future time, full-length portraits of the Judges to whom Her Majesty's Government had committed the property of all the landlords of Ireland. It was necessary that the officers of such a Court should be persons of the utmost impartiality. Whether Mr. Fottrell was connected with the Land League or not, the Land Court had been circulating for six weeks a seditious and most objectionable pamphlet. Naturally enough, they looked to the Prime Minister for an explanation of the publication of that pamphlet; and what was that explanation? Simply that there had been a miscarriage of a most remarkable character. Now, it seemed to him that, from Mr. Fottrell's known political proclivities, the Government might have expected something to happen of a remarkable character. The idea of a miscarriage was something premature, and possibly Mr. Gladstone thought the appearance of this pamphlet was premature. He knew nothing about that; but it appeared to him that the miscarriage was a breach of the 11th

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  Commandment—"Thou Shalt not be found out.
  EARL FORTESCUEsaid, he thought the explanation given by Her Majesty's Government was far from satisfactory. It appeared to him that they should have marked their indignation by the summary dismissal of Mr. Fottrell, and should not have allowed him to resign.
  THE EARL OF KIMBERLEY: The Government had nothing to do with the appointment.
  EARL FORTESOUE: Am I to understand that it is in the gift of the Court?
  THE EARL OF KIMBERLEY: Yes.
  EARL FORTESCUEwent on to remark that, in his opinion, the Land Court was dealing with the ease in a spirit of extraordinary tenderness. He had not read the pamphlet; but if it was such as had been described by Members of the Government, such an abuse as its circulation, in the name of the Commissioners, was not calculated to enhance the opinion which would be entertained in the country of the impartiality of the Land Court. In regard to Mr. Godley, he might be a valuable officer; but what had happened would, he believed, very seriously shake the public confidence in Mr. Godley's fitness for his place, inasmuch as, after serving some months with him in the same Office, he had relied on a partizan like Mr. Fottrell, and had blindly endorsed his recommendation. As to the Sub-Commissioners, from what he had learnt publicly and privately, he believed that, in spite of the Government's grand professions of impartiality, the appointments of several of them were neither better nor worse than the political appointments made for many years by successive Governments in Ireland.
  EARL STANHOPEsaid, he hoped the Government would give their Lordships some information as to the amount of time which would be required for deciding all the cases which had been presented to the Land Commissioners. It had been stated that, at the present rate of progress observed, decisions on those various cases could not be given within the present century. It would be interesting to hear whether the Government had made any calculation on that point.
  LORD CARLINGFORDsaid, that it would be quite impossible for him to give the noble Earl any satisfactory
  486
  answer on that point. Such a question was not to be answered by a mere arithmetical calculation, as the result would depend upon facts which no one could predict with certainty. But it might relieve the noble Earl's mind to say that the number of cases settled voluntarily out of Court was very large, and was increasing daily.
  THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, there is more reason for surprise at what the noble Lord the Lord Privy Seal has not told us than at what he has told us. I was very much struck that the noble Lord passed without observation an important statement made by my noble and gallant Friend behind me (Lord Dunsany), to the effect that these letters, which were boiled down into the form of a pamphlet and circulated throughout Ireland, were actually written by Mr. Fottrell. I do not know whether that is so or not; but probably my noble and gallant Friend would be well informed on the subject, and would not speak without authority. But if the Government admit that by silence, it certainly throws a new light upon Mr. Godley's assent to the publication. But, in any case, whether Mr. Fottrell was the original author or not, or had anything to do with the concoction of this pamphlet or not, the Government must have known that he was strongly imbued with the principles of the Land League; and they hardly seem to take a sufficiently grave view of the character of Mr. Godley's action in the matter. They seem to think that if they once establish that he knew nothing about it they have achieved a great triumph. But I would really rather that Mr. Godley had known something about it. It seems to me so tremendous a thing that in the administration of a law affecting the future happiness of Ireland for generations the Secretary of a Commission should circulate a Circular which purports to be a statement of the views of the Land Commission upon the most vital points, not only without reading it, but without having the slightest idea of what it contained. It seems to me only part of the strange and mysterious inadvertence with which it has been the fate of the Government to be attended in all their dealings with Ireland. I had rather, I say, that Mr. Godley had known something of the matter, because, whatever his personal opinions were,

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  similar conduct might be prevented for the future by adequate care. I confess that I should hear with some satisfaction that some graver notice had been taken than a mere refusal to receive Mr. Godley's resignation on account of this very serious neglect, or more than neglect, on his part. Whether Mr. Fottrell was the author of these letters or not, Mr. Godley must have had a very shrewd idea of what his proclivities were, and either he must have been inconceivably careless, or had an impression that his superiors would view without distate his adopting that side of the controversy in Ireland.
  EARL GRANVILLE: My Lords, I must point out the inconvenience of what has happened this evening. There is a very important Notice on the Paper about the administration of the Land Act, upon which there is very likely to be a long debate, and now a number of questions are asked on the subject. The noble Earl below the Gangway (Earl Fortescue) has rushed to the front at once—as he is apt to do—and condemned the Land Commission without having read the pamphlet in question.
  EARL FORTESCUE: I heard of it from the Government.
  EARL GRANVILLE: The noble Earl has not read the pamphlet; he does not seem to have read the Papers presented to the House; and he did not know whether it was for the Government or the Land Commission to take action against the Solicitor, yet he immediately condemned the Government for not taking immediate action. Before there had been time to take action Mr. Fottrell had sent in his resignation, which was accepted. I have at this moment information which I think has a great bearing upon the appointment of that gentleman; but I prefer waiting till Friday to give it. With regard to what the noble Marquess (the Marquess of Salisbury) has said, I quite agree that it was certainly wrong for the Secretary to sanction the publication of any document without having made himself master of it. But I have been connected with official life for many years, and it is idle to pretend that the head of an Office is never to accept the judgment of a trusted subordinate on a long document which has not had time to master. Will the noble Marquess say that he has never shown such confi-
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  dence? Certainly, Mr. Godley has been a singularly diligent public servant, by the concurrent evidence of all who have known him.
  Motion amended, and agreed to.
  Resolved, That there be laid before this House—
  Return of names of Assistant Commissioners appointed under The Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881:
  Also, Return showing in what cases the Commissioners or Assistant Commissioners under the Act have availed themselves of the power contained in clause 37, sub-section 6, and also in clause 48, sub-section 4, of the Act, of directing an independent valuer to report, &c. as to value of holding:
  Also, Return of the time spent by each Sub-Commission at each town where sittings were held, stating how much of such time was spent in court and how much in visiting holdings, in accordance with rule 20 of the Irish Land Commission:
  Also, Statement of the profession or occupation followed by Sub-Commissioners during twelve months previous to their appointment.
  House adjourned at half past Six o'clock, till To-morrow, Eleven o'clock.