Sitting of 25 May 1905

Preamble
The House met at Two of the Clock.

MR. SPEAKER'S ABSENCE.
The House being met, the Clerk at the Table informed the House of the unavoidable absence of Mr. SPEAKER, owing to continued indisposition.
Whereupon Mr. JAMES WILLIAM LOWTHER, the Chairman of Ways and Means, proceeded to the Table, and, after Prayers, took the Chair as Deputy-Speaker, pursuant to the Standing Order.

PRIVATE BILL BUSINESS.

  PROVISIONAL ORDER BILLS (STANDING ORDERS APPLICABLE THERETO COMPLIED WITH).
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKERlaid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petition for Private Bills, That, in the case of the following Bill, referred on the First Reading thereof, the Standing Orders which are applicable thereto have been complied with, viz.:—Local Government Provisional Orders (No. 12) Bill.
  Ordered, That the Bill be read a second time To-morrow.

  CANALS BILL (STANDING ORDERS AP PLICABLE THERETO NOT COMPLIED WITH).
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKERlaid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, pursuant to the Older of the House of the 22nd day of this instant May, That, in the case of the following Bill, the Standing Orders which, are applicable thereto have not been complied with, viz.:—Canals Bill.
  Ordered, That the Report be referred to the Select Committee on Standing Orders.
  Wrexham Gas Bill. Lords Amendments considered, and agreed to.
  London and North Western Railway Bill (King's Consent signified). Read the third time, and passed.
  Mexborough and Swinton Tramways (Extension of Time) Bill [Lords]. Read the third time, and passed, with Amendments.
  Rhondda Urban District Council Bill. Read the third time, and passed.
  Local Government Provisional Orders (No. 17) Bill. "To confirm certain Provisional Orders of the Local Government Board relating to Milton-next-Sittingbourne, Sittingbourne and Milton (Rural), and the Enfield and Edmonton Joint Hospital District," presented by Mr. G rant Lawson; supported by Mr. Gerald Balfour; read the first time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 228.]
  Local Government Provisional Orders (No. 6) Bill. Reported, without Amendment [Provisional Orders confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill to be read the third time Tomorrow.
  Local Government Provisional Orders (No. 7) Bill. Reported, without Amendment [Provisional Orders confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill to be read the third time Tomorrow.
  Local Government Provisional Orders (No. 8) Bill. Reported, without Amendment [Provisional Orders confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill to be read the third time Tomorrow
  Local Government Provisional Orders (No. 9) Bill. Reported, without Amendment [Provisional Orders confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill to be read the third time Tomorrow.
  Local Government Provisional Order (Gas) Bill. Reported, without Amendment [Provisional Order confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill to be read the third time Tomorrow.
  Local Government (Ireland) Provisional Orders (No. 3) Bill. Reported,

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  without Amendment [Provisional Orders confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill to be read the third time Tomorrow.
  Electric Lighting Provisional Orders (No. 7) Bill. Reported, with Amendments [Provisional Orders confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill, as amended, to be considered To-morrow.
  Municipal Corporations (Merthyr Tydfil Scheme Confirmation) Bill [Lords]. Reported, with Amendments [Scheme confirmed]; Report to lie upon the Table.
  Bill, as amended, to be considered upon Monday, 5th June.
  Midland Railway Bill; Caledonian Railway Bill. Reported, with Amendments; Reports to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.
  Metropolitan Railway Bill [Lords]. Reported, without Amendment; Report to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.
  Worcestershire County Council (Bridges) Bill. Reported, with Amendments; Report to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.

  MESSAGE FROM THE LORDS.
  That they have agreed to—South Suburban Gas Bill; Nottingham and Retford Railway Bill, without Amendment.
  South Metropolitan Gas Bill, with an Amendment.
  Amendments to—Leeds and Liverpool Canal Bill [Lords] Metropolitan District Railway Bill [Lords]; Orphan Working School and Alexandra Orphanage Bill [Lords], without Amendment.
  That they have passed a Bill, intituled, "An Act to provide for the granting of Superannuation Allowances to the Officers and Servants of the Council of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney; and for other purposes." [Stepney Borough Council (Superannuation) Bill [Lords.]
  Also, a Bill, intituled," An Act to amend the Acts relating to the Tees Valley Water Board, and to confer further borrowing and other powers on the Tees Valley Water Board." [Tees Valley Water Board Bill [Lords.]
  Also, a Bill, intituled, "An Act to incorporate a board of trustees, and to authorise them to acquire the Workington Harbour and Lonsdale Dock undertaking, in the county of Cumberland; and to construct an extension pier at Working-ton; and for other purposes." [Workington Harbour and Dock Bill [Lords.]
  And, also, a Bill, intituled, "An Act to empower the Corporation of Hythe to construct additional waterworks; to make further provision for the improvement of the borough; and for other purposes." [Hythe Corporation Bill [Lords.]
  Stepney Borough Council (Superannuation) Bill [Lords]; Tees Valley Water Board Bill [Lords]; Workington Harbour and Dock Bill [Lords]; Hythe Corporation Bill [Lords]. Read the first time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills.

PETITIONS.
  EDUCATION (PROVISION OF MEALS) BILL.
  Petitions from Aberdeen, in favour; to lie upon the Table.
  SALE OF INTOXICATING LIQUORS (SUNDAY) BILL.
  Petition from Northfield, in favour; to lie upon the Table.
  UNEMPLOYED WORKMEN BILL.
  Petition from Aberdeen, n favour; to lie upon the Table.
RETURNS, REPORTS, ETC.
  MILITIA (SERVICE OUTSIDE UNITED, KINGDOM).
  Return [presented 24th May] to be printed. [No. 172.]
  INEBRIATE REFORMATORIES (SCOT LAND) (REGULATIONS).
  Copy presented, of General Regulations for the management and discipline of certified Inebriate Reformatories in Scotland [by Command]; to lie upon the Table.

  RAILWAY ACCIDENTS.
  Copy presented, of Returns of Cases of Derailment of Engines of Passenger Trains into which Inquiries have been held by the Inspecting Officers of Railways, during the twenty years ending 31st December, 1904, divided into—I.

  Loans raised in sums not exceeding £100 otherwise than by the issue of stock.

  Amount standing to the credit, on the 31st day of March, 1905 of sinking funds or other funds provided for the repayment of these Outstanding Loans.

  17. Were the sums borrowed applied to purposes for which the Council had been duly authorised to raise Loans, and, if not, how were they used?

  Loans secured on mortgage of rates or funds administered by the Council, or of any land, works, or other property belonging to them.

  Other Loans raised as above mentioned.

  Total amount outstanding on the 31st day of March, 1905

  1. Name of Borough.

  Minimum amount which the Council—

  4. Rate or rates of interest payable.

  5. Period for which borrowed.

  6. Number of persons holding these mortgages.

  7. In what manner and on what security borrowed.

  Minimum amount which the Council—

  10. Rate or rates of interest payable.

  11. Period for which borrowed or terms on which repayment is to be made of sums borrowed.

  12. Number of persons from whom the Council had received these Loans in sums not exceeding £100.

  2. Were prepared to accept.

  3. actually received.

  8. Were prepared to accept.

  9. actually received.

  13. Loans secured on mortgage.

  14. Other Loans.

  15. Loans secured on mortgage.

  16. Other Loans.

  18. Remarks.

  £

  £

  £ per cent

  £

  £

  £ per cent

  £

  £

  £

  £

  Tank Engines, and II. Tender Engines, showing in each case the Date, place of Accident, and Railway, and the Class of Engine [by Command]; to lie upon the Table.

  BOROUGHS (ENGLAND AND WALES) (OUTSTANDING LOANS).
  Return ordered, "giving the names of the Boroughs in England and Wales, the Councils of which, on the 31st day of March, 1905, had Outstanding Loans raised in sums not exceeding £100, otherwise than by the issue of stock, and giving particulars respecting such Loans in the following form:—
  EAST INDIA (INCOME AND EX- PENDITURE).
  Address for "Return of the net Income and Expenditure of British India under certain specific heads for the eleven years from 1893–4 to 1903–4 (in continuation of Parliamentary Paper, No. 168, of Session 1904)." (Sir Henry Fowler.)
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS CIRCULATED WITH THE VOTES.

  Fall in Price of Sugar—Suggested Reduction of Import Duty.
  COLONEL SADLER: To ask Mr. Chancellar of the Exchequer if his attention has been directed to the fall in the price of sugar, to-day's value being 5s. per cwt. below what it was in January last, whilst new crop sugar is quoted at under 10s. per cwt., or less than one penny per pound; and whether, having regard to the relative rate of the duty to the total value of sugar when it was imposed, he will favourably consider a pro rata reduction.
  (Answered by Mr. Austen Chamberlain.) Yes, Sir, I am aware of the fall in the price of sugar from the abnormal prices of last January, but I cannot admit the possibility of varying the duty pro rata with changes of price. The hon. Member is in error in thinking that the price of sugar is lower than it was when the duty was imposed.

  Alleged III-Treatment of a Prisoner at Thurles Lock-up.
  MR. KENDAL O'BRIEN: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been drawn to the proceedings at the inquest held on the body of William Fryday, at Ballyduagh, county Tipperary, on the 22nd day of April last, at which the son of deceased, Francis S. Fryday, swore that his father told him before his death that the police took off his boots whilst in the lock-up at Thurles on the 15th April on a charge of drunkenness and hit him under the eye with one of his boots, and that he was also knocked against the wall, and that he was taken by the police from the lockup to an out-house in the barrack yard in his stockings, and that his request for
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  a magistrate to be sent for was refused, and to the evidence of the doctor, examined at the inquest, that deceased came by his death through peritonitis, following rupture of the spleen, caused by external violence, and that Constables Vaughan and Barrett, who assisted Constable O'Connell to take deceased from the lock-up to the out-house in the yard, were not examined at the inquest; and whether an inquiry will be ordered to be held into the allegations that the cause of the death of the deceased was his ill-treatment by the police.
  (Answered by Mr. Walter Long.) I have received a report from the police authorities to the effect that on the 15th April last William Fryday, while in custody in the lock-up of the police station in Thurles upon the charge of being drunk and incapable on the public street, created a continuous uproar by shouting and kicking the door of his cell at a time when a magisterial investigation was being conducted in the station. It was found necessary to remove his boots and transfer him to another portion of the building. He resisted violently, and in his struggles struck his head against the door post, cutting his eye. He was discharged from custody later upon the same day, when, for the first time, he complained of having been ill-treated by the police. He asked to see the head constable, who was then absent, but refused to wait for his arrival. Fryday died on the 21st April, and, as the result of a post-mortem examination, the jury at a coroner's inquest found that death was due to peritonitis, resulting from rupture of the spleen The police proved that no violence was offered to him, and that at no time did he request to see a magistrate. The three constables named in the Question were present at the inquest, but the coroner and the jury intimated that they did not require their evidence, all the facts having been proved by other witnesses. Under these circumstances, I see no ground for imputing any blame to the police, and no necessity for further inquiry.

  Misappropriation of Funds by Late Staff Officer of Royal Irish Constabulary.
  MR. NANNETTI: To ask the Chief Secretary to

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  the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether, as A result of his investigation into the accounts of the late staff officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary Department, Dublin Castle, he has directed that the sum of £433 10s. 4d. be refunded to the widow of the said staff officer, the said sum having been deducted from an amount due on foot of an insurance policy on her late husband's life by direction of the Chief Crown Solicitor.
  (Answered by Mr. Walter Long.) The reply is in the negative. Legal proceedings for the recovery of the sum misappropriated were instituted against the widow, and as a result she paid the sum in question out of a policy of insurance on the life of the deceased.

  Pollution of Thames Estuary by Sewage Discharge from Forts and Barracks.
  SIR JOSEPH DIMSDALE: To ask the Secretary of State for War whether he is aware that the estuary of the Thames is being polluted by the discharge of crude sewage from forts and barracks at Tilbury and Gravesend; and whether, if the War Office is unable to proceed with the works necessary for the purification of the sewage during the current financial year owing to funds not being available for the purpose, he will take steps, by a Supplementary Estimate or otherwise, to remove this difficulty, and in the interest of the public health have the works carried out without further delay.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Arnoldforster.) Schemes have been prepared for the septic treatment of sewage from the War Department barracks and forts at Gravesend and Tilbury, and part of the work at Gravesend has already been done.

  Postmarks on Letters Showing Time of Posting.
  MR. TALBOT: To ask the Postmaster-General whether he will consider the practicability of detaching the date postmark from the obliterating mark upon the face of letters (as is already done in London) so as to enable the time of posting, which is now often illegible, to be easily read.
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  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) I fear that it is not possible to adopt the hon. Member's suggestion generally. The electrically-driven stamping machines, which are in use to some extent in London and elsewhere, separate the dated postmark from the obliterating stamp; but these machines can only be used with advantage at offices where the stamping to be done is great in amount and continuous. Double hand-stamps were tried at one time, but they were found to be too large and heavy for easy use.

  Delivery of Letters to Callers on Public Holidays.
  MR. WEIR: To ask the Postmaster-General whether he has yet arrived at a decision in regard to the general question of the delivery of letters to callers on public holidays.
  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) Yes, and I have issued instructions that on bank holidays, and on public holidays in Scotland observed by the Department in the same way as bank holidays, persons who are not private box renters or entitled to use the poste restante may, on payment of a special fee of 3d., obtain at the counter of offices open to the public on those days any correspondence addressed to them which may be available and readily accessible at the time of calling. The arrangement will be duly notified in the next issue of the Post Office Guide.

  Postal Deliveries at Staveley Head, near Kendal.
  CAPTAIN BAGOT: To ask the Postmaster-General whether he is aware that at Staveley Head, near Kendal, there are nine houses having only two postal deliveries a week, whereas at Staveley Park, within half a mile of Staveley Head, there are only two houses with two deliveries a day; and whether he will endeavour to arrange, by slightly altering the route of the local postman or otherwise, to give the houses at Staveley Head a daily delivery.
  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) I am not aware of the circumstances as regards the deliveries at Staveley Head, but I

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  will make inquiry into the matter and acquaint the hon. Member with the result.

  Postal Charges to Canada.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: To ask the Postmaster-General whether he has received from Lord Strathcona, High Commissioner for Canada, representations upon the subject of the postal charges to Canada; whether the High Commissioner has forwarded a copy of the debate in the Canadian Senate on the subject; and whether he is able to say if this matter will be submitted for consideration at the Colonial Conference of 1906.
  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) Representations on the subject from the Canadian Government, together with a report of the debate in the Canadian Senate, have reached my hands, though not through Lord Strathcona; and I expressed my views fully on the matter to a deputation, including Members of this House, a short time since. I have no intention of submitting the question for consideration to the Colonial Conference; but I am unable to say whether it will or will not be raised at the Conference by the Colonial Delegates.

  Empire Cables and the Colonial Conference.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: To ask the Postmaster-General whether the resolutions adopted by a number of Chambers of Commerce of the Empire respecting Empire cables have been brought under his notice; and if he intends submitting, at the Colonial Conference of 1906, any scheme or policy with respect to Empire cables.
  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) No recent representations on the subject of the hon. Member's Question have been addressed to me, and I do not feel called upon to submit to the Colonial Conference any scheme of the kind he suggests.

  Cable Communication—Agreement be tween the Government and the Indo European Telegraph Company.
  SIR EDWARD SASSOON: To ask the Postmaster-General whether, having regard to the recommendation
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  made in the first Report of Lord Balfour's Inter-Departmental Committee on Cable Communications (pp. 10 and 11) concerning the Joint-Purse Agreement relating to the transmission of telegrams to and from India, any arrangement has been concluded between His Majesty's Government and the Indo-European Telegraph Company in connection with the recent renewal of the leasing of land wires in this country and submarine cable wires between Lowestoft and the German coast; whether the terms of such agreement, if any, would be furnished to this House; and what effect such arrrangement will have in the direction of terminating or modifying the period of duration of the Joint-Purse Agreement as recommended in the Report of the above-mentioned Committee.
  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) The negotiations recommended by Lord Balfour's Committee proved to be complicated and difficult, and it was not found practicable to effect the termination of the Joint-Purse Agreement in the manner proposed; but, in connection with the renewal of the lease of wires to the Indo-European Telegraph Company, to which the hon. Member refers, steps were taken to provide, as far as possible, that obstacles should not be placed in the way of reasonable reductions of tariff in the future. This was the main ground on which Lord Balfour's Committee, desired to terminate the Joint-Purse Agreement.

  Work of Coleraine Post Office.
  MR. JAMES O'CONNOR: To ask the Postmaster-General whether he has made inquiries into the action of the surveyor in ordering special returns to be made out dealing with the work at the Coleraine Post Office; whether he can state the result of his inquiries; and whether he can give the reason for altering the returns.
  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) No, Sir. I have not made any inquiries, as I consider the matter should be left to the discretion of the surveyor.

  Sick Leave in tin Post Office.
  MR CLAUDE HAY: To ask the Postmaster-General whether the periods of annual leave and bank holiday reliefs are included in the six-months leave which an officer may be allowed on full pay in the case of sickness on a medical certificate; and, if so, what is the reason for counting these periods as sick leave.
  (Answered by Lord Stanley.) Under regulations applicable to the Civil Service generally, absence from duty on full pay, whether on account of annual, bank holiday, or sick leave, cannot exceed six months in any one year. The regulation seems to be liberal.

  Sanitary Condition of Schools at Barvas, Island of Lewis.
  MR. WEIR: To ask the Lord-Advocate whether the local authority for the parish of Barvas, Island of Lewis, has submitted to the Local Government Board a detailed report by Dr. Ross, the medical officer of health for the parish, setting forth particulars of the defective water supply and other sanitary defects in seven public schools within the parish; and, in view of the fact that the health of the children attending these schools is endangered, will he state what action it is proposed to take in the matter.
  (Answered by Mr. Scott Dickson.) The Secretary for Scotland is not satisfied that the information before him enables him to give a complete Answer to the hon. Member's Question. He is consulting with the Local Government Board, and will communicate further with the hon. Member.

  Isolation of Liverpool Smallpox Hospitals.
  MR. BAYLEY: To ask the President of the Local Government Board whether he has supplied a copy of the recent report of Dr. Reece, one of the medical inspectors of the Local Government Board, on the Liverpool Smallpox Hospitals to the local authority of that city; and
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  whether, in view of Dr. Reece's conclusion that the influence of the hospitals has been responsible in material degree for the sustained prevalence of smallpox in Liverpool in 1902–3, he has made any representations to the local authority as to the desirability of discontinuing the use for smallpox purposes of the two hospitals situated within the city, viz., the Priory Road and Parkhill hospitals, which are especially condemned by Dr. Reece, and of making such other arrangements for the treatment of smallpox cases as will be less likely to be a source of danger to the inhabitants than those which now exist.
  (Answered by Mr. Gerald Balfour.) The Local Government Board sent copies of Dr. Reece's report to the Town Council of Liverpool, but they did not deem it necessary, in connection with it, to make any special representations to the council of the kind suggested in the Question. The Board have issued a Memorandum containing their views as to the liability of smallpox hospitals to disseminate the disease, and as to the desirability of their being placed outside towns as far distant from any populated neighbourhood as considerations of accessibility permit. The Board sent copies of this Memorandum in 1902 to the Town Council of Liverpool, amongst other local authorities, and in the circular which accompanied it they expressly stated that smallpox hospitals should be placed in sparsely populated situations.

  Average Attendance of Infants in Public Elementary Schools.
  MR. ERNEST GRAY: To ask the Secretary to the Board of Education whether he can give the average attendance of children in the infants' departments of public elementary schools, and the average attendance of such children between the ages of three and five during the last year for which the information is available.
  (Answered by Sir William Anson.) The average attendance of children in the infants' department s of public elementary schools for the year 1903–4 was 1,572,224.

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  The average attendance of children between the ages of three and five was 456,068.

  Cost of Elementary Education at Bourne- mouth, West Ham, Grantham, East Ham, Wimbledon, and Walthamstow.
  MR. ERNEST GRAY: To ask the Secretary to the Board of Education whether he can state the total charges consequent on the provision of elementary education in Bournemouth, West Ham, Grantham, East Ham, Wimbledon, and Walthamstow in the last year for which

  Name.

  Gross Expenditure.

  (d) Government Grants.

  (e) Percentage (d) is of (b).

  (f) Percentage (d) is of (c).

  (a) Provision and Administration.

  (b) Maintenance.

  (c) Total.

  £

  £

  £

  £

  Bournemouth

  1,168

  15,217

  16,385

  11,022

  72·43

  67·27

  West Ham

  56,328

  186,263

  242,591

  101,302

  54·40

  41·76

  Grantham

  307

  6,056

  6,363

  5,926

  97·85

  93·13

  East Ham

  16,554

  58,570

  75,124

  36,890

  62·99

  49·11

  Wimbledon

  1,738

  12,885

  14,623

  9,303

  72·00

  63·62

  Walthamstow

  16,267

  63,881

  80,148

  38,007

  59·49

  47·30

  Pay of Dockyard Writing Staff.
  MR. KEARLEY: To ask the Secretary to the Admiralty whether he is now able to state the result of the inquiry as to the revision of the pay of the writing staff of the dockyards.
  (Answered by Mr. Pretyman.) The matter is still under consideration.

  Port of London Bill-Position of Dock Companies.
  LORD ALWYNE COMPTON: To ask the Secretary to the Board of Trade whether, having regard to the fact that the London and
  the information is available, and in each case the percentage of such charges met by Parliamentary grants.
  (Answered by Sir William Anson.) The Board have no returns for a complete year under the Act of 1902 for the areas named in the Question, with the exception of Grantham and Wimbledon, and in these two cases the actual figures for 1903–4 may not represent a normal year's working. The following are approximate figures based on the latest available returns:—
  India Docks Company obtained powers to make a new dock so long ago as 1901, and have spent a large sum in acquiring land for the purpose, and that it is impossible that they can spend further capital in providing dock accommodation while the question of the future administration of the Port of London remains unsettled, he will state if it is the intention of the Government to bring in any further measure for dealing with the question.
  (Answered by Mr. Bonar Law.) I cannot go beyond the reply which I have given on more than one occasion, that

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  the Government is not prepared to make any proposals with respect to the Port of London this session.

  Board of Agriculture—Forestry Section.
  MR. MUNRO FERGUSON: To ask the President of the Board of Agriculture whether there is a distinct forestry section in his Department under a responsible head; whether he can state how far his Department accepts responsibility for promoting sylviculture in England, Wales, and Scotland; and in what respects its responsibility is shared by other Departments, more especially with regard to providing facilities for sylvicultural training.
  (Answered by Mr. Ailwyn Fellowes.) There is no distinct forestry section in the Board of Agriculture, but my Department deals annually with many applications for advice on forestry subjects, and in other ways does much to disseminate a knowledge of sound sylvicultural practice. The Board of Agriculture support two lectureships on forestry in the University Colleges situated in Bangor and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and I understand that not only is the demand for instruction, at these places very satisfactory, but the experts in charge are largely consulted by the owners of woodlands. My Department has already given effect to the recommendation of the Committee, of which the hon. Member was Chairman, that the attention of corporations and municipalities be drawn to the desirability of planting with trees the catchment areas of their water supply; and I am now making arrangements to carry out the recommendation of the same Committee in regard to forestry statistics. While my Department accepts full responsibility for the general improvement of forestry in England and Wales, I have to acknowledge very friendly co-operation on the part of the Office of Woods, which has established a school in the Forest of Dean for the practical training of foresters, and in other ways has done mach to help forward the movement. I have also received much valuable assistance from the Local Government Boards of England and Scotland in connection with the inquiry into the afforestation of the catchment areas of
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  public water supplies. Education in forestry in Scotland, as the hon. Member is aware, does not fall within the province of my Board.

  Compulsory Sheep-Dipping.
  MR. WORSLEY-TAYLOR: To ask the President of the Board of Agriculture, with reference to the compulsory sheep-dipping area in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, created by virtue of Orders of the Board dated January 27th and April 15th, 1905, whether his attention has been called to representations from many parts of the said area that the provisions of the said Order will cause serious difficulty in respect of the dates fixed thereby for compulsory dipping, and in respect of the movement and sale of fat sheep and lambs, the season for which has just begun; what are the facts as to sheep scab which have made it necessary to create the said area; and if he will consider whether, consistently with maintaining due and reasonable precautions against the spread of sheep scab, the said Orders can be modified so as to avoid or lessen the difficulties aforesaid.
  (Answered by Mr. Ailwyn Fellowes.) I have received representations from the district referred to, to the effect that it would be more convenient to many of the flockmasters therein that the general dipping prescribed by the Orders should be postponed until the month of August and I am in communication with the local authorities concerned on the subject. If there is a general agreement that the later period would be more suitable for carrying out the operation of compulsory dipping in this area, I shall be glad to give effect to the wishes of those concerned. The application to the district referred to of the provisions of the Sheep Scab (Compulsory Dipping Areas) Order of 1905 was rendered necessary by the fact that disease had been detected within the area scheduled, and amongst sheep grazing over large tracts of common pasturage in the Clapham and Heasden districts. From inquiries made by inspectors of the Board it was further ascertained that the origin of several outbreaks of sheep scab which occurred in the districts surrounding this area was

  1385
  attributable to sheep moved from the area scheduled. It became necessary therefore, in the general interest, to take steps to eradicate the disease from this locality. As my hon. friend is aware, I am most anxious to avoid placing unnecessary restrictions upon the movement of sheep intended for immediate slaughter, but owing to the fact that sheep sold for slaughter are not necessarily at once removed from further contact with other sheep, it is impossible to exempt entirely such sheep from the requirements of dipping. If it is found to be practicable to devise some special provisions applicable to the case of young lambs which are being specially prepared for the butcher, I shall be glad to modify the Order accordingly. I may perhaps add that, in regard to all the areas scheduled under the general Order, I propose to suspend Part II. of the Sheep Scab (Compulsory Dipping Areas) Order of 1905, which deals with the movement of sheep out of such areas, until the spring of next year, so soon as I am satisfied that the prescribed dipping has been thoroughly and efficiently carried out.

  Number of Licensed Hackney Carriages and Drivers—Horse and Mechanically Propelled.
  CAPTAIN NORTON: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he can state the number of hackney carriages and hackney carriage drivers licensed up to date, number of same with mechanical licences, number of motor omnibuses and of stage carriages licensed, number of stage carriage drivers, and number of same holding mechanical licences.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Akers-Douglas.) I can only give the figures for the Metropolitan district, and they are as follows: Up to and including the 24th instant, there were licensed 10,986 hackney carriages, three of which are driven mechanically; 3,547 omnibuses, seventy-five of which are driven mechanically; and 1,798 tramcars, of which 967 are driven mechanically. There are 12,763 licensed hackney carriage drivers, nine of whom hold mechanical licences; and 8,558 stage carriage (i.e., tram and omnibus) drivers, of whom 2,006 hold mechanical licences.

  Municipal Government of Calcutta.
  MR. WEIR: To ask the Secretary of State for India whether he is aware that the Municipal Government in Calcutta, established by Lord Northbrook in 1876 and developed by Lord Dufferin, so that out of seventy-five members of the corporation fifty were elected by the ratepayers, has during the last few years been reorganised in such a manner as to reduce the number of elected members to twenty five and thus place them in a perpetual minority; and, in view of the fact that a Committee has bean appointed to prepare a scheme whereby the administration of Calcutta will be broken up into boroughs, will he explain why no member of the Corporation of Calcutta has been appointed to a seat on that Committee.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) The Committee of six (three being Europeans and three Natives) appointed by the Government of Bengal to work out a scheme for decentralising the work of the Calcutta Corporation, includes two members of the corporation. A third member of the Committee was recently a member of the corporation. I am unable to say why no elected member of the corporation is on the Committee, but having regard to the fact that of the three native gentlemen on the Committee one is a Judge of the High Court and two are members of the Bengal Legislative Council, I have no reason to suppose that any better selection could have been made.

  Construction of Telegraph between Teheran and Indian Frontier.
  SIR EDWARD SASSOON: To ask the Secretary of State for India whether the construction of the telegraph land line between Teheran and the frontier of India via Kerman and Robat is yet completed, or when such completion may be expected; and whether this line, when completed, will be opened for public traffic.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) Telegrams can be exchanged between Teheran and Quetta via Kerman and Robat, but the system is not sufficiently complete for transmission of public traffic. Action has been taken to carry

  1387
  the Indian extension of the Central Persia line through Beluchistan to Karachi; and on this line being completed it will be at once opened for public traffic.

  Separation of Judicial and Executive Functions in Indian Administration.
  MR. EUGENE WASON: To ask the Secretary of State for India, with regard to the memorial urging the separation of judicial and executive functions in Indian administration, presented in August, 1899, can some statement be placed before Parliament showing what course has been followed since that memorial was forwarded to the Indian Government, and what is the general view taken of this subject by that authority; and can any of the more recent correspondence on this question between the Government of India and the Secretary of State be presented to Parliament at an early date.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) As I promised in my reply to the hon. Member for West Denbighshire, on the 23rd February† last, I wrote to the Government of India on the 10th March asking for a report of the results up to the present time of their consideration of the subject. I have not yet received a reply. There has been no other recent correspondence on this question between the Government of India and the Secretary of State.

  Mrs. Grace Pakenham's Estate, Mahon, County Roscommon.
  MR. JAMES O'KELLY: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Estates Commissioners have had under their consideration the sale and purchase of the entire estate of Mrs. Grace Pakenham, Mahon, in the county Roscommon, including the pastoral and agricultural hamlet of Strokestown; and, if so, whether any progress has been made by the Estates Commissioners in this matter; and have they declared the whole estate to be an estate within the meaning of the Land Act, 1903.
  See (4) Debates, cxli., 1073.
  1388
  (Answered by Mr. Walter Long.) No proceedings for the sale of this estate have been instituted before the Estates Commissioners.

  Imprisonment of Crew of Steamer "Parthania" at Singapore.
  MR. ROBSON: To ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies if he can state under what circumstances, and for what offence, some of the crew of the steamer "Parthania," owned by Messrs. Donaldson Brothers, have just been imprisoned at Singapore; and, if the men were imprisoned for refusing to carry contraband of war, will he take steps to see that they are released.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Lyttelton.) I have no information on the subject, but I have telegraphed to the Governor of the Straits Settlements asking for a report.

  Repatriation of Chinese Coolies—Other Penalties.
  MR. LEVY: To ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether, when making inquiries as to the reasons for the repatriation of the 332 Chinese to December last, he will also inquire what penalties in addition to repatriation were imposed; whether all or any portion of the wages earned by such labourers were withheld or deducted as is provided by Clause 27; and whether such repatriated labourers were returned merely to the ports of embarkation or to their homes.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Lyttelton.) I will make the further inquiries in accordance with the hon. Member's request.

  Strength and Cost of Volunteer Battalions in the Field Army.
  MR. SEELY: To ask the Secretary of State for War what are the number of Volunteer battalions in the Field Army; what is the enrolled strength of those battalions; and what is the total annual cost including grants, camp allowances, and other expenses.
  (Answered by Mr. secretary Arnold-Forster.) There are twenty-seven infantry

  1389
  units and one bearer company of the Volunteer forces in the Field Army, and their enrolled strength, including permanent staff, on the 1st November, 1904, amounted to 28,450. Their total cost for the year 1904–5 amounted approximately to £210,000.

  Military Honours at Soldiers' Funerals.
  MR. SLOAN: To ask the Secretary of State for War whether his attention has been called to the funeral of the late Corporal John Henshaw, Crimean veteran, at Weaste, on the 6th instant; and if he will explain what were the exceptional circumstances which permitted military honours to be given in this case while it is forbidden in others.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Arnold-Forster.) I have no information on the case mentioned, but I am making inquiries.

  Colonial Conference, 1906.
  LORD HUGH CECIL: To ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether the Colonial Conference which is to assemble in 1906 will be constituted in the same way, and deliberate under the same conditions, as the Colonial Conference of 1902, or whether there will be any change, and if so, in what respect; whether he still adheres to his intention, declared at Sheffield and elsewhere, not to make the merits of any proposal for colonial preference founded on the taxation of food an issue at the next election, or whether that intention has been modified, or might in the future be modified, by the proceedings of the Colonial Conference to be held in 1906; whether he still adheres to the intention declared in the past not to propose to Parliament any scheme for the commercial union of the Empire, unless it has been formulated by an Imperial Conference representing not only, like the Colonial Conference of 1902, the self-governing Colonies, but also India and (so far as may be) the other dependencies of the Crown, and laid in the shape so formulated before the electorate at the time of a general election; whether he intends to summon an Imperial Conference, representing the whole Empire, as distinct from a Colonial
  1390
  Conference of the pattern of 1902, during the continuance of the present Parliament.
  (Answered by Mr. A. J. Balfour.) With all respect to my noble friend, I think those parts of his Question not already answered in the House, may more conveniently be dealt with in the debate on Tuesday than in an Answer to a Parliamentary Question.

  Scotch Church Dispute—Position of Lord Johnstone.
  MR. BLACK: To ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether he is aware that Lord Johnstone, having acted as senior counsel for the Free Church of Scotland, is now compelled, as Lord Ordinary on the Bills, to decide cases raising questions of possession between that Church and the United Free Church and cannot decline jurisdiction; and what course the Government proposes to take in the circumstances.
  (Answered by Mr. A. J. Balfour.) I am advised that the hon. Member's Question proceeds on an erroneous view of the law. The point has been already considered and dealt with by the Court. Lord Johnstone's declinature has been sustained, and it has been arranged that the cases referred to shall be remitted to another Judge.

  Colonial Conference, 1906.
  MR. LAMBERT: To ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether the representatives at the Colonial Conference, 1906, would be asked to discuss whether the idea of a closer union on a commercial or any other basis commended itself to them; and, if so, in what precise manner it could be carried into effect; whether any scheme formulated would be submitted by the colonial representatives to their respective Governments, and no scheme would be deemed binding on His Majesty's Government until it had been submitted to the electorate of this country.
  (Answered by Mr. A. J. Balfour) (1)The Answer to the first Question is in the negative. (2) I have no control over the colonial representatives or the Colonial

  1391
  Governments. (3) Nothing done by the Conference can be binding on His Majesty's Government.

QUESTIONS IN THE HOUSE.

  Naval Gunnery Practice.
  SIR GILBERT PARKER: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty whether the "Magnificent," "Majestic," "Prince George," "Victorious," "Cæsar," "Hannibal," "Illustrious," "Jupiter," "Mars," "Goliath," "Ocean," and "Vengeance" carried out from each of their four 12-inch guns the full quarterly practice, including the firing of full charges for the quarters ending 31st December, 1904, and 31st March, 1905; will he state the reasons for the omission when any portion of the firing was not carried out; and have any special instructions been issued to any of the above ships with reference to firing from any of their 12-inch guns.
  THE SECRETARY TO THE ADMIRALTY (Mr. PRETYMAN, Suffolk, Wood-bridge): So far as is known all the ships named which were in commission at the time carried out the full quarterly practice, including the firing of full charges, for the quarters named, with the exception of the "Majestic," in which ship, as already stated, two of the 12-inch guns developed defects and were exchanged. The Answer to the last part of the Question is in the negative.

  Atlantic Mail Routes—Galway Route.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether his attention has been called to a speech delivered by His Excellency the Governor-General of Canada, advocating the Galway route for the transmission of mails and merchandise across the Atlantic; and whether it is intended to discuss this subject at the Colonial Conference of 1906.
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (Mr. LYTTELTON, Warwick and Leamington): I have not seen any report of the speech referred to by the hon. Member. Without expressing
  1392
  any opinion with regard to this particular scheme, of which I have little knowledge, the question of such a service appears eminently suitable for discussion at the next Colonial Conference.

  The Price of Sugar.
  COLONEL SADLER: I beg to ask Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer if his attention has been directed to the fall in the price of sugar, to-day's value being 5s. per cwt. below what it was in January last, whilst new crop sugar is quoted at under 10s. per cwt., or less than one penny per pound; and whether, having regard to the relative rate of the duty to the total value or sugar when it was imposed, he will favourably consider a pro rata reduction.
  THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER (Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN, Worcestershire, E.): Yes, Sir, I am aware of the fall in the price of sugar from the abnormal prices of last January; but I cannot admit the possibility of varying the duty pro rata with changes of price. The hon. Member is in error in thinking that the price of sugar is lower than it was when the duty was imposed.
  MR. LOUGH: Is it not true that sugar is nearly double the price now as compared with the period before the duty was imposed, and does the right hon. Gentleman attribute the rise to the duty or the Convention?
  MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN: The hon. Member is endeavouring to put an argument in the form of a Question. If the hon. Member will raise the question as briefly in the debate on Monday I shall be happy to answer him.

  Motor-Cars—Speed Regulations.
  MR. SLACK: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board whether any applications under Section 9 of the Motor-Car Act, 1903, made by various local authorities to the Local Government Board to issue regulations limiting the speed of motor-cars within the areas, or parts of the areas, of such local authorities to a speed not exceeding ten miles an hour, have not yet been finally dealt with; and, if so,

  1393
  whether he will give the names of such local authorities, and the dates when their respective applications were received by the Board.
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. GERALD BALFOUR, Leeds, Central): Three applications under Section 9 of the Motor-Car Act, 1903, are now before the Local Government Board, made respectively by the Denbighshire County Council on the 16th of this month, by the Town Council of Guildford on March 7th last, and by the Town Council of Ealing. The last was originally made in October, 1903, and after the lapse of many months, during which the matter rested with the town council, has recently been revived. In twelve other cases applications have been made and not formally withdrawn, but in each of these cases it is for the local authorities concerned to take the next step, and as for some months no Communication has been received from them, it is assumed that the applications are either temporarily or permanently abandoned.
  MR. SLACK: Does the right hon. Gentleman include St. Albans in the list of twelve? That city has not withdrawn its application, which has been urgently pressed.
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: I cannot answer that without notice, but so far as I am aware, whenever an application remains suspended, it is because the local authority has not replied to the communication from the Local Government Board.
  MR. GIBSON BOWLES: Will the right hon. Gentleman consider the propriety of allowing local authorities to settle these matters for themselves? The Local Government Board must be unacquainted with every locality.
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: In doubtful cases there is an inquiry.
  SIR HENRY FOWLER: What does the right hon. Gentleman mean by the next step? I understand the Local Government Board sends down an inspector to hold
  1394
  an inquiry, that he reports to the Local Government Board, who communicate the report to the local authority. What is the next step to be taken?
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: I do not think any of these cases have reached that stage. What has happened has been that application has been made and notice of objection received. Those objections have been communicated to the local authorities and no reply has been received from them. The stage of public inquiry has not been reached.
  MR. SLACK: Was not a letter written at the instance of the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor on June 3rd, 1904, to the town clerk of St. Albans in which it says—
  MR. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: The right hon. Gentleman can hardly answer that Question without notice.

  Spotted Fever in Northamptonshire.
  MR. THEODORE TAYLOR: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board what action he has taken with reference to the Northamptonshire cases of cerebro-spinal meningitis or spotted fever; and whether, in view of the rapidity of its spread and fatal effects in Germany, special means will be taken, and, if so, what means, to prevent its spread in the United Kingdom.
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: The Local Government Board have caused one of their medical inspectors to visit the district affected for the purpose of ascertaining the facts, and of giving advice to the district council and their officers. As a result of the inspector's visit, the Board have expressed their willingness to entertain any proposal from the district council to make it compulsory during a limited time to notify to them cases of the disease referred to which occur in their district. I may add that the Board would be prepared to entertain similar applications from other local authorities who may deem it desirable to adopt this course, and thus to safeguard their districts from the importation and spread of the disease.
  MR. THEODORE TAYLOR: Would the right hon. Gentleman not consider it desirable to make the notification national instead of local?
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: Up to the present time I have not thought it desirable.

  Sewage Pollution of the Thames Estuary.
  SIR JOSEPH DIMSDALE: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board whether he is aware that the sewage from the towns of Faversham and Whitstable is discharged into the Thames estuary in a crude condition; and whether he will make a representation to the authorities of those towns urging them to adopt some method of sewage purification.
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: I will communicate with the Town Council of Faversham and the Whitstable Urban District Council with regard to this matter.

  Electric Motor Broughams.
  SIR HENRY FOWLER: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board whether any regulation has been made by the Local Government Board for compelling electric motor-cars to give the audible and sufficient warning required by Section 3 of The Locomotives on Highways Act, 1896.
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: One of the regulations in the Motor-Cars (Use and Construction) Order, 1904, issued by the Local Government Board, makes it the duty of every person driving or in charge of a motor-car to give, whenever necessary, by sounding the bell or other instrument required by the section referred to in the Question, audible and sufficient warning of the approach or position of the motor-car.
  SIR HENRY FOWLER: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that that regulation is habitually disregarded by nearly all electrical broughams in London?
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: I am not able to answer that Question, which I think ought to be addressed to the Home Secretary.

  Denbighshire Education Dispute.
  MR. MOSS: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Board of Education whether his attention has been called to the statements made at the annual meeting of the Denbighshire Education Committee, held at Chester on Friday, May 19th last, and to the resolution unanimously passed at that meeting; whether he has received a copy of such resolution; and, if so, whether he proposes to take any, and what, steps in relation to such statements and in reply to such resolution.
  MR. HERBERT ROBERTS: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Board of Education whether his attention has been drawn to the statement made on the 18th inst. by the chairman of the building committee of the Denbighshire education authority, to the effect that the council had appointed a surveyor before the appointed day to visit, inspect, and report upon the condition of every school in the county, provided and unprovided, and that the building committee had proceeded to execute the necessary repairs of the provided schools in accordance with the recommendations of the surveyor's report; and whether he proposes to take steps to verify the accuracy of this statement.
  THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY TO THE BOARD OF EDUCATION (Sir WILLIAM ANSON, Oxford University): I have this morning received a communication from the local education, authority for Denbighshire. I am inquiring into the matter, and hope to send them a full reply at the earliest possible date.
  MR. LLOYD-GEORGE: But the hon. Gentleman made a very definite statement about a fortnight ago that they had not yet appointed any one to survey the county schools. Does he still say that is so?
  SIR WILLIAM ANSON: I can hardly answer without going into detail. My statement was substantially correct. I will write to the local education authority, and if there is any correction to be made it shall be made.
  MR. LLOYD-GEORGE: Then I take it the hon. Baronet did not communicate with the local authority before he made the statement. I may tell him, as a matter of fact, that they did appoint a surveyor.
  SIR WILLIAM ANSON: I have said I will communicate with the local authority.
  MR. LLOYD-GEORGE: Did the hon. Baronet say he communicated with the local authority before he made the statement referred to?
  SIR WILLIAM ANSON: I did not say that. What I did say I believe I shall be able to justify.

  Agrarian Crime in England
  MR. MACVEAGH: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he will issue a monthly Parliamentary Return setting forth the number of offences reported to the police in agrarian districts in England and Wales, classifying the various offences, and the number under every head in every county.
  THE UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT (Mr. COCHRANE, Ayrshire, N.): No, Sir. The system on which the statistics are prepared does not distinguish between agrarian and non-agrarian districts; and the collection of a monthly Return would involve an immense amount of trouble.
  MR. MACVEAGH: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that quarterly Returns are made as regards Ireland? Why not for England? Are there too many offences committed?
  MR. COCHRANE: It is not thought necessary.
  CAPTAIN DONELAN: Is there a manufacturing department for crime in England?
  MR. FLAVIN: Are we to understand that the number of crimes is so small that they are not worth returning. Where is the difficulty in giving the Return there?
  MR. COCHRANE: It is absolutely unnecessary. The same conditions do not obtain in England and Ireland.
  MR. FLAVIN: That is your opinion, not our's.

  Agrarian Crime in Scotland.
  MR. MACVEAGH: I beg to ask the Lord-Advocate whether he will issue a-monthly Parliamentary Return setting forth the number of offences reported to the police in agrarian districts in Scotland, classifying the various offences, and the number under every head in every county.
  THE LORD-ADVOCATE (Mr. SCOTT DICKSON, Glasgow, Bridgton): I refer the hon. Member to the Return given every year in the Report on the Judicial Statistics for Scotland. I am not prepared to give him any other Return.
  MR. MACVEAGH: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that a benevolent Government gives these Returns for Ireland? Will he not let us know in the same way the amount of crime committed in Scotland?
  MR. SCOTT DICKSON: I am glad to hear the hon. Member is so well off under the Irish Government. The information is contained in the Return I have referred to.
  MR. MACVEAGH: But as we are so much interested in the matter, cannot the right hon. Gentleman keep the information up to date? We get it quarterly in Ireland.
  MR. SCOTT DICKSON: We think once a year sufficient for ordinary purposes.
  MR. MACVEAGH: Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will send a copy of that Answer to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland.

  Irish National Education Board—Rule 127 (b).
  MR. DILLON: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can now say whether he will lay upon the Table the

  1399
  minutes of all meetings of the Commissioners of National Education at which Rule 127 (b) was considered.
  THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. WALTER LONG, Bristol, S.): Yes, Sir; the minutes will be laid on the Table.

  Banogue Schools, County Limerick.
  MR. LUNDON: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland if he is aware that the amalgamation of the male and female schools, in the case of the national school in Banogue, county Limerick, has been carried out by the Commissioners of Education against the advice and opinion of the manager; whether, seeing that for the ordinary school work all the pupils, including infants, are taught in one room, he will state what is the number of children on the rolls; what are the dimensions of the school room; what floor space does it afford per child for the number on the rolls; is any classroom or cloak-room attached to it; and whether, seeing that the infant children are compelled to stand for hours every day for want of desks, and that there is no room for additional desks, will he say if the Commissioners still intend that this amalgamation shall be maintained.
  MR WALTER LONG: The separate schools were, before amalgamation, under one roof. The manager protested against the amalgamation solely because the average attendance had been reduced owing to illness. The schoolhouse contains two rooms, each 34 feet by 18 feet. There are eighty-four children on the rolls, and therefore 14 square feet of floor space is available for each child. There is a room for each of the two teachers, and no additional class-room is necessary.

  Alleged III-Treatment of a Prisoner at Thurles Lock-up.
  MR. KENDAL O'BRIEN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been drawn to the proceedings at the inquest held on the body of William Fryday, at Bally-duagh, county Tipperary, on the 22nd flay of April last, at which the son of
  1400
  deceased, Francis S. Fryday, swore that his father told him before his death that the police took off his boots whilst in the lock-up at Thurles on the 15th April on a charge of drunkenness and hit him under the eye with one of his boots, and that he was also knocked against the wall, and that he was taken by the police from the lock-up to an out-house in the barrack yard in his stockings, and that his request for a magistrate to be sent for was refused, and to the evidence of the doctor, examined at the inquest, that deceased came by his death through peritonitis, following rupture of the spleen, caused by external violence, and that Constables Vaughan and Barrett, who assisted Constable O'Connell to take deceased from the lock-up to the outhouse in the yard, were not examined at the inquest; and whether an inquiry will be ordered to be held into the allegations that the cause of the death of the deceased was his ill-treatment by the police.
  MR. WALTER LONG: It would be more convenient to furnish with the Votes a printed reply to this Question, and, with the hon. Member's permission, I will adopt that course. The reply is necessarily of considerable length.

  Mrs. Trant Stanton's Estate, Kinsale.
  MR. CREAN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that arrangements have been made for the sale to the tenants of Mrs. Rose Trant Stanton's Estate, Ballyfeard, Kinsale, county Cork; will he say whether the evicted farms at present in possession of labourers are included in the sale; and, if so, what inquiries have been made by the Estates Commissioners for the purpose of enabling the evicted tenants to avail themselves o the clauses of the Land Act to regain possession of their holdings.
  MR. WALTER LONG: An application for sale has been lodged, but the property has not yet been declared an estate, and consequently the case has not yet been referred for inspection and inquiry. Applications have been received from persons who state that they are evicted

  1401
  tenants from the estate, and due inquiries will be made.

  Irish Agrarian Crimes Returns.
  MR. MACVEAGH: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can now state the object of issuing periodical Parliamentary Returns regarding agrarian offences in Ireland; whether he is aware that no such Returns are issued either for urban offences in Ireland or for urban or agrarian offences in England, Scotland, or Wales; and whether, seeing that the particulars given in these Returns are otherwise available in the Civil and Judicial Statistics, the publication of the periodical Returns of agrarian offences will be discontinued.
  MR. WALTER LONG: I have already stated that these Returns are furnished for the information of Parliament, and that it is not proposed to discontinue them. The particulars given in the Returns are not distinguished in the Criminal and Judicial Statistics.
  CAPTAIN DONELAN: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the police in Ireland are always prepared to supply Crime to order?
  MR. MACVEAGH: The right hon. Gentleman has not told me the object of publishing these Returns. He promised to inquire as to that. Is he aware no such Returns are given for England, Scotland, and Wales? Is the object political in issuing these invidious and offensive Returns?
  MR. WALTER LONG: They are furnished for the information of Parliament. I have nothing to do with the other Departments.

  Moneymore Disturbances.
  MR. MACVEAGH: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can now state if Captain Welch, R.M., swore, at the petty sessions Court, that a deputation of four Orangemen waited upon him, and that, by promising them that certain contingents of Nationalists would not be allowed to pass through Moneymore, he succeeded in quieting his Visitors down;
  1402
  whether he can state the names and occupations of the four visitors, and their positions in the Orange order; and whether there is any precedent for such a compact as Captain Welch is alleged to have entered into.
  MR. WALTER LONG: Captain Welch's evidence was not to the effect stated. He neither swore that he had made any promise, nor had he as a matter of fact made any promise. He denied on oath that any compact had been made. But, as I informed the hon. Member on Monday,† he explained to the persons who waited on him that only those processions whose routes lay through Moneymore would be allowed to pass through that place. I cannot see that any useful purpose would be served by stating the names of those persons.
  MR. MACVEAGH: Whom did these four represent?
  MR. WALTER LONG: I cannot say.
  MR. MACVEAGH: Did not Captain Welch swear they were representatives of the local Orangemen?
  MR. WALTER LONG: That is a different Question to the one on the Paper. It is impossible for me to answer without notice.

  Irish Agricultural Department— Veterinary Branch.
  MR. JOSEPH DEVLIN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that Treasury sanction has been obtained for increases of fifty per cent, and upwards in the salaries of certain officials in the Agricultural Department, some of whom had been only about two years in the Department's service, whilst at the same time unsuccessful applications were made to the Treasury for increases of less than 1s. a week in the salaries of clerks in the veterinary branch who had been engaged on the same class of work for a decade; and whether he will explain why the latter are denied the right of promotion to higher posts as opportunity offers.
  † See page 978.
  MR. WALTER LONG: This Question, in other forms, has been repeatedly answered. I refer in particular to the reply given by my right hon. friend the Member for Dover to the Question put by the hon. Member for East Mayo on June 30th † last.

  Carrowkeel Proclaimed Meeting.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland if he will state the names of the constables who threw Mr. Thomas Higgins, J.P., over a stone wall at Carrowkeel, on April 30th last.
  MR. WALTER LONG: I informed the hon. Member on Monday ‡ that Mr. Higgins was not thrown over a wall, but that he was merely pushed on by a constable. The name of this particular constable is not known; there were a considerable number of constables present, and several persons were moved on.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: On my responsibility as a Member of this House, I affirm that Mr. Higgins was violently thrown over the wall; and that the information supplied to the right hon. Gentleman is incorrect. I saw the act.
  MR. DELANY: Do you know that Mr. Higgins' life would have been lost unless someone was at the other side of the wall to catch him?
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: I saw this, and it was a brutal exhibition.
  CAPTAIN DONELAN: Will the right hon. Gentleman take steps to supply accurate information?
  MR. WALTER LONG: I have no reason to suppose that my information is inaccurate.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: I hold to my statement that the information is inaccurate.
  MR. JOHN REDMOND: After my hon. friend says he was present
  † See Debates, cxxxvii, 170
  ‡ See page 969.
  1404
  and saw the incident, the right hon. Gentleman rises and states he still holds that his information is correct. I wish to ask whether that is in order?
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: Can this House try the issue?
  MR. JOHN REDMOND: It is a question of the veracity of a Member.
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: That is an issue. [A NATIONALIST MEMBER: You are not at the Old Bailey.]
  MR. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: This is the time for asking Questions, and not for making statements and contradicting them. The matter can be raised and thrashed out at a later stage.
  MR. JOHN REDMOND: This is a question of impugning the personal testimony of a Member who says he saw the incident as he was present at the transaction.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLINsaid unless he could raise the matter at the end of Questions he could not raise it at all, because a "blocking" notice prevented it being discussed.
  MR. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: The matter cannot be raised as one of privilege, but it may be discussed in Supply.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLINthought that, as the Chief Secretary impugned his veracity, he should be allowed to state exactly what occurred.
  MR. T. L. CORBETT MR. T. L. CORBETT (Down, N.) rose to a point of order.
  MR. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: The question cannot be discussed now.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: I adhere to my statement, which is correct.

  Coalisland Polling Station.
  MR. DOOGAN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he has received a protest, signed by 207 local government electors, against the proposed

  1405
  change by the returning officer, Mr. Claud Hamilton, of their polling station from Coalisland to New Mills, on the grounds that rumours had reached him that there was some disorderly conduct at the previous election, notwithstanding the fact that the presiding officer, polling clerks, candidates, and police state that the rumour was baseless; whether he is aware that the Orange village of New Mills has neither police station nor telegraph office, that it is two miles distant from Coalisland, that there are only 150 voters in the neighbourhood as against 480 in Coalisland, mainly mill workers, many of whom, after quitting work at six o'clock, would be unable to walk two miles and have their votes cast within the statutory period; and whether, in the public interest, he has communicated with Mr. Hamilton and made to him representations that the proposed change should be abandoned.
  MR. WALTER LONG: Yes, Sir; the protest was received and communicated to the Returning Officer, who stated that after the elections in 1902 complaints were made to him as to the manner in which voters, agents, and others had been treated by the crowd at Brackaville. He took steps to investigate these complaints before deciding to change the polling station to New Mills, and satisfied himself that they were made bona fide and were true in fact. The Returning Officer in making the change was not influenced in any way by political considerations. Under Sections 1 and 13 of the Local Government Board Election Order of February, 1899, the Returning Officer has the right to determine the situation and number of polling stations and the Board have no jurisdiction to interfere in the matter. I have communicated to Mr. Hamilton the representations made to me against the change, and that officer regrets he cannot see his way to revert to the old arrangement. I may add that I personally regret he has not Seen his way to take this course.

  Aughrim (Galway) Arrests.
  MR. ROCHE: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can state the reason why the thirteen men arrested in the neighbourhood of Aughrim,
  1406
  county Galway, on the morning of April 1st, were not proceeded against by ordinary summons; and whether he can state why those men were taken out of their beds between the hours of 4 and 5 a.m., and were not allowed to have their breakfast before being brought into Ballinasloe, where they were detained until 11 a.m. before they were furnished with any food.
  MR. WALTER LONG: The arrest of these men, instead of proceeding against them by summons, was a legal and proper course, which was adopted with the object of bringing them more speedily to justice. They were arrested at the early hour mentioned in order to avoid turbulence. At half-past seven that morning the brother of one of the prisoners, who resides in Ballinasloe, sent word to the police station that he was about to provide breakfast for the whole party. The breakfast, however, was not sent in till between nine and ten.
  MR. ROCHE: Can the right hon. Gentleman give the date of the offence and of the arrests?
  MR. WALTER LONG: I have not the information here.
  MR. MACVEAGH: Why were these people not summoned instead of being arrested?
  MR. WALTER LONG: I answered that Question.

  Reid v. Coote.
  MR. DILLON: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that Mr. William Coote, Grand Master of the Orange Lodge at Carntall, county Tyrone, was recently a defendant in an action, Reid v. Coote, in the King's Bench, listed for trial, in which the cause of action was conspiracy to boycott; and that Coote did not go to trial, but settled the action for a substantial sum; and, if so, why Mr. Coote has been continued in the commission of the peace.
  MR. WALTER LONG: I am informed that the action in question was settled without trial by a friendly compromise

  1407
  on the terms that Mr. Coote should pay to the plaintiff a contribution towards his costs, that all further litigation should cease, and that the parties should resume their former amicable relations. The same controversy came up recently in a case decided by Mr. Justice Barton, but as it is stated that this decision is to be appealed from, it would be obviously improper that the question of Mr. Coote's commission of the peace should be considered pending the result of the appeal.
  MR. DILLON: Is the right hon. Gentleman sure it is the same controversy? I am told it has no relation whatever to the case under appeal. Seeing that this man by his action admitted he was guilty of conspiracy to boycott, why is his name retained in the commission of the peace?
  MR. WALTER LONGsaid he would make further inquiry. He had given the information supplied him.

  Ireland—New Education Rules.
  MR. DILLON: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can lay upon the Table of the House a copy of any Returns or Tables which were submitted to the Board of National Education in Ireland showing the effect on the salaries and promotions of the new rules or regulations in the Code of 1905 which did not appear in the previous Code.
  MR. WALTER LONG: The Commissioners do not consider it desirable to make public any Returns or other documents considered by them when revising their rules and regulations.

  Coolaclarig Evicted Farm.
  MR. FLAVIN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that police are in occupation of an evicted farm at Coolaclarig, Listcwel, from which a tenant named Walsh was evicted for a half year's rent, and that the tenant has made several applications to Lord Ormathwaite, the landlord, and Robert Fitzgerald, the agent, for reinstatement, which has been refused; and whether
  1408
  he will consider the advisability of withdrawing the constabulary from the farm.
  MR. WALTER LONG: The police are not in occupation of this evicted farm, but a protection post, consisting of two constables, exists on it for the protection of the caretaker. A tenant who had taken the farm was murdered on July 29th, 1888. The constant personal protection of the caretaker is considered to be necessary, and it is not intended to withdraw this protection.
  MR. FLAVIN: As this man has several times applied for reinstatement and been refused will the Government now take action?
  MR. WALTER LONG: The Government cannot take action. It is for the landlord and tenant to come to terms.
  MR. FLAVIN: The tenant is willing and has said so through me, yet he is being treated with contempt.

  Lord Listowel's Estate, North Kerry.
  MR. FLAVIN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can state what action, if any, the Estates Commissioners have taken in connection with the application of cottiers and sub-tenants on Lord Listowel's Estate at Pilgrim Hill, North Kerry, to have their holdings enlarged; whether, seeing that tenants in the district have held grazing tracts of land, he will say what steps the Estates Commissioners have taken to divide those grazing lands amongst the smaller tenants who have uneconomic holdings.
  MR. WALTER LONG: The agreements for purchase have been lodged, and the matter will shortly be ready for inspection. Application has been made by cottier tenants at Pilgrim Hill North to have their holdings enlarged, and the question will be considered in due course.
  MR. KILBRIDE: Will the Estates Commissioners inquire into this particular matter? It is the case I alluded to recently in which the agreement made between landlord and tenant was for the same number of years

  1409
  purchase as in the agreement between the landlord and the Estates Commissioners.
  MR. WALTER LONG: I know nothing about the facts, but no doubt they will be inquired into by the Estates Commissioners.

  Tirkane National School Teacher.
  MR. SLOAN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been called to the character of the speeches delivered at a meeting on the 16th ultimo at Carntougher, county Derry, organised by Mr. R. C. Bonner, teacher in Tirkane National School; and whether, in view of the fact that national school teachers are debarred from taking part in political meetings, he will say what action, if any, has been taken in this case.
  MR WALTER LONG: Yes, Sir, and the matter has been brought to the notice of the Commissioners of National Education.
  MR. SLOAN: Has any action been taken?
  [No Answer was returned.]

  Prosecution of Mr. Shawe Tener.
  MR. ROCHE: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been drawn to the fact that, in the case of a prosecution under the Local Government Act of Mr. Shawe Tener, agent of the Marquess of Clanricarde, for having voted when disqualified at a meeting of the Portumna Board of Guardians, the justices who adjudicated and refused to convict, but agreed to state a case for the superior Courts so far back as two months ago, have not yet stated such case, though more than once requested to do so; and, if so, will the attention of the Lord Chancellor be called to the conduct of the magistrates in question.
  MR. WALTER LONG: If the facts were as mentioned, it would be open to the guardians to take proceedings in the superior Courts to compel the magistrates to state a case. But I
  1410
  am informed that the case has been fully stated and signed by the magistrates, and that it was forwarded to the guardians' solicitor on the 17th instant.

  Lough Corrib Drainage Board.
  MR. CHARLES DEVLIN: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been called to the neglect of their duties shown by the Lough Corrib Drainage Board; whether, seeing that the gentlemen composing the Board do not reside near Lough Corrib, and in view of the need which exists for a thorough cleaning of the mill race at Galway, the Government will take over the duties of the Lough Corrib, Drainage Trustees; and, if not, will the Government hand over this work to the Galway County Council.
  THE FINANCIAL SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY (Mr. VICTOR CAVENDISH, Derbyshire, W.): The transfer of the functions of drainage trustees to a county council is regulated by Section 20 of the Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898, and the consent of the trustees is necessary. The Board of Works cannot permanently take over the duties of the trustees, but can only do so temporarily, and to the extent authorised by the Drainage Acts, where the trustees are found by the Board to be in default in maintaining the district. From the information before the Board of Works it is considered that the district, including the mill race, is in a fair state of maintenance.

  Irish Teachers' Pensions.
  MR. ROCHE: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether teachers who spend some years in teaching in Poor Law Union schools previous to the passing of the Pension Act, and who were subsequently transferred to ordinary national schools, will be allowed such years in calculating the amount of pension allowance payable to them on retirement.
  MR. VICTOR CAVENDISH: The National School Teachers (Ireland) Act,

  1411
  1879, only enables pension to be granted in respect of service as a "classed teacher," as defined in Section 2 of the Act; and, as the teachers in Poor Law Union schools do not come within this definition, there is no power to give effect to the suggestion of the hon. Member.

  The Colonial Conference.
  MR. EDMUND ROBERTSON: I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether, on December 11th last, the Imperial Federation (Defence) Committee submitted to him a memorandum claiming that the question of colonial co-operation in the maintenance of the Navy necessitated primary consideration at the proposed Colonial Conference; whether he assented to that claim; and whether he adheres to his intention to submit this question for primary consideration by the conference.
  THE PRIME MINISTER AND FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY (Mr. A. J. BALFOUR, Manchester, E.): In answer to the first part of the hon. Gentleman's Question I have to say that he correctly represents, if I understand it, the memorandum submitted to me by the deputation to which he refers, but nothing fell from me indicating that I was of opinion that this question should be first in order of importance, or that it should be the first submitted to the Colonial Conference.
  MR. EDMUND ROBERTSON: Does the right hon. Gentleman mean that the Government will take action in the sense advocated by the deputation?
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: No, I have not said that.
  MR. EDMUND ROBERTSON: What is it that the right hon. Gentleman intends to do?
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was a member of the deputation, but if he was that was the time to ask the question.
  MR. EDMUND ROBERTSON: No, I was not.

  India and the Colonial Conference.
  MR. HERBERT SAMUEL: I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether it is proposed that the Indian Government should be represented at the Colonial Conference of 1906; if it is, whether such representation was contemplated by the resolution of the Colonial Conference of 1902, which suggested the summoning of another Conference in 1906; and, if the Indian Government is to be represented without such suggestion having been made, whether he will state the reason for this change from the ordinary composition of Colonial Conferences.
  *SIR CHARLES DILKE: May I ask whether, in addition to the representation of India, steps will be taken to give due weight to the interests of the Crown Colonies and other dominions of His Majesty?
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: If the conference of 1906 meets before a dissolution it will be, of course, the conference contemplated by the resolution of the conference which met in 1902. This resolution did not suggest either Indian or Crown Colony representation.
  MR. HERBERT SAMUEL: Will the right hon. Gentleman say whether, if India is not represented, any proposals, for colonial preference will be debated at that conference?
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I do not know what ground the hon. Gentleman has for thinking that the Government mean to make proposals to that conference on the subject.
  *SIR CHARLES DILKE: Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that at the last conference we were informed—of course the full report was never published, but we were informed—that someone was present on behalf of India?
  MR A. J. BALFOUR: Well, I have refreshed my memory this morning of the resolution actually passed at the conference—
  *SIR CHARLES DILKE: I do not mean the resolution.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: It is that on which the Question was based, and that resolution will be strictly followed, as far as we are concerned, supposing the conference meets before a dissolution.
  MR. HERBERT SAMUEL: Are we to understand that, as India is not to be represented at that conference, no resolutions arrived at by the conference propounding a scheme of Imperial preference will form the basis of a scheme to be submitted to the electorate at the next election?
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I really think that the hon. Gentleman is travelling far beyond the Question originally put, and I would suggest to him that these are questions which will probably be debated on another occasion.
  MR. CHURCHILL: Did I understand the right hon. Gentleman to say that His Majesty's Government would not submit any proposals in regard to Imperial preference to the conference which will meet next year, if it should meet before the dissolution?
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: No, Sir, we shall not make proposals any more than at the previous conferences.

  Debate on the Indian Budget.
  MR. HERBERT ROBERTS: I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether, in view of the fact that no opportunity has been given this session for the discussion of Indian affairs, he will arrange for the Indian Budget to be taken at an early date after the Whitsuntide recess.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I am anxious, if possible, to bring on the Indian Budget early this year, and I have been considering the matter with my right hon. friend the Secretary for India. I cannot give a pledge, but I still hope to be able to carry out some plan by which an early discussion will be secured.

  THE VOTE OF CENSURE.
  SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: I have to ask the right hon. Gentleman, with regard to
  1414
  the business for next week, and as part of that, what day he will allocate for the debate on the Motion standing in the name of my right hon. friend the Member for Berwick.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I propose to go on with the Budget on Monday, and the arrangements after that must in part depend upon the right hon. Gentleman himself. I am very anxious to give him the day for which he has asked; but, as he will remember, I made an appeal to him when he first made his proposal, to which appeal he has, I think, so far not seen his way to make any response. I think he will himself agree with me that I am in some difficulty. The substance of what occurred was this. The very subject of the vote of censure was brought up at the right hon. Gentleman's instance on a Motion for the adjournment; he was listened to with profound attention and respect by this side of the House [Cries of "So would you have been"]; he was followed by a Member of the Government who was not allowed to finish, I think, one sentence so that he could be heard; and during the whole of that time the interruptions from that side of the House were not protested against by the right hon. Gentleman. Now I do not wish to go back on an old sore, but let it be remembered that the right hon. Gentleman proposes that we should discuss the same subject; and I propose to put up the same speakers more or less in the same order. That is to say, I shall probably ask my right hon. friend the Secretary for the Colonies to speak early in the debate, and I shall certainly reserve myself for some later stage of the proceedings. Now, I think the right hon. Gentleman will feel that I am bound, not only to my right hon. friend but to the House, to see that, so far as. I am concerned, the scene which disgraced us in the eyes of the world—
  *MR. JOHN ELLIS: It was a disgrace to you primarily.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR (resuming)does not recur; and that there is some danger of its recurring, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, is

  1415
  quite evident from the noisy and disorderly interruption of the hon. Gentleman who was quite unable to control himself on the previous occasion. In these circumstances my appeal is simply to the right hon. Gentleman to do his best to prevent a recurrence of such an outrage upon decency and fair play.
  SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: I am greatly surprised that the right hon. Gentleman should have renewed to- day the condition or stipulation which he mentioned two days ago, and which at the time I did not regard as of a serious character at all. I cannot imagine that the right hon. Gentleman's appeal is a serious appeal; in the first place, because the right hon. Gentleman is aware that the Chair alone can maintain and enforce order in this House, and if I were to give—which it never entered into my mind to do—the undertaking he asks for, I should be so far usurping the authority of the Chair; in the second place, because the right hon. Gentleman must also be aware that if there was any disorder on Monday [Cries of "If!"]—well, so far as there was any disorder on Monday, it was occasioned by the fact that the right hon. Gentleman departed from the invariable practice when the personal conduct either of a Minister or a Member is directly impugned, and did not himself rise to meet the charges against him. The right hon. Gentleman is aware that there was no discourtesy intended or felt towards the Colonial Secretary; but the House, or a large number of Members of the House, having experienced for weeks and months past the greatest difficulty in ascertaining from the right hon. Gentleman his view of his own opinions, and finding that he, when confronted by a statement made by me in very plain and unaggressive terms showing as we thought, as I thought, and as I still think, at all events a prima facie case of a breach of faith on his part, did not rise immediately to explain the circumstances—that was the cause of the disorder, that, Sir, and that alone. And if similar circumstances arose again, I think it is only natural to suppose that a similar expression of feeling would be given. There has never been any desire here on the part of any of my friends to disturb the ordinary business of the House unless
  1416
  on such an occasion as this when the ordinary practice was flagrantly departed from. I cannot give the undertaking he asks for.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I am sorry the right hon. Gentleman, by the observations he has just made, has laid it down that it is not discourteous to an hon. or right hon. Gentleman to keep him standing fifty minutes without allowing him to speak. He has also laid it down that the provocation given was sufficient to justify that procedure. That is a doctrine which goes to the very root of Parliamentary business. The right hon. Gentleman, to my intense surprise, has defended his friends by saying that I was violating a rule of the House by not rising at once, and by waiting until the whole attack which was in contemplation by hon. Gentlemen opposite had developed, and until the person accused had heard all the accusations that were made against him. That also is a new doctrine to which I absolutely refuse to subscribe. The right hon. Gentleman has told his friends that they would be justified in pursuing the same course if the same situation were to arise. Well, but the same situation will arise. Whatever attacks may be made upon me in the earlier stages of the debate for which the right hon. Gentleman has asked, and which I am anxious to give, whatever the charges made against me may be, I do not propose to rise early in that debate, any more than I proposed to rise early in the debate the other night. In those circumstances the right hon. Gentleman, having given fair warning—
  SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: As perhaps the decision of the right hon. Gentleman is hanging in the balance, I wish to explain that I do not conceive this Motion of my right hon. friend's to be at all of the same character as the proceedings of last Monday. This is a Motion dealing with the whole question of the Colonial Conference and the policy to be submitted to it. Therefore it is a perfectly reasonable thing that the Government should put up such Members as they think fit, and it will be no ground for disorder. But on Monday night last there was a direct challenge of

  1417
  the honourable conduct of the right hon. Gentleman, and I never before knew a Member of Parliament, either an ordinary Member, if I may be allowed to use the term, or a Front Bench Member, still less a high official of the Crown, who refused or appeared to evade replying. [Cries of "Withdraw."] The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to lose his temper entirely the moment any question of this sort arisen. The ground taken on Monday last was that the attack was a personal one, to which the right hon. Gentleman alone could give a reply. That would not be the case at all on the occasion of the Motion which it is proposed to bring forward on Monday, or whatever day may be fixed.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I think the interruption of the right hon. Gentleman, which has attained such proportions that perhaps it might be thought to be an independent and self-supporting speech, is really deplorable. A right hon. Gentleman who leads the Opposition, and some day may well lead the House, puts forward a proposition which I think absolutely ruinous to our proceedings. I have been the subject of as much direct personal and individual attack as any man in this House, probably of more than any man in this House. That is so owing, among other things, to the circumstance that I was Irish Secretary at a time when feeling ran very high in Ireland, and naturally enough the Irish Government and the Minister responsibly identified with the Irish Government—especially identified with it—was subject to almost nightly attack. Never have I heard it laid down that I was bound to reply at once, although more important speeches might come, or there might be reason to think more important speeches might come, at a later stage of the proceedings. That is not all. The right hon. Gentleman appears to think there is no personal element in this vote of censure. He is quite wrong. This Resolution states precisely what was stated and put by you, Sir, from the Chair as a matter of urgent public importance, namely, the alleged conflicting utterances of the Prime Minister [OPPOSITION cries of "Ministers"], and if the contention of the right hon. Gentleman
  1418
  be accepted it appears to me that I should be expected to rise first on whatever day was selected, as I was expected to rise on Monday. I repudiate the doctrine absolutely, and nothing will induce me to depart from that position in any way. It is in the first place a gross violation of Parliamentary procedure to lay down that that is the rule; and if it were the rule, the sanction which it has received from hon. Gentlemen opposite is of a kind which should really receive the severest condemnation from the Leader of the Opposition if he desires, as I am sure he does desire, to see that our debates in this House are conducted fairly and decently. I should like to know whether I may gather from the right hon. Gentleman, who presumably does know the mind of his followers, whether we are to receive a fair hearing or not.
  SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN rose again, but could not secure a hearing.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: If he will inform me that to the best of his ability, and so far as his knowledge extends—[Cries of "Oh"]. I withdraw the term "to the best of his ability," because he has repudiated any influence in this matter with his friends. If he will tell me that to the best of his knowledge the debate will be fairly conducted on Tuesday, supposing Tuesday to be the day, or on any other day which is selected, I shall be glad to find an opportunity for the right hon. Gentleman; otherwise I cannot.
  MR. CHURCHILL: Will you do the same?
  SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: We had better know how we stand. Is Tuesday to be given for this purpose?
  SIR GEORGE BARTLEY: Are you going to give the pledge? [OPPOSITION cries of "No, no!"]
  MR. BRYN ROBERTS: I think it is a piece of gross impudence to ask it.
  SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: There is no reason that I can see why

  1419
  anything should lead any Member to depart from the ordinary course of debate, if the right hon. Gentleman does not provoke it by departing from it himself.
  MR. CHURCHILLasked whether the right hon. Gentleman the First Lord of the Treasury would himself use his influence with his own followers to procure a hearing for Members speaking from the Opposition side of the House upon points of order or other matters in the course of the debate.
  MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I understand that, though in somewhat grudging and stumbling language, the right hon. Gentleman has given the pledge. In that case I shall be quite ready to give Tuesday next.
  MR. BRYN ROBERTS: Why did not you climb down at once?
  MR. CHURCHILL MR. CHURCHILL rose again.
  MR. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: A decision has been come to, and it seems undesirable to prolong this discussion.
  MR. CHURCHILL: On a point of order, you have allowed me, Sir, to put the Question to the right hon. Gentleman. May I not ask him whether he will endeavour to secure a fair hearing?
  MR. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: The Clerk will now proceed to read the orders of the day.

  POST OFFICE (TELEPHONE AGREE- MENT).
  Ordered, That the Minutes of the Evidence taken before the Select Committee on Telephones, in Session 1895, together with the Report of the said Committee, and the Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee on Telephones, in Session 1898, together with the Report of the Committee, he referred to the Select Committee on the Post Office (Telephone Agreement).—(Mr. Stuart Worthy.)
  SALE OF INTOXICANTS TO CHILDREN BILL [LORDS].
  Order for Second Reading To-morrow read, and discharged. Bill withdrawn.

  SUPPLY [8TH ALLOTTED DAY].
  Considered in Committee.
  (In the Committee.)
  [Mr. JEFFREYS (Hampshire, N.) in the Chair.]

CIVIL SERVICES AND REVENUE DE- PARTMENTS ESTIMATES, 1905–6.

  CLASS II.
  Motion made, and Question proposed, "That a sum, not exceeding £13,950, be granted to His Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1906, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Offices of the Chief Secretary in Dublin and London, and of the Inspectors of Lunatic Asylums."
  *MR. JOHN REDMONDsaid one of the most serious results of the present system of the Government of Ireland was to be found in the fact that the discussions of Irish administration in Committee of Supply had been almost turned into a farce. Many millions of money were every year raised in Ireland, and by far the greater portion of the money so raised was spent in Irish administration, and he thought it was the universal belief by men of all Parties in Ireland that it was spent extravagantly and foolishly. Yet notwithstanding that fact it was impossible for Irish Members in any quarter of the House to obtain time to adequately discuss the various branches of Irish administration. Under the new rules of procedure twenty days were allocated for the discussion of Supply for all parts of the United Kingdom, and they had been able in recent years with difficulty to obtain sometimes three, and sometimes four days for the discussion of the Irish Estimates. He thought that even hon. Gentlemen opposite who differed so much from the Nationalists as to Irish policy would

  1421
  agree with him when he said that if they were to discuss these Estimates properly, with a view to effect economy in Irish administration, Irish Votes alone would require for discussion all the days that were given for the whole of Supply. The great majority of the Irish Votes passed without discussion. The result of the matter was that at the end of the session about five-sixths of the money voted for Irish administration was passed by the House under the closure without one single word of discussion. The Vote for the salary of the Chief Secretary was one upon which it was possible to discuss almost all questions of Irish administration—certainly all questions of Irish administration for which the Irish Executive represented by the Chief Secretary was in any sense responsible. And a general discussion was not a satisfactory thing, for each branch of Irish administration ought to be discussed separately. Irish Members had, however, no alternative but to initiate a general discussion, because the time at their disposal was so miserably inadequate.
  The Chief Secretary had only held his office for a few weeks, and he presumed that the natural answer he would give to criticisms from these benches would be that he was not in office or personally responsible for these transactions, and that, indeed, he knew practically nothing about them. He was, in this respect, in the same position as every other Chief Secretary since the Union. The average official life of an Irish Secretary was about two years, and there had been about fifty-two or fifty-three Chief Secretaries. With one or two exceptions they had been all Englishmen sent over from this country to govern Ireland without any knowledge, and in most cases not having put their foot on the shores of Ireland before. Without impugning their sincerity and desire to do good for the country, he would say that the whole two years of their official existence had been spent in trying to learn something about the country they were set over. The very moment they were beginning to learn something about Ireland they were removed, and an entirely ignorant person was sent over to take their place. He was bound to say
  1422
  that the right hon. Gentleman had been charmingly candid. He went the other day to make a speech at the dinner given to him in the City of Dublin by those to whose service in Ireland he had devoted his sword. The first thing he said in his speech was that he was ignorant and incompetent to fulfil his duties. He said—
  "I have come to my office with no hope and no belief that I am in any way competent to adequately discharge the responsible duties placed upon me."
  The modesty and honesty of the right hon. Gentleman almost disarmed criticism. But, from past experience, he was inclined to believe that such honesty and modesty would not be long-lived in his administration of Ireland. He asked English and Scottish Members whether they did not consider this an awful system that as soon as the Chief Secretary had, by patient work over in Ireland, begun to understand something about the country, he was at once removed? The truth was, of course, that the Chief Secretary was not the Governor of Ireland at all, and that, like his predecessors, he was only nominally responsible in that House for the Government of Ireland. Ireland was governed by forty odd semi-independent boards with permanent officials drawn entirely from one small section of the population who carried on the Government, of course, in sympathy with the aspirations and views of that small minority.
  The right hon. Gentleman's own appointment—and of course he would be the last to deny it, if he spoke as candidly here as elsewhere—was a concession to that ascendancy faction in Ireland. His appointment, of course, heralded an entire change of policy. Almost his first official act was to go over to Dublin and make his vows to his new master, and to "kiss hands" on his appointment. In the first speech he delivered on Irish soil to the Irish people he said to his new masters, representing an insignificant fraction of the population of Ireland—
  "I only hope I may not fail in the expectations which you, my Lord Duke, and you, my Lords and gentlemen, have been good enough to indulge in with regard to me."

  1423
  Let the Committee mark this was not, in fact, a representative gathering of the Protestants or Unionists of Ireland at all. It represented only an insignificant fraction of the population. One gentleman of whom personally he knew nothing, with more or less of an independent mind, but a well-known Unionist—Mr. Andrew Jameson—rose to make a speech, and because he ventured to give expression, very mildly and tentatively, to some more or less liberal views—remember he was a Unionist and an anti-Home Ruler—he was howled down. That was to say, he was treated with that amount of decency and want of fair play about which the Prime Minister had been lecturing the House that afternoon. He mentioned this fact in order to emphasise his statement that the right hon. Gentleman went over to Ireland to make his vows of allegiance to a small ring of the Unionists of Ireland, who had been in the past, and were now, the cause of all the trouble and mischief in Ireland. But having commenced with whispering humbleness by expressing the sincere hope that he might not fail in fulfilling the expectations formed of him by the noble Duke and Lords and gentlemen present, he then went on to explain to the Irish people, through this medium, what his new policy was. The first thing he did was to denounce and to pour unmeasured contempt upon the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas. The Chief Secretary was, he thought, a very shrewd and adroit man. He attributed these words to Lord Dunraven, but they were not Lord Dunraven's words at all, but the words of the Viceroy of Ireland under whom the right hon. Gentleman as his Chief Secretary was supposed to hold office. In 1902 Lord Dudley made a remarkable speech, speaking for himself and the Government as well. He said that—
  "The opinion of the Government was, and it was his opinion also, that the only way to govern Ireland properly was to govern it in accordance with Irish ideas."
  And yet the Chief Secretary for Ireland, in his first speech after his appointment, poured ridicule upon the idea of governing Ireland in accordance with Irish ideas. He wanted to know what Irish ideas were. He said there
  1424
  were 1,250,000 of anti-Home Rulers in Ireland, and apparently his idea of governing Ireland properly was to govern it in accordance with the ideas of the minority as against the ideas of the majority. He said—
  "A careful perusal of Lord Dunraven's speech would show that he was drifting down that road which had been taken by all those, who had begun their downward career by a policy of surrender to the forces of disorder."
  That was to say that the Chief Secretary thought that to govern according to Irish ideas was to surrender to the forces of disorder. He continued—
  "Lord Dunraven had played a difficult and ungrateful part. He was not the first man who had carried on a campaign of law and order against disorder. He was not the first man who had thrown up the sponge. He told them to believe in another policy—the policy of governing Ireland in accordance with Irish ideas. What were Irish ideas? In the first place he took the population of Ireland. There was 1,250,000 of Unionists in Ireland; and the remainder, who were in the vast majority, held other ideas."
  And so the right hon. Gentleman went on, in a long passage, to pour ridicule and contempt on the principle on which Lord Dudley had said that Ireland could alone be properly governed— viz., that it should be governed according to the opinions of the overwhelming majority of the people of Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman made no disguise of his real views; and he went on, in the most candid way possible, to lay down this formula. In place of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas his conception was to "tighten the chain." When he first read these words he was amazed, and was inclined to believe that they were a maladroit, or what he might call a somewhat stupid phrase which had escaped from the right hon. Gentleman. But it had been pointed out to him that the right hon. Gentleman was neither a maladroit nor a stupid man, and that he must have known the effect of the words which he used deliberately. The right hon. Gentleman used them deliberately to please the audience he was addressing, and to assert that his idea of governing Ireland was to tighten up the chain more firmly than ever. His words were—
  "Here I believe there is room for reform and amendment in the administration in Ireland. We must tighten up the chain, and if in that

  1425
  chain there is any weakening it must be strengthened."
  He was inclined to thank the right hon. Gentleman for the candour of his speech. At any rate the right hon. Gentleman had let them know where they stood. He did not think it would be possible, after this confession of faith on the part of the right hon. Gentleman, to have any doubt whatever as to the opinions which he held.
  He had some complaints to make with reference to the action of the right hon. Gentleman since he had taken up his present position, and the first was with reference to the working of the Land Act. He was bound to admit with all honesty that very largely the fault did not lie with the right hon. Gentleman personally, it was one connected with the Administration before he accepted office. He would not, therefore, in the absence of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Dover, seek to indict him or his policy in that respect. There were certain things in connection with the working of the Land Act he must allude to; and he was bound to admit, in candour, that the greater proportion of the fault rested not with the right hon. Gentleman personally, because they were faults committed before he came into office. He had stated, with reference to the most vital portions of the Land Act—the evicted tenants and the congested estates, and also the position of the non-judicial tenants—that the action of the Irish Executive had tended to the destruction of all hope of the Act bringing about any real settlement and peace and harmony between the different classes in Ireland. Three Commissioners were appointed to administer the Act. The largest and widest powers and discretion were given to them, and yet they found that on these vital portions of the Land Act they had had their discretion interfered with, they had had their powers cramped and confined, and they had had their action over-ridden and put on one side by the Executive. He knew he could not discuss the recent Report of the Commissioners at any length, but he contended that they could discuss any portion of that Report which bore on the action of the Irish
  1426
  Executive in the control of those Commissioners' action for which the Chief Secretary of the day was personally responsible.
  It would be remembered that when the Bill was going through the House they received a pledge from the Member for Dover, which was renewed afterwards in the most formal way by the Attorney-General, that the regulations which were to be issued for the control and guidance of the Commissioners by the Executive would be placed upon the Table of the House, or, at any rate, that they would in some shape or form be published. They demanded the publication of these regulations, and the Member for Dover refused again and again to place them upon the Table, or to inform them as to their nature. They had nothing to go on but the vaguest rumours. They were refused that information, and all they knew was that there was a wide-spread belief in Ireland that the discretion of the Commissioners was being tampered and interfered with by orders from Dublin Castle; and, notwithstanding the pledge, these orders were withheld from them. When the present Chief Secretary came into office, and when they made this case, he answered them with perfect candour. He said he knew nothing about the past, he had not been concerned with it; but he thought the demand made for the publication of the regulations governing the Commissioners was a reasonable demand, and he would at once see that they were published. He had not fulfilled to the full and in the spirit that pledge, because what had he done? He said there ought to be no secrecy, he saw no reason for it, and he thought they ought to have full information as to these orders and regulations, and he promised that his first official duty would be to look into this matter and see that they got the information. What had he done? He had drafted a lot of new regulations, and it was those new regulations he had published, or at any rate promised to publish; but he had not published the old regulations issued by the late Chief Secretary and which were in operation up to the other day, and it was quite clear from the Report of the Commissioners that he did not intend to publish them. The demand which they had a right, he

  1427
  thought, to make was that everything connected with these regulations or orders which had interfered with the action of the Commissioners for the last year and a half should be published.
  What occurred with reference to the evicted tenants? Everyone knew that, although the evicted tenants, question was in one sense a limited question, in another sense it was probably the most important of all questions in connection with the Land Act; because the main object of the Act was not merely to transfer the ownership of land from the landlord to the tenant, but to end the land war and bring about some appeasement of feeling in Ireland with happy consequences, as they all believed, to the country and everyone connected with Ireland; and so long as this evicted tenants' question was allowed to rankle there and fester as a sore this object could not be carried out. The Commissioners were impressed with that view, and they set to work to grapple with the matter. Considerable correspondence passed with the Treasury, which resulted in the issue of directions to the Commissioners last February to confine their inquiries to estates actually for sale before them. There was clear proof that the discretion of the Commissioners was interfered with by the notion of the Executive, and he thought the pledge given that there should be no secrecy and that they should know what was actually done in the way of orders had been violated. He asked the right hon. Gentleman would he, in fulfilment of his pledge, produce the correspondence that had passed with the Treasury and make a clean breast of the whole matter. He might have a difficulty in the matter, because this took place before he came into office; but he definitely promised them in the House, in almost the first speech he made as Chief Secretary, that there should be no further secrecy in the matter, that they should know what was going on, that the regulations and orders issued should be given to them; and he (the hon. Member) submitted respectfully that he was not fulfilling in the spirit his pledge if he only gave them future regulations and withheld all information as to the regulations and other means whereby the Commissioners were prevented from putting the Act in operation
  1428
  in a way likely to bring about a successful issue with reference to evicted tenants.
  There was one other matter connected with this Report to which he wished to refer, and that was the position of the non-judicial tenants, who were a numerous body. The Act provided that they were not to come within the operation of what was called the zones, that was to say that in all cases of suggested sale inquiry and investigation should be instituted by the Commissioners into the security for the amount issued and into the equity of the price, and the Commissioners in their Report, at the end of page 3, said—
  "In the case of non-judicial holdings inspectors were required, in the instructions issued by the Commissioners in February, 1904, to inquire as to the security of each holding for the price agreed to and as to the equity of the price to all persons interested, including the tenant purchaser. Subsequently, the interpretation of the law acted upon was that both in the case of non-judicial and judicial holdings the only questions which arose were the security to the State and the equity of the price to parties other than the vendor and purchaser."
  He did not know whether hon. Members followed this, but it was really very simple. Let them take the case of a holding of a non-judicial tenant? The property in that was two-fold. There was the interest of the tenant, and that portion of the holding was his property now. There was also the interest of the landlord. The tenant proposed to purchase the interest of the landlord, and the Act provided that the Commissioners were to make an inquiry as to the security for the loan and as to the equity of the price; but by these new orders and directions, which had been issued and which, he claimed, should be published, they were to take into account the equity of the price so far as it affected everybody except the tenant. This meant that, although the tenant might pay a price which was really the price not only of his own interest but of the interest of the landlord as well, that was not to be taken into account at all so long as the whole holding was adequate security for the loan. This was not the intention of the House of Commons when the clause was passed, and manifestly a clause in that shape would never have been allowed to pass by Irish Members sitting on that

  1429
  side of the House; and if the law officers of the Crown, upon whose opinion he presumed this decision had been arrived at, thought they were right, at any rate they should have full information as to how it was arrived at and the reasons for it given in order to press for such amendment as was necessary to meet the case. The Commissioners in all these cases were over-ruled, and he thought it was a most unjust tiling, not only to the Committee but to the Commissioners themselves, that full information should not be given as to the manner in which the were overruled, and as to the orders issued by the Government for that purpose.
  He passed now to another subject, a subject in which the right hon. Gentleman was himself personally responsible to the full extent. He had to make a charge against the right hon. Gentleman of the most serious character. He charged the right hon. Gentleman with deliberately fostering the cry for coercion in Ireland and doing that not for the purpose of maintaining law and order, which were not threatened, or protection of life and property, which were not threatened, but for the purpose of compelling Sir Antony MacDonnell to resign his position. That was a serious charge.
  THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. WALTER LONG, Bristol, S.): Hear, hear!
  *MR. JOHN REDMOND: Six or seven weeks ago, before anything of this kind became publicly mentioned in the papers, he was informed by those who had opportunity of knowing—not Sir Antony MacDonnell, from whom he had heard nothing, directly or indirectly—[Mr. WALTER LONG: Hear, hear!] and who were behind the scenes both in London and Ireland, that in view of the fact that Sir Antony had made a declaration that he would not administer coercion, a determination had been come to to force him out of Dublin Castle by forcing coercion upon certain parts of Ireland. He (Mr. Redmond) hardly thought it credible, but he was told to watch The Times, Irish Times, the Globe, and the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, and of course he need hardly say it was
  1430
  necessary to watch the Unionist Members opposite. Almost immediately after that communication The Times began to write upon the subject. The Dublin correspondent of The Times day after day sent letters, sometimes of a column in length, describing alleged outrages. That was followed up in the Globe and the Irish Times. After a time they came down from generalisations to particular instances, and most Members would remember the sensation created in London by the account which appeared in the papers of a midnight attack on the house of a Mr. Persse, in Galway, by a body of armed men who fired into the house and who were only routed by the bravery and valour of Mr. Persse and a few friends. That case was commented upon, and he was not sure that it was not treated pictorially in some of the weekly journals. The changes were rung upon it for a week, and then it was investigated by the right hon. Gentleman and the police of Ireland, and it was found that the whole story was an invention, and nothing of the kind had occurred at all. Then there was a sensational account of alleged houghing and mutilation of cattle—a crime which should be denounced as horrible, shocking, un-Christian, and detestable. This case was investigated, and it was found there was not a single case of a beast being houghed or mutilated. Then they had stories of incendiary fires. He must express his opinion that it was dastardly for people either in the public Press or in that House or out of that House to take part in any conspiracy of this kind, seeking to blacken the reputation of a people who, so far as outrages and crime were considered, stood on a higher position than the people of either England or Scotland. The hon. Member (Mr. Redmond) then read extracts from the declarations of Judges at the recent Spring Assizes in the counties alleged to be disturbed to show that there was no evidence of an outbreak of crime and disturbance in any part of the country. The newly appointed County Court Judge of Roscommon, Mr. Wakeley, said the other day there was a conspiracy in England to misrepresent Ireland, and though he was a gentleman bitterly opposed to him in politics, Mr. Wakeley

  1431
  said he should always take the opportunity of standing up for the Irish people. Lord Dunraven gave the same testimony in his pamphlet, in which he said a certain section of Unionists had been too busy painting in too lurid colours the condition of Ireland. An isolated case might be quoted, but was that fair in dealing with one country and another. Only the other day he read of a case of cattle mutilation in Sunderland, a case where a farmer had placed some calves in a shed overnight, one of the calves was missing in the morning, and the farmer traced it to a field near at hand where he found it with its hind legs cut off. He was not so foolish or unjust as to found any argument upon that case. These offences were bound to occur in every community now and then, but thank God not often. But supposing Ireland was governing this country under coercion and that trial by jury could be suspended at the will of a single man, would it be fair to ring the changes upon the case and to publish it and then to say, "This is a horrible condition of crime in England."
  Questions had been asked recently about a Return of the agrarian outrages in Ireland. He sympathised with his hon. friend who asked why this Return was made at all. For example, if a man's hay was burned, or something of that kind, why was that to be put down as an agrarian offence without evidence? And why should there be this Return for Ireland more than for any other country? This Return for 1904 showed there were 206 agrarian outrages in Ireland during the last twelve months. Of those 206 outrages 124 were classed as intimidation, and of those 105 were cases of sending threatening letters. Was it not a cruel thing to charge against Ireland 124 cases of agrarian intimidation, thereby leading people to believe that serious offences had been committed, when 105 of those cases were threatening letters? He believed that this session he had received certainly 105 threatening letters, bearing English postmarks. In fact, he never made a speech in this House that he did not receive shoals of letters and postcards of a threatening character, some of which did not come stamped. He received most abusive and threatening letters of
  1432
  all kinds; threatening not only eternal damnation, but all pains and penalties of this life, for his having expressed opinions and convictions which were not shared by the senders. If these cases were all reported to the police and solemnly put into a Return as outrages what a farce it would be. Yet it was on a string of figures like this that the Committee were asked to believe that agrarian outrages existed in Ireland. Agrarian crime did not exist in Ireland. There was no such thing. He found further down in the Return, under the head of injuries to property, thirteen cases! Thirteen cases in twelve months amongst a population of 4,500,000! The Return showed nothing. If they went to the general criminal statistics, they would find that Ireland stood far above either England and Scotland not only in the matter of serious crimes, but of all crimes.
  Coming back to his charge against the right hon. Gentleman, he said that since the right hon. Gentleman had been made Chief Secretary he had pandered to those who had endeavoured to raise the cry that Ireland was in a state of disturbance and that coercion must be put into force. He had done so by his speeches, in which he had never failed to say something about the necessity of maintaining law and order. The right hon. Gentleman had done that in order to pander to the attempt that was being made to force coercion on Ireland. But the right hon. Gentleman had done more than that; he had drafted hundreds of extra police into this district of county Galway, with the object of creating the idea that it was necessary to take some steps to protect life and property, when he could not quote an instance where the life and property of any man in that district had been threatened. What else had the right hon. Gentleman done? He had created a little reign of terror there with these policemen. Would it be believed that the innocent recreation of playing a band along a country road was forbidden in this district? A band recently had proceeded a short way along a country road when it was met by some police and ordered to stop playing and to go back. The men ceased playing and

  1433
  turned back along the road, and the police came after them and turned upon them and broke up their instruments, and then these men for whom their neighbours had subscribed money to buy a new drum and other instruments, were told if they brought the band out again, during the day or night, anywhere in that district, the instruments would be broken up again.
  The right hon. Gentleman also employed the police in their spare time in making domiciliary visits all through that district. The right hon. Gentleman in this House recently tried to turn the matter off with a laugh, but it was too serious a matter. Could anyone imagine anything more irritating, more maddening to the people of a district where no disturbance existed at the present moment than domiciliary visits being made at all hours of the day and night? The right hon. Gentleman admitted that some visits were made by night, but said they were not made at any hour when people ought to be in bed? What right had he to say at what hour the people should be in bed. The right hon. Gentleman had admitted that one visit was made at 10.30 at night, hours after many of these people were in bed. He warned the right hon. Gentleman that by proceedings of this kind he might create in that part of Ireland a state of things which he had assumed had been in existence for some time. The right hon. Gentleman had also instituted proceedings at law against certain persons in this district. Against that he had nothing to say. If men offended against the law let them be tried fairly and impartially. In this country in cases of this kind men were made amenable to the law by being summoned before a magistrate and sent to trial in serious cases, and the right hon. Gentleman tried that procedure in some parts of this district, but he had now mended his plan. The right hon. Gentleman was now engaged in a most provocative course of procedure, viz., arresting these people in their homes, taking them before magistrates, and then, when they were committed for trial, releasing them again. Why was that done? Did the right hon. Gentleman think that these people were going to run away to America to avoid his summonses? No such preposterous claim could be put forward.
  1434
  Why did he not summon these men instead of arresting them and dragging them from their homes? On May 1st, between the hours of four and six in the morning, thirteen men were dragged from their beds by the police, taken a long distance to Ballinasloe, given no food, brought before a magistrate, returned for trial, and then at once released. Could anything be more provocative? Why were not these men summoned? Or if it was necessary to arrest them, why should the proceedings be carried out in the middle of the night? If the right hon. Gentleman allowed his advisers to lead him into courses of that kind he would create disorder. ["That is what he wants."] It was absurd to imagine that such proceedings could be carried on without the most provocative effect upon the whole people.
  He respectfully warned the right hon. Gentleman that he ought not to allow himself to be drawn along this road. He gave that warning quite disinterestedly as he had never concealed his belief that the national movement in Ireland was generally strengthened by coercion. Whereever the national movement was somewhat apathetic, the one infallible remedy to stimulate it into action was a little of the salt of coercion. Therefore in giving this advice he was not thinking of the immediate prospects of the national movement. He took a wider and graver view of his responsibilities. He was one of those who looked forward to the day when there would be a possibility of reconciliation between the two nations, when the people of this country, might get better and truer information about Ireland, when they would see in a truer light the facts of the Irish situation, and understand more clearly the true meaning of the forces represented by hon. Gentlemen opposite; and when, on the other hand, the people of Ireland would be able to take perhaps a fairer or more generous view of the mistakes committed by this country. He spoke for himself in saying that, and it was unnecessary to add that such a reconciliation could take place only on conditions which would leave Ireland free for the management of her own affairs.

  1435
  With all seriousness he warned the right hon. Gentleman that the road along which he was being pushed was a fatal road. He was being made the servant, not of the Unionist Party in Ireland, but of a section of that Party, which all through the history of Ireland had the same record—a section of men who had no country and no cause, whose one political creed was greed, and who to-day were just the same as they were a hundred years ago. He would read to the Committee an extract from a letter written in 1792 by Mr. Edmund Burke to Mr. Dundas, Secretary for Ireland. At that time the Irish Parliament was beginning to see its way towards loosening the chains on the Catholics of Ireland, the Catholic Emancipation Act of the following year was beginning to be discussed. It was a Protestant Parliament, and although as a whole it was in favour of this extension of the liberties of Catholics, there was a powerful section who were bitterly opposed to it, and who threatened Mr. Dundas with what they would do if the loosening of the bonds of the Catholics permitted any interference with their monopoly of place and power. They were then strenuous upholders of the Irish Parliament and called themselves Irish Nationalists, but they told Mr. Dundas that if this policy went on they would cease to support the Irish Parliament and become Unionists. Mr. Burke wrote as follows—
  "If Mr. Hobart is not somewhat mistaken in his accounts of the disposition of the Council of the Lords and Commons of Ireland it is not much to their advantage. Rather than admit of the least participation in their privileges they are ready to abandon them altogether, to shut up their Parliament House, and to become a province of England. If yon had a mind to answer peevishness in kind you would tell them that the sooner they execute their resolution the better, that they have been long enough the curse, the scourge, and the bane of the Irish nation, and that never having performed one act of real legislation, when they are called upon to adopt a measure of justice, dictated by the circumstances of the times, they resent as an outrage an attempt to render them at least of some use to their unhappy country. They actually threaten if you do not behave better to quarrel with their places and pensions, to surrender with disdain their charter of monopoly and to break up the great staple trade, never carried on to its full perfection but in Ireland, of the whole art and mystery of jobbery.
  That was Burke's description of the small section of the Protestants of Ireland
  1436
  who formed the ascendancy faction in that day. Their lineal successors in Irish politics were animated by just the same spirit, and if the right hon. Gentleman allowed them to push him along the road instead of exercising an independent judgment, his career in Ireland would end, as the career of so many of his predecessors had ended, in ruin for the interests of law and order and good government, and probably disgrace to himself. He begged to move.
  Motion made, and Question proposed. "That Item A be reduced by £100, in respect of the Salary of the Chief Secretary."—(Mr. John Redmond.)
  MR. WILLIAM MOOREjoined in the wish of the hon. and learned Member for Waterford that the time might soon come when the people of this country, by a wider diffusion of true information, would understand the position of affairs in Ireland. Irish Unionists had never concealed what the true facts were. At the time of the Home Rule controversies, as soon as the true facts of the case were brought home to the people of Great Britain, Irish Unionists were able, simply owing to the spread of truth, to secure a verdict in their favour, and the same result would happen again. While he regarded as a base and unworthy charge the accusation that the Chief Secretary had manufactured the cases referred to by the hon. Member for the purpose of evoking the special provisions of the Crimes Act, he congratulated his right hon. friend on the fact that such a speech had been made against him. It was some time since charges of corrupt administration had been brought against the chief executive officer of the Irish Government, and the more such charges were made against the Chief Secretary the greater confidence would Irish Unionists feel in him. Speeches such as that just delivered would do the right hon. Gentleman a great deal of good in Ireland, and, when analysed, no harm in England.
  The hon. and learned Member had said with truth that there had been a change of policy in Ireland. There had indeed been a most satisfactory change of

  1437
  policy. Owing to the action of the right hon. Gentleman during his short tenure of office there had grown up a marked feeling of confidence in those very parts of Ireland and among those very classes of the people which it was the duty of a Unionist Administration to encourage. The object of Irish Unionists was to secure in every part of Ireland an absolutely impartial administration of the law. Under a former régime there had been grounds for suspecting that the administration was not impartial, but within the last two months a most marked change had come over the feelings of those who had a stake in the country, shopkeepers as well as landlords believing that the law was going to be enforced irrespective of persons.
  He would ask the hon. and learned Member for Waterford to forgive him for not going into detail in reference to the topics to which he had alluded, but there were some other topics upon which he desired to say something. He thought that when the matter came to be considered in England the gravamen of the charges which had been made against the Chief Secretary would scarcely bear close examination. One complaint made by the hon. and learned Member was that in a certain district in Galway the police made domiciliary visits at 10.30 at night. Was that a crime on the part of the police whose duty it was to preserve the peace of the district? Was it a crime for these men to knock at the doors of certain houses to make inquiries, more especially when this was done, as had been stated lay the Chief Secretary, with the consent of the occupiers. The right hon. Gentleman had told them that if he found that the system being pursued on this matter constituted an intrusion he would have it stopped wherever there was a grievance Then it was said that certain men should be made amenable to the ordinary law. It appeared that in one case some eleven or twelve men, instead of being summoned before the magistrate in the usual way, were arrested and taken out of their houses early in the morning. As in this case the men were liberated on bail almost immediately, he did not think there was very much of a grievance
  1438
  in that. The explanation of this case had been given in the House that day. These men were arrested at a very early hour. In Ireland it was in the discretion of the magistrates whether a person should be brought up by arrest or by a summons, and these men were arrested, upon the statement of the officer responsible to this House in order to avoid a tumultuous assembly. If in order to avoid a breach of the peace it was considered necessary to arrest certain men he thought hon. Members would agree with him that there was nothing very serious in that. Then there was the band, which the hon. and learned Member appeared to think was a very harsh case. They knew how innocent some of these transactions could be made to look. He said that this band was going through an uninhabited part of the country. He thought the hon. and learned Member was going to tell them the whole of the facts but he had omitted some very material facts. He did not say where this band was going. They had announced their intention of holding a musical demonstration at a farm in possession of a man whom the United Irish League were terrorising.
  MR. JOHN REDMOND: I do not accept that statement.
  MR. ROCHEsaid there was no meeting on that occasion.
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: No, there was no meeting because before the band got there it was stopped by the police, and that was what the hon. and learned Member had complained of. The police acted with the most perfect propriety. This was a band which intended to intimidate a man who had as much right to carry on his trade without any intimidation as any man in this country, and when a band set out, in defiance of the warning and the proclamation issued by the police, to serenade with the object of attracting a crowd, he thought the police were justified in interfering.
  There was another matter upon which he desired to express his approval of the action of the Irish Executive, and that was in connection with the landing of the sheriff on Dursey Island. He was

  1439
  surprised that the hon. and Member had not drawn attention the matter. In this case the sheriff went to the island in an Admiralty gunboat called the "Storm Cock," and, resistance being offered, he was protected by the police, when he proceeded to execute the writ of the King's Court. The duty of a sheriff was a very unpleasant one, and he quite agreed that there was not likely to be anybody in that House who did not sympathise with the poor people. The officers had of course to do their duty and obey the orders of the highest Court of the land. Nobody could say that they were guilty of misdemeanour in doing so. What was the law? Lord Chief-Baron Palles' opinion on the subject was as follows. Speaking previous to sentencing prisoners found guilty of wilfully obstructing the sheriff in the execution of his duty, he said—
  "Speaking generally for the purpose of pointing my observations to the matter in hand, I may state that upon each of these occasions when the sheriff arrived with his force for the purpose of executing those writs, there were attempts by his bailiffs to execute them, that such bailiffs were assaulted in their attempted execution of those writs, and that that attempted execution, and the assaults upon the bailiff consequent upon it, lasted for a period upon each occasion of about an hour. During the entire of that time the Royal Irisn Constabulary, standing there under the orders of the county inspectors, did not move. No order was given to them by the magistrate in command for one whole hour, during which the officer of the Queen was attempting to execute Her Majesty's writ. For one whole hour breaches of the peace, in gross and open violation of the law, in contempt of the authority of the Queen, and of her mandate to the sheriff, were persisted in, in the presence of that strong force of constabulary, and they did nothing. Upon, as I understand it, the conclusion of that period, orders were given to them by the resident magistrates, and the moment those orders were given they performed their duty, not only with a promptitude and courage which cannot be too highly commended, but with a remarkable, amount of patience and forbearance, clearly evidenced by the fact that of the several thousands constituting the riotous mobs upon the occasions in question there is no suggestion that injury was suffered by one. In the observations I make I advisedly exclude all reference to the military. Their officers were bound to wait for the command of the civil authority. I advisedly also refrain from referring to subordinate officers, to district inspectors, and the sergeants and men of the constabulary who were under their control. They were bound to wait for the orders of the county inspectors. My observations
  1440
  are pointed, in the first instance, to the two county inspectors and to the two resident magistrates then present, and only upon the hypothesis that they were acting without orders and upon their own responsibility. If they acted upon orders, far be it from me to make the slightest reflection upon them, because they were obeying the dictates of their superiors. But I take leave to say that in point of law, no illegal order or unconstitutional order, given by an official—be he Inspector-General, or, going higher, even Under-Secretary or Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant—can justify any man in the violation of the law; and howsoever high the position of these officials may be, they are bound by our Constitution to obey the law in the same way as the humblest man who walks the streets."
  That was what a Judge of the High Court had said. It was obviously a breach of the duty of any official or other person to disobey the decree of the King's Court. And to have it said, as had been said in the class of literature to which he had referred, that in landing a force on Dursey Island to carry out the decree of the King's Bench Division was a scandal—that was an absolute misrepresentation of the case.
  MR. SWIFT MACNEILL: Will the hon. Gentleman tell me in reference to that charge is it not a charge of Chief Baron Palles given at the Winter Assizes at Sligo in 1887, and was not that charge in condemnation of the Executive Government of the time?
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to read it?
  MR. SWIFT MACNEILL: I know it.
  MR. WILLIAM MOOREsaid he would now pass to another matter, one in reference to the Estates Commissioners. He thought that the arrival of the Chief Secretary in Ireland had done a great deal towards influencing for the better the action of the Estates Commissioners. A very significant fact with regard to the Estates Commissioners would be found in this. As the Act of 1903 was passed, the House would remember that there were two ways in which a man could get rid of his land. He could either deal direct with his tenants or he could sell to his tenants by selling in bulk in the first instance to the

  1441
  Estates Commissioners, and a very good clue to the confidence which at the start of the Act was felt by the general public who had land to sell was this, that practically, except in those parts of Ireland where intimidation was rife, everyone refused to sell to the Estates Commissioners. Nearly everybody preferred to negotiate with his tenants himself, and conversely when they got to Connaught and to the very place where intimidation was rife they found the local bodies—branches of the United Irish League and in other places, Town Tenants Leagues—in Tipperary and Cork cases were brought to his knowledge—they were insisting that they would in no way deal unless the sale was made through the Estates Commissioners. He thought if a Return were published the number of estates outside Connaught sold to the Commissioners would be limited to something under ten. And unfortunately there was a great deal of idea abroad that the Estates Commissioners were very apt to lend themselves to the local behests of the United Irish League. He was glad to say that that had been altered. The other day the Estates Commissioners for the first time published a circular which had reference to the proceedings in the West of Ireland—a most proper circular, and the only misfortune was that it was not published twelve months ago—that where they found that local intimidation was on foot for the purpose of forcing the owners to sell the land to themselves (the Estates Commissioners) they would absolutely decline to deal.
  MR. DILLON: Was that a circular or a letter?
  MR. WILLIAM MOOREthought the hon. Member was right. It was a letter which appeared in the papers and which was published, he supposed, by the Commissioners or by the Executive, and it appeared in the whole of the Irish Press. With regard to the question of the Estates Commissioners, as they all knew they had a very strong power and he would like to know in a particular case which had attracted a great deal of public attention how it was going to be exercised. It was a case which had been brought several times before the House by Question and Answer by his hon. friends. The
  1442
  Commissioners had the power of deciding what part of a landlord's estate was to constitute an estate for the purposes of the Act, and the importance of the decision on that was this, that unless they declared the bit which the landlord was able to sell an estate he would get no bonus and practically there would be no sale. He found that on an estate in Cork—the Arnott estate—
  MR. DILLON: A very interesting point of order arises here, and we should be clear upon it. I perceive that the hon. and learned Member is going to discuss in detail the action of the Estates Commissioners. The hon. and learned Member for Waterford discussed the action of the Estates Commissioners in so far as, according to their Report, it had been dictated by the regulations of the Executive. The hon. and learned Member opposite is going a step further, and is discussing the powers of the Estates Commissioners and the action they have taken on their own responsibility.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: This is a matter which is sub judice.
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: If the case is sub judice certainly it cannot be discussed. Nor do I think the action of the Estates Commissioners can be gone into in detail as the hon. Gentleman proposes. The action of the Commissioners, I understand, is like that of a legal Court. [NATIONALIST cries of "No. no!"]
  MR. DILLON: It is not in that sense a legal Court. It is subject to the Executive and the criticism of this House. The hon. and learned Member for Water-ford guarded himself specially and said he was entitled to discuss the action of the Commissioners in so far as, according to their Report, that action had been coerced or dictated by the Executive Government. The hon. Member opposite is going a step further than that. He is discussing the action of the Commissioners in so far as they are acting independently and on their own judgment. I do not object in the least, but I only want to know whether we will be at liberty to answer it.
  MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I hope you will give no decision which will bar the way to the discussion of Section 5 where the Executive have interfered with the Estates Commissioners and reversed their proceedings. That is a wholly different thing.
  THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL FOR IRELAND (Mr. ATKINSON, Londonderry, N.): That is also sub judice.
  MR. T. W. RUSSELL: In so far as it is merely an administrative operation I hope the hon. and learned Gentleman will see that that will come more appropriately on the Vote for the Commissioners.
  MR. DILLON: I take exception to the statement of the Attorney-General.
  MR. ATKINSON: I mean the construction of Section 5 is sub judice.
  MR. DILLON: No, Sir, the Executive Government has decided the question. We must be allowed to challenge that.
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: I do not wish to go into further details on this point.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: Surely it is not in order that on a matter affecting the administration of public money, which is at the present moment before a tribunal, whether it be a legal or administrative tribunal, a discussion should take place for the purpose of affecting that body with reference to the particular distribution of the money.
  MR. DILLON: This is an important question, and the Chairman is in a difficult position when asked to decide upon in, because it all depends on the construction of an Act of Parliament which we have followed very closely and which may not be so familiarly known to the Chairman. I differ from the hon. Member for North Louth. This strikes at the promise given to us that the whole of the proceedings of the Commissioners in all their details should be submitted to the judgment and criticism of the House of Commons. We have that promised most clearly in the wording of the Act
  1444
  and in the promises of Ministers. The proceedings of the Commissioners are not those of a judicial body in the sense that they are withdrawn from the consideration of this House.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: There is no difference between the hon. Member for Mayo and myself. I think we have a right to object to the hon. and learned Member opposite discussing a particular matter which is really intended to prejudice the tenants' side of the question in the Arnott Estate case.
  MR. ATKINSON: It is quite true that the Commissioners are not wholly in the position of Judges. It is quite true that some of them are under the control of the Executive and some of them guided by the regulations but, at the time they are judicial in this sense, that they have to decide certain applications that come before them upon facts that come before them, and while they are deciding these applications, I submit that they are in the same position as any other judicial authority, and that you should not discuss the matter of that application.
  MR. DILLON: I absolutely protest against this interpretation made by the Attorney-General.
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: If the Commissioners are acting under the responsibility of the Executive, of course their actions can be discussed. If the case is sub judice, of course it cannot be discussed.
  MR. DILLON: But what is the meaning of sub judice? I cannot allow it to pass without protesting against the assumption of the Attorney-General that the action of the Commissioners is withdrawn from the discussion of the House of Commons.
  MR. BLAKE: I venture to hope that the hon. Member opposite will not carry this further. I think the point is important, and it requires serious consideration before a conclusion is reached.
  MR. WILLIAM MOOREsaid he would not state anything that was to the prejudice of the case. What he was about to bring to the notice of the Committee was a certain statement made in regard to this estate that the Commissioners had acted in a particular way. If the statement were true, he thought it was a case in which the Executive should exercise their control. In deference to the hon. Member ho did not put it further than that.
  He came now to the question of the constabulary. He thought that the feeling in the force, so far as he could see, was greatly improved during the last couple of mouths. The constables had more confidence that they would be protected—a confidence which unfortunately previous to this they had largely lost. From all he could find out—and he had been talking to some of them—he believed a great deal had been done in the way of strengthening the esprit de corps between the officers and men, and the belief was now much more general than it was formerly that they would be protected in the discharge of their duty. He saw the other day at Limerick an application was made in thematter of some maliciousincendiarism, and the application was tried before County Court Judge Adams. Judge Adams they all knew, and he did not suggest that he had any prejudices or sympathies. If he had, hon. Members opposite would agree that they rather lay with the Nationalist Members. A police sergeant went before the Judge and stated that he believed the application was a bogus one. If the Judge had acted on that evidence there would not be another word to say, but the Judge said he had no doubt malice had been proved and injury had taken place, but he held there was not a tittle of evidence to support the constable's statement. That was an extraordinary thing to happen, coming as the statement did from a constable who was supposed to know the district. It was a matter that should be investigated, and if any investigation had taken place he should be very glad to know the result. The Chief Secretary had behind him the fullest approval of those who wished to see the law enforced, particularly in regard to public meetings
  1446
  in those districts in the West of Ireland where unfortunately intimidation prevailed. He did not wish to see the right of public meeting prevented, but it had been properly prevented where, in the judgment of those responsible for the peace of the country, it would lead to a breach of the peace. He had no doubt that a great many of the constituents of Members opposite who wanted security for themselves would also support the Chief Secretary in this matter. It was also satisfactory to find district inspectors and county inspectors and the force generally were not intimidated by the fact that a gentleman, knowing what he was about, had committed a breach of the law, from doing their duty. So long as that course was pursued, the right hon. Gentleman would have the support of the Members from Ireland who sat on those benches.
  There was a case also where local justices refused to attest a recruit for service in the Army. The men who did that were not fit to hold the commission of the peace. It was clearly a matter which ought to receive the attention of the Chief Secretary. There were also cases in which justices were very apt to act, and especially ex-officio justices, in defiance of evidence. He knew it was a delicate subject to touch, but there were cases which were too plain. He referred to one case where the defendant admitted he committed the offence, and yet the magistrates ordered his acquittal. There was a case at Westport. A Bible-reader met a Roman Catholic clergyman and assaulted him, as he admitted. The case came before the magistrates, three in number. They unanimously acquitted the prisoner, although he said he assaulted the man and would do so again. That carried the law into contempt. He noticed in the same week a priest was assaulted in the street in Belfast, the defendant holding a Bible close to the priest's nose, saying he was in need of it. Although he had not laid a hand upon the priest he was fined 40s. or a month's imprisonment with hard labour. This showed that the law was administered in one way at Westport and in another way at Belfast. Where there was open disregard of evidence in law the Lord-Chancellor should take action and remove these gentlemen from the administration

  1447
  of justice. After all, the administration of local justice went to the security and contentment of Ireland.
  He and his friends heartily approved of the new policy that had been carried out during the past six weeks. The first consideration for the country was the observance and enforcement of the law of the land. If that was successfully asserted, he had no doubt the Chief Secretary would carry out to the full the policy which, up to the present, they had earnestly hoped the right hon. Gentleman would develop—namely, the industrial side. Last night, so far as the Bann was concerned, they had had an offer from the right hon. Gentleman to reorganise the whole drainage system of Ireland. He did not say that that was very much, but, at any rate, if the Nationalists insisted in paralysing the executive officers of the Crown by acting in defiance of the forces of law and order in the country, it was obvious that they were delaying the industrial development of Ireland. The hon. Member for Mayo had been good enough to give him notice that he intended to attack him in regard to what he had said about Sir Antony MacDonnell. What he said and what he still said about the Under-Secretary's position in regard to the unhappy Anderson case was this,—parenthetically he might say that he did not think it was very useful to the Under-Secretary that this case should be so constantly dragged in. He maintained that every thing which he had said was absolutely true.
  MR. DILLONsaid that all he wanted was to see that the truth prevailed.
  MR. WILLIAM MOOREsaid he also desired that. What he had stated was that the Under-Secretary was directly responsible for the dismissal of Constable Anderson on the identical evidence on which that man was afterwards reinstated. Of course, he was aware that the Chief Secretary was, in constitutional law, responsible for the acts of his subordinate; but in dealing with that charge he was dealing with actual responsibility. On June 26th the late Chief Secretary the Member for Dover said that he was first cognisant of the matter in the
  1448
  month of February; and that was supplemented afterwards by saying that he had never heard a word about the case until February. Whatever that right hon. Gentleman's responsibility might be it was limited till after February. Who, then, did deal with Constable Anderson? It was the Under-Secretary and the Inspector-General. What were the facts? This man was dismissed in December. On January 2nd a letter was written by his solicitor enclosing a medical certificate which was received in Dublin Castle on January 3rd. It was I this medical certificate which induced the right hon. Member for Dover to reinstate Anderson. According to the statement of the right hon. Member for Dover the police records of Anderson were for seventeen and a-half years perfectly clear.
  MR. DILLONsaid he did not dispute that the late Chief Secretary said that Anderson's record was perfectly clear; but he knew that it was not.
  MR. WILLIAM MOOREsaid he thought that was hardly a generous way of dealing with this matter. The late Chief Secretary said that the man's record was perfectly clear, and he reinstated him on the medical certificate after consultation with the law fficers of the Crown, who revised the case, and who advised him that on the evidence the man should not have been convicted. Why did not the Under-Secretary consult the law officers? Up to the dismissal of Anderson the Under-Secretary could only have communicated with the Rev. Mr. O'Hara. What communications passed between the Rev. Mr. O'Hara and the Under-Secretary? He was privately informed that in spite of this man's record every effort was made to rake up scandals against him until January 23rd, when it was stated that the medical certificate on which the whole case turned had no bearing on it and that the dismissal accordingly stood. That letter was drafted by the Inspector-General and submitted for approval to Sir Antony MacDonnell. That proved the whole case to the hilt. He himself felt so much approval of the change which had taken place in affairs in Ireland that he regretted he was not able

  1449
  to vote for the salary of the Chief Secretary. If it were only a personal matter he would vote with a heart and a-half, but voting would involve an expression of confidence in the Irish Administration, all the members of which were not responsible to this House. The Lord-Lieutenant was a most generous and lavish entertainer, but they had no confidence in his political opinion. Then there was Sir Horace Plunkett, and he did not know what the present opinion of Sir Horace Plunkett might be, but at one time he was in open sympathy with the Lord-Lieutenant and Lord Dunraven. Further, the Under-Secretary was the actual draftsman of the devolution scheme. All these excellent officials were opposed to Unionist policy. In these circumstances, it would be impossible for Ulster Unionist Members to vote for the Chief Secretary's salary.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLsaid in days long gone by he once heard Mr. Disraeli remind the Members sitting behind him that this country was not governed by logic. He thought the Chief Secretary for Ireland, after listening to the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim, would be inclined to believe in that statement; for, that he should be deprived of his salary because of certain views of Lord Dudley, whose salary was not involved, Sir Horace Plunkett, whose salary was not involved, and Sir Antony MacDonnell, whose salary was not involved, was certainly one of the most illogical things ever submitted to the House of Commons. Truly, the official Unionists of Ulster were fearfully and wonderfully made, and had their own ideas of logic, no doubt. He agreed in one thing, and that only, with the hon. Member. He said that a great change had come over Irish policy. It was true. He noticed, however, that the hon. and learned Member never suggested any change until the Land Act was passed, and he got thirty-one years purchase for land he had offered for twenty before it was passed.
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: The hon. Member has told the story so often that he believes it, but it is not the case. He has been misinformed.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I have the hon. Member's letters. I say we never heard a whisper of new policy until the Irish landlords, the hon. and learned Member included, got their purses well lined. They spoke out when the new policy involved justice to other parties.
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: How about the thirty-one years? Do you withdraw that?
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I have the letters.
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: I defy him to produce the letters. I am prepared to go into the whole history of my estate; every tenant was satisfied and I have forty-two.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: If I have made an error in thirty-one instead of thirty—
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: If a charge is made against an hon. Member which he repudiates it is usual to accept his statement.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLsaid he withdrew his statement so far as the thirty-one years was concerned. If the hon. Member had any refuge behind that he might take it. His case was this, and it included every Irish landlord who was now to the front of this new policy, they never complained of the old policy until the Land Act was passed which filled their pockets out of the funds of this country. It recalled the time when Lord Cornwallis wrote to the Duke of Portland with regard to the negotiations for the Act of Union—
  "You cannot believe how I loathe the men with whom I have to treat, and how I should like to kick them."
  The leopard had not changed his spots. The hon. Member made a side attack on the Estates Commissioners. He did not take a reasonable view of their explanation or what would be their explanation. He said the general public distrusted the Estates Commissioners, and that practically no land had been sold to them as the Act authorised and provided.
  MR. WILLIAM MOORE: I said, in those districts free from intimidation.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: Why did the landlords prefer to sell direct to the tenant? There were great inducements given for sales to the Commissioners. A great deal of the expense was borne by the Commissioners. Why did not the landlords deal with them. They knew the Commissioners inquired into the value of land before they purchased. They knew they would not get the price out of the Commissioners which they could wring out of the tenants. That was the reason why the landlords had set aside that portion of the Act.
  The hon. and learned Member, in his long speech, had gone over a large number of items. Let him say this to the House. He had been a Member for twenty years. He had heard debates on the Chief Secretary's salary which were debates indeed. He had lived through times of outrage and crime in Ireland, and intimidation that could be called such. But what was the case now? Contrast past times to this. Contrast the debates of old and horrors of old with what they had heard that day. Was it not ludicrous? The Judges were going through Ireland receiving white gloves, and declaring the country practically crimeless. There was one spot in which it was alleged there had been intimidation. The whole of the country except that spot was perfectly peaceable and perfectly quiet. What did this reorganisation of the Unionist forces in Ireland mean? There was a perfectly plain and clear meaning to everyone who chose to go beneath the surface. He was a somewhat old electioneerer. He had been in a good many battles and he could tell the House what it all meant. He would tell the House what this conspiracy to libel a country which was perfectly crimeless and clear from outrage meant. Those Gentlemen were politically played out and they knew it. When they were down in their luck electorally they tried Home Rule. They raised the Home Rule bogey. That was the way to frighten Englishmen. They did not care about other things. They had broken their pledges—they were played out, and being so they raised the Home Rule bogey. "Let us," they said, "take that through England. Let us send the Member for North Antrim
  1452
  through England with the Anderson case or with the Ballinasloe doctor's case." He had been more through England than ever the hon. Member had. He had fought a good many more battles than he had fought or ever would fight. The English people would not be deceived by him now as they were in 1886. They would not be deceived by these bogus charges—by this new election conspiracy which had been got up for political purposes. It was a scandal that a country should be libelled and defamed by newspapers and politicians without the slightest cause.
  Now he rose for the purpose of asking two Questions of the Chief Secretary. He wanted to put down cases to him very explicitly, and he asked for a plain answer. The Chief Secretary had been at Dublin, and he (Mr. Russell) had noticed the company that surrounded him—landlords and agents and men connected with Irish land. That was the company he had got into. It was the beginning of the Chief Secretary's term of office, and he had no right to give him advice. He had known him for a long time and he wished to say frankly that he had no desire to obstruct him in his work, and he had no sympathy with bigotry and outrage. He had voted against these things all his life and he was as bitterly hostile to them to-day as ever he was. From him the Chief Secretary would find no difficulties in these matters. He himself admitted that, as administrator of the law in Ireland, the Chief Secretary was bound by the law. He, however, wanted to be frank and fair with the other side. The Chief Secretary would admit, he thought, that it was of the utmost importance that at this juncture in Irish affairs he should strive to steer an even keel.
  The first Question he desired to ask the right hon. Gentleman was a Question regarding the action of the Executive in reference to the alteration of the Commissioners findings in regard to Section 5 of the Land Act. If the House would permit him for a few moments he would like to make the case clear. When the Land Act was debated in Committee in 1903, a clause stood which placed all rents of

  1453
  whatever kind under the zones. Three nights were spent in the House endeavouring to alter the zones. They failed to alter them. But the Chief Secretary on the third night made a great concession. He declined to alter the zones, but on an Amendment of his (Mr. Russell's) he agreed to strike out from the zones all the non-judicial tenants. Their case was that these non-judicial tenants who had never had rents fixed ought not to come under the zones because their rents were too high, and that they ought not to be treated on the same plane as judicial tenants. The Chief Secretary gave way on that, and he exempted from the zones all non-judicial tenants and promised to treat them in a different way. What took place was this: a new clause was brought up and that clause now stood as Section 5 of the Act. The Estates Commissioners in their Report gave a fair rendering of that clause. The inspectors went to work on that clause, but they had not been long at work when the Executive interfered. His first point was what right had the Executive Government to interfere in a matter like this. The Act stated that all questions of law were to be referred to a Judge, who was appointed for that purpose. Yet the Executive on their own Motion, after these instructions had been in operation for some time, absolutely reversed the instructions and told the Commissioners that the equities of the tenants were not to be taken into account, but that all that was to be considered was what was the fair value so far as the incumbrancer and remainderman were concerned. Was there ever a more monstrous interference? But half of this had not been disclosed, because the Commissioners in this Report said that there was one set of instructions issued in which the equities of the tenants were to be taken into account. But the Executive reversed that, and the question of law thus raised as to the meaning of "equitable" under Section 5 had been referred to the Judicial Commissioner under Section 23 of the Act. Did anyone ever hear the like of that? Why did they not refer it to the Judicial Commissioner at once? Why did they presume to alter what was considered to be the law, and after they had made the alterations, if they were not sure about
  1454
  them, why did they agree to send the matter to the Judicial Commissioner, why did the Executive step into the shoes of the Land Judge? He thought that of all methods of doing business this was the funniest he had ever heard. What did it all mean? It meant, and the sooner the House of Commons knew it the batter, that they might pass whatever Act of Parliament they liked for Ireland, but the moment the Act went across to Dublin and into the hands of the law officers of the Crown and the Executive generally, that moment it was twisted and perverted in favour of a class. That was the position in which the right hon. Gentleman would find himself before he was much older. The right hon. Gentleman was bound to tell the House how, in face of the concessions the right hon. Member for Dover made in 1903, these non-judicial tenants came to be treated in this way.
  Let the House understand what had been done. He took one case of the 70,000 future tenants of Ireland. The estate was being sold. The man's holding was not a judicial rent; therefore it could not come under the Zones. The Estates Commissioners sent down an inspector. Under the first rule the inspector would have been entitled to report whether the price agreed upon between the tenant and landlord was a fair price or not. But under the new rule, what he was told in his instructions was to value the farm as it stood—landlords property and tenants' property—and if the; two combined were security for the advance, then that was all that was wanted, and he had no right to enter into the question whether the price was a fair one or not. Did the Attorney-General; dispute that advances had not bean made under the old Acts because the security was not sufficient?
  MR. ATKINSONsaid there was not a line to that effect in any Act of Parliament. The security given was the property of the landlord and tenant combined.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLcontended that what was sold under the Ashbourne Act was the landlord's interest. But what

  1455
  was sold now under the new directions to the Commissioners—
  MR. ATKINSON: The hon. Member has no right to say that. It is absolutely false!
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: Has the right hon. and learned Gentleman any right to say that to me? I appeal to the Chair.
  MR. ATKINSON: I mean that it is unfounded; not that the hon. Member made a deliberately false statement.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLsaid the right hon. and learned Gentleman had better say what he meant, and not bandy words like these across the floor of the House. What happened on these holdings? The inspectors simply found out whether the property of the tenant and the landlord was security for the advance, and that was taking all the equities into account. The tenant might, and very frequently would be, buying his own improvements. The old Act prevented that, because the Commissioners would not advance the money. These 70,000 future tenants were tied up: they could not get their rents fixed; if they purchased they would be at the mercy of the landlords; and the Executive by a mere act of its own stopped the inspector from reporting on the equity of the bargains, and then referred them to the Judicial Commissioner for decision as to whether they were right or wrong. That was the way Ireland was governed! These were the only people fit to govern the country! Who authorised these instructions? In reply to the Question whether the law officers of the Crown had given any advice to the Estates Commissioners on the administration of the Act, the reply was given the other day to this effect: "No; the law officers advise the Lord-Lieutenant." Of course they did, and the Lord-Lieutenant acted on their advice. Was that so?
  MR. ATKINSONindicated his assent.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLasked whether it was fair or reasonable that the right hon. Gentleman should deny that he had ever advised the Estates Commissioners when what he did was to advise the Lord-Lieutenant,
  1456
  who acted on his advice and directed the Estates Commissioners—
  MR. ATKINSON (interrupting)was understood to say that he had never given any advice. When he was asked a Question he had to reply. He could not state what advice he had given the Chief Secretary or the Lord-Lieutenant. The Estates Commissioners were not to take any law from him at all, and he had always disclaimed any attempt in that direction.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLasked whether anyone could say how the alteration had been made, and by whose authority? The Chief Secretary said it was done by order of the Executive. The Executive was Lord Dudley. Did Lord Dudley give these instructions off his own bat or on his own idea? Was that governing Ireland according to Irish ideas? No! they all knew how these things were done. The Executive acted on the advice of the law officers. Lord Dudley gave these instructions on the advice of the law officers, and they ought to state to the Committee what their grounds were for giving that advice. The Attorney-General had said that he had nothing to do with the intentions of Parliament: he had only to deal with the Act of Parliament as it stood. That was so, but the right hon. and learned Gentlemen knew what the intentions of Parliament were, and if the section did not carry out those intentions it was the fault of the Attorney-General. He was not paid £5,000 a year for doing nothing. It was part of his duty to see that Bills in their passage through Parliament carried out the intentions of their promoters.
  There was only one other question with which he intended to deal. He desired to call in question the action of the Crown Solicitor of the county of Tyrone and the Solicitor-General for Ireland in appearing in Court in a case in which the Judge pronounced his decision that the man was guilty of conspiring to boycott. He did not doubt that it would be said that that was a civil case, and that that fact differentiated it from a case of criminal conspiracy. That was a lawyer's subterfuge which he could not appreciate. Was

  1457
  not the "Tallow" case a civil action? That was one of the worst cases of boycotting which ever took place in Ireland. What would have been thought if the Crown Solicitor of Waterford and the Solicitor-General had gone down and taken briefs for the leading boycotter in the Tallow case? What had made the Tyrone case a civil case? There was no doubt about the facts.
  MR. GORDONasked whether, having regard to the Answer given by the Chief Secretary that there was an appeal pending in the Tyrone case, it would be in order to discuss the matter?
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: If an appeal is pending, of course there must be no discussion of the matter.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL (continuing),said he did not propose in the remotest degree to touch the question itself. He was dealing with the question of the law officers of the Crown taking up such a case with a view to preventing their appearing in it should there be an appeal.
  MR. GORDONsaid that as he understood the case the question was whether there was a conspiracy to boycott, and the hon. Member wished to raise the point whether the Solicitor-General should appear in that case, when the question was still pending as to whether or not a man was liable for damages for criminal conspiracy.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLthought the hon. Gentleman entirely misapprehended his object. He dismissed altogether the case as far as its merits were concerned. His point was that it was unseemly for Government officials to stand up to defend a man whom the Judge had pronounced guilty of boycotting.
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: The matter is out of order on this Vote, as there is no mention in it of the law officers of the Crown.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELLsaid he had got out all he desired. He had managed to call attention to what he ventured to call the
  1458
  scandal of the law officers of the Crown standing up to defend a boycotter in the North of Ireland. With what face could the Government denounce boycotting in the West of Ireland now when their own Ministers stood in Court to defend it? Did they think that people would believe in their sincerity? Not a bit of it. They would believe as mach in their sincerity in this case as they would in their new cry of Home Rule, which they were dragging as a red herring across other electoral issues. He had said enough to convince the public that a grave dereliction of duty had taken place and that the Executive should interfere to prevent its occurring again.
  He would tell the Chief Secretary frankly that he was beginning a very perilous march. He could see what was going on in Ireland as well as most people. He had been long familiar with every part of that country and he knew many people on both sides of politics. He would tell the House of Commons perfectly frankly that they would not ultimately succeed in keeping the two-sections of the Irish people apart. That was the basis of the whole policy of hon. Gentlemen opposite. Anything that would bring Catholics and Protestants together was anathema maranatha to them. Their two objects were to keep the Irish people at each other's throats and to get place and pension for themselves. That was their idea of politics. He regretted the new policy mainly for one reason. For four years there had been something like daylight in Ireland. They had had a gradual appeasement. He had noticed it in Ulster. There he had seen sights that had never been seen for over forty or fifty years—thousands of Catholics and Protestants marching to the same polling booth to vote for the same man. He had seen it in Orange Fermanagh, in Antrim, in East Down, and they would see it all over Ulster at the general election. That was the cause of all the trouble. The idea that Irishmen had a common country, common interests, and that it did not so much matter where men worshipped or at what shrine they knelt so that they united for the good of their common country was making its way all through the country,

  1459
  and the new policy was designed to thwart it and stamp it out. Members opposite knew that the moment the Irish people united, their rule must cease. They had got the Chief Secretary by the two shoulders and were endeavouring to make him stand firm as a kind of bogeyman. He hoped they would not succeed. If he was spared in health and strength he would do one man's part in preventing them succeeding. He thought it was a scandal that after four years of peace and light, the dark cloud should again drop over the face of the country, owing to the action of half-a-dozen men who did not represent Ulster and who could not get fifty men to their meetings when they held them. That was the imposture the Press was carrying out. The Unionist Press was almost as bad as the Unionist Members. It was a catastrophe for Ireland that such a thing should be allowed, but he hoped there were some Members from Ireland on the benches opposite who would see what was at the bottom of the whole business, and would refuse to bow at the bidding of hon. Gentlemen opposite.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid he was sure they were all much obliged to the hon. Member for his very statesmanlike and moderate speech.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: It was as statesmanlike as yours.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIG: You had better wait to hear it before you express an opinion. Continuing, he said the hon. Member had held up a picture of thousands of Catholics and Protestants marching to the polls together. He did not say whether they would do so in his own constituency of South Tyrone.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I think they Will.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid time would show. The circumstances of the hon. Member's constituency were peculiar. There were a little over 6,000 voters there, of whom 3,000 were Nationalists and a little over 3,000 were Unionists. At the last election Mr. Russell got in by the votes of 3,200 Unionists.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I was opposed by both Nationalists and landlords in a three-cornered fight.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid at the next election the hon. Member hoped to get in by the half of the three thousand majority.
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: Order, order! These are personal matters. I ought, perhaps, to have stopped the hon. Member for South Tyrone. They have nothing to do with the Chief Secretary's Vote.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid of course he bowed to the Chair, but it was rather hard to hear oneself attacked in a most personal manner.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I never attacked you.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIG: Yes, you did, in a most personal and almost insulting manner. Continuing, ho said if he was not permitted to reply he would confine himself to some remarks which the hon. Member made with respect to the Party to which he once belonged, but from which, he was glad to say, he had now parted. He wished Members on the opposite side of the House joy of their new acquisition, and he could assure the hon. Member for South Tyrone that the attacks he made upon the Irish Unionist Members, so far from doing them harm, would do them good in their constituencies. In one of his most violent attacks the hon. Member for South Tyrone pointed the finger of scorn and said, "That is the Unionist policy in Ireland." They had been trying to pin him to a definite statement that he had left the Unionist Party. For some time he found it very difficult to vacate his seat on the Unionist side of the House. They were glad he had done so, and that he had now declared himself in such a way that they would know how to deal with him when the election came. He had accused Unionists of a change of policy.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I said that I agreed with the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim that there had been

  1461
  a change of policy. I did not accuse him of it.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid the hon. Member stated that their policy had been changed because some of them who were landlords had had their pockets lined under the Land Act. He thought the hon. Member for South Tyrone was the last man in the world who ought to throw out a taunt to anybody of having changed their policy, because he had changed his own no less than six times. Probably the hon. Member began to change his policy before he (Mr. Craig) was born.
  *MR. T. W. RUSSELL: You had better not give an opinion upon that.
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMANsaid he could not allow these personal matters to be discussed.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid he had tried to avoid personal matters, but the remarks of the hon. Member for South Tyrone had been directed solely against himself. He said that the Irish Unionists as a Party were played out politically, and that was a personal remark. He ventured to predict that the political career of the hon. Member for South Tyrone would end within the next two years.
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMANagain cautioned the hon. Member in regard to his remarks not being relevant.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid he was sorry to say that if he was stopped upon this subject he had very little more to say, because having addressed the House at very great length on the previous day he did not intend to inflict another speech on the House that day. The personal remarks, however, of the hon. Member opposite had drawn him to his feet, although by the ruling which had just been given his remarks would be considerably curtailed.
  The hon. and learned Member for Waterford had proved, no doubt to his own satisfaction, that Ireland was in a perfectly peaceful condition and that there was no more necessity for the application of force than there
  1462
  had been during the last two years. Dealing with the county of Galway the Member for Waterford instanced two cases out of many which had been reported to show that the complaint made that the county was in a disturbed condition was bogey. He was glad to hear that the attack in one of those two cases had proved to be much less serious than was at first reported, but was the hon. and learned Member opposite prepared to say to the House that in the case of Patrick Costello there had not been very serious intimidation. This was one of the first cases in which this new form of intimidation, namely, the pulling down of walls around the farms and rendering them useless as grazing farms, had been committed. In this case over 600 yards of solid stone wall were pulled down in one night. When it was remembered that this was a grazing farm it would at once be seen that this conduct was one of the must ruthless forms of intimidation that could be indulged in. Costello then put up 600 yards of wire fencing, but three days later that was demolished, and then, to add injury to injury, Costello was summoned five times because his cattle had strayed on to neighbours' lands. It was a most horrible system of intimidation. Then there was the case of a man named Dooley. He had the lease of a farm which he wanted to buy. But the United Irish League, who up to the advent of the present Chief Secretary were the absolute lawgivers in the district, wanted this farm to split up amongst the small holders round about, and on 8th April the walls surrounding that man's farm were pulled down. Could it be contended that a county in which such things went on was in a peaceful condition? It had been stated that the policy of the Act of 1903 was that large grazing farms should be divided amongst small holders. There was no doubt that was one object of the Act, but did Members opposite uphold the methods used by the people in Galway to carry out that policy. Did the Act say that if a grazier refused to sell his farm it was legal or justifiable to put such pressure upon him as to make it impossible for him to live in the country? Every Unionist, nay, every fair-minded man in Ireland, and the Nationalist

  1463
  Members also, if they believed his statement of the state of affairs existing there, must think that it was a perfectly disastrous state of things that the law should have been allowed to be set aside and that an evil policy of that sort should have gone unchecked for the time it had. He was glad to say that since the present Chief Secretary had been in office there was every appearance that that policy would be checked. An hon. Member the other day accused him and his colleagues of glorying in the coercion of his fellow-countrymen. To-day he might tell him, as he told him then, that that was absolutely false, but that if it was necessary and if the state of affairs which existed continued or grew worse, then it was the duty of the Chief Secretary to do everything he could, and if necessary to put the Crimes Act into force.
  MR. HAVILAND BURKEsaid the only fact he regretted in connection with the speeches of the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim and his colleague who had just sat down, was that every English, Scotch, and Welsh Member of the House was not present to listen to them. He believed that if a few thousand ordinary level-headed Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Welshmen were doomed to hear Orangemen talk for an hour once a week for twelve months the Irish question would be solved, and Home Rule secured at the end of that period. On this occasion, and on the occasion of the debate on the Address, the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim, with terrific solemnity, rose to indict a nation and to impeach the Government on the score of its suspected toleration of the majority of the nation in question. What did his speech on the Address, and even his speech that afternoon, amount to? One would have thought that after all his "sound and fury signifying nothing" he had some dark and fearful secret in the background, some real iniquity to reveal, some plot to unravel; but his grievance on the last occasion amounted to a twopenny-halfpenny complaint as to the action of a rate collector under a Nationalist county council, and to-day they had the Constable Anderson case. Constable Anderson occupied in the mind of the
  1464
  hon. and learned Member for North Antrim the same place that King Charles's head occupied in the mind of Mr. Dick when drafting his famous memorial. He was an absolute maniac on the subject of Catholicism and Catholics, and his judgment on any matter where the anti-Catholic question could by any possibility be brought in absolutely precluded him from presenting a reasoned argument or drawing a reasonable conclusion. He challenged the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim to say whether what he had done that afternoon—and he was possibly a future resident magistrate or County Court Judge—
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMANhoped the hon. Gentleman would not transgress by making personal remarks.
  MR. DILLONsaid his hon. friend was perfectly in order. He was entitled to reply to the speech of the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim, and his personal remarks arose out of that speech.
  THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: What I heard was that the hon. Member was said to be looking forward to being made a resident magistrate or a County Court Judge.
  MR. HAVILAND BURKEsaid he was about to say, when called to order, that the hon. Member for North Antrim rebuked the Nationalist Members for undermining the foundations of society in Ireland, though he himself, possibly a future administrator of justice in Ireland, came down there that afternoon and made a deliberate attempt to ruin the professional career and future of a head constable in Limerick, who had the courage to stand up in Court and say that the outrage of the incendiary fire had been the work of some malicious tramp and not the result of any agrarian agitation in the district. This was the respect for law and order which they were invited to copy. The hon. and learned Gentleman came there deliberately to make a public appeal to the Chief Secretary to black-mark a head constable in Limerick because he had the manhood and the courage to say

  1465
  that an incendiary fire was not a malicious or an agrarian outrage, but the action of a tramp who was revengeful on account of not getting relief.
  MR. WILLIAM MOOREsaid the constable did not say it was an accident. He said that the man had done it himself. The Judge said he did not believe the constable, and that was his reason for mentioning the matter.
  MR. HAVILAND BURKEsaid if the hon. Member insisted that the oath of a head constable in Ireland was not to be believed he would close with the bargain and accept the statement. The whole gist of the hon. Member's complaint was that the head constable swore in Court that the National League had nothing whatever to do with it. If that was not intimidation, he did not know what intimidation was. Another small complaint of the hon. Member was in regard to a Bible-reader who got into conflict with the local priest. The priest admitted that he lost his temper, and that he struck or hustled the Bible reader. Speaking as a Protestant, he said that anybody who knew at all about Ireland knew perfectly well that the visits of these so-called Bible-readers were neither welcome nor wanted by more than one out of every 500 Protestant curates or rectors in the West of Ireland, [An HON. MEMBER: That's no reason for assault.] The question of assault was a dangerous one to raise, because the trivial assaults made on Irish Church Society Mission men, the presumptuous youths who called themselves Bible-readers and went about the South and West of Ireland, were insignificant when compared with those committed on the Salvation Army in an old cathedral town, or by mobs in places in England.
  He sincerely regretted that the Chief Secretary should have allowed himself, the moment he crossed the water, to be "collared" by the Orange gang in Ireland. He repudiated the right of the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for North Antrim to speak for the mass of the Protestants of Ireland. There were tens of thousands of Protestants in Ireland who would no more be seen in an Orange procession than in one of Dr. Bowie's tabernacles.
  1466
  The wretched Protestant versus Catholic question only flourished and provoked riot and bloodshed in those districts where Orangeism flourished. In King's County Protestants formed a strong and influential minority of the population and such a thing as the Protestant versus Catholic question did not exist in Tullamore. The Catholic and Protestant clergy were on the best of terms with one another, but if an Orange lodge were imported this good feeling would be at an end. They would have bogus outrages and bogus prosecutions. What were the Orangemen doing at the present moment? The hon. and learned Member for North Antrim talked about "my country," and yet he engaged in the ignoble work of defaming that country! He put it to Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Welshmen, no matter on which side of the House they sat, what would they think of a Member who went through the London weekly papers every Sunday, made an abstract of all the murders, incendiary fires, assaults on women and children, etc., and then put on the Notice Paper of the House Questions as to why the police were not taking more stringent measures to suppress these. Yet that was what the hon. Members opposite were doing assiduously; and they were aided in their work by a gang of journalistic scavengers in Ireland. What did these Unionist scavengers do in the different towns of the country? A rumour, perhaps, got afloat that a shot had been fired into a country house, and it was published with great head-lines in the Irish Times and the Daily Express. A few days afterwards it had to be confessed that it was all a mistake; that, at most. only a stone had been thrown. [MINISTERIAL ironical laughter.] Hon. Gentleman opposite railed, but everybody knew that if a lie got twenty-four hours start, it could never be caught up,.
  MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid the rumour was denied within twenty-four hours.
  MR. HAVILAND BURKEsaid that he had never known a case in which hon. Members opposite, belonging to that particular group, had put a Question relating to an outrage in Ireland which

  1467
  was subsequently proved not to have happened—he had never heard one of them stand up and say that he was sorry he had put the Question.
  As regarded the suppression of public meetings he thought it would be very interesting to have a Return of the number of public meetings which had been interfered with in England during the last fifty years. He was sure it would compare in a very startling way with the number of meetings which had been interfered with in Ireland within the last two years. He wanted to speak coolly and impartially to the Chief Secretary. The peculiar folly of proclaiming public meetings in Ireland was that it could do no good; it could only do harm. He had been at a good many proclaimed meetings, and never at one which they did not succeed in holding in the long run. He could not imagine any possible reason for proclaiming a meeting, even if it were intended to cause harm to or increase bitterness against some local man. By proclaiming the meeting it made the harm and the bitterness all the more certain. Surely the police, who were always in overwhelming force, and armed to the teeth, could prevent any outrageous attack on a particular man. To drag Members of Parliament about like common felons when they went to visit their constituents, and to inflict cruel injuries on unarmed people with baton and musket-butt, did not enhance the respect for the law. They heard a great deal about respect for the law; but he did not think the law in Ireland deserved to be respected. Repect for the law rested on the general moral sense of the community. There was respect for the law in England, because there was a widespread public belief that the men who administered the law did so without fear or favour, and without any thought as to whether their decisions would be acceptable or otherwise to a section of the community. In Ireland they had no such belief. The public sentiment was very much to the contrary.
  He believed that the Chief Secretary had made his initial mistake by pandering to this little pushing, noisy, bullying Orange faction which was
  1468
  playing the same game to-day as they had done a hundred years ago. No better illustration of that bullying game could be found than the Question put on the Notice Paper by the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim, who complained of the fact that when Sir Antony MacDonnell, at the suggestion of the Congested Districts Board, visited Galway to arrange a local dispute, he was guilty of the infamy of calling on Mr. Higgins, the chairman of the local branch of the Land League, a man of considerable local importance, a magistrate, and one universally respected. The whole Orange virus was concentrated in that Question. Let the Committee observe the bullying audacity of the contention. This was what the Chief Secretary would have to guard himself against. The right hon. Gentleman would have to understand that the ascendency men were not Irishmen, any more than they were Scotsmen or Welshmen. They had arrogated to themselves the title of the garrison in Ireland; and their only grievance, at the present moment, was that they had only 80 per cent. or 90 per cent. of the rich places in the administration of the country. Their only objection to Sir Antony MacDonnell was that he was a Catholic, and was suspected of Nationalist tendencies. That was the casus belli. It commenced when Mr. Gill was appointed secretary to the Board of Agriculture. Then the Dublin Unionists were prepared to tear the Union Jack into tatters in order to punish Sir Horace Plunkett for appointing Mr. Gill, who, after being a member of the Irish Party, had not donned the penitential sheet and lit the penitential candle. The whole matter was that latterly Catholics and Nationalists were to a small extent having a part in the administration of Ireland. That was the frightful grievance which the Orangemen brought before Parliament. The Chief Secretary was on the wrong tack. He could not satisfy an appetite that was insatiable; and the right hon. Gentleman could no more change the ascendency man from what he was a hundred years ago than he could change wrong into right. He was still thinking of the gallant days when he lived on the fat of the land; and when the Catholic was only a hewer of wood and drawer of

  1469
  water. His beau ideal would be the revival of the penal laws. He, himself, did not impute conscious inaccuracy as regarded hon. Gentlemen opposite; but he believed their dominant feeling was that Ireland should be governed apart from the opinion of the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of that country. A very superficial examination of the history of Ireland would teach the Chief Secretary that to throw himself into the arms of the Orange gang would mean ruin to any political reputation to which he might aspire.
  MR. T. L. CORBETTsaid they could afford to take compliments of the kind paid them by the hon. Member who had just spoken when they remembered that they represented 1,250,000 of the people of Ireland; and not the least respectable and loyal of those people. They had been taunted with living in an atmosphere of unjust and unfair suspicion. Ulster Members and the Press were so spoken of by the Prime Minister. They had indeed been living more or less during these past years in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, but he denied it had been either unfair or unjust. Recent events had proved up to the hilt the need of that suspicion and that vigilance on the part of the Ulster Members. The representatives of Ulster had always been the most loyal supporters of the Unionist cause. It would be strange indeed if that were not so, because the Unionist cause meant to them not a mere item in a political programme, but a question absolutely vital to them and the constituencies they represented. In the feeling of mistrust and suspicion they had not been alone in the House, and they had also been backed, he was thankful and grateful to say, by a very large section of the Unionist Peers in England. He believed the Prime Minister did not make a practice of reading the newspapers. If he had read the newspapers he would have been surprised by the warning of journals, usually his hearty and enthusiastic supporters. He would take the opportunity of thanking the Press and his Unionist colleagues in the House for the support received in bringing home the reasons for this suspicion and distrust. Ulster Members might be few in numbers,
  1470
  but they represented the province which was the very corner-stone upon which the Unionist Party was built, and their influence had been recognised by all who realised their true position in the Unionist Party. He had spoken of suspicion and distrust, but he was very glad to be able to say—and he thought he spoke on behalf of a great many of his colleagues from Ulster—that that suspicion and distrust had been so far removed that they felt they were in a position to vote against the Amendment, and to vote with the Government for the first time for some time past on questions affecting Ireland, [A NATIONALIST: 'Moore did not.'] He was speaking for himself and possibly for some others.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: Ulster is divided.
  MR. T. L. CORBETTsaid they would see when the division took place. He was undivided in his allegiance to the Chief Secretary for the splendid work he had done for Ireland, and in recruiting the Unionist Party since he took office. The Chief Secretary was not one of those who would indulge in idle dreams, like those entertained by the hon. Member for South Tyrone and those sitting by him, of an ideal Ireland which could never be. He was a strong man, determined to master his own Department, and to deal with facts as he found them, and he, while seeking to improve the material condition of the people of Ireland, would not allow any criminal conspiracy of any league or any Church to interfere with the carrying out of the law which it was his first duty to enforce. They believed he had the two great qualities most needed in Ireland, the most respected in Ireland in the end, the qualities of courage and sympathy. He heartily congratulated the right hon. Gentleman on the beginning of his career as Chief Secretary. The right hon. Gentleman undertook the office with great courage and self-sacrifice, and he had great pleasure on behalf of his constituents in heartily supporting him.
  MR. FLYNNexpressed his regret that the Chief Secretary had surrendered so easily and so quickly to the miserable forces of bigotry and reaction. The right hon. Gentleman had already shown that he had a

  1471
  blind confidence in the official gang and an absolute distrust of the people. Law and order were not imperilled even in Galway. Where was the contempt for law and the disregard for property? What justification had the right hon. Gentleman for delivering such lectures? Great political capital had been made out of a few disturbances in Galway. But one of the main purposes of the Purchase Act of 1903 was to divide the vast grazing lands amongst the people. All sections of the House were united in the hope that these unfortunate people would be placed upon the rich lands to work out their salvation under circumstances of comfort and possibly prosperity. There was no more cruel and tantalising state of affairs in any civilised country of the world than that which presented itself in Galway and Roscommon, where there were these vast grazing ranches on the one hand and people anxious and willing to work on the other, and yet an unnatural, anomalous, and deplorable condition of things kept the population and the land apart. Orderly meetings were held to demand that the law should be carried into effect; representations were sent to the Estates Commissioners to deal with the matter; but all the forces of so-called law and order were ingeniously worked against the people. Where was the wrong if they called upon the men who held the land, and practised neither violence nor outrage? Did hon. Members opposite believe that the House would have consented to the passage of the Act of 1903 if it had been thought that these people would have been excluded for ever from the arable lands of the country? Even the hon. Member for South Antrim would not deny that that was a laudable and praiseworthy object, good for the people and good for the common weal. The atrocious crime of these people was that they held meetings and petitioned the Estates Commissioners, and because they did not conduct their debates with the moderation of the hon. Gentlemen on the Front benches they were to be visited with the pains and penalties of the Coercion Act. Feelings of indignation could not be coped with by the importation of thousands of policemen.
  The Chief Secretary was not to be commended for the manner in which
  1472
  he replied to Questions of hon. Members whose only object was to defame the character of their fellow-countrymen. The history of representative institutions afforded no precedent or parallel for a body of representatives being constantly engaged in defaming the character of the people of the country from which they came. It was reserved for hon. Members opposite to devote their energies to fouling their own nest. Attention had recently been called to the total of 205 agrarian outrages during the year, and the Chief Secretary, to keep hon. Members opposite in a good temper, gave the congenial Answer that the immunity from punishment was due to the fact that the people who were victimised were afraid to come forward. But 124 out of the 205 cases were only cases of intimidation, and of these the bulk were threatening letters and notices. Did anybody believe that the majority of those letters were not written or caused to be written by the people themselves? How could anything of that kind be proved to be a threatening letter. He had always believed, and he still believed, that it was quite within the power of an unscrupulous policeman, panting for promotion, to keep his finger on the valve of crime and outrage, make the register rise or fall, and to increase or decrease the number of threatening notices and letters and even the atrocious crime of cattle mutilation and outrage. Had the House forgotten the Sergeant Sheridan, the Constable Sullivan, and the Mulrooney cases? Were not Sergeant Sheridan's colleagues capable of doing the same thing to-day? Surely they were not going to accept these figures of 205 simply upon constabulary authority. The Chief Secretary accepted this statement without examination and analysis, and then proceeded to lecture the Irish people as a whole and the Irish Members without discretion or discrimination.
  They had observed with what levity the right hon. Gentleman had treated the sacred right of public meeting and free speech. An hon. friend of his attended a public meeting in Ireland at which he was subjected to personal violence by the police and where he saw one of his colleagues attacked by the police. And what did the Chief Secretary bring

  1473
  forward in reply to a Question upon this subject? Simply the bare statement of those who were on their defence in this matter. But for the ruling of the Chair his hon. friend would have been denounced as guilty of falsehood, although he was speaking of what he saw, because he was looking on and saw the occurrence himself. The Chief Secretary, without investigation, was always ready to accept the statements of constables, and he waived aside the testimony of his hon. friend. That was not treating Members of the House of Commons with proper courtesy. He disputed the doctrine of the Chief Secretary that the police had a legal right on their own mere ipse dixit to prohibit a public meeting in Ireland. They knew how all this was worked. The right, hon. Gentleman said that the police had the power to stop a lawfully convened public meeting on their own responsibility. The Russian police at the present time claimed no more than that. When they saw the right hon. Gentleman addressing a meeting of his political friends in Dublin accompanied by all the forces of bigotry and ascendency in Ireland, and laying down all the old doctrines, the Irish people were apt to take such action as the prelude and forerunner of a course of coercion, and naturally their suspicions were aroused. He warned the right hon. Gentleman against taking a course of that kind. All they could do in the matter now was to remonstate. The right hon. Gentleman might consider it to be his duty to do what other Chief Secretaries had done, but his effotrs would end in failure in the same way as the same policy adopted by his predecessors had failed.
  *MR. SLOANtwitted the Nationalists with having during the past three hours devoted themselves to personal recrimination instead of the discussion of Irish administration. The hon. Member for King's County had said that he spoke as a Protestant. He deprecated references to the religious beliefs of hon. Members, although he quite believed that if he were to cross the floor and declare that he was a converted Orangeman the Nationalist Members would not only accept him but even find a constituency for him in order to point out the great salvation there was within their fold. He protested against the
  1474
  unscrupulous attempts which were made to misrepresent the position of Ulster Members, and complained that the Nationalists in their criticisms did not give other people credit for the honesty they claimed for themselves. The hon. Member for King's County had referred to the treatment which the Salvation Army received from English mobs in a cathedral town. He could not help recalling that when in Dublin on one occasion he saw a little bit of Irish administration in regard to the Salvation Army. Walking along the street one evening he heard a great noise, and on going to the scene he found 300 or 400 people not disguising the fact that they were Nationalists. They were gathered around two or three Salvation Army lasses, and were cursing and swearing at them while there was breath in their bodies. On that occasion they were tolerated by the police, and in the interests of law and order it was found necessary to pat them on the shoulder and say, "Now boys, keep quiet." His idea of Irish administration would have been to lock them up, but he knew that would be repulsive to people whose tolerance in the case of Dr. Long of Limerick took the form of refusing a conveyance to drive him to a patient. Yet they found hon. Members representing Nationalist constituencies getting up, without blush or shame, and making certain charges against Members from the North of Ireland. These personal attacks were a waste of the time of the House.
  His hon. and learned friend the Member for North Antrim had referred to the notorious case of Constable Anderson. He, himself, had been waiting with anxiety to hear a demand from the hon. Member for East Mayo for the public inquiry in regard to which he had put a Question on the Paper the other day. He did not object to the effort on the part of the hon. Member to enable the Rev. Mr. O'Hara to clear his position, but that should not be made at the expense of the character that had already been indicated, and it should not be made in order to bring further base insinuations against a man who had been tried once and acquitted, tried again and found guilty, and tried a third time, by the head of the Irish Administration

  1475
  and reinstated with full pay for the time he had been off. That man had had the misfortune, in the estimation of some, to pay attention to a girl who happened to be a Roman Catholic. He had been refreshing his memory regarding what passed in the House when the subject was debated, and he found that the late Chief Secretary did not attempt to justify Father O'Hara's action with regard to the whole of this transaction. He and his friends had no objection to an inquiry for they had nothing to fear. But he would ask hon. Members opposite whether it was their intention or desire that this woman, who had become the wife of Constable Anderson, should go through this unpleasant ordeal again. Her character had been vindicated beyond dispute, and was she to be held up to the public gaze for the gratification of one man. He regretted that the case had been brought up again, and he thought hon. Gentlemen opposite should have some consideration for the feelings of people who had been in a position less fortunate than themselves.
  And, it being half past Seven of the Clock, the Chairman left the Chair to make his Report to the House.
  The Clerk at the Table informed the House of the unavoidable absence of the Chairman of Ways and Means from the remainder of this day's Sittings.
  Whereupon Mr. JEFFREYS, the Deputy-Chairman, took the Chair as Deputy-Speaker, pursuant to the Standing Order.
  Committee report Progress; to sit again this evening.

EVENING SITTING.

  SUPPLY (8TH ALLOTTED DAY).
  Considered in Committee.
  (In the Committee.)
  [Mr. JEFFREYS (Hampshire, N.) in the Chair.]

  CIVIL SERVICES AND REVENUE DE- PARTMENTS ESTIMATES, 1905–6.

    CLASS II.
    Motion made, and Question proposed, "That a sum, not exceeding £13,950, be
    1476
    granted to His Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1906, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Offices of the Chief Secretary in Dublin and London, and of the Inspectors of Lunatic Asylums."
    *MR. SLOAN (continuing his speech)said he did not see why Nationalists should take exception to the Chief Secretary accepting an invitation to a banquet under the auspices of a Unionist organisation, seeing that Sir Antony MacDonnell had accepted an address from his political friends at Castlebar. The Member for North Antrim referred to a case in Belfast, and lest the House should be misled he would like to supplement what had been said. That man did not take exception to a Roman Catholic clergyman as such. He was somewhat eccentric and denounced the clergy of all denominations: he was fined 40s. for what he did. And in contrast to that he pointed out that at Westport a priest who had kicked a man because he disagreed with what he was doing was dismissed by a majority of the bench, and was presented with a purse of sovereigns and an address by the people of the district as marks of their approval of his action. What an uproar there would have been from the Nationalist Benches if that individual had been a Protestant clergyman. He then referred to the matter of the auxiliary asylum at Youghal, where 350 simples were confined in an unused industrial school without any resident medical superintendent, and he wished to know whether it was the intention of the Irish Government to give the capitation grant. A few days ago an inquest was held with reference to the death of one of the inmates, and the jury distinctly stated that these individuals ought not to be kept in that place, but ought to be in hospital. The Inspector of Lunatics had protested against the arrangement and Sir Antony MacDonnell had done likewise. He asked the Chief Secretary how long was this state of things to be permitted to continue. He protested against the allegations of the Nationalists that the hon. Members for Ulster brought forward nothing but bogus grievances.
    A NATIONALIST MEMBER: You have a grievance against the Carlton Club.
    *MR. SLOANsaid it did not matter to him whether it was against the Carlton Club or anybody else: he would give voice to any grievance he might have. He did not take any mere partisan view of his responsibility as a Member of Parliament. He was born in Belfast and he was not ashamed of being an Irishman, and any measure which promised to better the condition of the people of Ireland—whether Protestants or Roman Catholics—would have his support and he should not be ashamed to give an account of his stewardship to the people who sent him to the House of Commons. He could not think the Nationalists seriously meant to assert that there was a Party in the North of Ireland who desired to crush everybody in order to get an ascendency. He hated ascendency, and he believed the people should be free and unfettered. He believed the present Chief Secretary was doing his best, and although he regretted that coercion should have to be resorted to be was not in a position to dictate to the Administration when special measures should or should not be applied. The real justification for any measures of that kind was the conduct of the people. He was sure that in regard to the effort being made to batter the country, honesty would be observed by those representing Ulster constituencies as well as by those in the South and West.
    MR. T. M. HEALYurged that the House ought to have something like a statement of the policy of the new Chief Secretary on the initiation of his reign in Ireland. The silence which the right hon. Gentleman had maintained for so long was the more remarkable because he had been accused, or complimented, as the case might be, of being the representative, if not the author, of a new policy in Ireland. The Nationalists in that House were entitled to know what that new policy was. It could not be a new policy for one part of the country, because the Ulster people had declared that they were content with the British Government. It must be, therefore, a new policy with regard to the discontented
    1478
    portion of the country; and they were entitled in that House to a first statement as regarded that policy, such as was given by the Secretary of State for War or the representative of the Admiralty. For some reason or another it had seemed good to the Conservatives of Ireland to discount the official statement by holding a dinner in Dublin in order to decant the right hon. Gentleman's opinions there. Certainly the result of that decantation, if he might use the word, had been the most extraordinary statement he had ever known an official to make. It was all very well for a gentleman to proclaim his unworthiness and unfitness for a position. When he cried nolo episcopari one generally expected him to lay down the crozier and the mitre. If an Irish Member were inducted into the office of Home Secretary for England, it would be an extraordinary thing for him at a banquet at the Holborn Restaurant to say that he was utterly unfit for the office, that he would not know England on the map, that he did not know one county in England, that he did not know Holborn from the Strand, that he was in ignorance of the situation here, and that his only claim to the position was that he had assumed it at the call of duty to his chief. Let any one fancy a man taking charge of a man-of-war, having been a bricklayer or a carpenter; or taking command of an army, having been a shoemaker or clerk, and boasting of it, and claiming consideration from his opponents on the ground that he was absolutely unfitted for the position. It made one ashamed of being an Irishman to think that an English Minister could boast that his chief claim to the consideration of that country was that he knew absolutely nothing about it.
    The right hon. Gentleman denied that Ireland had been neglected by the Parliament of England, because, he said, forty-one statutes had been passed by the Tory Party in this country for Ireland in the last ten or twelve years. How many statutes had bean passed for England and Scotland in that time? They were passed every year by the hundred. The right hon. Gentleman considered that the Government were entitled to boast because they had passed as many statutes for Ireland in ten

    1479
    years as the humblest Irish Assembly which could be constituted in that country could pass in a single session. The right hon. Gentleman watered the wild Unionism in Dublin with an announcement that did not seem to have been entirely palatable to the noble army of Dukes and others gathered at the festivities. He stated that there were still wanting various reforms and amendments in the law which it was the duty of the united Parliament to make. Why had they not his statement as to what they were? The present Government had not long to run. Was the right hon. Gentleman content to remain in office for whatever lees and dregs might remain and to do nothing but ordinary acts of administration? That would be an ignoble position for a statesman to assume. However interesting these small matters that had been raised on the other side of the House might be, it was almost degrading to hear them being discussed, when Irishman were concerned in so much larger questions. Both sides lost by allowing themselves to be enmeshed in these smaller questions, because Ulstermen needed measures of progress for themselves as much as people in other parts of Ireland did. England had the benefit of Irish troops and Irish seamen; and again he asked where was the value for the money which the Irish people paid?
    He maintained that Ireland should insist, every year when the Chief Secretary's salary came up, on a statement from him, just as the House insisted on a statement with regard to the great Indian dependency, or colonies like the Leeward or Windward Islands. Let the right hon. Gentleman give them some information about their country and as to what the British Government was doing with it. When it was squandering their revenues and appointing their officials, what had it got to say for itself, with a mass of seething discontent in the North and the South and the West? The right hon. Gentleman was entitled to claim that he had a representative gathering in Dublin the other night, but what were the facts? The Orange Party in Dublin took a division against giving him a dinner at
    1480
    all. While the right hon. Gentleman had the support of the great landlords like the Duke of Abercorn and all the worthy gentleman who were well off no matter what Government was in power, there was a democratic Party which drove him from Liverpool at the last general election and compelled him to get a seat lower down in the country. He was obliged by this very Orange section to quit his own constituency on the religious difficulty. He, himself, took no interest in that question; but what happened? When the question of the invitation to the right hon. Gentleman came up before this great council of Orangemen not more than thirty of the entire body were present and fourteen of them voted against giving him any reception whatsoever. The Unionist Members did not speak of these things in the House before the Nationalists. They did not want to let the Philistines rejoice, but meet an Orangeman or a Protestant anywhere in Ireland, unless he had a salary, and he was as bitter and indignant, against the methods of British Government in Ireland as the Nationalists. Therefore he said they were entitled to ask what the British Government were doing with their ten millions of money. He believed that the notion of this river of gold which was for ever flowing from their poor little impoverished country to enrich this great and wealthy land would even yet appeal to Irishmen of all classes. In London they saw millions expended on new buildings for the Navy, for the Army, and other Departments, but when a small expenditure was asked for Dublin Castle the money could not be got. The time would come when Irishmen on both sides in the House of Commons would have to have a sort of Public Accounts Committee, which should trace Irish revenue from its source in Ireland to its place of expenditure here and see what they got in return. They got nothing but broken-down Chief Secretaries.
    Those of them who were engaged in the real business of politics, and not in recrimination or idle chatter, were sent there to promote a far higher cause than that raised by hon. Gentlemen on the other side of the House. The right hon. Gentleman had

    1481
    now been inducted into his office and he would therefore ask him, had he a policy; what was it; where was it invented; did it differ from the policy of the right hon. Member for Dover; and how was it originated? Did he sit in the Cabinet for four years with the right hon. Member for Dover and approve of his acts? The right hon. Member passed the Land Act and made various speeches on the University question. Did the Chief Secretary approve of those statements, and if he differed from him had his so-called new policy the sanction of the Cabinet? Did he differ from his Lord-Lieutenant, and, if so, were the Irish people to look to the Lord-Lieutenant for a statement of policy, or to one who was, nominally at least, his subordinate officer? They were induced two years ago to support the Purchase Act and especially the bonus of £12,000,000 to the landlords upon the suggestion that they were entering upon something like a new era of conciliation. If the right hon Gentleman had a different policy from that of the Member for Dover, the Irish landlords had been getting the money under false pretences. What business had the landlords of Ireland to press round the right hon. Gentleman and insinuate new policies in his ear which they did not declare when the Bill of 1903 was going through the House of Commons? Great fault was found now with the unfortunate Connaught peasants because it was said that they were greedy of land and wanted to drive the graziers off their farms; but who first gave official encouragement to these poor cotters? The most Socialistic and revolutionary proposals on this subject were to be found in the statutes that the Imperial Parliament had passed; but because these sections of compulsory purchase were directed, not against the landlords, but against the tenants, Socialism and Communism received legislative sanction. The third Section of the Act of 1903 enabled the Congested Districts Board to resume, which meant annex, a holding in order to distribute it amongst the surrounding tenants. But if the Board might seize his little farm, which he held under a judicial tenancy, why were not the branches of the National League, containing gentlemen just as respectable and honourable as the
    1482
    members of the Board, to pass resolutions on the subject? He would again ask the right hon. Gentleman what his new policy was.
    MR. GORDONsaid he wished to reprobate the doctrine contained in the concluding part of the hon. and learned Member's speech. This was not a question which ought to be determined in a debate of this kind. The violence of language used by hon. Gentlemen opposite towards Unionists ought to be an object-lesson as to what they would have to suffer if they had a Parliament in Ireland. The hon. Gentleman argued that because the Legislature had provided a means under the law of dividing up the grass lands of Connaught, and because that was not being carried out as rapidly as the people wished, they were entitled to intimidate the owners of property. That was against not only every principle of law, but of every principle of morality; and he was surprised that a Member of the legal faculty should stand up for such a doctrine. Why should the hon. and learned Member justify outrages and crimes which ought to be suppressed? The hon. and learned Member for Water-ford brushed aside the Return of outrages and said, "Oh, that is nothing." In Munster and Connaught there were all these serious agrarian crimes which brought terror and misery to innocent householders. Were firing into houses and maiming cattle of no account? Was the right hon. Gentleman who was responsible for the preservation of law and order in Ireland to be condemned because he said in public and in the presence of the Press that he intended so far as he could to preserve law and order in Ireland? The suggestion was always made that these outrages were provoked by the police, because one black sheep had been found in the police. It was an unworthy suggestion. There were eleven cases of killing and maiming cattle in the two provinces of Munster and Connaught Were these outrages not to be put down? Did hon. Gentlemen opposite defend these crimes?
    MR. FLAVIN: We have always condemned them and we always shall.
    MR. GORDONsaid that he did not think that hon. Members opposite had condemned them. The hon. and learned Member for Waterford had spoken of the number of threatening letters which he had received. He should like to see these letters, and compare them with the threatening letters sent to innocent householders threatening to injure their property and to make family life unbearable. Was the Chief Secretary to be denounced because he said that he would try as well as he could to see that law and order were maintained and that such crimes were put an end to? It was the first duty of every Government to give security to life and property, and to see that the law was obeyed. They were told that everything the Unionist Members for Ireland said must be wrong. But they represented a certain section of the community, just as much as hon. Gentlemen opposite represented their section. The Unionist Members represented the section of the community which had two-thirds of the industries of Ireland, and paid more than half of the revenue collected from the whole population of Ireland. He thought, therefore, that when the House heard statements made by the Nationalist Members of Ireland in reference to the small body that represented the Unionist Party in Ireland it ought to bear in mind that that body, however small, represented practically one-third of the population of Ireland, far more than one-half of the manufacturing industries of the country, and a great deal more than one-half of the actual revenue that was paid by Ireland to the Imperial Exchequer. Therefore, though their numbers were small they had the right to have their opinions and views put before the House just the same as the Members for the South and West of Ireland. Law and order ought to be equally administered in every part of the country and to every man in the country irrespective of class or position. Let every man be treated on fair and equal terms. Let the Chief Secretary administer the law in that spirit and be would earn the praise, not the blame, of all right-minded men.
    He was surprised that the hon. Member for South Tyrone could not avoid attacking the meeting at which the Chief Secretary
    1484
    was welcomed to Ireland. Was it suggested that the Unionists of Ireland were not justified in extending their hospitality to the Chief Secretary? If the Radicals were in power and sent over a Chief Secretary he would probably be entertained by the Radicals in Ireland, but it would not be a very big entertainment.
    MR. T. W. RUSSELL: Did you ever entertain the late Chief Secretary?
    MR. GORDON: The hon. Member for South Tyrone had described the gentlemen at the meeting as "old pals" of his. He rounded on his old pals occasionally, and whoever were the hon. Member for South Tyrone's pals now they would find that he would round on them some day. But there were about 200 at that dinner, and they represented the trade, commerce, and industry of Ireland, with a few Peers who were Irishmen living in Ireland. Was it a great charge against the right hon. Gentleman that he went to such an entertainment as that and that he made a speech which was reported in every newspaper in Ireland, and of which the only parts that could be attacked in the House of Commons were those in which he declared his determination to preserve law and order. If there had been anything in his speeches at Belfast and Dublin that could have been laid hold of by the Nationalists they would have set it out in detail in the House of Commons. They had had from the Nationalists a hollow pretence of an attack. It must be made on every Chief Secretary, whether they agreed with him or not. It had been made in the same terms, in the same form, and chiefly by the same speakers often before, and they might expect it to be made so long as a Unionist Government was at the head of affairs. And even when the Opposition came into office they would not escape, because it would be impossible for any man who tried to preserve law and order in Ireland to avoid those attacks.
    They had been called the Ascendancy Party. He thought there was very little of the quality of the Ascendancy Party amongst them. They were ordinary, plain, hard-working men who had to make

    1485
    their living in Ireland, and who were capable of forming an opinion as to what they believed would be to the best interests of Ireland. It was not a question of landlords. The Nationalists were always talking about landlords. Whatever the Nationalists said about them, the men who represented the Unionists of Ireland were trying to voice the views of their constituents, and trying as far as they could to get even-handed justice in Ireland, and to see that law and order were preserved there.
    MR. DILLONsaid the hon. Member opposite had been giving the Nationalist Party a lecture, and his speech was full of recrimination from beginning to end. He wished to call attention to a new departure, not in policy, but in the procedure, made by the Chief Secretary from the custom which had ruled Ireland in recent years. The present Chief Secretary had imprudently broken a custom according to which the responsible Minister for Ireland avoided Party meetings in that country. It was even more necessary to avoid Party meetings when the Chief Secretary happened to represent a Government which was in sympathy with the minority in Ireland. The post of Chief Secretary for Ireland was not analagous to the position of any other British Minister because there was only one Minister who governed Ireland. Sometimes it was the Lord-Lieutenant and sometimes the Chief Secretary, and he was absolute in all departments of the State in Ireland. It should be remembered that when a coercion Government was in power the British Minister for Ireland governed that country against the opinion of the over whelming majority of the Irish people. That was unfortunate, but it nevertheless threw upon the Chief Secretary an additional burden of responsibility not to identify himself with any Party in Ireland by attending Party meetings. What would be said by the hon. Members of the small Unionist Party opposite if, when a Radical came into power, the Irish Secretary were to inaugurate his tenure of office by attending a mass meeting in the Rotunda under the auspices of the United Irish League. That was just as lawful a body as the
    1486
    Dublin and Belfast Unionist Associations and it represented the majority of the Irish people; consequently it would be, constitutionally, a much more decent proceeding than what the Chief Secretary did in Belfast. Such a proceeding would have been received with howls [MINISTERIAL cries of "Oh, oh!"] Yes, it would have been received with howls, and the first man to howl would be the Solicitor-General for Ireland. It was an imprudent thing for the Irish Secretary to have identified himself in such a prominent way with the Irish Unionist Party. This was the more unfortunate when he went over to reverse the policy of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas. His policy was to govern Ireland against Irish ideas. In the speech he recently made he studiously avoided mentioning Lord Dudley's name, and put up Lord Dunraven as a kind of Aunt Sally to aim his blows at; but the whole of that speech was directed against the Lord-Lieutenant, and poured ridicule and contempt on an address he had delivered by and with the authority of the Cabinet. They did not need to ask the right hon. Gentleman for his policy, because they had got it. His policy was to govern Ireland in accordance with the wishes of the loyalist section of the Irish people. The Chief Secretary's masters were the three gentlemen sitting beside him—the English Solicitor-General and the Irish, law officers. He would be allowed to remain in office so long as he obeyed them, and not an hour longer.
    If it were possible he would much prefer that they should confine this debate to the broad general questions affecting the general policy of Ireland, but under the present circumstances it was idle to do that, because by doing it they would be simply beating the air and keeping aloof from the actual position of things in Ireland. They had to utilise such opportunities as were offered to them to expose and criticise the conduct of the Executive Government in Ireland. Three topics on which he desired to address the Committee were the Anderson case, the disastrous interference of the Executive in the administration of the Land Act, and the deliberate conspiracy, encouraged by the Chief Secretary, to manufacture

    1487
    bogus outrages in order to justify coercion. The Anderson case was an important issue, because it illustrated the methods by which the Orange Party carried on their campaign against justice and common honesty in Ireland, endeavouring when brought to book in the House to burke discussion and to run away. They had endeavoured again and again to get a full statement of the facts in regard to this case, because the Ulster Party had used it in the most unscrupulous and cruel way to hound down a man whose mouth was closed, but when they were brought to book upon it they had run away on every occasion, and they had done all they could to burke discussion and suppress the facts.
    MR. WILLIAM MOOREsaid the only chance they got was last session, and they took it.
    MR. DILLONsaid that on the 8th of July last the subject was introduced, and, when the Anderson case was raised, the Whip of the Unionist Party rose and brought up another subject in spite of the repeated protests of the hon. and learned Member for Waterford.
    MR. WILLIAM MOOREsaid the hon. Member was referring to an attempt made to confine the Anderson case to a discussion between the hours of nine and twelve. The hon. Member apparently did not know the facts.
    MR. DILLONsaid that what he had stated was absolutely correct.
    MR. WILLIAM MOORE: No, it is not correct.
    MR. DILLONsaid that later on the case was again brought forward by the leader of the Ulster Party, the hon. and gallant Member for North Armagh, and a long discussion took place. The hon. and gallant Member moved a reduction of the Chief Secretary's salary, and then it was talked out by a Member of the Party opposite.
    MR. WILLIAM MOORE: The charge that we had it talked out is absolutely unfounded. An hon. Member got up and talked it out, and he was censured by our Party for doing so.
    MR. DILLONsaid it was absolutely true that they censured the hon. Member for Belfast, but he had had his say, and he had since explained that it was arranged that an English Member should talk it out.
    AN HON. MEMBER: Did the hon. Member impute that they made any such arrangement with an English Member. If he did it was absolutely untrue.
    MR. DILLONsaid the hon. Member for Belfast said at a public meeting that he regretted the censure passed upon him because it was necessary to keep up appearances, but he said everybody knew that arrangements had been made that an English Member should talk it out, and that it was not to be allowed to go to a division. He further stated that the reason he rose to talk it out was that the English Member who should have talked it out was not sufficiently alert in getting up to speak. In the course of that discussion he urged that a full inquiry into the case should be held, and that all the documents should be produced, and what did hon. Members opposite do? Not one of them backed up that demand. The hon. Member for North Antrim had written a letter to him saying that he was strongly opposed to any further inquiry into this case.
    MR. WILLIAM MOORE: Will the hon. Member read my letter?
    MR. DILLON: No.
    MR. WILLIAM MOORE: I said that, as regards the Constable Anderson case, I thought three inquiries and a debate in this House were quite sufficient without inflicting another upon us. I said that if the Under-Secretary believed what the hon. Member had stated, that he had not been adequately defended, it was open to him to resign and defend himself.
    MR. DILLONsaid there was a most remarkable anxiety amongst hon. Members opposite that the facts of this case should not be made public. ["Oh, oh!"] A more cruel, baseless, and abominable calumny was never uttered against a public servant or a clergyman than that brought against Sir Antony MacDonnell and the priest concerned in connection with the Constable Anderson case. The whole thing was a lying invention, and, although hon. Members from Ulster continued to describe it as "the Anderson crime and abomination," the true facts were still withheld, and hon. Gentlemen opposite made no effort to have them elicited. He wished to remind the Chief Secretary of what occurred in the House of Lords. On July 12th Lord Cadogan made an application in the House of Lords that all the Papers in connection with the Anderson case should be laid on the Table. If that had not been a proper thing to do Lord Cadogan would not have done it. Lord Ashbourne said he would inquire into the matter and see whether Papers could be laid. Lord Spencer, another ex-Lord-Lieutenant, also urged that Papers should be produced, and when asked what Papers, replied—
    "I can only speak from experience in these matters. There was a time when matters of this sort entirely came before me when I was Lord-Lieutenant, and in my idea there must be minutes relating to the Court of inquiry and minutes which would show how the primary and final decisions were arrived at."
    Those were the minutes which should be produced. Not a single reason had been given for their non-production, and yet for months a great servant of the Crown had been allowed to be most shamefully assailed, and down to that hour Sir Antony MacDonnell had not been honestly defended in the House. If he was to blame in this matter he was not fit to hold his position, but he ought to have ordinary justice. The commonest criminal would not be allowed to be so treated. If Sir Antony MacDonnell had sinned let him suffer, but if he had not sinned, let his reputation be completely cleared.
    MR. WILLIAM MOORE: Does he say, or do you, that he has not been properly defended?
    MR. DILLON: I say so on my own responsibility. That is a cowardly observation to make.
    THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: Order, order! That is not an expression that should be used.
    MR. DILLON: It was used to me two or three times recently, but you did not call my assailant to order.
    THE DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: I did not hear the expression used, or I should have called for its withdrawal.
    MR. DILLONregretted the Deputy-Chairman had not taken the same view the other day. In any case, he did not call the hon. Member a coward; he said the observation was cowardly. Although he withdrew the expression, he thought it was perfectly in order. All he would say was that it was improper and mean for the hon. Member to get up and ask whether Sir Antony MacDonnell said he was not properly defended. Did not the hon. Member know enough of public life to be aware that Sir Antony MacDonnell's lips were sealed in this matter, and he was absolutely defenceless. That in itself was a reason why his superiors should treat him with greater generosity and loyalty. Even the Solicitor-General had hounded on the Orange gang against him, and denounced his own colleague and a subordinate of his own Government in a way never—
    THE SOLICITOR-GENERAL (Sir EDWARD CARSON, Dublin University)said he had never denounced his own colleague. What he said was that his colleague had disavowed a certain scheme, and that if a subordinate was connected with a scheme which his superior had disavowed he was guilty of misconduct towards the Government.
    MR. DILLONsaid the right hon. and learned Gentleman must be aware that from the surrounding circumstances of that speech he had laid himself open to

    1491
    the imputation of having used private information obtained as a member of the Government.
    SIR EDWARD CARSONsaid he had no private information. It was alleged that an official at the Castle was connected with the bringing forward of this devolution scheme, and all he said was that, if so, it was misconduct.
    MR. DILLON: Before you made that statement did you ask Lord Dudley or the Irish Secretary as to what the circumstances were?
    SIR EDWARD CARSON: Certainly not.
    MR. DILLONsaid he would pass from the Anderson case, as he thought he had said enough to convince any fair-minded man that Sir Antony MacDonnell had been treated in a very scurvy manner. The importance of lie case lay in the fact that it was an illustration of the means and methods y which Government was carried on in Ireland.
    The next point he desired o raise was the interference by the Executive Government with the operations of the Estates Commissioners. In this connection he would make a direct charge of gross breach of faith against the Government. The Report of the Estates Commissioners stated—
    "All proceedings under this section have since been regulated by the Act of Parliament, provisional rules, and the instructions received from time to time from His Excellency the Lord-Lieutenant."
    A most distinct pledge was given during the discussions on the Bill that all regulations issued by the Lord-Lieutenant should be communicated to the House.
    MR. ATKINSON: Future regulations.
    MR. DILLONsaid he was referring to the discussions during the passage of the Bill. It was generally understood that that expression included all communications
    1492
    from the Executive Government having a binding or directing effect on the operations of the Commissioners. But what had been done? It was evident from the Report issued by the Commissioners that they had been controlled, and in some instances controlled against their opinion, by instructions issued by the Executive Government, and though the Act had been in operation for a year and a-half the country was still in ignorance of the nature of these instructions. The Government had taken refuge in the extraordinary plea that these instructions were not regulations under Sub-section 8, but confidential communications from one department to another. That was a subterfuge which would enable them completely to evade their pledge and to give the public no information whatever about these instructions. It was the grossest breach of faith he had ever known in the House of Commons.
    MR. WALTER LONG: I have stated quite distinctly what is my position in the matter. I can only deal with the future. I have stated quite explicitly that I am responsible for the regulations, which will be issued. The regulations which are now in draft and will be issued as soon as I am able to lay them on the Table, are all the regulations which will be issued to the Estates Commissioners, and I have stated that if it should be necessary to add to or alter them, so far as I am responsible, those alterations or additions shall also be placed upon the Table.
    MR. DILLONsaid that if that were so, why should there be all this concealment with regard to the instructions already given and in operation. Where was the difference? If the sub-section was admitted to apply to all regulations given in the future, had it not the same efficacy with regard to instructions given in the past? Why should there, be all this mystery? The House was driven to the conclusion that there was something in those instructions of which the Government was ashamed and which they did not dare publish to the world. [Mr. WALTER LONG: No.] Then why

    1493
    not publish them and so end the whole controversy? Never had so absurd a position been taken up by a Government. The Commissioners stated that, under the instructions to inspectors, provisional agreements between landlords and tenants were indicated as one of the means by which the price which the tenants would be willing to pay could be ascertained, but that subsequently they were regarded as conclusive evidence of the tenants' willingness to buy at the price. Why were they taken as conclusive evidence? Thousands of such agreements were signed under duress of threats to proceed for arrears of rent, and they were signed by tenants in the confident belief that when inquired into by the inspector they would be broken. The original instructions laid it down that such agreements were to be considered only as one element in determining what the tenants were willing to pay, but now under some compelling force they were to be taken as final evidence, and the inspectors were not allowed to inquire whether there had been duress exercised or not.
    Then there was the question of the reinstatement of evicted tenants, the provisions in regard to which had been a dismal failure. The Commissioners stated—
    "Considerable correspondence passed with the Treasury which resulted in the issue of directions."
    Who authorised the issue of those directions?
    MR. ATKINSON: I know no more about them than the hon. Member himself. I never heard of any such instructions.
    MR. DILLONsaid the mystery deepened. Where in the name of Heaven did they come from? Who had authority to issue them? Did the right hon. and learned Gentleman suggest that the Commissioners made a false statement in their Report?
    MR. ATKINSON: I have had matters attributed to me of which I know nothing
    1494
    whatever, and with which I am in no way concerned. I never saw the instructions or gave any opinion upon them. I know nothing whatever about them.
    MR. DILLON: said the Committee had been informed that the Attorney-General always gave his legal advice to the Castle when asked to do so, and he assumed—
    MR. ATKINSON: You have no right to assume it, because it is not true. I said I gave advice when I was asked for it, but that does not justify the hon. Member in assuming that I was asked for and gave advice in this matter.
    MR. DILLONasked whether it would not be better to publish the whole of the instructions and thus clear up the entire business. There was evidently some ugly mystery, and the Attorney-General appeared to be particularly anxious to wash his hands of all responsibility. The instructions must have come from somebody. The Treasury had no right to issue directions. Whence did they come? Directions had been issued which had paralysed the operations of the Land Act in one of its most important departments; nobody was responsible, and nobody knew whence they came, but they had done their work, with the result that the promises held out by the Member for Dover had been completely nullified. No wonder the people were exasperated and disappointed.
    Another respect in which the of the Act had been paralysed was with regard to congestion. When the Act was introduced they were told that its primary object was to rescue the unhappy population of the West of Ireland from their hideous condition; now by some malign influence that portion of the Act had also been rendered a nullity, and while the Duke of Leinster added £4,000 or £5,000 a year to his income, and other relations of Ministers also got their twenty-five years purchase at the expense of the English taxpayer, these unhappy peasants of the West ware left in the misery from which this Act was specially passed to rescue them.

    1495
    It was a disgrace and a scandal, and the Committee ought to use every means in its power to draw aside the curtain which cloaked the operations which had destroyed the efficacy of the Act as a remedial and assuaging measure.
    Then there were the alleged outrages in the West of Ireland, and the conspiracy for the manufacture of bogus outrages, a shameful conspiracy got up by Lord Ashtown and others, and shamelessly carried on in the House by a handful of Irishmen who ought to be ashamed of their conduct in seeking to blacken their country in the eyes of the world. Being an opponent of dynamite, he was shocked when the London Press, including The Times, were rather inclined to justify the gentlemen who threw bombs in St. Petersburg and Warsaw. He was not there to advocate the rule of Rus ia, but under that rule, whatever might be said of it, Warsaw had doubled in population and quadrupled in wealth, and both Finland and Poland had increased in wealth and population, while under English rule Ireland had dwindled away in both those respects. Who, then, would condemn the peasants of Galway if they went out with bands of music and pulled down stone walls?
    He would refer for a moment to a remarkable Return issued by the Chief Secretary yesterday showing the number and nature of the outrages and other offences of an indictable character reported by the police in each county of Ireland from December 1st, 1904, to April 19th, 1905. There were eight cases of murder in the whole of Ireland, of which two were in Ulster; four of homicide and manslaughter, of which three were in Ulster; six of firing at the person, of which three were in Ulster. With regard to the offence of procuring or attempting to procure abortion, this heading was absolutely blank for the whole of Ireland. Could they show such a record in this respect in England?
    1496
    This was the country which they were going to place under a Crimes Act because a stone wall had been pulled down. The same Return showed that there had been 115 cases of burglary and house-breaking in Ireland, sixty-one of which were in Ulster; seventy-four cases of robbery, and thirty-four of them in Ulster; coining and uttering base coin, seven cases, and four of them in Ulster. In regard to disgraceful crimes, Ulster stood, he would not say at the top of the list, but in a worse position than the whole of the other three provinces combined. And it was the representatives of this province who had the audacity and insolence to comedown to the House and, night after night, ask questions about the throwing down of a stone wall in Galway. If this kind of thing continued they would search the English papers, and in the case of every atrocity that was committed they would ask the British Government what they were going to do, and they would make this House ashamed of England. They would not allow the House of Commons to be used as a place for advertising bogus outrages in Ireland.
    The Chief Secretary, by the Answers he had given in that House, had encouraged this proceeding. Did anyone imagine that every member of the Irish Constabulary did not take his hint from the Chief Secretary, who was a more absolute ruler in Ireland than was the Tsar in Russia, who ruled Ireland with as great and unchecked a power as the Suit in ruled Turkey, and, when he saw that outrages were wanted, produced them? Those men had for years gone round Ireland receiving rewards and promotion for their zeal, and it was very remarkable that wherever they were sent outrages cropped up, and it turned out that they had been committed by the police themselves, and innocent people were arrested for those crimes. Some of the cases had been found out, but how many were there which had never been found out? It

    1497
    was his deliberate conviction that this kind of thing was still going on in Ireland. What had happened in the House that night? When the Orange crowd opposite had been brought to book, what was the catalogue of crimes they had to produce? Simply a wall which had been knocked down in Galway, and that was their whole case. Was that an awful record against a population goaded to madness by the broken pledges of the Government, who had promised that the grass lands would be bought up and divided amongst them. He was astonished at the patience of the peasantry. For his part, he said that, unless the Government made up their minds to amend the Land Act where it required amendment and to withdraw the evil influences which were now mysteriously exercised, it was impossible that human nature could be patient, against the treatment to which the Irish people had been subjected. Agitation would arise, and it was little short of a crime for any man to go over from this country and say that he had but one remedy—force. He begged to renew the Amendment.
    Motion made, and Question proposed, "That Item A be reduced by £100, in respect of the Salary of the Chief Secretary."£(Mr. Dillon.)
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid he had listened to the criticisms made by the hon. and learned Member for Louth with some astonishment because he understood that there was a desire on the part of hon. Members on both sides of the House that he should not intervene in the debate before dinner. He took the view that it was right for him to hear what could be said in criticism from as many quarters as possible before he rose to reply. The hon. Gentleman
    1498
    the Leader of the Nationalist Party had taken him severely to task because, as the hon. Gentleman said, he had begun his career as Chief Secretary by confessing his entire inability to deal with the responsibilities of the office and his total ignorance of Ireland and Irish difficulties. The hon. Gentleman had not quite accurately expressed the opinions he uttered.
    MR. JOHN REDMOND: I quoted your own words.
    MR. WALTER LONG: Yes; but the deduction the hon. Gentleman drew from them was not quite fair. He did not know that it was very blameworthy to be a little modest as to one's personal ability. He did not say that he feared the responsibility or that he was not prepared to do the work to the best of his ability. All he did on coming new to one of the most important offices in the Government of the country was, naturally, to express the misgivings he had. He did not say he did not know anything of Ireland or her difficulties, and he thought it was not quite fair to translate what he had said into a confession of incompetence. Hon. Gentlemen had sought to show that in that speech he had also tried to throw discredit on the views of the Lord-Lieutenant when he dealt with the statement that the policy of the Irish Government had been, in 1902, to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas. He was not dealing in that speech with the declaration itself, or the question whether or not that ought to be the policy of the Irish Government. His point was that there was no precedent in the case of any Government, where there was a deliberate change of policy, where a new departure was to be adopted,

    1499
    for the announcement of that new departure being made by anybody but the responsible Minister. He asked what that phrase meant, and he found nothing in Lord Dunraven's pamphlet that gave him any information on the point. The debate had been mostly maintained from the other side of the House; and yet he was no wiser than at the beginning as to meaning of the phrase, "government according to Irish ideas."
    MR. DILLON: Why did the Cabinet instruct Lord Dudley to use that phrase in Ireland?
    MR. WALTER LONG: He never did anything of the kind, so far as I know.
    MR. JOHN REDMOND: In the words which I quoted, Lord Dudley said that he spoke for the Government, and he said that he personally agreed with that view.
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid that Lord Dudley never mentioned the Cabinet. But even if Lord Dudley said that he spoke on behalf of the Government as a whole, it was still permissible to ask Lord Dudley or anyone else what the expression meant.
    MR. JOHN REDMOND: In 1902, Lord Dudley used these words—
    "The opinion of the Government was, and it was also his opinion, that the only way to govern Ireland properly was to govern it in accordance with Irish ideas."
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid that the point was not whether Lord Dudley was authorised to speak on behalf of the Government or not. Before the Government were condemned by Lord Dunraven
    1500
    and hon. Gentlemen opposite as not being prepared to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas, they had a right to demand a clear explanation of the phrase. What the hon. Member for Waterford and his friends meant was perfectly well known. They had never altered their opinion, and they had been absolutely consistent during the twenty-five years they had been in the House. They had never altered their demand and the House knew what it was. If that was governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, then he must say it was a policy to which the Party to which he belonged must be unalterably opposed. Then it was asked, "Is your policy a changed one? Is conciliation a thing of the past?" He had never held that the so-called policy of conciliation was one that stood by itself, and was the opposite and antithesis of a policy of strong government. The two policies must go hand in hand if the prosperity of the country was to be secured. Reference had been made to his use of the stupid phrase "the chain'' which connected the Irish Government with Ireland, and the hon. Member appeared to think that it referred to the chain that bound Ireland to the United Kingdom. It had never entered into his head to put any such construction on the use of that phrase. He used it in connection with the famous scheme of devolution. He pointed out that he thought devolution was not likely to command much support, and in connection with Irish Government the chain he meant was the various branches of the Irish Government under the Minister responsible for that Government, and that the links in that chain required strengthening. It never occurred to him, that the use of the word "chain" could

    1501
    be interpreted as implying anything unpleasant or offensive to Ireland. Fault had been found with him also because he had poured scorn on the devolution scheme.
    MR. JOHN REDMOND: I did not say a word about the devolution scheme.
    MR. DILLON: What we said was that you poured scorn on the observations of the Lord -Lieutenant that Ireland should be governed in future according to Irish ideas.
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid he thought that the devolution scheme was mentioned, but now he understood that it had not even a friend to-day and was regarded as decently interred.
    MR. SWIFT MACNEILL: What about Wyndham?
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid the mover of the Motion had made two accusations against the Government. The first was in connection with the administration of the Land Act. But since he had gone to the Irish Office he had devoted by far the largest share of his time to doing all be could to secure that the Land Act should be successfully and rapidly worked. [NATIONALIST cries of "Oh, oh!"] The hon. Member for East Mayo and others appeared to have some difficulty in believing that statement.
    MR. DILLON: I do not disbelieve the right hon. Gentleman's statement, but I am afraid our ideas of what would be a successful working of the Act are very different.
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid he should have thought that no matter how much
    1502
    they might differ politically their interpretation of the meaning of the word "success" did not need to be different. When he said "successfully" he meant that the Act of 1903 should be carried out to achieve the purpose for which it was passed, namely, that as rapidly as possible the land should be transferred from the present owners to those who were now occupying it; that there should as far as possible be a restoration of the evicted tenants, and an alteration in the economic holdings wherever that was possible. Hon. Members said that the operations of the Act had been delayed by the action of the Executive Government, and that there had been a non-application of the regulations issued by his predecessor. He knew of no mystery in this matter; he had nothing to conceal, and there was no reason why these operations should not be made public. He had to the best of his ability endeavoured to obtain all the information he could upon this question. When the Act came into operation and a certain amount of control was given to the Executive Government there were, he was informed, innumerable communications between the Executive Government and the Estates Commissioners, but he found no record of them; they appeared to have been of a verbal character He was dealing now with regulations controlling the operations of the Estates Commissioners. So far as he knew no regulations of that kind were ever issued by his predecessor. It might be that the right hon. Gentleman was to blame for not issuing them; it might be that it would have been better to have issued them earlier. But the Act was new, the work thrown on him and the Estates Commissioners was laborious, and he thought they should be forbearing in any

    1503
    criticism passed on this branch of the question.
    MR. DILLONasked what was meant in the Report of the Commissioners by the reference to instructions from time to time from the Lord-Lieutenant. Were they to believe that there was no record of these instructions?
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid so far as he knew the instructions were verbal, and, though given in the name of the Lord-Lieutenant, the Chief Secretary was the Minister responsible for them. The hon. Gentleman knew perfectly well that where the Chief Secretary was a member of the Cabinet he was responsible, although instructions were given in the name of the Lord-Lieutenant. It would be idle for him, and indeed it would appear to be an evasion, to throw upon the Lord-Lieutenant responsibility which properly belonged to his predecessor, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Dover. When he first came into office and found no regulations had been issued, he at once proceeded to have regulations drawn up; and he had undertaken that they should be laid on the Table of the House, together with any alterations or amendments that might be made in them. To that he adhered, and beyond that he did not think it was possible for any fair minded man to ask him to go.
    Severe attacks had been made by the hon. and learned Member for Waterford, the hon. Member for South Tyrone, and the hon. Member for East Mayo in reference to Section 5 and non-judicial tenants. Here, again, he was dealing with what had taken place before he took office as Chief Secretary; but, as he understood the
    1504
    position, communications passed between the Commissioners and the Executive Government, and the latter, after taking legal advice, expressed their view on their own responsibility. Obviously they were always entitled to fortify themselves by referring to their legal advisers or any other member of the Executive, but it was altogether contrary to practice and precedent to call upon a Minister to say upon whose authority he had given his opinion. The Minister was himself responsible. It was his duty to obtain the best and most reliable information he could get. Was it convenient or practicable to go behind the Minister and challenge him for the authority for the opinion he gave? In this particular case a view was expressed; but so far as he could ascertain there had always been a steadfast refusal on the part of the Executive Government to express a definite opinion as to the legal construction of the section, on the ground that Parliament had provided that such questions should be decided by the Judicial Commissioner, whose decision determined any such question, and any opinion not in accordance with it was set aside.
    MR. T. W. RUSSELLasked why the Executive did not instruct the Estates Commissioners to refer that question to the Judicial Commissioner when first they came to the conclusion that the decision was not sound.
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid the hon. Gentleman had overlooked one detail. Under the Act the Executive had no power to order the Estates Commissioners or even to advise them to refer the general question. It only enabled them

    1505
    to advise reference when, the question arose in a particular case, and it was when it arose in a particular case in this instance that they advised reference to the Judicial Commissioner. In fact, the Judicial Commissioner had definitely declined to deal with these questions when raised generally and in the abstract. Therefore the hon. Gentleman would see that there had been no improper action on the part of the Executive and no avoidable delay. In regard to these two charges which had been brought against the Executive he hoped he had shown that they were not guilty.
    He now came to a charge which the hon. and learned Member for Water-ford made against him, and which he confessed he heard made with astonishment. He had sat in the House for many years, and he had often listened with admiration to the hon. and learned Gentleman. He had watched his public action as leader of a Party in the House, with a growing conviction of his ability and power to lead. The hon. Member not only charged him with the old charge, which they had heard so often made before, of manufacturing bogus crime, but treated it as a sudden act on his part. [A. HON. MEMBER: No, not a charge against you.] Then if this charge was not against him, where was the change of policy? If it was not made against him, and if he was merely continuing the acts of his immediate predecessors, what was all this bother about? But this really was an old charge. The charge of which he complained, and which he thought unworthy of the hon. and learned Gentleman, was that he adopted a policy which had for its ultimate object the introduction of coercion, and that he had taken this
    1506
    course in order to secure the turning out of Dublin Castle of Sir Antony MacDonnell. That was a charge which no man ought to bring forward in the House of Commons against another unless ho had abundant proof. It was absolutely false and without foundation. He did take exception to a charge that he had lent himself to a policy so cowardly and contemptible as that indicated by the hon. and learned Gentleman—namely, that he, who had power to dismiss any permanent official under him to-morrow if he thought fit, chose the indirect way of slowly forging a policy of coercion, not because he thought it necessary for the protection of life and property or in the interest of Ireland and the United Kingdom, but in order to get rid of a permanent official whom he could not get rid of in any other way. If that charge was true, what became of all the speeches they had listened to the other day from hon. Gentlemen opposite? One hon. Gentleman told them exultingly that he did not mind a change of Irish Secretary because he knew that as long as Sir Antony MacDonnell was at the Castle there would be no change of policy, that to use a common phrase, the Undersecretary would be top dog. Hon. Gentlemen opposite had said also that the Government could not part with Sir Antony MacDonnell because there was a correspondence which might be disclosed which would damage the Government, or that for some other reason they were afraid to part with him. But if that were true, what was the origin of the charge tonight? Was there ever so clumsy a policy ascribed to man as had been ascribed to him? In the first place it was suggested that here was a man whom he

    1507
    dared not part with, and then that he had got up the troublesome machinery of forging crime so as ultimately to adopt a policy of coercion in order to get rid of him. The charge was one quite unworthy of the hon. and learned Gentleman, and one he ought not to have made unless he had the strongest proof in its support. He absolutely repudiated the charge, for which there was not a shadow of foundation.
    He rejoiced with the hon. and learned Gentleman that the condition of the greater part of Ireland showed material improvement, which he hoped would be maintained. As to the parts of Galway, Mayo, and Roscommon which had been referred to, in those particular districts there had been trouble for many years; twenty years ago it was probably the most disturbed part of Ireland, where crime was most prevalent. It was true that there was not now the overt crime there that there used to be, but there had been lately a very large amount, not of overt crime, but of action which was not only deplorable, but which if allowed to continue must undermine the whole foundations of society. The hon. and learned Gentleman spoke of receiving threatening letters; many of them had received such letters; but there was no comparison between the receipt of threatening letters by Members of that House and by isolated tenant farmers in the West of Ireland, especially when in the latter case there were also resolutions published in the newspapers passed by representatives of local associations all tending in one direction, all pointing out how certain desires could be gratified if such and such
    1508
    measures were adopted. With regard to the prohibition of meetings in the West of Ireland, he believed that in the great majority of cases these meetings had little or no effect. While meetings had been from time to time, as he held, rightly prohibited, the great majority of meetings had been held without any interference. But to compare a meeting held in the neighbourhood of some small farmer occupying a grazing farm in the West of Ireland, with one of our Hyde Park demonstrations to denounce the millionaires of Park Lane, was not a true comparison. Was it likely that the same effect would be produced in the case of the millionaires as in the case of the small farmers.
    He was charged with having embarked on a policy of coercion. What evidence was there for the charge that the Government were seeking to adopt a policy of coercion? There was no foundation whatever for that charge. But he lay under that charge, if it meant that so long as he was responsible for the Government of Ireland, he would do his best to protect the life and property of those who needed protection. It was not a charge against the people of Ireland to make that statement. On the contrary, it was an admission of the state of things which existed in a part of Ireland, and an assertion that the existence of that condition of things ought not to be permitted. He believed it would be found that in the last twenty-five years, while they had had to confront enormous difficulties, and Ireland had had much to suffer, she had made steady progress, and she was making progress now.
    MR. FLAVIN: It is towards America.
    MR. WALTER LONGsaid that, at all events, it was the duty and privilege of the Government to do all they could to develop Ireland's internal resources and to strengthen her industries. They were bound also to do that which appeared to excite so much contempt and scorn among hon. Gentlemen opposite, and that was to see that every man was free to work within the law according to his will and desire. The Government believed that that policy was essential to the happiness, not only of Ireland, but of the rest of the United
    Kingdom, and it was that policy that he should do his best to further.
    MR. DILLONsaid on March 6th last the hon. Member for Waterford asked whether there were any instructions contained in the correspondence, and the Attorney-General for Ireland replied—
    "No regulations have been made; but instructions and orders are contained in the correspondence, which is confidential and cannot be laid."
    Question put.
    The Committee divided:—Ayes, 98 Noes, 145. (Division List No 181.)

    AYES.

    Allen, Charles P.

    Hardie, J. Keir (MerthyrTydvil

    O'Connor, John (Kildare, N.)

    Ambrose, Robert

    Harrington, Timothy

    O'Donnell, John (Mayo, S.)

    Austin, Sir John

    Hayden, John Patrick

    O'Dowd, John

    Barry, E. (Cork, S.)

    Hemphill, Rt. Hon. Charles H.

    O'Kelly, James (Roscommon, N

    Blake, Edward

    Henderson, Arthur (Durham)

    O'Malley, William

    Boland, John

    Higham, John Sharp

    O'Shaughnessy, P. J.

    Bolton, Thomas Dolling

    Hutchinson, Dr. Charles Fredk

    Pease, J. A. (Saffron Walden)

    Brigg, John

    Isaacs, Rufus Daniel

    Power, Patrick Jospeh

    Bright, Allan Heywood

    Jones, Leif (Appleby)

    Rea, Russell

    Burke, E. Haviland

    Jones, William (Carnarvonshire

    Reddy, M.

    Caldwell, James

    Joyce, Michael

    Redmond, John E. (Waterford

    Campbell, John (Armagh, S.)

    Kennedy, Vincent P. (Cavan, W.

    Roberts, John Bryn (Eifion)

    Causton, Richard Knight

    Kilbride, Denis

    Roche, John

    Cawley, Frederick

    Lamont, Norman

    Roe, Sir Thomas

    Channing, Francis Allston

    Law, Hugh Alex. (Donegal, W.)

    Russell, T.W.

    Cheetham, John Frederick

    Lawson, Sir Wilfrid (Cornwall)

    Schwann, Charles E.

    Crean, Eugene

    Layland-Barratt, Francis

    Shackleton, David James

    Cremer, William Randal

    Leigh, Sir Joseph

    Shaw, Charles Edw. (Stafford)

    Delany, William

    Lundon, W.

    Sheehan, Daniel Daniel

    Devlin, Chas. Ramsay (Galway

    MacNeill, John Gordon Swift

    Shipman, Dr. John G.

    Dillon, John

    MacVeagh, Jeremiah

    Slack, John Bamford

    Doogan, P. C.

    M'Fadden, Edward

    Stanhope, Hon. Philip James

    Douglas, Charles M. (Lanark)

    M'Hugh, Patrick A.

    Sullivan, Donal

    Emmott, Alfred

    M'Kean, John

    Taylor, Theodore C.(Radcliffe)

    Eve, Harry Trelawney

    M'Killop, W. (Sligo, North)

    Thomas, David Alfred(Merthyr

    Ffrench, Peter

    Mooney, John J.

    Warner, Thomas Courtenay T.

    Field, William

    Moss, Samuel

    Wason, Eugene (Clackmannan)

    Flavin, Michael Joseph

    Murphy, John

    White, George (Norfolk)

    Flynn, James Chistopher

    Nannetti, Joseph P.

    Woodhouse, Sir JT(Huddersf'd

    Gilhooly, James

    Nolan, Col. John P. (Galway, N.)

    Young, Samuel

    Gladstone, Rt. Hn. Herbert John

    Nolan, Joseph (Louth, South)

    Goddard, Daniel Ford

    O'Brien, K. (Tipperary, Mid.)

    TELLERS FOR THE AYES—

    Griffith, Ellis J.

    O'Brien, P. J. (Tipperary, N.)

    Captain Donelan and Mr.

    Hammond, John

    O'Connor, James (Wicklow, W.)

    Patrick O'Brien.

    NOES.

    Agg-Gardner, James Tynte

    Allsopp, Hon. George

    Arrol, Sir William

    Agnew, Sir Andrew Noel

    Anson, Sir William Reynell

    Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John

    Allhusen, Augustus Henry Eden

    Arnold-Forster, Rt. Hn. Hugh O.

    Bagot, Capt. Josceline FitzRoy

    Bailey, James (Walworth)

    Flower, Sir Ernest

    Pierpoint, Robert

    Bain, Colonel James Robert

    Forster, Henry William

    Platt-Higgins, Frederick

    Balcarres, Lord

    Foster, Philip S. (Warwick, SW.

    Plummer, Sir Walter R.

    Balfour, Rt. Hn. A. J. (Manc'r.

    Gardner, Ernest

    Powell, Sir Francis Sharp

    Balfour, RtHnGerald W. (Leeds

    Gordon, Hn J. E. (Elgin & Nairn)

    Pretyman, Ernest George

    Balfour, Kenneth R. (Christch.

    Gordon, J. (Londonderry, S.)

    Purvis, Robert

    Banbury, Sir Frederick George

    Gore, Hon. S.F. Ormsby

    Pym, C. Guy

    Beach, Rt. Hn. Sir Michael Hicks

    Goulding, Edward Alfred

    Randles, John S.

    Bhownaggree, Sir M. M.

    Greene, SirE W(B'rySEdm'nds

    Rasch, Sir Frederic Carne

    Bignold, Sir Arthur

    Greene, W. Raymond (Cambs.)

    Reid, James (Greenock)

    Bingham, Lord

    Gretton, John

    Roberts, Samuel (Sheffield)

    Blundell, Colonel Henry

    Groves, James Grimble

    Robertson, Herbert (Hackney)

    Boscawen, Arthur Griffith

    Hamilton, Marq. of (L'nd'nderry

    Robinson, Brooke

    Bousfield, William Robert

    Helder, Augustus

    Rolleston, Sir John F. L.

    Brassey, Albert

    Henderson, Sir A. (Stafford, W.)

    Round, Rt. Hon. James

    Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John

    Hermon-Hodge, Sir Robert T.

    Rutherford, W. W. (Liverpool)

    Brymer, William Ernest

    Hickman, Sir Alfred

    Sackville, Col. S. G. Stopford

    Bull, William James

    Hogg, Lindsay

    Sadler, Col. Samuel Alexander

    Butcher, John George

    Hope, J. F. (Sheffield, Brightside

    Sandys, Lieut.-Col. Thos. Myles

    Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin Univ.

    Hoult, Joseph

    Seton-Karr, Sir Henry

    Carson, Rt. Hon. Sir Edw. H.

    Kennaway, Rt. Hn. Sir John H.

    Sharpe, William Edward T.

    Cavendish, V. C. W. (Derbyshire

    Kenyon-Slaney, Rt. Hon. Col. W.

    Skewes-Cox, Thomas

    Cecil, Lord Hugh (Greenwich)

    Keswick, William

    Stanley, Edward Jas. (Somerset)

    Chamberlain, Rt Hn. J. A. (Worc.

    Knowles, Sir Lees

    Stanley, Rt. Hn. Lord (Lancs.)

    Chapman, Edward

    Lambton, Hon. Frederick Wm.

    Stewart, Sir Mark J. M'Taggart

    Cochrane, Hon. Thos. H. A. E.

    Law, Andrew Bonar (Glasgow)

    Stroyan, John

    Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse

    Lawrence, Wm. F. (Liverpool)

    Strutt, Hon. Charles Hedley

    Corbett, A. Cameron (Glasgow)

    Lawson, John Grant(Yorks N.R.

    Thornton, Percy M.

    Corbett, T. L. (Down, North)

    Legge, Col. Hon. Heneage

    Tollemache, Henry James

    Dalkeith, Earl of

    Leveson-Gower, Frederick N.S.

    Tomlinson, Sir Wm. Edw. M.

    Dalrymple, Sir Charles

    Long, Rt. Hn. Walter(Bristol, S)

    Tuff, Charles

    Davenport, William Bromley

    Lyttelton, Rt. Hon. Alfred

    Tuke, Sir John Batty

    Denny, Colonel

    Macdona, John Cumming

    Walker, Col. William Hall

    Dickson, Charles Scott

    Melville, Beresford Valentine

    Walrond, Rt. Hn. Sir William H.

    Dimsdale, Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph C.

    Mildmay, Francis Bingham

    Welby, Sir Charles G. E. (Notts.)

    Doughty, Sir George

    Milvain, Thomas

    Wharton, Rt. Hon. John Lloyd

    Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers

    Montagu, G. (Huntingdon)

    Whiteley, H. (Ashton und. Lyne

    Doxford, Sir William Theodore

    Montagu, Hn. J. Scott(Hants.)

    Williams, Colonel R. (Dorset)

    Dyke, Rt. Hn. Sir William Hart

    Morgan, David J(Walthamstow

    Wodehouse, Rt. Hn. E. R. (Bath)

    Egerton, Hon. A. de Tatton

    Morpeth, Viscount

    Wolff, Gustav Wilhelm

    Faber, George Denison (York)

    Morrell, George Herbert

    Wylie, Alexander

    Fellowes, RtHnAilwyn Edward

    Mount, William Arthur

    Wyndham, Rt. Hon. George

    Fergusson, Rt. Hn. Sir J(Manc'r.

    Mowbray, Sir Robert Gray C.

    Fielden, Edward Brocklehurst

    Murray, Chas. J. (Coventry)

    TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Sir

    Finch, Rt. Hon. George H.

    O'Neill, Hon. Robert Torrens

    Alexander Acland-Hood and

    Finlay, Sir R. B(Inv'rn'ssB'ghs)

    Parkes, Ebenezer

    Viscount Valentia.

    Fisher, William Hayes

    Percy, Earl

    Original Question again proposed
    And, it being after Midnight, the Chairman left the Chair to make his Report to the House.
    Committee report Progress; to sit again upon Monday next.

    CLOSING OF LICENSED PREMISES (ST. PATRICK'S PAY) (IRELAND) BILL.
    Order for Second Reading read, and discharged. Bill withdrawn.

    STANDING ORDERS.
    Resolution reported from the Select Committee.
    "That, in the case of the Cana's Bill, the Standing Orders ought not to be dispensed with."
    Report to lie upon the Table.
    Adjourned at twelve minute after Twelve o'clock.

PRIVATE BILL BUSINESS.
Tyneside Tramways and Tramroads Bill [H.L.]. Commons Amendments considered and agreed to.
Matlock Bath Improvement Bill [H.L.]. Reported from the Select Committee, with Amendments.
Dublin Corporation (Superannuation) Bill; South Oxifordshire Water and Gas Bill. Reported, without Amendment.
Morley Corporation Bill; Barrymore Estate Bill [H.L.]; Brentwood Gas Bill; Great Central Railway (Pension Fund) Bill [H.L.]; North Sussex Gas Bill; Colne Corporation Bill; Aylesbury Gas Bill. Reported, with Amendments.
Wellingborough and District Tram-roads and Electricity Supply Bill [H.L.]; Acton Sewage Bill. Report from the Committee of Selection, That the Lord Clifford of Chudleigh be proposed to the House as a member of the Select Committee on the said Bills in the place of the Lord Hare (E. Listowel); read, and agreed to.
Ealing Corporation Bill. Report from the Select Committee, That the Committee had not proceeded with the consideration of the Bill, no parties having appeared in opposition thereto; read, and ordered to lie on the Table. The orders made on Thursday and Friday last discharged, and Bill committed.
London United Tramways (Extension of Time) Bill. Read 2a, and committed.
Nottingham Corporation Bill [H.L.]; Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
Seaham Gas Bill. Read 3a, with the Amendments, and passed, and returned to the Commons.
Ilfracombe Harbour and Improvement Bill. Read 3a, with the Amendments;
1350
further Amendments made; Bill passed and returned to the Commons.
Great Northern, Piccadilly, and Brompton Railway (No. 1) Bill. Brought from the Commons; read 1a; and referred to the Examiners.
Tralee Urban District Council Bill [H.L.]. Returned from the Commons agreed to, with Amendments. The said Amendments considered, and agreed to.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne Corporation Bill [H.L.]; Wellingborough and District Tramroads and Electricity Supply Bill [H.L.]; Acton Sewage Bill. Leave given to the Select Committee to adjourn over To-morrow, and not to sit on Monday next till half-past Twelve o'clock.
North Metropolitan Electric Power Supply Bill [H.L.]. Reported from the Select Committee, with Amendments.
Education Board Provisional Orders Confirmation (Liverpool, etc.) Bill [H.L.]. Read 3a (according to order), and passed, and sent to the Commons.
Education Board Provisional Order Confirmation (London No. 2) Bill [H.L.]. Amendment reported (according to order), and Bill to be read 3a to-morrow.
Alexander Scott's Hospital Order Confirmation Bill; Grangemouth Waterworks and Burgh Extension Order Confirmation Bill; Arbroath Corporation Water Order Confirmation Bill. Read 3a (according to order), and passed.

PETITIONS.
Intoxicating Liquors (Hours of Closing) Bill [H.L.]. Petitions in favour of; of the London Auxiliary of the United Kingdom Alliance; read, and ordered to lie on the Table.
RETURNS, REPORTS, ETC.
  CERTIFIED INEBRIATE REFORMA TORIES (SCOTLAND).
  General regulations for the management and discipline of certified inebriate reformatories in Scotland.
  Sixty-sixth Annual Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records.

  RAILWAY ACCIDENTS.
  Returns of cases of derailment of engines of passenger trains into which inquiries have been held by the inspecting officers of railways during the twenty years ended 31st December, 1904, divided into (1) tank engines, and (2) tender engines, showing in each case the date, place of accident, and railway, and the class of engine.
  Presented (by Command), and ordered to lie on the Table.

  POLLING DISTRICTS (COUNTY OF DUR HAM).
  Order made by the county council of the county of Durham, altering certain polling districts. Laid before the House (pursuant to Act), and ordered to lie on the Table.
  ARUNDEL PORT.
  Account aud Report for 1904–1905. Delivered (pursuant to Act), and ordered to lie on the Table.

  THE WHITSUNTIDE RECESS.
  EARL SPENCER: My Lords, it would be convenient if the noble Marquess the Leader of the House could inform us what arrangements he proposes to make for the Whitsuntide holidays.
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (The Marquess of LANSDOWNE): My Lords, the noble Earl has allowed me to discuss this matter privately with him, and I have consulted other Members of the House. I propose that we should sit until the Friday before Whit Sunday, that the business of the House should be interrupted for a fortnight, which is, I believe, the usual time, and that we should reassemble on Monday, June 26th.

  EXTRADITION BILL [H.L.]
  [SECOND READING.]
  Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
  THE LORD CHANCELLOR (The Earl of HALSBURY): My Lords, a Convention has been concluded between His Majesty and the President of the United States for including in the list of crimes on account of which extradition may be granted certain offences, and, amongst others, bribery; and it is provided by the Convention that it shall come into force within ten days after publication in conformity with the laws of the high contracting parties. Bribery is not at present included in the list of crimes in the First Schedule to the Extradition Act, 1870, and the Convention cannot be published in conformity with the laws of the United Kingdom until bribery is so included. This Bill, therefore, enacts that the Extradition Act, 1870, shall be construed as if bribery were included in the list of crimes in the First Schedule to that Act. I think your Lordships will agree that it is highly desirable that effect should be given to the agreement which has been come to between the two countries.
  Moved, "That the Bill be now read 2a"—(The Lord Chancellor.)
  On Question, Bill read 2a and committed to a Committee of the Whole House on Monday next.

  SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE (IRELAND) (No. 1) BILL [H.L.]
  House in Committee (according to order). Bill reported without Amendment; and re-committed to the Standing Committee.

  NAVAL AND MILITARY MEDALS BILL [H.L.]
  House in Committee (according to Order).
  *THE UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR (The Earl of DONOUGH-MORE): My Lords, the two Amendments standing in my name have been

  1353
  drafted in accordance with the request made at the previous stage by the noble Lord behind me, Lord Muskerry, who pointed out that there was a certain medal which he did not think was covered by the Bill. It was certainly our object that the Bill should cover such a medal, and I beg to move these Amendments to make that clear.
  Amendments moved—
  "In Clause 1, page 1, line 6, after the word 'issued' to insert the words 'by His 'Majesty'; and in line 7, after the word 'forces' to insert the words 'or any other persons'."—(The Earl of Donoughmore.)
  On Question, Amendments agreed to.
  Bill re-committed to the Standing Committee; and to be printed as amended. (No. 88.)

  SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE (IRELAND) (No. 2) BILL [H.L.]
  [SECOND READING.]
  Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
  *THE LORD CHANCELLOR OF IRELAND (Lord ASHBOURNE): My Lords, this Bill proposes various reforms in legal administration in Ireland, which are considered by those most concerned as likely to be useful and advantageous and to greatly simplify matters. The first provision in the Bill is one to enable the hearing and dispatch at any winter assizes of any civil business other than traverses. It was found that owing to the construction of some of the statutes it was necessary that the transaction of civil business at winter assizes should be authorised in this way by Parliament. The next provision is to regulate future appointments in the Principal Registry of the Probate and Matrimonial Branch of the King's Bench Division, and to provide that junior clerkships, like those in other divisions, shall be filled by open competition. There is also a provision with regard to the extension of powers to make rules of Court which places this matter on a satisfactory basis. Provision, too, is made for appointments in the Registration of Tithe Officer. There is also an
  1354
  attempt—a successful one, I believe it will be—to remedy in this Bill a mistake that was made in the Statute Law Revision Act, 1893. No matter how carefully that work is done sometimes a slip may be made, and in the particular matter dealt with in this Bill an error was committed, and we seek in this Bill to set that matter right. There is also a proposal to remove a grievance in the matter of the constitution of local election Courts. It has been found that the selection of the barrister who was to try the matter was hampered owing to the technicalities surrounding the appointment, and that matter is sought to be put right in this Bill. I hope your Lordships will see no difficulty in granting the Bill a Second Reading.
  Moved, "That the Bill be now read 2a."—(Lord Ashbourne.)
  On Question Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House on Tuesday next.

  DISLOYALTY OF IRISH SCHOOL TEACHERS.
  LORD ORANMORE AND BROWNE: My Lords, I rise to ask His Majesty's Government whether it is a fact that at the annual dinner in connection with the Irish National Teachers' Association, held at Sligo on 26th April, a certain number of teachers left the room when the health of His Majesty the King was proposed, and many others refused to rise from their seats to honour the toast; and whether it is the intention of His Majesty's Government to take any steps to prevent such teachers from inculcating disloyalty among the children who attend their schools.
  I do not intend to detain your Lordships at any length, but I make no excuse for bringing this matter forward, believing as I do that it is one which may fitly engage the attention of your Lordships' House and the serious consideration of the people of this country. There is no subject to which public attention has been more closely directed during the last few years than that of education. We have been almost led to believe that in education we shall find a panacea for all the ills

  1355
  to which human flesh is heir, and it is not astonishing that on a subject of such importance we find many differences of opinion. There are some who hold that our system of education has been so improved and brought up to date that it is adapted to meet the requirements of the present generation. There are others who tell us that we have still much to learn from what is being done in foreign countries. There are those who hold that children should be brought up in the faith of their fathers, but there are others who would limit their religious instruction to such portions of Christian faith as recommend themselves to the conscience of Mr. Lloyd-George. But, my Lords, however great the difference may be on all these subjects, there is one point on which all parties in this country are agreed, which will recommend itself equally to the heads of the Roman Catholic Heirarchy and to the most extreme Welsh dissenters, to the right rev. bench and to the leaders of agnosticism, and that is that all the children of this country should be taught to take a pride in the history of the English race, with a confidence in the future of the British Empire and with a loyalty to the gracious Sovereign under whose benignant sway we enjoy a security and a freedom which make us the envy of many foreign nations.
  Very different, I regret to say, is the state of feeling across St. George's Channel. Owing to religious differences very little history can be taught, and what little is taught appears to me to consist mainly of a collection of fairy tales of doughty deeds wrought by Erse robber chiefs, who are dignified by the name of Kings and who one by one succumbed to the advance of the hated Saxon. Everywhere you find that England is regarded as the oppressor of Ireland, and England is represented by England's King. I am sure that those noble Lords who hail from the sister Isle will agree with me when I say that we heard of the behaviour of the Irish national teachers at Sligo with more sorrow than surprise. It grieves us, it fills us with resentment, but it causes no astonishment. We are only too accustomed to the rampant disloyalty of our Nationalist fellow-countrymen. We
  1356
  know that throughout three provinces of Ireland there is hardly an assembly of any kind at which the King's health is proposed. We know that many of the public bodies have had the words, "On His Majesty's Service" removed from their paper and the words "On the Public Service" inscribed in their stead. Worse than that, we know that in many places a black flag was hoisted on the public buildings on the occasion of His Majesty's Coronation; and so I say that though we grieve at this new instance of disloyalty we cannot profess to be surprised at it.
  We are often told in England that the Nationalists of Ireland are perfectly loyal, that all they are anxious to obtain is some extension of local government, the right to manage their own as apart from Imperial affairs. But, my Lords, we who live in Ireland know that this is not the case. The words "Loyalist" and "Nationalist" are not interchangeable terms, and the very fons et origo of the demand for Home Rule lies in hatred of England. We are all aware, if I may say so with all respect, that our gracious Sovereigns win golden opinions wherever they go, and Ireland was no exception to the rule. Those with whom they came in contact fell under the magnetic charm, but, after all, the opinions of a life-time are, I fear, not done away with in a moment, and the inborn dislike of this country overcomes ere long all transient impressions. My Lords, if a proof is needed of the truth of my statements, can a better one be found than in the conduct of these national school teachers at the dinner at Sligo? These are no ignorant peasants, blindly led astray by agitators; these are men who have been carefully trained at the expense of the State to teach the coming generation of Irishmen. These men are officials of the State; they are not paid by local bodies. I wish I could inpress this fact on every taxpayer in England and Scotland. It is with their money that these men are paid to inculcate disloyalty among the children of Ireland. For can we doubt that they do teach it?
  I do not for a moment accuse every Nationalist schoolmaster in Ireland of disloyalty. I am glad to say that I believe there are many notable exceptions,

  1357
  but, if you wish to know their view as a body, how can it be better judged than at a dinner held on the occasion of their annual conference? "By their fruits ye shall know them." Teachers now in active employment and in receipt of Government pay may not be very anxious openly to express their views; but may I quote to your Lordships the words of Mr. Seumas Macmanus, for some time a national teacher, in a letter to the Irish Independent, extracts from which appeared in The Times of May 16th. Mr. Macmanus, writing with reference to the custom of drinking the King's health, says that—
  "The custom has been tolerated too long in Ireland and it is the duty of every Irishman to make active protest."
  Mr. Macmanus defends the national school teachers who refused to honour the loyal toast at Sligo, and continues—
  "The Irish youth who quits school without realising his duties as a rebel is, or should be, a discredit to his schoolmaster as well as to his country."
  Mr. Macmanus was himself a national teacher for some years, and he says that during that time his salary was well earned—
  "So far, at least, as the stirring of discontent and the dissemination of rebellions opinions were concerned."
  Does not this disclose a serious state of affairs? Does not this call for a remedy?
  I ask His Majesty's Government what they are prepared to do. I cannot venture to advise them. The education of the children of Ireland ought, it appears to me, to be made a powerful factor in the pacification of the country. Unless you, have a loyal population you will never have a reconciled Ireland. We see that nowadays these children are being trained as "rebels," and I personally 'believe that this is being greatly helped by the assistance which is being given in national schools, out of Imperial funds, to revive the long-disused Gaelic language, which is of no earthly practical use to anybody in the world, and which is only made use of by agitation for the purpose of fostering an anti-British feeling. I acknowledge that the task of His Majesty's Government is no easy one, and that drastic measures may, perhaps, be
  1358
  worse than none at all; but surely some means might be taken to encourage loyalty in the training colleges where these teachers receive their education, and it might be made compulsory for the National Anthem to be taught and sung in all national schools. We are told that we must do our best to propitiate Irish feeling, but in this case English and Scottish feeling must also be considered, for it is with English and Scottish money that these schools are supported, and these teachers are paid. I beg to put the Question which stands in my name.
  *THE EARL OF ARRAN: My Lords, I venture to trespass on your attention in order to supplement the Question which has been asked by my noble friend. The noble Lord dwelt very fully on the incident as it is reported in the newspapers, and he also commented, very rightly, on the peculiar circumstances that attach to this incident, in that these men accused of disloyalty are schoolmasters having the charge of the future generation of Irishmen in their hands. I think your Lordships will agree with me that youth is the most impressionable part of one's life. The ideas that are imbued in a child are the ideas that remain longer than any other; they are the most deep-rooted and the most difficult to eradicate. We had an object-lesson in South Africa, where I was told over and over again by different Boers that one of the reasons for the great feeling of hatred towards England and the English race was that Dutch-speaking children from their very earliest years were taught in their schools to hate England and the English. Here, if the circumstances are as we are given to understand they are by the Press, we have the very same thing happening at our very door, or, I may say, in our own house. Whatever one's politics may be, whether one be a strong advocate of the policy of Home Rule or an enthusiastic Unionist, as I am, no one can approve of such action as these schoolmasters are accused of.
  The noble Lord who called attention to this question said he would not venture to make any suggestion to His Majesty's Government, but I

  1359
  am going to suggest that they should make full inquiry into this remarkable incident, if only in order that these schoolmasters may have an opportunity of clearing their characters from the serious accusation that has been made. Those who live in Ireland will agree with me that Irishmen are easily led in this matter. In this country a Hyde Park orator may make a speech and say, "Let's go and blow up St. Paul's,' but no one takes any notice of him, and St. Paul's remains. But it is not so in Ireland. Unless notice is taken of inflammatory speeches and strong Government disapproval shown, it is attributed, in the South and West of Ire-and at any rate, not to a policy of clemency but to weakness. I venture most sincerely to hope that we shall hear from His Majesty's Government that they have taken, are taking, or will take, such measures as will lead to full inquiry being made into this incident; land if, unhappily, the accusation is proved to be true, then the schoolmasters should be removed from the positions which by such action they have proved themselves unworthy of filling.
  LORD MUSKERRY: My Lords, I disagree with the noble Lord who called attention to this question, for I do not think that hatred of England is really implanted in the hearts of most of my countrymen. They extend a hearty-welcome to English tourists, and I do not think there is really any hatred in Ireland of the "brutal Saxon." Hatred of England does not lie at the root of disloyal demonstrations. The real secret is that these people have found that by agitation, disloyal speeches, and the like, the Government will give in to them, and they will get what they want.
  *THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL AND PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION (The Marquess of LONDONDERRY): My Lords, the three noble Lords who have spoken are thoroughly acquainted with Ireland and perfectly qualified to speak on the subject. I confess I followed the speech of my noble friend who put this Question with a certain amount of difficulty. I could not quite gather whether he expected
  1360
  me to defend the Board of Education from the attacks of Mr. Lloyd-George or confine myself entirely to the Question on the Paper. If he will allow me, I will deal with the Question on the Paper, for I shall have many opportunities in the future of alluding to Mr. Lloyd-George and his line of policy in regard to education in England and Wales. I am certain that the action of those teachers to which the noble Lord has referred will be disapproved by every Member of your Lordships' House, and I was glad to hear from the noble Earl opposite (Lord Arran) that they will be glad to have the opportunity of clearing their characters from the serious accusation that has been made.
  THE EARL OF ARRAN: All I stated was that I hoped His Majesty's Government would give them an opportunity of doing so.
  *THE MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY: I gathered from what the noble Earl said that if they were given an opportunity of clearing themselves they would gladly do so.
  THE EARL OF ARRAN: I have no reason to suppose that they will be able to clear themselves; but it was natural to imagine that, being servants of the Crown, they would be glad of an opportunity of clearing themselves if they could.
  *THE MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY: Nothing would give me greater pleasure personally than that they should be able to do so. Such action represents the feeling of only a very small minority of the people in Ireland, the vast majority of whom regard the name of their Sovereign not only with respect but with affection since the visit of Their Majesties, to Ireland and their manifestation of interest in the industries and welfare of that country. It is extremely difficult for the Government to obtain information of what really took place at the banquet in question. The only information we have at present is the report in the Sligo Champion, and from the wording of the Question of the noble Lord I have no doubt that it is couched in terms drawn

  1361
  from that journal. I gather from this journal that a, number of the invited guests, including some clergymen, having observed that the first toast on the printed programme was that of "The King," decided to leave immediately, and they did so, being unwilling to participate in a function where the toast was a feature. I understand that the toast was actually proposed, when, it appears, the majority of those present, guests and congress delegates, remained seated. That is all the information we have been able to obtain, and I cannot gather from the Press or from any other source of information that any speech was delivered by any of these people. Mr. Macmanus, to whom the noble Lord referred, is no longer a teacher.
  LORD ORANMORE AND BROWNE: I stated that he was no longer a teacher; but he described what he used to do when he was a teacher and under the control of the Education Department.
  *THE MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY: He is no longer a teacher. If he had been we should have known how to deal with him, and we should have dealt with him. But, as he is no longer a teacher, he is not under the control of the Irish Government. The Government referred the matter to the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland for inquiry, and they have reported that they have no information which would justify them in taking any action and that they have no means of obtaining such information. Noble Lords opposite laugh, but I do not quite know how the Government are to obtain information by any other means than through the local paper. His Majesty's Government feel as strongly as any noble Lord in this House that it is, and must be, absolutely disastrous to the interests of the rising generation if they are allowed to have inculcated in their minds feelings of disloyalty, and if it can be shown that any teacher is inculcating such feelings we will take the earliest opportunity of going into the matter and of seeing that that course of action is not repeated.
  THE EARL OF MAYO: My Lords, with all respect to the noble Marquess, I cannot refrain from expressing my strong opinion that there are means of obtaining this information if the Government had desired to avail themselves of them. We all know how information is secured in Ireland; it is obtained very easily, and I do not think it is at all satisfactory that Questions asked by noble Lords from Ireland should be anwered in this way. The information could be obtained more easily by His Majesty's Government than by private individuals. When there are cases of alleged crime the Government find no difficulty whatever in obtaining information, and I contend that it is their bounden duty in cases of this kind, when asked for information, to take the means they have in their power of obtaining that information.
  THE DUKE OF RUTLAND: I should like to ask who was the chairman of the meeting, and whether any question has been addressed to him as to what occurred.
  THE EARL OF MAYO: The name of the chairman is in the local paper.
  *THE MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY: I find that the chairman is here stated to be Mr. Hazlett, M.A., president of the organisation.
  VICOUNT GOSCHEN: I agree with the noble Duke beside me that the chairman of the meeting should be asked for an explanation. If a question were addressed to the chairman we would be able to discover whether this incident occurred. If there is a general feeling of loyalty among those teachers they will be able to repudiate it and to furnish the Government with the necessary reply to the charge.
  *THE MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY: I think that suggestion is a practical one, and, without pledging myself in any way, I will communicate with the Chief Secretary and ask him whether a question might not be addressed to the chairman for the purpose of obtaining further information.

  THE UNITED IRISH LEAGUE.
  *THE EARL OF DARTREY*THE EARL OF DARTREY rose to call attention to the United Irish League meeting at Scotshouse, county Monaghan, on Sunday, the seventh of this month, at which an inflammatory address, suggesting outrage and murder, is stated to have been delivered; and to ask what steps His Majesty's Government propose to take in consequence. He said: My Lords, I desire to call the attention of your Lordships' House to the recent proceedings of the United Irish League in the county in which I live, because from the accounts that have reached me they appear to have been of a very remarkable character. The meeting to which I refer took place on Sunday, the 7th instant, at Scotshouse, county Monagan. It does not appear to have been advertised beforehand, which possibly accounts for the local police sergeant knowing nothing about it; indeed, when the meeting commenced he was absent in a neighbouring town on other business, but I believe he got back in time to hear a good deal of what passed at the meeting. Much may be learnt from the Press reports. I may especially refer to two Nationalist papers—the Dundalk Democrat and the Anglo-Celt. From these I learn that—
  "At last Mass it (the meeting) was announced from the puplit by Mr. McElroy, the parish priest, who called on the people to attend and hear the advice which would be given them by Mr. Lynam, organiser, who was present as the accredited representative of the Irish Parliamentary Party."
  I had better begin with an incident, perhaps trivial in itself, but which gained importance from the way it was used. As the proceedings were about to commence, according to the Anglo-Celt—
  "Mr. J. C. Madden, of Hilton Park"—Hilton Park adjoins the village of Scotshouse—" who was one of the congregation coming out of the Protestant church, pushed his way through the crowd and complained to Father McElroy that the band playing had caused annoyance to the congregation in the Protestant church."
  I may at once say I have seen Mr. Madden, who denies having pushed his way at all; the crowd was not dense, and he walked through gaps in it. On a previous occasion—Christmas, 1903—he had complained to Mr. McElroy of noise outside the Protestant church during service, and then received from him an extremely civil reply, so he had no reason to expect
  1364
  anything else on this occasion. Having complained, Mr. Madden retired. I do not wish to say anything against Mr. McElroy.
  I pass on now to the principal speech delivered at the meeting. The speaker, Mr. Lynam, appears to have employed the incident I have related as an excuse for using specially violent language about Mr. Madden in the course of his torrent of invective against landlords generally. However, if he had confined himself to abuse, misrepresentation, and slander about landlords, those might hardly be grounds sufficiently tangible for the authorities to be justified in interfering, but in the middle of all this he expressed his opinion that—
  "All the compensation the landlords of this country are entitled to is three yards of a hempen rope."
  and I submit that in so saying he went very near indeed to counselling and advising wholesale murder, if, indeed, he was not actually doing so. Denunciation and abuse of landlords seem to have been the main purport of the earlier part of his speech, and I need not trouble your Lordships with further details on that point. But as he got further on he appears to have warmed to his work, and after telling his hearers that no concessions had ever been obtained from the British Government except by outrages or threats of outrages he proceeded to say that—
  "A few barrels of powder laid up against Clerkenwell Prison blew up the whole Protestant Church in Ireland!"
  and shortly afterwards he is represented as saying that—
  "He was not approving of crime, but most of them were aware that it was the shooting of some eleven or twelve landlords in certain parts that got them the Land Act of 1881. He did not, however, advise his hearers to take any such measures."
  Here we have this man, the accredited representative of the Irish Parliamentary Party, holding forth on the advantages which he said had ensued in the past from a policy of murder and outrage, no doubt qualifying his statements by saying that he did not advise his hearers to resort to such measures. But where is the practical value of such qualifications, or a dozen such, just after he had alluded to crimes as useful acts and likely to conduce to the realisation of their

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  desires? and that in a harangue which was obviously an appeal to the passions of an excitable populace whom we have every reason to believe to be in no way disinclined to commit lawless acts.
  It should be remembered that the object of Mr. Lynam's presence on this occasion was avowedly to reorganise the local branch of the United Irish League, which was done by enrolling members, collecting subscriptions, appointing officers, and arranging for a subsequent meeting to be held on Sunday last. Whether it has been held or what may have occurred, I have not yet heard. It is possible that His Majesty's Government may know more about it than I do. The gentle methods of the United Irish League are only too well known—they are much the same as those of the Land League of a few years ago, of which, in fact, it is really a resuscitation under a new name; and how soon may we expect some of these methods, i.e., outrage and murder, to be put in practice in the neighbourhoods—unless threats and intimidation have already produced implicit obedience to the orders and laws of the league? I would therefore submit that this meeting alone gives ample and sufficient grounds for proclaiming the United Irish League as an illegal association and for suppressing it. I would further ask if general orders could not be given to the police at all times to prevent and disperse any meeting or any noisy or disorderly concourse near a place of worship where Divine service is going on, which might in any way disturb the services then in progress?
  *THE MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY: My Lords, the noble Earl has stated the facts accurately. It is quite true that Mr. Lynam used very uncomplimentary language with regard to Captain Madden, but the noble Earl opposite who has been Viceroy of Ireland, together with the Prime Minister and myself, have been made the subject of denunciation at the hands of various Nationalists, in comparison with which the remarks of Mr. Lynam with reference to Captain Madden were as water unto wine. I certainly think that Mr. Lynam's speech was most unfortunate. The noble Earl asked whether it was the intention of the Irish Government to
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  prosecute Mr. Lynam, but they could not do so on legal grounds, the reason being that he protected himself by saying that the league denounced outrage of every description, and that their policy was one of constitutional agitation.
  *THE EARL OF DARTREY: During the greater part of his speech Mr. Lynam seems to have dwelt on the advantages of crime and outrage.
  *THE MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY: I have no desire to defend the speech, and I would be glad to see those who make such speeches brought to book and placed in the dock; but to do that you must have a good case, and I am afraid that this case is not strong enough. With regard to the inconvenience of the bands playing within such a short distance of the church, I am informed that at a meeting held in the vestry, at which Captain Madden was present, it was agreed that there was no intention of disturbing the service and therefore that no action should be taken. In view of that resolution, how could the Government interfere in the matter? The noble Earl has rightly called attention to Mr. Lynam's violent language. But he knows as well as I do that the policy of the professional agitator in Ireland is only one of blather, and that his only object is to retain his position as agitator. This is the first time I have heard of Mr. Lynam, but from reading his speech I imagine that he is only one of those professional agitators of whom Ireland has far too many. Certainly care will be taken that the power of the United Irish League does not increase; and the House may rely on it that the present Chief Secretary will insist on law and order being upheld. I may add that I personally would not remain a member of the Government if that policy was not carried out.
  LORD MUSKERRY: My Lords, I would only observe that it seems to me that the blather of the Irish agitator has been very successful. All Loyalists in Ireland hope and expect that the new Chief Secretary will bring about a change—and a change for the better.
  House adjourned at twenty-five minutes past Five o'clock, to to-morrow, half-past Ten o'clock.