said, that he objected to the way in which the Amendment had been received by the Government. On the one hand, they stated that the Bill had been introduced solely for the purpose of attaining a good object—namely, the preservation of peace in Ireland; and, on the other hand, hon. Gentlemen seemed to put another construction upon it, by which, as he understood it, tenants would be permitted to get a reduction of rents throughout the greater part of Ireland. Now that the original Bill had taken the different aspects, they could see that the two were utterly distinct; on the one hand, it was said the Bill was for the preservation of peace and the temporary relief of small tenants; and, on the other, that it was to enable whole districts that were scheduled therein, and probably a larger area to which it might be extended, to obtain reduction of rents. It had been stated by the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister that a great many objections had been excited by the exaggerated statements that had been made about the Bill. Perhaps that might be so, if the Bill had been confined to its purposes, as he stated them; but how was it, if the contention of hon. Members below the Gangway was the right one, and the question was one of a general reduction of rents? He had, for many years, been connected with the advance of money and taking of security over property, and, therefore, had had some experience on the subject. He might say that communications had been made to him from individuals and representatives of public bodies, as to the effect of the Bill upon securities in Ireland. He remembered when these were on a footing little different as regarded the rate of interest from those of this country. That was even the case, to a considerable extent, after the passing of the Act of 1870; because, although they saw that that Act rendered it difficult for owners to disturb a tenancy that existed, they were assured, at the same time, that it did afford further security, on this ground—that it would give the tenant a greater interest in his holding, and, therefore, give the landlord greater security for his rent. The effect of that Act was not to give greater value to property, as such, but rather to convert it into a kind of rent-charge, the rent being more fully secured, and the real basis of any advance being the actual security for that rent. But how would it be if that Bill were passed? What security would there be? They had been told that the object was to enable tenants to obtain a general reduction of rent throughout Ireland; and in that case, what became of the security for money already advanced? He had serious apprehensions with regard to that matter. No doubt, those apprehensions might be wrong, if the contention of the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister was the right one—that the Bill merely provided more fully for the relief of distress in Ireland. But was that so? He did not wish to go further into the general question with regard to the Bill. He merely stood upon that ground—namely, the contention between the Government on one side and hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway on the other, as to its object and effects; and he would put it to the Committee, having regard to the difference of opinion upon the subject, whether the Government ought to go on with the Bill without a distinct understanding as to the scope of its operation?

said, he rose to say that, while fully recognizing the manner in which the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister endeavoured to meet the view of his right hon. Friend the late Home Secretary (Sir R. Assheton Cross), which was expressed in the Amendment, still he felt it his duty, if his right hon. Friend pressed that Amendment, to divide with him, and on the following ground:—His right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland, in the speech in which he recommended the introduction of that measure, distinctly stated that it was based upon a particular clause of the Irish Land Act of 1870. That clause was the 9th in that Act, and it created a special exception to the general rule that eviction for non-payment of rent was not to be held as a disturbance on the part of the landlord, but as a disturbance of the tenant himself. The special exception was that where the rent of the existing tenancy was held to be exorbitant, then such an eviction should be held to be a disturbance. That was limited to cases of rent under £15 a-year. He maintained that if his right hon. Friend based his Bill on that clause he should be consistent, and carry out the same idea in the new Bill. He had no particular affection for the amount, £15—it did not matter if it was £15 or —100; but it should be always remembered that the basis was the clause of the Act of 1870. That led him to say that he thought his right hon. Friend had made a mistake in the Bill, and that was the reason why he was prevented from supporting him on the second reading. It was intended to deal with that emergency by exceptional legis- lation, and in that case they ought not to have gone upon the lines of the Irish Land Act, but rather to have taken a course quite different. He ventured respectfully to submit what he thought that course should have been. If it had been considered desirable to adopt the course which had been adopted by that Bill, it should have been done with a view to making the legislation not exceptional, but permanent. He was bound to say that a great deal more was to be said in favour of making that Bill permanent than exceptional. He might be supposed, speaking as an English Member, not to have much acquaintance, or, perhaps, sympathy, with Irish questions. [Mr. BIGGAR: Hear, hear!] The hon. Member for Cavan cheered that remark. He might be said to possess more knowledge than most English Members did on those difficult questions. As far as taking the trouble to read what had been written on the subject, he had spared no pains. He would not plead guilty to a want of sympathy, at any rate. With regard to the Bill, he was prepared to advise the Committee by saying that by far the strongest arguments in favour of it had been advanced not from the Treasury Bench, nor from the Benches of the Home Rulers, but from a right hon. Friend of his, the late Member for Oxfordshire (Mr. Henley), who spoke in the debates on the Bill in 1870. Mr. Henley was a Member whom it was a pleasure to know—one of the most sagacious, long-headed, kind-hearted men that ever sat in that House. He would tell them what he said on that occasion, and they should bear in mind that he was a man whose opinions were regarded as a matter of authority. He had prescience, foresight, and contemplated the possibility of another Irish famine. That was a matter that did not seem to have occurred to the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister. He had heard the Prime Minister say, in a speech during the present distress, that the occasion of another Irish famine did not occur to him when he passed the Land Act of 1870. But there were several precedents. They had one in 1740, of which they read that it swept away vast numbers of the population, and was almost as bad as that of 1846. In the interval between those two dates there was a great famine—namely, in 1822—and in the year 1829 they found, from the Duke of Wellington's Correspondence, that he wrote—"Nothing gives me so much trouble as these periodical famines." So long as the right hon. Gentlemen on the Treasury Bench, and those opposite to them, had not the courage to tell the Irish people that the potato was not fit for civilized human beings to live upon, so long must they expect those distressing troubles. What said a Roman Catholic Bishop in 1846? He threw the blame on this country for allowing the population to subsist upon such an exotic.

Order. The hon. Member will be good enough to bring his remarks to bear upon the limited question relating to £15 now before the Committee.

said, that they all tended in that direction. That right rev. Prelate had taxed the English people with being the cause of the recurring miseries of famine in Ireland. That was a point which the Government should bear in mind. Mr. Henley had contemplated the contingency which had now occurred, and he made an observation which to his (Mr. Walter's) mind carried great weight, and to which he did not see an answer. He was one of the 11 English Members who voted in the minority on the Land Act, and he laid down the strongest grounds for doing so. He said that the distinction between the case of a person being evicted for non-payment of rent and for any other cause was not capable of being sanctioned by Parliament. How could they distinguish in all cases what was disturbance—as, for example, if illness fell upon a man's family, or blight attacked his crops, or his cattle were destroyed by murrain? In all those cases it would not be due to the carelessness or neglect of the tenant. It was his opinion that it was better to avoid attempting to deal with such cases as those. He (Mr. Walter) saw no answer to that. As a general rule, perhaps, a tenant might be entitled to disturbance for non-payment of rent having arisen from a fault of his own; but calamities such as those mentioned by Mr. Henley were quite unavoidable. He fully believed that the legislation in that case should have been permanent and not exceptional. They would have a crisis like that again. His right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland had twitted them with the fact that a similar thing was done on a similar occasion—namely, during the Cattle Plague. At that time, by an Order in Council, an order was sent down, and certain laws were put in force, providing for the slaughter of animals during the Cattle Plague. He did not see much analogy between the two cases, and he hoped that that legislation would be put on some intelligible basis. His opinion was that if that difficulty had to be met by exceptional legislation it might have been done in a better way. That Bill was partly one of principle and partly one of pounds, shillings, and pence. He thought the latter was that with which it was chiefly concerned. If the right hon. Gentleman had not endeavoured to bring in a Bill which was really a Bill to amend the Land Act of 1870, an exceptional measure providing for the particular crisis might have been introduced and a compromise effected. It would have said to the landlords—"You cannot be allowed to turn those poor creatures out of house and home without any compensation whatever; on the other hand, you are not answerable for the calamity." His right hon. Friend appeared by that Bill to make them answerable, because he founded his legislation distinctly on this—that the case of the Famine was a case analogous to that of exorbitant rents. He begged leave to say there was no analogy whatever between the cases. In the latter, the loss should fall upon the landlords, because the compensation was always intended to be a kind of penalty for the eviction; but that did not apply in the least to the former case. He would have made some statement to the landlords like he had suggested, and would have given the tenants a sum not exceeding three years' rent as an alternative. That was, he believed, the way to meet cases of that kind. If they were turned out of their farms they could not all go into the workhouse; but many of them could go to America or the Colonies. There was no doubt that many of them were willing to go; but who would supply the means? He would levy rates upon Ireland for that purpose. That was the course he ventured to think the right hon. Gentleman should have adopted. He wished to say one word upon a point very material to that discussion. He believed a meaning had been attached to some of the terms of the Land Act, which it would not really bear. His right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland had said that an interest was at stake in this matter—namely, that which had been created by the Land Act in favour of the tenant. An hon. Member spoke the other night, the Member for Wolverhampton (Mr. H. Fowler), of the propriety of not allowing tenants to be deprived of the property they had acquired. He begged leave to say that, as he read the Act and the speeches of the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister, there was no such property as that referred to recognized by that Act. The right hon. Gentleman did not even recognize the existence of a goodwill. He even apologized for the use of that word. He said, in answer to some remarks of the late Mr. Ward Hunt, who had taunted him with having created a goodwill—"Unquestionably I used the word 'goodwill;' but the more correct phrase would be, 'damages for eviction.'" The real remedy provided by the Act was a penalty upon eviction; but it did not recognize a property. No one could be more careful than the Prime Minister to impress distinctly upon the House the fact that the eviction clause of the Act of 1870 did not create even a goodwill, much less a tenant right. The right hon. Gentleman scouted the notion of creating a tenant right; and he (Mr. Walter) failed to see any reason for the change of opinion which had come over the Treasury Bench on that subject. The right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister distinctly stated that he would not be a party to the creation of a spurious Ulster right. What was really done was the creation of a right of the tenant to claim damages for eviction in certain cases. It was difficult to find an analogy in that; but the nearest he could see was the damages claimed by a lady, who had accepted an offer of marriage, in case that offer was broken and there was a breach of promise. Similarly, a right was created by that Act which, if broken, entitled the tenant to damages. That was not a property in the proper sense, or even a goodwill. It was a right to obtain damages in the event of certain wrongs being done, and was more analogous to the case of a breach of promise of marriage than to anything else. He need not repeat his view of the matter— that the proper course for his right hon. Friend to pursue in the case of that particular emergency was not to bring in a Bill to amend the Act of 1870. The present Bill was, in fact, a Bill for the suspension of the payment of rent. If it was right to take such a course as that, it ought to apply equally to landlords and tenants.

I must call the attention of the hon. Member to the fact that I have listened closely to his remarks, and cannot find that they bear upon the substitution of £30 for £15.

said, he thought he began by reference to that substitution. He should support the Amendment of his right hon. and learned Friend for the insertion of "fifteen." His remarks had been strictly germane to the Bill then before the Committee. The present Bill was based upon Clause 9 of the Act of 1870. That Act limited the cases in which compensation was claimed to those where the tenancies were of the value of £15. He should stick to that. If they let out the amount, there was no reason why they should not go to £50 or £100. His right hon. Friend had founded his Bill upon the clause of that Act, and he should adhere to its terms. He should also prefer to see the limit to the amount to be paid to the tenant fixed at three years' rent. With that amount, he believed, the tenant would have sufficient money to go abroad, if he wished to do so. He should support the clause of his right hon. and learned Friend (Mr. Gibson).

said, that the remarks of the hon. Member who had just sat down at once brought him to his legs. It must be apparent to the House that the question of an emigration rate was one that should have taken a prominent position years ago. [ Cries of "Order!"] The hon. Member had referred to that question, and he believed he should be in Order in replying.

The hon. Member will not be in Order in discussing the question of emigration. I must call upon him to confine himself to the Question before the Committee.

said, he should proceed to discuss the Amendment. The hon. Member who had just sat down had referred to the question of emigration, without discussing the particular question of an emigration rate

If the hon. Member desires to speak on the substitution of £30 for £15 he will be quite in Order.

said, he wished to make a remark on the point of Order. That question of £15 or £30 raised a very wide matter. He would humbly suggest that it was impossible to discuss the Amendment without alluding to the circumstances of the small tenants, and questions connected therewith.

I must remind the Committee that the discussion has on former occasions taken a very wide range, and as that discussion arose on the 1st clause, which practically constitutes the whole Bill, I have not thought it desirable to confine it within the narrow limits of an Amendment; but at this stage the Committee will get through the Business with greater expedition, if the discussion be limited to the Question before it. That Question now is, the substitution of £30 for £15.

said, that, with all respect, he would say that that question of £15 or £30 could not be properly discussed without considering the question of the number of people who were likely to emigrate. That question of emigration—

The subject of emigration should not be discussed. I call upon Mr. Parnell, who rose with the hon. Member for Birkenhead, when he got possession of the Committee.

said, that in order to put himself in Order he should conclude with a Motion. It would be utterly impossible——

said, he rose to Order. With reference to the observations of the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Mac Iver) he wished to ask, whether he was not in possession of the Committee, if he spoke to the Question before the Committee?

I told the hon. Member for Birkenhead three times that he was not in Order in discussing the question of emigration; but that he would be so if he confined himself to the Question before the Committee. As he continued to speak on the subject of emigration, I considered it my duty to call upon Mr. Parnell, who rose at the same time.

said, he proposed to conclude with a Motion.

wished to ask, whether it was in the power of the Chairman of Committees to silence any Member without reference to the Speaker?

Yes. It is quite in the power of the Chairman to rule that the subject which is being discussed is not in Order. Another hon. Gentleman rose at the same time as the hon. Member for Birkenhead; and finding that the subject upon which that hon. Member was addressing the Committee was out of Order I called upon the other hon. Member.

said, he thought that course very unprecedented indeed. The hon. Member for Birkenhead was put to silence by the ruling of the Chair, whilst in possession of the Committee. The Chairman put him down, and called upon another hon. Member. Without questioning the propriety of that ruling, he should move to report Progress, in order that the opinion of Mr. Speaker might be ascertained.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Chairman do report Progress, and ask leave to sit again."—( Lord Randolph Churchill. )

said, he wished to ask which of the two hon. Members was in possession of the House, and whether the third hon. Member was in Order in making the Motion that he had?

said, he rose to Order. The question to report Progress having been proposed, the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy was himself out of Order in making the remark he had made.

said, he thought that was a matter quite independent of the merits of the Bill. It was a matter in which the Committee were called upon to decide whether or not they would support the ruling of the Chair. He understood that ruling to be that a subject had been brought into the debate foreign to the Amendment under consideration; and, therefore, it was ruled that it ought not to be considered. After being three times warned, the hon. Member still persisted, and the Chairman called upon another hon. Member. He thought that was a matter in which they were called upon to support the ruling of the Chair.

said, that he quite agreed with the right hon. Gentleman that that was really a matter in which it was necessary to support the ruling of the Chair. He hoped they might be allowed to proceed with the discussion.

said, he would venture to say that the question they had to consider was not as had been stated by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Devon—namely, whether they should support the authority of the Chair and put aside all other considerations. He should be sorry to say anything disrespectful of the right hon. Gentleman in the Chair; but he ventured to think that if they acceded to the proposal of the right hon. Gentleman they should be unduly limiting the freedom of debate. Therefore, he hoped that the noble Lord (Lord Randolph Churchill) would press his Motion, that Mr. Speaker might be called in to give his opinion as to the merits of the case.

said, that he believed no one would suppose that he would be a party to unduly limiting the freedom of debate. He was always anxious that independent Members should have full opportunity for discussion in that House; but in that particular case the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Mac Iver) had risen and at once travelled out of the subject before the Committee; and after the Chairman had told the hon. Member he was out of Order, he, notwithstanding, had persisted in his remarks. Three times over the Chairman called upon him to desist, and three times over the hon. Member refused to obey the suggestion of the Chair. He begged to say that if that was freedom and independence of debate, it would certainly lead to that House becoming a most disorderly Assembly. They ought certainly to submit to the ruling of the Chair; and the hon. Member having three times over persisted in going against that ruling, the Chairman was only doing what was right in the circumstances, and with a due regard to the proper conduct of Public Business, by calling upon another Member. He certainly thought that if the Motion to report Progress was pressed to a division it would be regarded only as another means of occupying unnecessarily the time of the House; and he, therefore, should oppose it. If it were accepted it would only be an encouragement to hon. Gentlemen to impede the Public Business.

said, he wished merely to say a few words. He thought it would be for the interest of the House and the proper conduct of Business that when any dispute as to the ruling of the Chair took place steps should be taken so that the Chairman of Ways and Means might be able to communicate with the Speaker, and submit to the House the proper course to take under the circumstances. For that reason, he should support the Motion to report Progress. Whenever the Committee were in difficulty, the simple course was to get the Speaker into the Chair, so that they might have his direction and guidance as regarded the conduct of Business. Such a course would have the effect of putting a stop to that discussion.

said, he thought that that complication had arisen in the Business on that occasion because the Chairman had not proceeded quite far enough in reference to the hon. Member disobeying the direction of the Chair when discussing the Amendment before the Committee. The hon. Member was warned three times that he was out of Order, and a Standing Order, passed in the Session of 1880, expressly provided for such occasions by enacting that the Chairman of Committees might submit to the vote of the Committee that an hon. Member who had wilfully disregarded his directions had wilfully disobeyed the authority of the Chair, and thereupon division might be taken, without debate, that the hon. Member in question, so offending, be suspended from service in that House for 24 hours. Therefore, if that had been put to the Committee at the time, they could have divided without debate, and the discussion that had since taken place would have been avoided.

said, that he could not help thinking that the remarks of the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell) partook of that nature of exaggeration which prevailed in the debates on this Bill. If the Rule he had referred to had been brought in, in the case of the remarks of the hon. Member for Birkenhead, it would, he believed, have surprised and astonished the Committee. That Rule was meant for wilful obstruction of the time of the House, and that only. What he understood the hon. Member for Birkenhead to be doing— and everybody was aware of the great interest he took in the subject of emigration—that he thought there was an opportunity of riding his hobby, and did not wish to get off it. The Chairman reminded him that that was not the subject before the Committee. He (Mr. W. E. Forster) did not think that he meant to persist in a subject that was not before them. It was desirable to get on with the Business, if possible; and he thought that was an unnecessary discussion. Such discussions, when necessary, were not pleasant, and on that occasion were not even necessary. He ventured to suggest that they might get out of the difficulty if the hon. Member were allowed to proceed with his remarks, confining himself, of course, to the subject under discussion.

said, that one thing was remarkable in that House, and that was the unanimity of the Front Benches in supporting the authority of the Chair against private Members; and, therefore, he thought that the best way, under the present circumstances, was to appeal to the Speaker for a decision on the matter. If the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland had proceeded a little further with his remarks, he would have probably made a confession, and they knew that "open confession was good for the soul." Notwithstanding that the hon. Member for Birkenhead had persisted three times to proceed on a subject not in Order, the case did not come within the purview of the Order passed in March last. If the right hon. Gentleman had proceeded a little further, he would have said that that Order was not meant for English Members, but for Irish. If he had stated that, he would have stated a fact as true as possible.

said, that he confessed that, with reference to the general ruling, it seemed to him that the whole question of the Irish Bill was sufficient ground for opening up that of emigration; but he bowed to the decision of the Chair. He agreed with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Cambridge University (Mr. Spencer Walpole) that they should have an authoritative decision. The suggestion of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland was that the hon. Member for Birkenhead should have the offer made to him of conforming to the Rule. He thought that, whatever the Chairman might have done originally, the question had passed beyond that stage then. His noble Friend near him (Lord Randolph Churchill) had since moved that, inasmuch as the question was a novel one, it be referred to the Speaker for decision. He must say that it appeared to him that that was the correct course to take.

said, he wished to be permitted to give his opinion on the matter, inasmuch as he had occupied the position of Chairman of Committees for seven or eight years. He had no feeling in the matter, as he was not present in the House when the case arose, and therefore did not share in any excitement that might have arisen. There was no appeal from the decision of the Chairman in Committee to the Speaker in regard to the application of any Rule of the House, or any point of Order which arose in Committee—[ Cries of "Oh!"]—well, he stated that deliberately, after a great many years' experience. The cases in which there was an appeal to the Speaker were when there had been a new Rule laid down in the House which had not received an authoritative interpretation, or, where there was some new point which had not been decided in the House. Such cases were excessively rare, and there might then be an appeal to the Speaker if the Committee desired. So excessively rare were they, that during the term of Office which he had experienced not a single case arose. He understood that the hon. Member for Birkenhead was addressing the Committee. The Chairman considered that his observations were irrelevant to the Amendment or clause, and called him to Order. Without entering into the merits of the question at all, which he wished carefully to avoid, he had no hesitation in saying that that was a point in which no appeal lies. The Chairman was the sole judge whether the matter was relevant or not. Then he understood that the Chairman called the hon. Member to Order several times because his observations were irrelevant; but the hon. Member persisted. Another hon. Member rose at the same time to address the Committee, and was called upon by the Chairman. That was a matter with regard to which no definite Rule of the House existed; but it was one of those questions which involved the exercise of tact and judgment on the part of the Chairman in conducting the Business of the Committee, such as arose, from time to time, when an hon. Member was wandering from the subject in hand and had to be recalled. Such a question had always been settled by the Committee, or Chairman of that Committee; and it, at any rate in his experience, had never been decided in any other way. Whatever difference of opinion there was with respect to the ruling of the Chairman, there could be no doubt that the Chairman himself was the proper person to decide as to the relevancy of the matter or not, and to call the hon. Member to Order if he thought necessary. That had been his experience, and he would venture to appeal to the Committee whether it was not the more prudent and direct course to settle this matter amicably between the Members of the Committee rather than to suspend the progress of Business in order to make a formal appeal to the Speaker in regard to a matter on which, so far as he understood, it would be exceedingly difficult to present a distinct question to him.

was very glad the Prime Minister was nowpresent. He did not wish to take any course which would be unsatisfactory to the majority of the Committee, and he would be content to refer the matter to him for a settlement. What occurred was that the hon. Member for Birkenhead three times strayed away from the Amendment in issue, and three times was called to Order. On the third occasion, the Chairman having called him to Order while he was still sitting in his place, called upon the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell), sitting in his place, to address the Committee. The Chairman of Committees, at that moment, could not, as he understood, have had any actual knowledge that the hon. Member for Cork wished to address the Committee. It was perfectly possible that while the hon. Member for Birkenhead was addressing the Committee he might have changed his mind. All he now wanted to point out to the Committee and the Prime Minister was that this was a question of procedure. A certain Rule was laid down by the House, after very careful and long debate, on the Motion of his right hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Sir Stafford Northcote), that when an hon. Member refused to obey the authority of the Chair a certain course was to be adopted. That course, although specified in the Standing Orders, had not been adopted, and a different course had been taken by the Chairman of Committees. He did not question his ruling; he did not dispute his decision; and he would be the very last to say he was wrong in what he had done. He would only say that a novel decision had been arrived at which resulted in putting in the hands of the Chairman of Committees a power which the Standing Orders and the practice of the House had not hitherto given to him. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for the University of Cambridge (Mr. Spencer Walpole), who had had a greater experience than any Member of the House had had on Questions of Procedure, had advised the House that his original Motion was not erroneous, and that the proper course for the Committee to pursue was to report Progress and, with the Speaker in the Chair, to decide the point. He would, therefore, appeal to the Leader of the House to allow this difficult question to be decided, in order that the Committee might go on more satisfactorily and smoothly in the future.

As this question considerably affects my ruling as Chairman, perhaps the Committee will allow me to state why I so ruled. The right hon. Gentleman the President of the Local Government Board (Mr. Dodson) has correctly stated the Rule of the House, that the Speaker has not the power to take a case on appeal from the Chairman of Committees to him as Speaker of the House. This, however, is a Question of Procedure, and I think it would be well that I should consult Mr. Speaker, or that the Commitee should consult Mr. Speaker, as to whether I acted rightly. Perhaps the Committee will allow me to state why I did so act. The hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell) was perfectly right in saying that there is now a Rule of the House which enables the Speaker to put to silence a Member. That power was not intended to be used except in extreme cases. It was no case of obstruction on the part of the hon. Member for Birkenhead. It was simply a misunderstanding on his part of what was the purport of the Amendment before the Committee. The precedent upon which I acted was a single precedent, so far as is known to myself, and it was this—upon a late occasion when an hon. Member declined three times to accept the ruling of the Chair as to how a Question ought to be put, and repeatedly rose in his place to contest the ruling, Mr. Speaker declared that unless he put the Question as he considered it was desirable to be put he would pass to the next person. In the case now before us the hon. Member for the City of Cork rose at the same time as the hon. Member for Birkenhead, and I was not for a moment sure upon whom I should call. It was under these circumstances that I considered—mistakenly, perhaps, on my part—that that was a precedent which might be used in Committee. There is, certainly, no appeal from the Chairman of Committees to the Speaker on a Question of Procedure; but still, perhaps, the Committee would allow me to consult Mr. Speaker, and according to his advice to act, for I cannot forget that Mr. Speaker has a very large experience, and that my experience, as Chairman, is limited to the short period of six weeks.

observed, that he believed the case referred to was not a very clear precedent, although it was certainly of very great importance in its bearing upon the present position of the Chairman. He would venture, with great respect, to say that the Chairman had not at all apprehended what was the real point in the debate. Upon the occasion to which he had referred, it was not the fact that he (Mr. O'Donnell) sought repeatedly to put a Question which the Speaker ruled to be out of Order; but that he sought repeatedly to obtain from the Speaker a reason for keeping that Question off the Paper. That was a totally different matter. Furthermore, the Speaker did not pass him over; on the contrary, the Speaker warned him that if he did not proceed to put his Question upon the Paper he would then call on the Member whose Question came next. Nothing of that kind occurred in the present instance. What took place on that was that he stated that, inasmuch as the Question had quite as legal a right, in his opinion, to be upon the Paper as any other, he would, under the circumstances, put no Question at all. If the hon. Member for Birkenhead, on hearing the decision of the Chairman, had got up and said that, under the circumstances, he would not continue his speech, there would then have been a certain parallel in the two cases; but no such parallel clearly now existed. Furthermore, there was a Motion on the Books of the House in his name for the purpose of formally bringing the ruling of the Speaker on that occasion before the Notice of the House, so that in almost no point whatever did any analogy exist.

I wish to address a few words to the Committee, with the just reserve which belongs to a Member who was not in his place when the conversation began. It appears to me, Sir, that by the observation you have made, the matter has been placed in a position which is convenient to the Committee. As I understand, Sir, you desire to consult the Speaker; and everybody, I think, must perceive the equity of mind and spirit in which you make that proposition. On the other hand, if I understand the position rightly, under these circumstances you make no objection whatever to the title of the hon. Member for Birkenhead to proceed with his observations, of course on the understanding that he will respect the ruling of the Chair on the point of Order as to certain particular observations. You will also take the opportunity of making reference to the Speaker, and obtaining the best means of settlement that the House possesses. I would observe, under these circumstances, that nothing can be mere inconvenient than to argue on the point which you propose to submit to the Speaker, for this plain reason, if for no other—that if it is submitted to Mr. Speaker he will not have the benefit of hearing these arguments. I do venture, therefore, respectfully to express a hope that the hon. Member for Birkenhead will be permitted to proceed.

The Question is that I report Progress, and ask leave to sit again.

thought that his noble Friend, and everybody else, would be glad to accept the proposition made by the Chairman that this matter should be referred to the Speaker. But that ought to be done at once. He might suggest that the Chairman had called upon another Member, without having previously warned the hon. Member for Birkenhead that if he persisted in rejecting the ruling of the Chair he would call upon some otter Member. It was very desirable that that point should be put to the Speaker.

Do I understand the noble Lord to propose to withdraw his Motion for reporting Progress?

saw no reason for withdrawing his Motion, for his point was recognized by the Prime Minister and his right hon. Friend the Member for the University of Cambridge (Mr. Spencer Walpole), and, indeed, by everybody except those who occupied the front Bench on that side of the House. It could not take any appreciable amount of time to submit the question to the Speaker, and have an authoritative ruling. They must recognize the extreme fairness and impartiality of the Chairman on all occasions; and, so far as he could see, the course now proposed by the Chairman met with perfect approval by everybody, and was the right course to be adopted.

ventured to submit to the Committee that, inasmuch as there was no immediate practical good involved——

I rise to Order.

I decline to give way. I am in possession of the Committee, and I am in Order.

I do not for a moment doubt that the right hon. Gentleman was in Order in what he was addressing to the Committee. That was my own view; but I wish to know whether, while one Member is addressing the Committee or the House, if another Member rises to Order, it is competent to the Member who is speaking to refuse to allow the point of Order, whatever it may be worth, to be stated?

The right hon. Baronet has correctly stated the Rule of the House. At the same time, it must be obvious that if this Rule of the House is often taken advantage of it may be made an element of disorder, and not of Order.

The recognition of the point of Order by you, Sir, is sufficient. I will not press the point upon the Committee, except to say, Sir, that as a private Member I will not submit to the dictatorial statements of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Chester (Mr. Dodson). If the right hon. Gentleman had in a cautious way asserted he was in Order I would not have pressed it; but having been called upon by you when he was addressing the Chair, I declined to be ordered down in that manner.

said, he was at a loss to understand why he had been interrupted. He was going to submit that as there was no practical issue before the Committee there was no object in reporting Progress, and in interrupting their proceedings. A question had arisen as to procedure; and the Chairman of Committees had stated that, in deference to the wish expressed by Members on both sides of the House, he would ascertain the opinion of the Speaker upon that point. But there was no question that the hon. Member for Birkenhead might be allowed to proceed with his observations, subject to the ruling of the Chair; and, under those circumstances, he thought they might proceed with other Business.

said, they were making much ado about nothing. The question of reporting Progress was, however, essentially one of great importance, because involved in it was the right of that Committee to appeal from the decision of the Chairman to that of the Speaker; and he was quite sure that the Committee would not, by a division, add the weight of their authority to such a proposition. What was the state of the case? The hon. Member for Birkenhead was speaking, and the Chairman ruled him to be out of Order. He persisted in those observations; and so far, therefore, as the Chairman, or any Member of the Committee was concerned, it seemed that he had no observations to address to the Committee, except those which were declared to be out of Order. ["Oh, oh!"] Well, so far as they had heard up to the present moment, the hon. Member for Birkenhead had not expressed the slightest wish to address any observations to the Chairman, except observations of a similar character to those which had been ruled to be out of Order. After those observations had been three times ruled out of Order, the Chairman called on the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell) to proceed with his observations, and he immediately commenced them. That was a tacit acknowledgment by the hon. Member for Birkenhead that he had no observations of a different nature to address to the Committee. Up to the present moment the hon. Member for Birkenhead had taken no exception to the ruling of the Chair, nor had he intimated the slightest wish to address the Committee; and it was too late now for him to insist upon the ruling of the Chair being gone back upon. If, however, he wished to continue his speech on other points he could do so presently, because any hon. Member in Committee could speak as often as he pleased. He would, therefore, put it to the common sense of the Committee whether they were acting as reasonable men in thus wasting time? It must be borne in mind that the Member of the Committee from whom this Motion to report Progress had come—the noble Lord (Lord Randolph Churchill)—on every occasion that it was possible to raise a discussion, relevant or irrelevant, on this Bill had done so. He appealed to the Members of the Committee not to give any countenance to this Motion; because, though it was important in one sense, as far as any practical result was concerned, it was a totally useless and foolish one.

said, the hon. and learned Member for Kildare (Mr. Meldon) had acknowledged in one point that this Motion was important, and that point was the single one to which they should direct their attention. This matter was of very great importance, as it concerned the privileges of Members of the House. As he understood, the hon. Member for Birkenhead was called to Order three times; he rose a fourth time, and had not said a word, when the Chairman called upon another Member, who had previously risen and was then sitting in his place, to address the Committee. The point he wished to raise was whether the Chairman had the power or authority, when a Member had thus been called to Order three times, instead of using the power given him by the Standing Orders, to call instead upon another Member to address the Committee? That seemed to him to be the whole point of the case, and it lay in a nutshell.

said, he was anxious that the time of the Committee should be saved. The proposal made by the Chairman, some little time back, that he should consult with Mr. Speaker upon a point which had some novelty in it, and was of importance in their proceedings—namely, the most convenient course to be adopted under certain circumstances which had arisen—had been generally acceptable to the Committee. There was no question that the matter as to procedure was one upon which all hon. Members must look with considerable interest; because, although it was but a small matter at that moment, it was one that would affect them in all their proceedings thereafter. It was, therefore, important that Mr. Speaker should be consulted. He had inferred, from the manner in which the Chairman had put that suggestion to the Committee, that it was his intention immediately to proceed to consult with Mr. Speaker; and it would, in his opinion, be convenient that it should now be done. It was not necessary that Progress should be reported, as the debate could be suspended for a few minutes.

said, the proposal of the right hon. Gentleman would be an agreeable one for him to adopt, as soon as the Motion before the Committee was disposed of.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn; Sitting suspended.

Sitting resumed.

said, in accordance with the desire expressed by the Committee, he had consulted Mr. Speaker upon the point of procedure which had arisen in Committee. Mr. Speaker was of opinion that the precedent upon which he (the Chairman) had relied was not a precedent sufficiently in point. Mr. Speaker agreed with him that the power which resided in the Chairman of putting to silence a Member under the Rule 173A, which was intended to be applicable only to cases of obstruction, was a very serious power; but he said that this was not a case in which obstruction could at all be conceived to arise; and, therefore, that the Rule could not be applied to it with propriety. Mr. Speaker thought if the hon. Member had persisted in continuing remarks irrelevant to the subject of the Amendment the fact should have been brought to the attention of the Committee, and that the Committee should have dealt with it. In accordance, therefore, with the opinion of Mr. Speaker, he should, of course, carry on the proceedings of the Committee by calling on the hon. Member for Birkenhead.

Question again proposed.

said, he desired to be allowed to explain that he had never intended to dispute the ruling of the Chairman; but reminded the Committee that the hon. Member for Berkshire (Mr. Walter), in speaking to the Amendment, having made a most interesting speech, he had desired to offer some remarks in reply. It was true that he desired to continue in the direction of the observations he had addressed to the Committee; but he now bowed to the opinion which had been expressed, and would reserve, to a later period in the debate, the remarks which he had to make.

said, he thought it would be convenient to the Committee if he stated that he proposed to put himself in Order, with regard to the observations he had to make, by concluding with a Motion. He did so, not on account of any ruling which had been given by the Chairman, but because he had intended to adopt that course previous to the transactions which had just occurred. He also wished to explain that in making the Motion to which he had referred, he did not wish, in the slightest degree, to expend, much less to waste, the time of the Committee; but he felt that, under the circumstances in which the Bill was placed, it would conduce to progress generally if he were able to explain how the Irish Members, at all events those sitting on that side of the House, regarded the Bill as proposed to be changed by the Motion of the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister. When this Bill was originally brought forward the Irish Members did not think it contained the germ which the Prime Minister subsequently stated that it contained— namely, the germ of compulsory sale— a germ which had been since interpreted and amplified by the Amendment placed on the Table by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland. They had always looked upon the introduction into any measure for the temporary protection of the smaller tenants of the principle of forced or compulsory sale as a very great danger, and likely to lead, under the circumstances of the case, to extensive clearances in the West of Ireland, and to the forced emigration, under very disadvantageous circumstances, of large portions of the Irish population. In order to show the Committee how much they had been struck with this danger, he ventured to refer to the Bill of the hon. Member for Mayo (Mr. O'Connor Power), to point out that it contained a sentence which provided against the risk of forced emigration and compulsory sale. He did not, for a moment, charge the Government with having that intention; but such would be the effect of the Bill. The tenantry might be compelled by suits brought by landlords for the recovery of rent as an ordinary debt to sell their interest in their holdings to some persons appointed by the landlords for the purpose of buying it at a nominal price, and in that way the intention of the legislation proposed for their protection would be defeated. Now that the Government had adopted the principle of forced sale, the Irish Members found that their fears were only too well justified, and that the Bill brought in avowedly for the purpose of protection was likely to be used as an engine of oppression. He felt convinced that the intention of the Government had been, undoubtedly, to afford fair and proper protection to the small tenants, and that they had failed in this through want of information as to the circumstances of the case. Under those circumstances, he thought not a moment should be lost in coming to an explanation with the Government as to the position of the Irish Members with reference to the further progress of the Bill. They did not wish to appear ungrateful to the Government for the bonâ fide attempt made to protect the interests of the smaller tenants; but, at the same time, they felt they could not take the responsibility of continuing silent, knowing, as they did, that it must have the effect of leading to extensive clearances in the West of Ireland, and the emigration of a considerable portion of the population. What were the principles upon which the Government had introduced the Bill? They distinguished two main reasons. One of them was the desire to protect to the tenants their property, acknowledged to exist by the Land Act of 1870. Their other reason was a desire to be able to put in force, with a strong hand, the law of the land, and put that law in force with a clear conscience, and the full belief that in doing so they would not inflict any hardship on the tenantry. Now, to the first of those reasons the Amendment of the Prime Minister, to except all tenancies of £30 and upwards, to a great extent ran counter; because if it was the desire of the Government to prevent the Irish landlords from taking advantage of the exceptional circumstances of the times to confiscate, or get rid of, the property acknowledged by the Irish Land Act to exist, why should they have made exceptions with regard to the class in whom the Irish Land Act acknowledged the existence of property? He found, in the 3rd section of the Land Act of 1870, that property of the different classes of tenants was acknowledged to exist to the following extent:—In the case of tenancies of not exceeding £10 valuation, the existence of property was acknowledged to the extent of seven years' rent; in tenancies of not exceeding £20 valuation, of five years' rent; not exceeding £40 valuation, four years' rent; not exceeding £50, three years' rent; not exceeding £100, two years' rent; and in the case of tenancies above £100 property was acknowledged to exist not exceeding one year's rent. But the Prime Minister, by his proposed Amendment, limited the operation of the Bill to tenancies under the rent of £30, and thereby practically limited the protection to be extended to the first and second classes, or a portion of the latter£namely, those tenancies severally not exceeding £20 and £30. They found that the Prime Minister, in his Amendment, only proposed to protect property acknowledged to exist in the first class by the Land Act, and in a portion of the second class. All the other classes in which the Land Act acknowledged property to exist in different degrees would be left without any protection whatever in the exceptional circumstances now prevailing in Ireland— in other words, the landlords were to be allowed at pleasure to take advantage of Irish distress, to confiscate the property of persons whose tenancies were valued at a higher rent than £30; but they were not to be permitted to confiscate the property of a tenant valued at under £20. He failed to see any argument in which such exception could be justified; and he thought he should be able to prove by-and-bye that a large portion of the class which it was now proposed to protect would not be protected by the Bill. If the tenants valued at under £30 were entitled to protection against the results of famine in Ireland, he said that tenants valued over £30 were entitled to have their property protected under similar circumstances. To proceed to his second contention, with regard to the want of protection for smaller tenants, he believed that this class could only be protected by the suspension of ejectments for a period until the Government had inquired into the whole of the Land Question. He wished, in dealing with this point, to ask the Committee to believe that the stories which had been told by some Irish Members on the opposite side of the House of the desire on the part of other Irish Members to force the Government into hasty and revolutionary courses were entirely without foundation. They had, at the beginning of the Session, brought forward a Bill which failed only in one respect—namely, that it asked too little. They would have supplemented the provisions of that Bill had it reached the Committee stage by a clause providing for the suspension of ejectments in the case of smaller tenancies. That Bill left a very little margin of ground for the Government to recede from; but they had largely exceeded that margin. The Irish Members thought they were rightly punished for asking for so little as they had asked for in the Bill of the hon. Member for the County of Mayo, by the fact that the Government had yielded to the pressure brought to bear upon them from the Conservative side of the House, and converted their Bill into a measure which would not protect more than 40,000 or 50,000 of the Irish tenantry. Again, the Bill would fail in protecting this class of tenant farmers, for the reason that the Prime Minister had introduced the principle of compulsory sale. These small tenants were not in a position to obtain a fair market for their holdings to anything like the extent—namely, seven years' rent of the property, acknowledged to belong to them by the Act of 1880. It would be impossible for them, in nine cases out of ten, to obtain anything more than the arrears of rent which they owed to the landlords. There were, he believed, 280,000 tenancies in Ireland valued under £8 a-year; and the tenants, as he had always endeavoured to impress upon the Committee when speaking on this subject, were not tenants in the ordinary agricultural sense, but a sort of cross between labourers and tenant farmers. Those tenants lived on little scraps of farms of four or five acres. They did not cultivate the land themselves, but left the work to their wives and children. In travelling through Mayo, Galway, and other Western counties of Ireland, they would see the fields occupied almost entirely by women and children, and with hardly a man at work there. The men were away in Scotland and England, earning the rent; and it was because they had failed of late years to earn rent in this way, owing to the depression which had existed among the large farmers of England and Scotland, and because the prices of the stock and of the few calves that they reared had been depreciated, owing to American competition, that this crisis had arrived. Secondly, the selling value of these holdings was scarcely anything. After the rent had been paid, there would be, practically, nothing left to the tenant to exist upon; and it was because there was nothing left for the tenant after the rent had been paid, and because they were compelled to find the rent by labour in another country outside their own holdings, that all this trouble had come upon them. Now, with all respect to the Government and to the Liberal Party, he said that it was, practically, a mere mockery to offer these tenants the right of selling their holdings when ejectment was brought against them by the landlord for non-payment of rent. If that were done a sufficiency would not be obtained to enable them to emigrate to America. They, perhaps, might get enough from the sale to keep them out of the poorhouse for a few weeks; but it would be nothing more. He stated, on the previous day, that the material value of this Bill was for classes of tenants having holdings of the value of about £10, and that that was why they had refrained from opposing it, and pointing out these things sooner. But by the Amendment of the Prime Minister this last hope had been taken away from them, and they were now face to face with a Bill which would not fulfil the purpose for which it was brought in. The Amendment was also fraught with still further evils. It would, undoubtedly, promote the consolidation of holdings; and he would point out that one of the great weaknesses of the Land Act of 1870 was that it had already tended to this consolidation of holdings, by reason of the large compensation which it gave to smaller tenants as compared with the larger. Ever since that Act was passed, many landlords had been only too anxious to take advantage of any opportunity which arose to get rid of their smaller tenants, in order that they might, by consolidating their holdings, have as tenants men who could not claim for disturbance more than one or two years' rent. The Amendment of the Prime Minister was, practically, a notice to the medium and larger sized farmers in Ireland that the right hon. Gentleman did not care for their interests. It was not only such a notice to the farmers, but it was also a notice to the landlords. The Prime Minister said, by excepting the larger tenants from this Bill, that he believed that such farmers were very much in the position of Englishmen, and were, more or less, able to take care of themselves. The landlords would assume that these were the lines on which the future and permanent legislation of the Government was to proceed—that it was only the smaller men who would receive protection and consideration, and that the larger and medium size tenants would be left to shift for themselves, and that they would take advantage of the engine afforded to them by this new Bill of the Government to immediately get rid of those small tenants, to flourish this Bill in their faces as they evicted them, and to offer them the poor consolation of the alternative of selling. When there were no purchasers there was no money in the country. The landlords would say to these small tenants—"Here is the protection which your own chosen Representatives have procured for you; we will act on the letter and spirit of that Act; we will eject you for the non-payment of rent; and we will give you the right to sell your interest for whatever you can get." That was the danger that they had been apprehending all along, and which had now been brought to a focus. The exclusion from the Bill of the larger classes of tenant farmers would simply be an invitation to the landlords to get rid of the smaller tenants. They had heard something recently about emigration from the hon. Member behind him; but he believed—and he hoped the Committee with him would firmly believe—that they had far too few people in Ireland for the purpose of developing the industrial resources of the country. They could not spare anyone; and it was a heartrending and horrifying sight to travel along the Irish railway lines, and to see the scenes which were occurring at all the railway stations. Crowds of stalwart young men and women were emigrating from their homes, leaving nobody but the old, useless, and the bed-ridden behind them. It was horrible to hear the lamentations of these poor people, torn from their fathers and mothers and compelled to emigrate to America with nothing to look forward to even when they got there. He had constant information from America, and he believed that the emigrants, when, they had reached that country, were grievously disappointed with the result. They found an already over-stocked labour market, a difficulty in getting out to the Western States, where their agricultural knowledge and experience would be of advantage, and they were, consequently, compelled to herd together in the Eastern States, and, in many cases, to become the prey of all the worst evils of what was called "civilization" in many of those American cities. He entreated the Government really to grapple with this question. It would not cost them much to take time to inquire and to inform themselves as to the facts, and to bring forward, when they were sufficiently informed, a land programme which should be worthy of a great Government and of a strong Liberal Party—a programme which, while it did not unduly injure the interests of the landlords of Ireland, would enable the Irish people to get out upon the land which was now lying in vast semi-waste tracts, and by their labour to make it yield what it would then so fruitfully produce. At a very little cost the Government might obtain that; for he believed an expenditure of £250,000 would be sufficient compensation for those landlords who might really want their rent this year. This present Bill, unless that principle of forced sale was guarded against—and he did not see how it could be—would simply result in the extermination of the Irish people. It was impossible for him to see how he and his Party, with the responsibility which rested upon them, could in any way accept the Bill in its present shape. The time of the House would be wasted in passing it. The Liberal Party who came into power, desirous of doing justice to Ireland as far as in them lay, would become disgusted with what would appear to them the unreasonable conduct of Irish Members. They would think that those Irish Members were adopting an unreasonable attitude of opposition in reference to the measure of the Government. Knowing, however, as he and his Friends did, the real situation of affairs, and the utter inadequacy of the Government measure to meet the present emergency in Ireland, he did feel that they would be doing only their duty in speaking now, while there was still time to give a proper direction to the exertions of the Government for meeting the very grave crisis in Ireland. He begged, therefore, to move to report Progress.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Chairman do report Progress, and ask leave to sit again."—( Mr. Parnell. )

The hon. Member for Cork has stated with great candour, and, I must say, with moderation, his reasons for the position he now takes with regard to the Bill. I understand him that, in moving to report Progress, he really does so believing that it is better that the Bill should be no further proceeded with. [Mr. PARNELL: Hear, hear!] To that proposition the hon. Member assents. Therefore, we have to face this fact—the hon. Member prefers that this Bill should not continue. He bases his contention for this proposition upon two grounds. First, as to what he thinks would be the effect of the Amendment introduced by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, or rather by the Attorney General for Ireland, to which we have not yet come; and also upon what he considers the effect of the exclusion from the operation of the Bill of all tenancies over £30 rent. By far the strongest ground, as he himself acknowledges is, that he thinks the small tenants would not be much benefited by the Bill on account of what he supposes to be the meaning of the words that will be introduced. I think he ought to have waited until those words were introduced. I think he misinterprets those words, and draws conclusions from them of which they do not admit. Surely, when he takes the very strong step of making a Motion intended to defeat the Bill, and bases it upon what he thinks will be imported into the Bill hereafter, he might wait until the Prime Minister, or I myself, or other Members of the Government, have given our official statement with regard to this Amendment. I understood him to say that he thought there would be a consolidation of farms in consequence of this Amendment. The Committee will, I am sure, acquit the Government of any such intention, or any desire, in fact, to take a step which would really lead to the expulsion of the tenant. We do not think that that would be the result of our Amendment; and we think we can show, at the proper time, that the Bill will not have that effect. What the hon. Member, and those who think with him, are now doing, is to say—"I choose to put my interpretation upon the meaning of this Bill; I will not wait for the interpretation which the Prime Minister gives of his own words; I will not wait for the interpretation which the Minister who brought it in can give in support of the Prime Minister; I will put my own interpretation upon it now, and, therefore, I will call upon the House to defeat and throw out this Bill?" I confess I do not think that is treating the Government or the question fairly. I think we ought to wait until we come to that point of the Bill. We have always said that we cannot enter into that discussion until it comes on according to the proper procedure of Business; that to do so now would be disadvantageous, and that we had better wait for that time. However, what we have to deal with now is this fact—that the hon. Member is so completely sure of what our intentions are, and what the Bill means, that he makes this Motion. Now, I come to the other point—the exclusion of tenants above £30. The reason why we have submitted the exclusion of tenants above £50 is simply that we do not believe, in practice, that such tenants would come within the operation of the Bill. We have never brought forward the measure upon the ground that it declared the principles upon which the legislation on the Land Question hereafter shall be based. We have always said it was brought forward as a temporary Bill, to meet a temporary emergency; and when we found there was very great opposition to it, and a wish to limit its operation, we tried to ascertain how far we could limit that operation, and yet be enabled to meet this temporary emergency. We think that these evictions, which are a danger, and which we found ourselves under the present state of the law obliged to enforce, will practically not exist above £30. All these cases in Galway are not only below £30, but I believe that I should be right in saying that they are below £10. At any rate, it is correct to say that, generally speaking, the difficulties with which we have to deal are the difficulties of the small tenants. That is the reason why we tried to meet hon. Gentlemen opposite by making a concession which we thought would not defeat the real object of the Bill, and would yet meet the temporary emergency. The hon. Member for Cork says we ought to give ourselves time to consider what we can do with regard to future legislation. That is the position which we wish to be in. That is the position we took at the beginning of the Session, and out of which we have been driven simply and solely on account of what appeared to us to be the emergency of the day. I will not go into statistics, although I think I could abundantly prove, if necessary, that the statistics already used were not only correct, but were far below the real dangers of the situation. They only extended to evictions; and what the police have to do is also to become process-servers in all the steps before evictions; and we found that we had a great many of those evictions, and we believed, and I believe at this moment, that they are increasing, and that there is great danger from their increase. We believe also, in many cases, that the landlords are not to blame. I have always said that there are many cases in which tenants have refused to pay rent who undoubtedly could pay it. At the same time, we have reason to believe that there were cases in which landlords were wrong. I am not going to discuss that question; I have always said that I would not; but I think hon. Members will feel that any man who is responsible for peace in Ireland, and who has to protect landlords in the exercise of their legal rights, should not fetter himself by entering into any cases of hardship on the part of landlords. But we believed that there were hard cases. We then came to the House to make it impossible, as we believed, that there should be any more such cases. That is the ground of this legislation, and that alone. "We want to be in the position that when we send down 100 or 200 men to protect a process-server, or to protect a man who is actually carrying out an execution or ejectment, that it should be an ejectment which would be justifiable not merely in a Court of Law, but in a tribunal of justice, and that is the sole object we have in view. Then, the hon. Member also thinks that to give a power of sale would not be a protection. When we come to that part of the Bill we think we can prove that it will; and we call upon him, and other Members from Ireland, to wait until we do come to that point, in order that we may be able to show it. But, meantime, he will not allow us to discuss the previous matter. He prevents us from getting to that point; and, in the Motion he is moving, hopes to defeat the Bill before we have had an opportunity of giving our real reasons and explanations of it. If, in the present condition of feeling in this House with regard to the Bill, he succeeds in getting a large number of the Irish Members to support him, and, with the aid of the regular opponents of the Bill should obtain sufficient numbers to defeat its progress, then I shall consider—I doubt not he himself will consider, and I am sure the Irish people, whether they agree with him or not, will consider—that it is owing to what he has done that this endeavour of ours to meet cases of possible oppression and hardship is defeated.

said, he had not the slightest intention of taking part in the debate until he heard the speech of the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell), and he would only occupy the time of the House for a very few minutes indeed. He was present when the Bill of the hon. Member for Mayo (Mr. O'Connor Power) came in for discussion, and he was very much struck by the arguments that were used in support of that Bill. It appeared to him that a very strong case was made out for those tenants who, owing to exceptional circumstances, might be placed in a very disadvantageous position, and, consequently, might not receive the compensation they would otherwise be entitled to under the Act of 1870. He, consequently, waited with great anxiety to see the manner in which Her Majesty's Government would deal with this question, He felt sure that they would do all in their power to deal fairly with the Irish grievance; and he trusted that they might be able to find a solution of it by which the tenants might be relieved from the situation in which they were placed. It was, therefore, with the greatest and most sincere regret, when the second reading came on, that he found it was impossible for him to bring himself to vote for it. He always felt that a grievance did exist; but, at the same time, he felt that while the Bill removed the grievance, it dealt very injuriously with a large number of landlords in Ireland. He believed that these landlords had endeavoured, in most trying and difficult circumstances, to do their duty to the tenantry to the best of their ability, and that the Bill, in its then shape, treated them very harshly. On going into Committee, by the Amendment of the Attorney General for Ireland, he felt that the Bill had been changed; and in consequence of that, and in consequence of the considerable amount of support, more especially from the Irish Members, that the Bill received, he felt that he ought to endeavour to support the Government. Now, however, owing to the speeches of the hon. Member for Cork, he and those who felt with him were placed in a very different position. Then, it appeared likely that the Bill would receive the support of a large number of the Irish Members. From what they now heard, that would not be the case. Next, he attached a considerable amount of weight to the remarks of the noble Lord the Member for Middlesex (Lord George Hamilton), who had shown, in a very powerful manner, that the evictions were not so numerous as they were stated to be, which had constituted a very grave reason for bringing in the Bill. He had never disguised from himself that there was a strong case for the Bill. If the evictions had been as numerous as they were originally believed to be, and if there was a strong feeling on the part of the Irish Members in favour of the measure, he felt that he and his Friends on that side of the House were almost justified in voting for it, although it might work some harm. But now, looking at the matter in its present position, it seemed to him perfectly hopeless for the Government to go on. The Session was now far advanced; and, to press the measure with only the moderate support it was likely to receive, did appear to him to be a hopeless task. He deeply regretted that he should appear to differ from the Government. It was not, however, an actual difference of opinion, so much as a consequence of the attitude taken by the hon. Member for Cork. Undoubtedly, they were placed in a most difficult position. A grievance existed, and, he was afraid, would continue to exist, among the smaller tenants. In consequence, a grave and serious responsibility rested upon the Government. But he did, nevertheless, feel, under the present circumstances, that the best hope for the prosperity of Ireland was that they should endeavour to put confidence in the landlords of their country, who had done their best in times past to help their tenants, and that they should trust to the force of public opinion, which had been shown in the debate, to prevent any of the unfavourable results of which they had heard so much.

said, that the speech just delivered ought to show the hon. Member for Cork that he should allow the Committee to deal with the Amendments in detail before proceeding with his Motion. The hon. Gentleman was perfectly in his right to oppose the Bill if he did not think it would answer its purpose; but he must point out, in the first place, that the hon. Member had not adopted the form of procedure established in that House. The usual course on these occasions was not to move to report Progress; but to move that the Chairman do leave the Chair. The noble Lord had recognized rather early in the day, considering this was a matter of procedure, that which everybody must feel—that the sentiment of the Irish Members must form a very serious element, indeed, in the question whether this Bill should proceed or not. The noble Lord had given that as one reason for thinking the Bill should not proceed; but he had also given another reason, and that was the figures quoted on Monday night by the noble Lord (Lord George Hamilton). Would the noble Lord allow him to say that he was a little hasty in acting on those figures? Those figures were contained in a telegram, and it was impossible for the Government to deal with them until they obtained further information. No doubt, it was an important statement, that in Donegal out of 150 evictions more than 90 were replaced in their tenancies. He admitted that was a statement of the greatest importance, and one that required to be carefully examined. But he had already observed that such a thing in the County of Donegal, however creditable to the landlords of Donegal, did not establish a strong presumption to the same thing applied in other districts where the custom of Ulster did not prevail. The matter, however, must stand over. They were bound to return to it in the future, when they had ascertained the facts. There were two or three points that were legitimately raised in regard to the position of the Bill. The first related to the limitation of the scope of the Bill to certain value of tenancies; the second related to the extension of the Bill over Ireland; and the third related to the Amendment he had to move, and which, in itself, might be said to involve the clause of the Attorney General for Ireland. Why might they not be permitted to deal with these points in Committee? And when they had dealt with them, they would know what the Bill was. As to the hon. Gentlemen opposite constituting the Opposition, he did not think their course would be influenced by anything the Committee might do. But there was the matter of common sense, and the matter connected with the degree of consideration due to a responsible Minister. ["Hear, hear!"] That was not an unfair thing to say. Let them decide on what form the Bill ought to assume, and if it was to go forward; and then, after the Committee had determined the various points, and the Bill had returned to the House, the question might be fairly raised. No difficulties could or would be thrown in the way by the Government. Let the House decide whether the Bill was to go forward. But, he must submit, that this practice of discussing the whole of the Amendments on a Motion for reporting Progress involved much more than the mere convenience of the Government. The character of the House was concerned in upholding the established methods of procedure. The proposals of the Government would come before the House, and he would ask the House to deal with them, and express their judgment upon them.

said, he thought that both the Prime Minister and the Chief Secretary for Ireland had misunderstood the position of the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell). They seemed to think his objection to the Bill was based upon the Amendment of the Attorney General for Ireland, and that, in discussing the Motion before the Committee, he was discussing the Amendment of that right hon. and learned Gentleman. Now, the statement of his hon. Friend was that the Amendment of the Prime Minister destroyed the value of the Bill; but, upon that Amendment, they were willing to take the judgment of the House. His hon. Friend was of that opinion, because the Amendment would except the larger tenancies from the protection offered by the Bill to the smaller tenancies. As a rule, the larger tenants were able to take care of themselves; but not tenants so small as those to whom the operation of the Bill was confined by the Amendment of the Prime Minister. The position of the hon. Member for Cork, and those who thought with him, was that this deprival of protection in the case of the larger tenants really re-acted upon the smaller tenants by diminishing the protection offered to them. It seemed, no doubt, irrational to say you deprived the smaller tenants of their protection in this way; but it was clear to their minds that this would be the effect of the limitation. It had been urged that although the larger tenants were excluded the Bill should be accepted, because it still gave protection to the poorer class of tenants. But that was the very point on which he joined issue with Her Majesty's Government. He held that if the Government removed the protection from the larger tenants, they held out an inducement to the landlords to increase the number of larger tenants on their estates; because the greater the number of larger tenants the smaller would be the demands upon them for compensation for disturbance, and, consequently, they would endeavour to decrease the number of smaller tenants. The proposal of the Prime Minister, therefore, actually deprived the class of tenants which he wished to protect of the protection offered to them in another part of the Bill. He thought the remarks of the noble Lord (Lord Edward Cavendish) should be a warning to the Prime Minister, and clearly proved the error of trying to make the Bill more acceptable to his Party by restricting its operation. The Prime Minister had, no doubt, a right to change his views; but he wished to point out that the concession he was now making would increase the hostility of Irish Members to the Bill, while it had not decreased the hostility to the measure on the part of hon. Members who sat upon the Liberal Benches.

said, he had not, up to the present, expressed an opinion on this Bill, because he did not happen to be present at the second reading, and he had not intended to say anything until the third reading. The Bill had undergone so many transformations, that he might be in a better position to express an opinion on the third reading. But the question had now arrived at such a crisis, on the Motion of the hon. Member for Cork, that he felt he should not be doing his duty if he did not express his opinion. He would join in the appeal made by the Prime Minister to withdraw his Motion, and allow the Bill to go on in Committee. At the end of the Committee, if they did not like the Bill, they could easily defeat it by a combination in that House, and by action in "another place." But they would be placing themselves in a false position if, before discussing the details, they threw out the Bill. They might give the Prime Minister such reasons as would induce him to give up the £30. It appeared to him it had not been a question that had received a great amount of consideration. The late Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Gibson), in that manner of his which was so winning, seemed to produce an effect on the Treasury Bench which he had not calculated. When they came to the Amendment, he (Mr. Shaw) would decidedly vote against the limit of £30. He did not see there was any principle in it. The Government had thought only of Mayo and Cork. They should think of Donegal and Sligo, and other parts of the country, where a great many of the classes lived who would be affected by this Bill by reason of their paying over £30. Therefore, he hoped when they came to that clause, the Government would see reason for making a change. There was no such limit in the Land Act itself; and he did not see why, in relieving distress, they should put a limit of this kind. The Bill had excited immense attention in Ireland among tenants and landlords. A good many landlords whom he met were opposed to the Bill. But it was curious thing that when they came to the details of the Bill, no one acknowledged that it would affect him at all. They considered themselves such very good landlords that the Bill would not apply. It was very unfair that the noble Lord (Lord George Hamilton) had based his arguments on the state of Donegal and Tyrone, instead of Mayo and Galway. He would like to know more about the 93 cases in which men were put back into their tenancies. No doubt, they signed away their tenant-right, and put themselves, body and soul, in the power of the landlord, on condition that the landlord did not drive them, neck and crop, into the cold road. Unfortunately, in some parts of Ireland there was a bad feeling on the part of some landlords, he did not say towards their tenants, but towards the public, and which had been created by a species of oratory which, of course, he could not speak of in the House. He had, on a former occasion, spoken of it, and was called to account both in that House and elsewhere. So he must avoid that. In a great many districts of Ireland there was a bad feeling in the minds of landlords towards things in general, and, in consequence, a good many were proceeding to get rid of their tenants. This Bill was intended to restrain those men from doing what in their cool moments, when reason again held sway, they would regret themselves. It was in the interest of landlords themselves to prevent these men, or to help the Government to prevent these men, doing in moments of anger things that a whole class would suffer from. He asked those landlords who, though so bad a feeling existed, said the Bill would not affect themselves, why they objected to it? One said because it dealt with the rights of property. Ever since he had sat in that House, the question of the rights of property had cropped up on all occasions. He happened to have some property himself in one of the scheduled districts, and he was not a bit afraid of this Bill. Other landlords asked why, if it was such a small Bill, did the great Conservative Party oppose it? He gave a short answer, and that was—"Hares and Rabbits." They thought they might carry on this discussion until they stopped that Bill. He did not say that, in the long run, Irish Members might not find it necessary to reject this Bill; because, while the Amendment would include a certain class of men, he did not think they would be justified in excluding from the benefit of the Bill another class of the community. It would be their duty to see the Bill through Committee, and then they would be able to reject it, if they thought right. He was quite sure the views he entertained were the views of many in Ireland.

said, he welcomed the appearance of his hon. Friend the Member for Cork in this debate, as he saw in that the prospect of receiving from him valuable assistance in the discussion which might take place upon the Bill on a future occasion. They all welcomed the return of the hon. Member, whose absence had been regretted exceedingly. He did not wish the Committee to suppose that he desired to assume the responsibility of throwing out the Bill at that moment. His Motion to report Progress was not intended for the purpose of throwing out the Bill, but in order to allow further time for the consideration of the Amendment of the Prime Minister taken in connection with the Amendment of the Attorney General for Ireland, and in order that some little time should be afforded to the class interested to consider their position created by the Amendment of the Prime Minister. A meeting of the Irish Members had been held on Tuesday night, at which the following resolution had been passed:—

"Resolved, that we consider Mr. Gladstone's proposed Amendment, limiting the operation of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill to tenants paying £30 and under, destroys nearly all the usefulness of the measure, and renders it dangerous to the existence of small tenants by affording further inducements for the landlord to consolidate holdings; and that we request the Chairman of the Party (Mr. Parnell) to move to report Progress to-morrow, at the commencement of the Sitting of the Committee, in order that time may be afforded to the tenants of Ireland to consider whether they will sanction the acceptance of the measure."

It would be seen, that he was requested to move to report Progress, in order to give time to the tenants to consider whether they would accept the measure. He did not want to take the responsibility upon himself; but he was perfectly willing to do what the class interested thought he ought to do, provided it lay in the direction of what he thought ought to be done. If the Irish tenant farmers, after considering the various changes through which the Bill had passed, thought they ought to accept it on the principle that the ninth part of a loaf was better than no bread, the responsibility would rest with them; but he wished to protest against the responsibility of having it supposed that the Irish Members sitting on that side of the House thought the Bill at all adequate for the purpose for which the Government originally introduced it. He, therefore, asked leave of the Committee to withdraw his Motion to report Progress.

said, he had listened with pleasure to the speech of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), with a great portion of which he agreed. What had been their experience during the last two days with regard to the progress of the Bill? It would be in the recollection of the Members of the Government who took charge of the Bill, and of the Committee generally, that yesterday a very flimsy Amendment had been proposed by the noble Lord the Member for Middlesex (Lord George Hamilton), that it had been fully answered by the Solicitor General for Ireland, and that ultimately, when it had effected its purpose of occupying the time of the Committee, it had been withdrawn without a division. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) had then moved an Amendment, limiting the operation of the Bill to tenancies of not exceeding £15 a-year rent; and immediately after that had been moved, the Prime Minister rose and said he did not fully accept the proposal of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, but would himself move to limit the operation of the Bill to tenancies of not exceeding £30 a-year rent. He urged the Government to make the Bill beneficial to all Irish tenants, and not to yield to the unreasonable opponents of all concession, which could but result in the measure becoming so worthless that it would not have a single supporter in Ireland.

said, he was confident that the withdrawal of the Prime Minister from the advanced position which he had taken up with reference to the Irish Land Question would be received with dismay throughout Ire- land. The most ardent Follower of the right hon. Gentleman must admit that his course with reference to the Bill had been extremely fickle, and that it had produced the impression that it was difficult to see what the right hon. Gentleman would do next. It was perfectly clear that he had not been acting upon any matured plans, and that although he saw plainly what he ought to do, and what he would like to do, in justice to the occupiers of land in Ireland, he had not the courage, or resolution, to face the hostility and opposition of the Landlord Party. They had been given to understand that the course of the Government had been governed by considerations of very high policy. That was really very immaterial, when the results of that policy were so insignificant and so disastrous. In deference to the wishes of some influential landlords and agents the character of this Bill had been materially changed, and the area of its operation most injuriously circumscribed. "While the opinion of the vast majority of Irish Members on the matter had been utterly disregarded, it was astonishing to think that three or four noble Lords, who happened also to be landlords, and in Ireland, and some of whom, if not all were, he believed, Members of the Government, by conspiring together, had completely defeated the almost unanimous wishes of the Irish Representatives. After this, it was positively comical for the Government of the right hon. Gentlemen to come down to the House and endeavour to gain popularity by announcing their intention to introduce a Bill for the extension of the Irish Parliamentary Franchise. He would like to know what would be the use of extending the franchise to people whose Representatives—["Question!"] —this was really the Question, and a most pertinent one—whose Representatives were denied all power? At one time they were told, in tones of portentous gravity, that the very safety of the country depended upon precautions being taken to prevent these evictions; and the next moment they were told that all they need do was to look after the interests of tenants rated under £30. The Committee might easily guess how landlords and agents in the scheduled districts were occupied that morning. They were looking over their lists, to see how many tenants they had who would be able to claim protection under this rule. The Chief Secretary for Ireland had made one most extraordinary statement, that no tenant whose rental was above £30 would be affected by this Bill. Before that day week he would undertake to furnish him with the names of 1,000 tenants in Kerry alone, whose rental was above £30, and who were in danger of eviction. His hon. Friend (Mr. Parnell) had acted with his usual wisdom and discretion in bringing forward this Motion; but as it was to be withdrawn, he did not see the use of troubling the Committee with any further observations.

remarked, that he would like to corroborate the statement of his noble Friend the Member for Middlesex (Lord George Hamilton). The Prime Minister did not seem to be quite satisfied with the figures given by the noble Lord, although they had been corroborated by the hon. Member for Armagh (Mr. De la Poer Beresford), who stated what had occurred in County Cavan. He had himself obtained authentic information from Leitrim of the number of evictions. In the Return it was stated that they were 39; but the actual number re-admitted was 15; while in three of the others there was no house on the farm, and, therefore, there was no actual personal eviction which could take place. The figures from these three counties should be sufficient to show Her Majesty's Government that a very considerable necessity existed for, at all events, revising these Returns, and letting the House know clearly what were the actual number of evictions in fact, as compared with the number stated on paper. This measure had been said to be one for the relief of paupers amongst smaller farmers in Ireland, and the Government recognized this principle by the fact that they were willing to adopt the limitation to the £30 rental. Now, what were the actual facts? If the Bill came into operation limited to £15, what would happen? The hon. Member for the County of Cork (Mr. Shaw) had just now said that the Government were taking two small districts of Ireland. He had the figures for the Province of Connaught, which represented, approximately, one-fourth part of Ireland, and the total number of holdings there under the £15 limit was 104,624. In arriving at those figures, he was estimating that a holding of 30 acres was equivalent to £15 rental; and, for the purpose of calculation, he took it that all holdings below 30 acres were under £15 rental. The holdings under the 30 acres, then, comprised the figures he had given while the total above 30 acres was 22,253, or about one-fifth. That would give the proportion in which the Bill would affect the tenants of Ireland if the limit of £15 was fixed. Another reason why £15 should be the limit was, that that was the principle already accepted in the passage of the Seeds Act of last Session. In that Act the limit at which the tenant was entitled to the relief contemplated by it was £15. He did not see, therefore, why the Government should object now to accept this Amendment.

ventured to think that he was perfectly in Order now in continuing the remarks which at an earlier period of the Sitting had not seemed to be in Order. Before doing so, however, he would like briefly to refer to some remarks which fell from the Prime Minister. What was the present position of Her Majesty's Government? They were trying to sit on two stools. They were endeavouring, on the one hand, to conciliate the hon. Members from Ireland; and, on the other, to retain the approval of Members who generally supported them. If they had not already discovered the fact, they would certainly soon find that these two elements could not possibly be united without any sort of qualification. There was no Member in that House who had a more hearty dislike to this particular Bill than he (Mr. Mac Iver) had; yet he would ask the Committee to consider whether it was not true that Ireland had some reasonable claims upon that House and upon the Government which Her Majesty's Government did not seem prepared properly to consider? He was much struck by some remarks of the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell), who divided the tenants into two classes—a certain class who could not afford to pay any rent at all, and then a richer class, whose landlords were not always what they ought to be. But he (Mr. Mac Iver) remembered that from more than one Member of the Government they had heard of the advantages of small holdings. It seemed to him that the observations of the hon. Member for Cork were irreconcilable with the supposed advantages of small holdings. In Ireland there were more people desirous to take farms than there were farms to be had; the country was far too dependent upon agriculture alone; and, consequently, the competition between one and another for the land was such as to induce the offer for rents, which very often the tenants, when they got into occupation, found they really could not pay. Therefore, he thought the hon. Member for Cork, and those who agreed with him, did deserve attention in some, at least, of the contentions they had made. But, for his part, he would far rather urge upon the Government that it could not reasonably be maintained that the causes of distress were temporary. Ireland had suffered immensely from our mistaken fiscal system. In some respects she had not a fair share of the advantages of the Union, as compared with England; and he ventured to think that the question of emigration lay really behind the causes which were operating to produce this Bill. What were those poor people to do who had to leave Ireland? The hon. Member for Berkshire (Mr, Walter), in a most important speech, which had not received the attention it deserved in that House, spoke of an emigration rate for Ireland. Who was to pay that? It was to fall upon the distressed landlords, who were sometimes in as much trouble as their tenants. The point he (Mr. Mac Iver) wished to urge was that if an emigration rate was right at all, it was right that they in England and Scotland should come forward and help Ireland to carry it out. It was not a thing to be done by one part of the United Kingdom alone, but was a burden which ought to fall upon the United Kingdom as a whole. This matter of emigration ought not to be of indifference to any of them. What was to become of these people? The hon. Member for Berkshire said that it was the workhouse on the one hand, and America on the other. But it should be remembered that we had possessions across the Atlantic, and that every healthy adult emigrant who left Ireland was worth 1,000$ to the country which received him. In the present state of our commercial relations with foreign nations, how could our people be prosperous? ["Question!"] He ventured to think that was the Question. Why should our one-sided fiscal policy continue? It placed Ireland at a special disadvantage, even as compared with Great Britain, and, at the same time, induced those poor people to go to America rather than to our own possessions across the seas. The United States wanted our material wealth alone. They would take the bone and sinew of our people, but held out no welcome except to the young and to the strong; and those who could not earn their livelihood would have to remain behind to embarrass alike the tenants and landlords of Ireland. [ Loud cries of "Divide! Divide!" and "Agreed!" amidst which much of the observations of the hon. Member was lost. ] Was it of any importance where the people of Ireland went? ["Order, Order!"]

I rise, Sir, to ask if the hon. Member is in Order? The whole of his remarks, as far as I can hear them, are devoted to the question of emigration. There is not a word about emigration in the Bill; and I respectfully submit to you that he is not in Order.

On a Motion to report Progress, great latitude is given to all speeches and all subjects really connected with the Bill; and, as I understand the hon. Member is speaking upon the interests of the tenants of Ireland, I do not think that is outside the question.

continuing, said, he was speaking not merely in the interests of the tenants, but of the Empire as a whole. [ Renewed cries of "Divide!" and "Agreed!"]

I beg, Mr. Chairman, to direct your attention to the fact that the hon. Member for Stockton is openly and persistently endeavouring to interrupt the speech of the hon. Gentleman.

My attention was not directed to any interruption by the hon. Member for Stockton; but, if it was so, of course, it was not a regular interruption.

continuing, said, that the population of the United States at the present time was about 40,000,000. That was nearly 10 times as much as the population of Canada; and yet British North America took far more than a tenth of our manufactures as compared with the United States. Canada took of our manufactures last year to the extent of four or five times as much per head for every emigrant who went there in preference to the United States. The extent of emigration from Ireland within the three months ending June had been something wholly unprecedented. The steamers which sailed from Liverpool and called at Queenstown in the last three months—March, April, and May—carried from those two ports alone no less than 79,551 persons—mostly Irish—who went to the United States. He had made inquiries as to where the passage-money came from; whether it had been contributed in this country, or sent from other parts of the world. He remembered, in years gone by, when he was himself largely connected with the emigration trade, that, even then, the United States sent home about one-third of all the passage-money of the Irish emigrants.

I rise to Order, Sir, and I really do think the time of this House, either at the bidding of the noble Lord the Member for Leicestershire (Lord John Manners), or of anybody else, should not be employed in advertizing emigration agents. I appeal to you, Sir, on a Question of Order, whether these observations are not entirely foreign to the Question before us?

I have already said that the subject of emigration, as relating to the peasantry of Ireland, who may be evicted under the present state of law in Ireland, is not out of Order; but the hon. Member will see that the general opinion of the Committee is that he is going into this subject on the Motion to report Progress at considerably greater length than is proper or convenient to the Committee.

asked permission to make a personal explanation, after the very unfair attack which had just been made upon him. He trusted the Committee would believe him when he told them that he had had nothing personally to do with emigration for the last six or seven years. But there was nobody in the world who had so much to do with it as he formerly had. Therefore, he had an entire knowledge of the trade, and still possessed many opportunities of obtaining special information, although no longer interested in it. He was, therefore, able to tell the Committee that the conditions of passage were altogether different from what they were six or seven years ago. A far larger proportion of the passage-money was now sent home from America; and the conclusion he drew from that fact was that the people of America were relatively more prosperous than they now were in this country. But could they do nothing for the prosperity of Ireland? He thought they might; but this Bill was going to do nothing, in his opinion. If he thought it would improve the condition of the people he would, instead of heartily and cordially opposing, be the first to give it his hearty support. Though Great Britain and Ireland were, and ever must be, united, he believed that their present condition was a good deal like that of the earthen pot and the iron pot in the fable. The two sailed down the stream together, and the earthen pot got the worst of it.

wished to call attention to a remark which had fallen from the hon. Gentleman the Member for Cork County (Mr. Shaw). That hon. Member said that questions with regard to the rights of property had come greatly into prominence of late years, and that proprietors were unwise in calling attention to these matters and resisting measures which were right, and founding their resistance upon questions of the rights of property. According to the right hon. Gentleman, the eel, when skinned, ought not to wriggle—and, in fact, they ought to submit to whatever measures the Government for the time being, in its wisdom, chose to pass. There had been, of late, a great change in the views of hon. Members. Those who had sat in the House under the Administrations of Lord Aberdeen, Lord Russell, and Lord Palmeston—of which Administrations the present Prime Minister was a Member—knew that this question did not then arise, and that at that time owners of property were not complaining of the attacks made upon them. It was since the present Prime Minister had reached the position which he now held at the head of affairs that those questions had been brought before the House, affecting property of different descriptions. It was in consequence of his action that owners of property of various kinds, whether in mines, or farms, or otherwise, felt bound to protest. The hon. Gentleman had also referred to the Hares and Rabbits Bill as explaining why Members on that side of the House were anxious to stop this Bill, and to delay its progress. For the matter of that, he thought measures which were of a revolutionary, novel, and persecuting character, whatever form they might assume—whether of a Bill such as this, or of the Hares and Rabbits Bill—ought to be opposed in every possible manner, and that such opposition was quite justifiable.

I beg to ask you, Sir, whether the noble Lord is in Order in calling a Bill of the Government a revolutionary Bill?

There was no remark which fell from the noble Lord which seemed to me to call for any intervention on my part to indicate Order. I would observe, that it would be out of Order if the noble Lord was at all to discuss the merits of any other Bill before the House.

resuming, said, that he was not at all intending to do that; but if the word "revolutionary" was offensive to the hon. Gentleman opposite he would withdraw it, and would substitute instead the word "Communistic," as more accurately describing the kind of legislation against which he and his Friends, as a small minority and a feeble minority, were endeavouring to protest. He was not going to discuss the Hares and Rabbits Bill. That had been referred to as a reason for the opposition offered to this measure. It was said that hon. Gentlemen on his side were opposing this Bill in order to prevent the Hares and Rabbits Bill from coming on. He was not actuated by any such motive. He would resist that measure when it did come on, because it was of the same character as the Bill they were now discussing. With regard to the figures of the Prime Minister, he submitted that they had been shown by the noble Lord the Member for Middlesex (Lord George Hamilton) to be incorrect with regard to Donegal; and, if they were incorrect there, the logical conclusion was that what was true in one county was true in another; and that if the figures were faulty in Donegal, they were equally faulty in every other part of Ireland.

said, with reference to what had fallen from the hon. Gentleman the Member for Cork City (Mr. Parnell), he entirely agreed with him that the Bill ought never to have been introduced unless, at the same time, it made provision for granting to landlords compensation for the injury that might result from the operation of the Bill. He regretted, for that reason, that the hon. Gentleman did not persist in his Motion; for there could not be a more unjust and unfair Bill than this. If the landlord was not able to obtain his rents, it would be utterly impossible for him to pay the charges on his estate, or to settle with his creditors; and why on earth this Bill should have been introduced without compensating landlords was to him entirely inconceivable. Now, however, that the Bill was in Committee, he wished to challenge the limit to £30. If the Bill was to be of any value at all it should affect every tenant, no matter what rent he paid. Surely, a tenant having a dispute with his landlord, no matter what his rent was, whether it was £15, or £150, or £300, or £400, had a right to have it settled by the County Court Judge.

begged to remind the Committee that the sole question before it was whether the Motion to report Progress should be withdrawn.

said, he should be very sorry to see the Bill lost; but, on the other hand, he did hope that the Government would stand firm, and not allow it to be whittled away by the Tory Members. At the present time, no sooner was an Amendment or a suggestion proposed to cripple the Bill, than the Government went half-way to meet it; and that gave him a very faint hope of the ultimate success of the measure in any shape that would make it worth having. With regard to statistics, he wished the Committee to remember that the number of recorded evictions of which they could find a trace in Parliamentary Returns, gave a very poor idea of the extermination of the people which was going on. Large numbers of Irish tenants surrendered their holdings, and gave up their properties, without requiring the whole process of the law to be carried out. Large numbers, again, after being served with notice to quit, did not wait until the matter was completed—the fires quenched on their hearths, and their little furniture thrown out on the road-side—but surrendered their holdings and fled the country. Therefore, he hoped it would be remembered that these official statistics in no way gave either a fair idea of the extent to which the people were being turned out, or of the suffering that they were undergoing. With reference to the limitation proposed in this measure, it ought also to be recollected that the argument of the Chief Secretary for Ireland was founded on the existing state of things. It was true that the crops, at present, looked in good condition, and that there was a promise of an abundant harvest; but the weather at present was unfavourable, and it might be that, after all, the promise of the present would only result poorly afterwards. He feared that they would not have in Ireland, at any rate, that abundant harvest which was calculated upon so confidently by many Members of the House. The Ministerial measure had been assailed in the most violent manner by the Opposition, and by a few Gentlemen, on the Ministerial side, and that caused him to think there must be a great deal of good in it. A measure dealing with the Irish tenants, and intended for their relief, so violently denounced and so frantically assailed by the Representatives of the landed interest, must have some benefit in it to the Irish peasantry. That Bill had been assailed by all sorts of stories—with alleged figures, with unauthoritative statistics, with extracts from private letters, with every possible mode and means of attack. Actually a Gentleman on the opposite side of the House, a few nights ago, had quoted a story from Vanity Fair. The next time that hon. Gentleman spoke, he supposed he would oblige them with a quotation from Moonshine. The good landlords had been quoted against them. There were, he believed, such men in Ireland; but history did not give that character to the class, and it was not the good landlord who sent Irish exiles all over the world, bearing in their hearts hatred and detestation of the rule by which they were driven from the land where they were born. Let it be remembered, also, that it was not the good landlord they were dealing with by this Bill, and the majority of the class were not good landlords. The noble Lord who had just spoken had referred to the Ulster tenant-right; and it was not the first time that he had heard that tenant-right referred to by Gentlemen who represented the landed interest in a manner which showed that they were by no means enamoured of it. It had this great fault—that it gave other creditors than the landlords something to go upon for their debts. It gave the creditors something that was not seizable by the landlord; and that argument was continually produced against the extension of that tenant-right to the other parts of Ireland. It had been said that custom enabled the money-lender to come upon the tenant for what was due to him. Well, why not? Why should not the money-lender, or the grocer, or the baker, have something to go upon for his debts? What was the function of the moneylender? In some cases the tenants went to the money-lenders to borrow from them the money required to pay their exorbitant rents. Yet it was a great outrage, according to the view of the landlord, that the money-lender should have any way of recovering his debt. Frequent reference had been made to the sanctity of a Parliamentary title, and this proposed change in the law had been called confiscation, Communism, and he knew not what. But the last of all classes of men in the world to say anything about confiscation should be the Irish landlords; for, but for confiscation, where would they be? He would tell them. They would be engaged in some honest occupation; they would be digging the soil, or carrying the musket at 1 s. a-day, but for confiscation. They and their forefathers had lived on the fruits of confiscation. He did not refer merely to the confiscation resulting from wars and conquests, for at the present time confiscation was going on as it had been going on for many years past—namely, the confiscation of the improvements made by Irish tenants on their farms. Upon the confiscation of those improvements the landlords had grown rich and fat, obtaining incomes which enabled them to spend their time in racing and chasing, and sporting about the world. A Parliamentary title, they had been told, was a sacred thing; but there was a still higher title than that, and it was the title of an honest man willing to work while there was room for him to live in his own country. It was the title of a man to justice—the title of a man to enjoy the fruits of his industry in his own land. That was higher than a Parliamentary title, and that was the title which they had not yet got in Ireland, because they were shut out from it by the laws, rules, and regulations made for them by the British House of Commons.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Question again proposed.

said, he had an Amendment on the Paper which was cognate to that now before the Committee, and, therefore, he would say a word or two on it. He and other Liberal Members who were always willing to support the Government in reference to this Bill, had been taunted by the noble Lord opposite with not saying a word on the subject. His impression, however, was that he should best support the measure by keeping silent. Now, however, that they were in Committee, the time had come when those who had paid attention to the subject—and it was one in which he had taken very great interest—should try their best to put the Bill into as good a shape as possible. It was quite absurd to speak of this Bill as an infringement of the rights of contract. The tenants interfered with, in his opinion, were not contract tenants at all, but were in the nature of status tenants, having distinct interests in the land recognized by the Act of 1870, of which they would, under Peculiar and exceptional circumstances, be deprived unless this particular Bill should pass. Under present circumstances, the evil would be greater than the good if they were to interfere with purely contract tenants. Therefore, in his opinion, they should attempt to draw a line between small tenants holding rights under the Land Act, and purely contract tenants who were usually large tenants quite capable of taking care of themselves—in regard to whom, in his opinion, there was not so great and pressing an emergency as that it was necessary to pass a measure for their protection. He could quite conceive that there might arise cases which it was right and possible for the House to take into its equitable consideration; but if they were to extend the Bill to all tenancies, small or large, there would be certainly no justification for confining it to Ireland. It ought, in that case, to be extended to every part of the Kingdom where tenants were suffering from the bad seasons; and he could assure the House that there were many parts of the United Kingdom where the tenants suffered just as much, as they did in Ireland. In the county he came from—the county of Fife—from the bad seasons many tenants had suffered enormously, and a very large proportion of the farmers had become almost or quite bankrupt, although they were men of energy and possessed of many good qualities. He could imagine extreme cases in which non-interference could be pressed too far; yet in regard to large purely contract tenants, he felt that the evil would be greater than the good if they were to interfere with the rights of contract. On the other hand, these tenants in Ireland were in a different position. They held rights of property; and in their case he was quite content if a line could be drawn distinguishing the status tenants from the contract tenants. The real question was where should the line be drawn? Practically, the question before the Committee was not whether the line should be drawn, but where? The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) had placed it at £15; but, undoubtedly, the general opinion was that the Bill would be much damaged if the limit were placed as low as that. A much more reasonable point recognized in the Land Act of 1870 was that tenants under £50 rental needed protection. By the Land Act tenants above £50 could contract themselves out of its operations; but tenants below £50 could not. Hon. Members from Ireland further told him that £50 was a practical point; and as that was the point fixed by the Land Act itself, he did hope the Committee would adopt it. The class between £30 and £50 comprised very many good farmers who were not men of capital, but worked with their own hands, and who at present were liable to be evicted and to lose their rights, while their country, if that took place, was likely to be deprived of the very best class of its inhabitants. Of course, it would be hopeless for him to press his Amendment if it was opposed by the Government; but he ventured to express a strong hope that a limitation so distinctly fixed in the Land Act itself ought to be accepted now as a compromise between the views of the Ministry and the views of the Irish Members.

wished to support this proposal on two grounds. He did not agree that it was wise to introduce a limit at all, for that, in his opinion, was a mistake. At the same time, no doubt, the number of large tenants was very small in any part of Ireland, while it was still smaller in the Scheduled districts. If this limit were introduced, therefore, the number who would be shut out by the limit proposed would be very small indeed. The Committee must remember that 71 per cent of the holdings in Ireland were under 30 acres, and that 83 per cent were under 50 acres; and for the purpose of his argument he would assume that a farm of 50 acres represented a rental of £50, although, of course, the value of land varied in different parts of Ireland. When the Land Act was passed it was decided, rightly or wrongly, that there should be a limit above which the tenant should, if he wished, be allowed to contract himself out of its benefits. That, in his opinion, was also a mistake, and one of the most fruitful sources of the partial failure of the Land Act. Still, that limit did exist; and if the same limit were accepted by the Government in the present Bill, the measure would stand upon an intelligible principle. If the hon. Member for Cork City (Mr. Parnell), with a great many of whose desires he cordially agreed, had proceeded with his Motion, he would have been unable to follow him; because rather than have no Bill at all, he would accept the one even with a limitation of £15. That would do some good, at any rate, to a large number of tenants; and the number under £15 was far larger than the hon. Member seemed to think. But, on the other hand, he did not wish at all to minimize the benefits which this Bill would confer upon the tenants of Ireland; and he would earnestly urge her Majesty's Government to accept the limitation just suggested. If they accepted the limitation proposed by the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), they were merely throwing a stop to Cerberus. After the proposal of that right hon. and learned Gentleman, there were proposals from the noble Lord the Member for Haddingtonshire (Lord Elcho) and from the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill); and if those noble Lords were also to have a sop thrown to them, there would be nothing left in the Bill. Of course, the Government must be judges finally on what the limit was to be; but he would urge them, as far as possible, to endeavour to fix it on some intelligible principle.

would ask the Government to base their action on another part of the Land Act—namely, the 9th section, which presented a much closer analogy to the question now before the House than the section referred to by the hon. Member who had last spoken. The figure found in the section ought not, he thought, to be departed from without some adequate ground. He would request the Committee to remember the facts brought before it in the very impressive speech of the Solicitor General for Ireland on the second night of the debate. The hon. and learned Gentleman stated that 35,000 out of the 33,000 tenants in Mayo occupied holdings under £8 rental, and that the same was the case in reference to 24,000 out of the 33,000 tenants in Donegal; and the right hon. and learned Gentleman told them that it was for the protection of that class of tenants that the Bill was intended. Now, if the measure was intended for the protection of tenants under £8, and if the proportion was so great as 25 out of 33, he could not help thinking that the limitation suggested in the Amendment now before the House was excessively liberal, and that the only reason why the right hon. and learned Gentleman proposed it was that he found the figure already suggested in the 9th section. The Prime Minister, in his speech on this Bill, had said a great deal which he should be glad to see confirmed. It was very reassuring, considering much that had been said, to hear that it was the object of the Government to maintain the rights of property, to enforce the provisions of the law, and to secure the payment of rent; and that, to do this, a very broad and clear line would be drawn between the cases which the Bill was intended to meet and the cases to be excluded from its operation. If the Bill had coincided with the speech of the Prime Minister, he would have felt very differently disposed towards it; but he did not find in that Bill any of the security which, the Prime Minister desired to give, and most assuredly he did not find in it that broad and clear line which the Prime Minister wished to draw. The mischief arising from the Bill consisted not so much in the measure itself as in the view taken of it in Ireland; and there could no doubt that its scope and purpose was there supposed to be very much larger than the Prime Minister asked the House to understand. There had been statements in the Irish Provincial papers congratulating the tenantry on the passage of a Bill to suspend the payment of rent for two years; and they could scarcely wonder that there had been misapprehensions outside as to the purport and scope of the Bill, when they had hon. Members in the House, who had listened to the debate, expressing the opinion, as the hon. Member for Cork City (Mr. Parnell) did yesterday, that until this Amendment was brought forward by the Prime Minister he had supposed that the object of the Bill was to enable the tenants of Ireland to get a reduction of their rents. In his opinion, the Prime Minister, after the views he had expressed in the House, was bound to do everything in his power to remove the misapprehension which existed in Ireland, and to carry out his own promise that there should be a clear and intelligible line drawn between the cases in which this Bill was to apply and those in which it was not. He took it that the right hon. Gentleman, in offering to accept the £30 limit, wished to make a substantial concession upon this point. The hon. Members who spoke last could scarcely be aware that if that limit was adopted it would only exclude 4 per cent of the Scheduled districts, and an Amendment which excluded only that per centage would simply be useless. His hon. Friend the Member for Leitrim (Mr. Tottenham) had shown that even under the £15 limit nearly four-fifths of the tenants would be affected by its operation, and only one-fifth excluded. Certainly, one-fifth of the tenantry would be as small a proportion as was fair; and he, therefore, should be very glad if the Prime Minister would accept the Amendment proposed by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South-West Lancashire (Sir R. Assheton Cross.)

said, this was a Bill framed for a temporary emergency, limited in its area, and based on the principle of the Land Act of 1870. When he heard what limitation was proposed by the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister—that limitation that was doubtless suggested by the landed aristocracy—he asked himself whether there was any fair and just reason for this limitation, and whether the right hon. Gentleman was departing from his principles for any good and valid reason. If the limitation of £30 was accepted, what was the result as compared with the Land Act of 1870? By that Land Act, tenants of £40 and upwards were entitled to have compensation up to four years' rent; while the compensation was diminished, in the case of £50 and upwards, to three years' rent. It had been said that these larger tenancies formed a very small percentage of the whole tenantry of Ireland. If that was so, it was so much the better for the landlord. But he did very seriously desire to call the attention of the Prime Minister to the equities of this case, in order that he might act on that principle which he had recognized as running through all his written and spoken words on this subject. Let them take, first, the case of the man paying £50 a-year, always bearing in mind that this Bill was framed merely for a particular occasion and a particular time. That man, after bad harvests in 1877, 1878, and 1879, found himself risking beggary. He would have parted with everything on which he could raise money. He would be hunted by creditors, to whom he was in debt; while, under the Land Act, he would only be entitled to three years' compensation. Now, were the landlords, in such a case as that, to have all the rights and none of the responsibilities? Were they to hold absolute dominion over all other creditors, and, therefore, independently of this right of eviction, to stand in a more favoured position than any other person; to depart from the principles of the statute law, and to be able to exercise territorial rights over what was really the property of their tenants, because of the exceptional circumstances of the case? That, he contended, was a wrong; and as regarded the Amendment which had been acceded to by the Premier, he said it was a distinct infraction of, and departure from, the principles of the Land Act of 1870; and that as long as the name of the Prime Minister was connected with the Legislature—and he hoped it would be for a very long time—they would always have it in their power to point their finger at him, and say that, for the sake of conciliating a small proportion of the majority at his back, he had departed from the principles which up to that time had been associated with his name. If the right hon. Gentleman had kept to the Bill as it was originally introduced, and relied on the Irish Members and the common sense of his majority, he had very little doubt that the Bill, long before this time, would have passed into "another place" for consideration.

said, he heartily agreed with the noble Lord the Member for North Derbyshire (Lord Edward Cavendish), that anything they could do was a perfect waste of time after what had been said by the hon. Member for Cork City (Mr. Parnell). There were two ways of killing a man—one by the happy dispatch, and the other by slow poison; and at present they were engaged in employing the latter means. He was glad, therefore, that his duties would take him to another place for the next 10 days, and that he should not see this work performed. He desired, however, to point out that whether the present Amendment was carried, or the alteration suggested by the Prime Minister was accepted, it put the good landlord at a very great disadvantage to the bad one. Let them take, for instance, the case of land which was rateably valued at £31 or £32. A good landlord might let it to his tenants at £28 or £29; and, therefore, he and his holdings would be brought under the operation of this Act. On the other hand, the hard landlord, who had rack-rented his tenants, would let land really worth only £28 or £29 at over £30, or even £31, and so would get safely beyond the operation of the Bill. For that reason, he thought rent was an unfair and improper basis for this limitation. He would also remind the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister that in the 3rd clause of the Land Act it was not rent which was chosen as a limit at all, but rateable value. In the Amendment which he had himself proposed, he had recognized that principle, and used the very words of the 3rd clause of the Land Act of 1870; and he ventured to ask the Prime Minister whether it would not be far more satisfactory to accept a rateable value of £20 than the rental limit now proposed? The object of the Bill was clearly not to catch good landlords and to allow rack-renting landlords to escape, but to put down capricious evictions of poor, helpless tenants. He hoped, also, that some limit would be put to the amount of compensation which tenants were to receive, as otherwise the Bill would open the door to an immense amount of imposition and litigation. He did not believe that any sensible person who had ever had anything to do with the management of property, even in Ireland, would doubt that under whatever restrictions there were this Bill would lead to some imposition and litigation. Certainly, it could not be fair to put the small tenant and the large one on the same footing. Another question which had been entirely left out during the deliberation was that of the deterioration of the land. Where in a small holding a man and his family cultivated the land themselves, it did not deteriorate so quickly as when extra labour was required. The first thing a farmer did when he was in difficulty was to cut down the labour bill; consequently, the land immediately began to deteriorate. The next thing was not to stock it properly, and then the land deteriorated still further. Therefore, the line which it was just and fair to draw, in his opinion, was where a man and his family worked the land themselves, and not to extend the operation of this Bill to those larger tenants who employed labourers to work for them. He could not, of course, press his Amendment at the present time; but he did hope that the Government would fairly consider the alteration which he had suggested; but if they did not, he certainly should vote for the Amendment of the right hon. and learned Gentleman opposite (Mr. Gibson).

said, he had to apologize to the Committee for not being present when this Amendment was moved, and to thank his right hon. and learned Friend (Mr. Gibson) for having so ably introduced it. Although he felt very strongly in regard to this measure, he had refrained from discussing the main principle, in order not to take up time. But if any justification were wanted for the Amendment he had now introduced, it would be found in the speech of the Prime Minister himself, who very candidly and rightly acknowledged the justice of the case which was supported in it. The Prime Minister showed conclusively to his mind, and in stronger language than he could himself possibly use, how much justice there was in the claim to have limits put to the operation of this measure. After that statement, and the speeches of the other Members of the Government, he would not say another word upon that part of the case, but would simply confine his observations to considering whether the limit should be £15 or £30. A great many of the speeches which had been made on both sides of the House had argued this question very much as though this were a permanent measure affecting tenants generally throughout the Kingdom. That, of course, was a mistake. This was not a Bill for the purpose of regulating the law between landlord and tenant generally, but a Bill brought forward for a particular purpose—for the relief of distress in certain particular districts of Ireland. He differed wholly from the measure, because it seemed to him to contain a principle which it would be very difficult indeed to confine to particular districts and particular cases, and because the emergency that existed ought, he thought, to be met in a totally different spirit and manner. The arguments, no doubt, that had been used all through the discussion were arguments which would have been applicable if they had been discussing a general principle of law. He did hope they would get rid of that idea altogether, and that it would always be remembered that all they were called upon to do at the present moment was to consider a measure which dealt with particular places in Ireland where, unfortunately, very great distress prevailed among the small tenants of land. That was the object the Government had in view. The Government had stated that they wanted to protect the small holders of laud. Over and over again they had stated that; and why should they not accept the limit of £15? The hon. Member for Berkshire (Mr. Walter) said that the Government had based their whole case practically upon the 9th section of the Land Act. Well, if they based their case upon the 9th section of the Land Act, when they came to the question of limitation, it seemed only natural that they should follow the lines of that section in dealing with the limitation of pounds, and take the figure named in that section—that was, £15 rental. The principle could not be more forcibly expressed than it had been by the hon. Member for Berkshire in the remarks which he had made about the 9th section. The reason why the hon. Member supported the Amendment was that if the Bill were to extend to the larger class of tenants, there was no reason in principle for confining its operation to Ireland; because there were tenants in England and Scotland who were equally in distress with those in Ireland, and if a similar claim were raised in England and Scotland it would be difficult to resist it. If the Bill were passed at all, though he and those who sat on his side of the House objected to it, they wished to confine it, as far as possible, to a particular class of tenants who were in the greatest misery. The whole case in support of the Bill had been based upon the necessity for relieving the misery of that class of person. If they went upon the 9th section of the Land Act they must limit the amount to £15. The suggestion to make the limit £50 would tend to defeat the whole value of the Amendment. He felt that he must put the Committee to the trouble of dividing upon the question of what the limit was to be, as the Government were resting their claim upon the 9th section of the Land Act. If he did not succeed he should be bound to accept the offer of the Government to place the limit at £30.

said, that the statement of the right hon. Gentleman was perfectly fair in principle, and ha might say that the Government rested the Bill upon the 9th clause of the Land Act as it passed the House of Commons, and not as it was amended by the House of Lords.

said, that with the best intentions to support the Govenment he could not follow their course upon the Bill. It should be remembered that they were not dealing permanently with the case of landlord and tenant, although they were setting a precedent for dealing permanently with it. He could see in the Bill very good reasons for supporting the £50 limit, and also for supporting the £15 limit; but he could see no reason for making the limit £30. He understood that the Bill was introduced on the ground of the great number of evictions that had taken place in Ireland, and the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister feared that these evictions would increase in number. But now the right hon. Gentleman had given up this ground as the noble Lord the Member for Middlesex (Lord George Hamilton) had produced figures which entirely cut it away from under the feet of the Government. It had been shown that there was not such a number of actual evictions as had been supposed. The right hon. Gentleman had then entirely changed his ground, and said that the Bill was founded on the necessity to give security to the tenants for the rights which were intended to be secured them by the Act of 1870, of which rights it was now found that they might be defrauded. He admitted that the right had been extended by the Land Act of 1870, but the clauses introduced had entirely changed the character of the Bill; and it was now practically a Bill for temporarily extending the Ulsler custom throughout the whole of Ireland. That might be a good thing or a bad thing; but it was certain that this question could not be debated at that time of the Session without opening the whole question of Irish land tenure. No doubt, it was a reason for the reform of the Land Act, and the House would be quite prepared to discuss the matter when it came before it; it was also the best reason for adopting the suggestion of the noble Lord the Member for North Derbyshire (Lord Edward Cavendish), that the Bill should be withdrawn, when the House would be quite ready to discuss the question at the proper time. With regard to the Amendment placed upon the Paper, he would ask why, if the Bill were to secure the right to the tenant which had been granted by the Land Act of 1870, it was to be limited to tenants at £30 rent? That right (by which he supposed was meant compensation for eviction or disturbance) was secured to tenants in Ireland up to £50; and he wished to know why a tenant at £30 was to have his rights secured to him while the tenant for £50 was to go away homeless? If the right were secured to the tenant of £50 by the Land Act of 1870, he should also like to know whether the operation of the Bill was to be confined entirely to the scheduled districts? If the Act were required for the scheduled districts, it was required for the rest of Ireland, Ulster included. These were the reasons which induced him to express the hope that even now, finding that the Bill did not give satisfaction to hon. Members representing those constituencies in favour of which the Bill was introduced, the Government would withdraw the measure.

said, he could not understand from the hon. Member who had last spoken whether he intended to vote against the £30 limit or the £15. If he meant to vote in favour of extending this Bill to the whole of Ireland, then he should certainly vote with the hon. Member; but he did not know whether he intended to vote for that or not. But the hon. Member said that the statistics of the noble Lord the Member for Middlesex had quite cut away the ground from the feet of the Government. He was at a loss to understand how the statistics introduced had at all interfered with the ground upon which the Bill was based. Those statistics went to show only that out of 150 ejectments placed in the hands of the Sheriff some 93 tenants had signed acknowledgments, and were allowed to remain in possession. Now, what were these acknowledgments? They were executed under an Act of Parliament, which gave power to the landlord to execute the ejectments any time he pleased within six months—that was, the execution of the ejectments were only postponed to suit the landlords' convenience. It seemed to him a reductio ad absurdum to say that that took away the ground upon which that Bill rested. But it appeared also that some 30 of these tenants were put in as care-takers. Now, what was a care-taker? He was the landlord's servant, and could be removed at his pleasure, at the petty sessions, or at quarter sessions. Were not all those tenants still open to eviction; and if they were exposed to eviction, were they not entitled to some compensation? Of course, they were not in such a state of misery as men who had been turned out on the highways. For his part, he could not understand why these miserable statistics, which had been paraded before them, should be held as the least reason for calling upon the Government to withdraw the Bill. The right hon. Gentleman, in whose name the late Attorney General for Ireland had moved the Amendment yesterday, rested it upon the ground that the £15 limit was the limit under the 9th section of the Land Act of 1870. What did that section do? It said that the tenant evicted, in the case of a holding under £15, was to be at liberty to treat the action as one of disturbance, if the rent was exorbitant. Now, he defied any person to put a legal construction on what was the meaning of that word. It did not mean unreasonable; it did not mean excessive; in fact, the Judges were puzzled what meaning to put on it, and, accordingly, no case ever arose under it. It was to remove the mischief of the section that this Bill had been brought in. It was unintelligible to him why the limit of £15 should have been fixed by that section, or why the £15 limit should be placed in this Bill. He would remind the Committee that, whatever the limit was, the tenant would have to fulfil all the conditions mentioned in the Bill before he could get compensation. He had to obtain the decision of the Court, and the Judge had to use his discretion as to whether he should treat the case as one of disturbance. Thus the tenants in the Schedule were placed upon the same level with the tenants who were entitled to compensation for disturbance under the Act of 1870. Who were the tenants entitled to compensation under the Act of 1870? They were not confined to £15, or £30, or £100 limit. The reason assigned for giving protection by this Bill was that it might affect tenants of £30, or £50, as well as £15. And why, if the Judge decided that the 9th section could not come into operation, was he to stop at the £15 limit? Did not the Bill point out the conditions upon which the Judge was to decide? They were that a man was to be unable to pay his rent by reason of failure to his crops and distress arising there from. Might not distress arising from that cause affect the man of £30, or £50, as well as the one at £15? He could see no reason whatever for placing the limit at £15. Another condition was that the tenant was willing to continue in occupation upon reasonable terms. Might not the higher rented tenant stay on reasonable terms as well as the tenant of £15. The third condition was that the offer of the tenant should have been unreasonably refused, and that no alternative was proposed by the landlord. Might not that apply as well to men at a higher rent as at a smaller rent? The right hon. and learned Gentleman the late Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Gibson) based his argument for placing the limit at £15 upon the statement that in the Province of Connaught the majority of holdings were under £15. He stated that in Connaught five-sixths of the holdings were below £15. But even if that were true as regarded the Province of Connaught, which it was not, it did not justify the exclusion of all over £15. Why should this limit be applied to the whole of Ireland because it was said that in Connaught the majority of holdings were under £15? There was no reason whatever for this Amendment. It was entirely contrary to the principle upon which the Bill had been introduced into the House, and it was contrary to the principle of the Act of 1870. The principle of that Act, when it left the House of Commons, was that the discretion in the matter should be left to the Judge. No limit of £15 was imposed when that Act passed from that House. But when it went to "another place" it came back with the £15 limit inserted, and the word "exorbitant" introduced. It was objected to in that House; but the House was ultimately forced to accept it. Now they were to be told that the House of Commons was to be coerced by an Amendment made by the House of Lords in the Act of 1870. That Amendment was made in defiance of that House, and he could see no reason for adopting it. He trusted that the Government would not accept the Amendment of the right hon. Gentleman the late Home Secretary. There would be time to consider the limit when that question came before it; but there could be no difference of opinion as to rejecting the proposed limit of £15.

said, that he wished to enter his protest against the appeal of the Government to a certain law as the foundation of another Bill; and when an Amendment was proposed to assimilate that Bill to the Act, that they should rest their case upon that law, not as it stood upon the Statute Book, but upom something that took place in that House before it became law. That was a mysterious document. He opposed the Bill on principle, and he objected to it because he felt it to be wrong in principle, and believed that it would be found mischievous in practice, and not for the benefit of the Irish people. But although objecting to the Bill in principle, he regarded the Amendments in this light—that they would minimize the evils of the Bill. Everything that minimized the operation of the Bill minimized its evils; and, therefore, he should vote for the Amendment. If the Bill proceeded to a third reading he should do his best to throw it out. This Bill, when first introduced, was nominally for the benefit of the smaller tenants; but now it was being extended in the direction of including larger tenants. He wished to know upon what principle, if the Bill were applied to the large tenants of Ireland, they could refuse to apply it to England and Scotland? It had happened lately, as many Scotch and English proprietors would know, that 20 or more large farms on some estates had become vacant. The distinction between the Irish farmer and the Scotch and the English farmer was, that when the latter found that they could not fulfil their contracts they let their farms; whereas the Irish farmer stopped, and agitated for a Bill to be brought in to keep him in possession. He could not conceive on what possible grounds the Government could refuse to bring in a Bill equally applying to England and Scotland in this matter. It was clear that the same cause—a bad harvest—had caused suffering amongst the tenant farmers in England and Scotland quite as severe as in any part of Ireland. Their great difficulty in dealing with the question arose from their inability to understand with what object the Government had brought in this Bill. The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Brand) stated the object of the Government was to bring in a Bill for the benefit of the small tenants. But from the Treasury Bench they had heard one reason assigned for bringing in the Bill at 12 o'clock, another at 4 o'clock, and a third reason at 6 o'clock. He wished to point out that these reasons differed according to the hour of the day, and the nature of the debate. The Government were in a difficulty. They seemed to him, to use a homely illustration, and without intending any personal reference, to find themselves between the devil and the deep sea. The last reason they had given for the Bill was that stated by the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister. First, it was a distress Bill for the benefit of the small tenants, then at 20 minutes past 5 o'clock the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister said that he was not making an appeal ad misericordiam , but that the measure was intended to preserve order and to make the administration of the law practicable. The conclusion to which he (Lord Elcho) and most of his hon. Friends came to was that this Bill had been brought in not to meet any distress, or to give the relief intended by the Act of 1870, either as it left that House, or as it stood upon the Statute Book, but that it was really a kind of Peace Preservation Act; a substitute for the one the Government had not the courage to maintain.

Question put.

The Committee divided:— Ayes 154; Noes 231: Majority 77.—(Div. List, No. 53.)

Question again proposed.

said, that he hoped the Committee would not accept the Amendment without discussion, for it certainly raised a very important question. Up to the present the Government had maintained that the principle of the present Bill was simply, under the exceptional circumstances of the present times, to permit the tenants to have the benefit of the interest or rights vested in them under the Land Act of 1870. It had been more than once stated by the Chief Secretary that when that measure originally left that House for the House of Lords, it contained a clause enabling the compensation to be granted, under special circumstances, to tenants evicted for nonpayment of rent. Why should the Committee, then, thus limit the operation of the present Bill, and abandon the lines of the Land Act of 1870? No real arguments had been brought under their attention which in any way justified the Chief Secretary in now departing from the provisions of the Bill as introduced and proposing the present limit. He could see no good reasons for the proposed limitation. He would ask the Committee not to permit any class of tenants to be subjected to the possibility of forfeiting the interest in their holdings, and being driven forth under the pressure of the present distress from their homes, without compensation. The Bill was founded on the principle that it was necessary to secure the tenants in the rights intended to be conferred by the Act of 1870. It surely would be then very unwise of the Committee to depart from what was unanimously admitted to be right by that House in 1870. Let him remind the Committee that, unfortunately, their placing a limitation of this character, and conferring only on tenants under a rent of £30 a-year the benefits of the Bill, would be most detrimental to the interests of the small tenants, whom the Chief Secretary stated he was most anxious to protect. Those who had experience of the practical working of the Land Act knew but too well that, though well intended, it had largely increased the consolidations of farms. In consequence of the thirst for land many large farmers had gone to the landlord, and had got him to evict the smaller tenants by offering to pay the entire compensation. Let not the Committee be under the impression that the tenant would in every case, and as a matter of course, in case of eviction for non-payment of rent, obtain compensation under the provisions of this Bill. He would trespass on their attention by reminding them that before the County Court Judge could consider the question of compensation, the tenant would be bound to show, first, his inability to pay rent, and not merely that he was unable to pay it, but that that inability had arisen from the failure in his crops caused by the present distress; and, secondly, that he had made a reasonable offer to his landlord, which had been refused without any reasonable alternative being proposed for the acceptance of the tenant. This, in fact, practically compelled the tenant to give to the landlord some description of security for the arrears of rent, and show, if the rent was a fair one, that payment would be made, if not immediately, within some reasonable time. Then, as he understood its meaning, the subsequent Amendment which would be proposed by the Prime Minister gave still greater protection to the landlord. For if the landlord gave the tenant a fair and reasonable opportunity of making sale of his farm no compensation would be granted. Thus protected by these safeguards, there was no reason to apprehend that the interests of landlords would be unfairly prejudiced. If the Bill was to effect any good, it was essential that the rights of all classes of tenants should be alike protected. He trusted, therefore, the Committee would not assent to the proposed alteration.

said, he thought the Premier was really travelling out of the direct path of justice which, if undiverted, he would have pursued to the end. This was surely a curious time to project a limit into this Bill, and to object to the extension of the measure to all classes. In a time of distress, which was everywhere acknowledged as most disastrous and altogether abnormal, it was surely not right to limit the indulgence granted by a measure which was admitted on all hands to be a measure of simple justice. Rather, surely, should justice be extended at the present time than limited. The larger tenants were excluded from the provisions of this Bill because it was said that they were more out of the line of distress which the failure of crops had entailed. But he thought enough had been said by hon. Members near him to show that that was not at all the case, and that the larger tenants were suffering very severely, and that the larger nature of their holdings and transactions only made them suffer more deeply than the smaller tenants under similar circumstances. Of course, when the only cause of trouble was the failure of crops, it was quite clear that the larger a man's transactions the more severe would be his losses. It was in agriculture just the same as in trade—the larger a man's transactions the greater was the calamity when failure fell upon him; and for that reason he utterly failed to see any grounds for exempting the larger classes of tenants from the operation of this Bill. However, he maintained that such an alteration was on the face of the Bill novel to the measure, and novel to the intention of the right hon. Gentleman who brought it in. The Bill itself did not refer to the small or large tenants, or make any of these invidious distinctions now sought to be imported into it. It was merely a measure to provide for the compensation of tenants who suffered disturbance. There was not a word of distinction among the tenants. And it was only at the suggestion of hon. Members opposite that this distinction had been brought in to cramp a measure, never very large. There was another point in this question which was worth attention, because it directly affected the case of the small tenants. He would ask the right hon. Gentleman whether it was not the fact that if they laid down the principle in the Bill that large tenants should have no claim against their landlords, whether they were not indicating to landlords to have none but large tenants? Any person of ordinary ability must admit that that was so; and this Bill immediately struck at small holdings, and encouraged landlords to sweep away all their smaller tenancies, and to substitute large ones for them, to whom this legislation would not apply. One other matter. The hon. Gentleman the Member for Cork County (Mr. Shaw) had said that expressions had been used in Ireland which had, perhaps, had an injurious effect on the passage of this Bill. He had himself never been upon such platforms, and knew no one who had. But he would ask hon. Members to bear with him while he read an extract from a paper which led public opinion, to a great extent, in Ireland, and would have a very great effect in inspiring the very feelings which were condemned, more than anything that had fallen from agitators. In The Times of the 12th of that month he found this extraordinary sentence referring to the Bill before the House—

"In the absence of stronger evidence than has yet been forthcoming of social disorganization in Ireland, there is not sufficient to justify this Bill."

Now, he would put it to the present Government, what was the clear meaning of that sentence? That there must be disorganization in Ireland sufficient to induce the Government to pass measures of relief. What was that but clear advice to the Irish people to continue agitation until the excitement had reached an extent of disorganization which would bring them justice? That great leader of public opinion, in fact, suggested to the people to continue their agitation and their disturbance until they had by that means forced the Imperial Parliament to attend to grievances. He hoped he would hear no more of those instigations to violence attributed to Irish agitators. He appealed to the right hon. Gentleman, in the name of what he believed on this question was a united Irish Party, not to he ashamed to do what he might wisely much oftener do—to listen to what they asked him on behalf of their constituents, and to make no change in the proposals of his Bill, and to withdraw from it this very pernicious Resolution. The Government could not feel any points of honour about this Amendment, because it was merely a suggestion from the enemy; and, therefore, he hoped that they would at once abandon it, and return to the straightforward position which they occupied before it was proposed.

said, he had not paid any attention to what the leading journal had said on this question; and, therefore, he need not enter into a discussion whether a particular leader ought or ought not to have been written. But as regarded the Amendment, the principle he was now advocating was the principle he had vindicated throughout—that this was a temporary emergency, and to meet it they must pass a temporary Bill. In carrying measures through that House, he had always been willing to concede points where he found no practical injury would be done thereby to the principal object he had in view. Now, he thought their object of protecting tenants from the operation of unjust or harsh landlords would be practically fulfilled if they accepted the Amendment, and excluded from the operation of the Bill all tenants above £30. [ Cries of "£50!"] No; he said above £30, because he thought the object they had in view would be practically fulfilled. He had no reason whatever to expect that they would have to send the police to protect process-servers when ejectments were served in holdings above £30. There was no reason whatever to expect that; and he thought, therefore, the Amendment might be accepted. The number of holdings in the scheduled districts above £30 was very small. The Return made in 1867 showed that they were rather less than one fourth of the whole of the tenantry. The ground for making this concession was that the Government wanted to remove opposition; and, in order to do that, they were willing to accept any change which did not prevent their attaining the object which they had in view.

said, that the closing words of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland seemed to him to require some explanation. It had been understood that this was a measure of an exceptional character, and had been brought forward to meet exceptional circumstances of distress. He should like to know whether the Government deliberately wished to imply that the law of landlord and tenant in Ireland was unjust?

What we have stated hitherto, and what I beg to state again, is that landlords might possibly, in some special cases, in view of the existing distress, take advantage of the present letter of the law to break what we consider its spirit, and oblige us to aid them in so doing. We have naturally an objection to do what we consider in our hearts to be unjust; and, therefore, we have introduced this Bill. We do not wish to convey the impression that we think Irish landlords, as a class, unjust. I fully believe the contrary. I believe that, in circumstances of much, difficulty, they have, as a body, acted with great justice, leniency, and kindness towards their tenants, as they did at the time of the great Famine. And I must say honestly that it has been a great grief to me personally, and to the Government, to find that they misconstrue the object of the Bill, which is to strengthen the position of just landlords. I think that they have misconceived and misunderstood the Bill; but I do not despair of their cordial assistance in endeavouring to further the welfare of the people of Ireland generally. I hope that my action in the post that I have the honour to occupy will not prejudice them against any effort I make for the good of Ireland. I do believe that, as the law at present stands, the landlords may take advantage of the calamity of the present year to do injustice and oblige us to give them our assistance in doing so. We do not think that this will be probable, or, I might say, scarcely possible, in the case of tenants at a greater rate than £30; and, therefore, we have proposed to limit the Bill at that sum.

said, that words had fallen, from the right hon. Gentleman which, he thought, ought to be taken as a reason of his being in favour of the £30 a-year limit. He stated that if they drew the line at that limit they would not have to send police to protect the process served in Ireland. He should like to know whether the right hon. Gentleman meant to convey that the large tenants were not sufficiently numerous as to be likely to offer much resistance to process serving, and, therefore, did not merit the attention of the Government, although they had suffered injustice?

said, he could not understand how the noble Lord should so misconstrue his words. The round on which he based his argument for the limit of £30 was that he did not believe that the circumstances of Ireland were such, at the present moment, that the unjust cases which the Bill was to render impossible would be likely to be initiated by landlords against tenants laying over £30 a-year.

said, that the hon. Member for Kilkenny (Mr. P. Martin) poke at some length before the Committee, and, during the progress of his observations, a considerable amount of interruption took place, the result of which was that, in his opinion, the right hon. Gentleman who had charge of the Bill did not hear the argument of his hon. Friend. At all events, the right hon. Gentleman did not reply to those arguments; and he thought it was desirable in this matter that he should repeat to him a portion of what the hon. Gentleman then said. It had been said, in some quarters, that this Amendment would not affect many persons in Ireland, for this reason—that only a few tenants held farms in Ireland above £30 rent. He would give one illustration as to the rule on that point in the County Cavan. In one case in which he was acquainted, a farmer was a tenant under a gentleman who had the reputation of being a good landlord. This tenant occupied two holdings, each one of which was decidedly about £30 a-year; but this unfortunate man had got into such arrears of rent, that he had been served with an ejectment and was ready to be evicted. Under these circumstances, he went to the landlord and appealed to him for liberty to sell his interest in one holding by which he would obtain a sufficient sum to pay the rent for both, and enable him to make a fresh start. The landlord would not allow him to sell his interest. That was a case in point, and he did not see why such a case as that should be excluded from the operation of the Bill. He would appeal to the Government, with reference to this particular Amendment, that they should not agree to the compromise of £30 instead of £15. He held that the Government were thoroughly dissolved from any agreement with the opposition as to any compromise. He had never yet heard any answer to the question which had been frequently put as to whether they could not modify the clause by making it a matter of valuation instead of rent?

It being a quarter of an hour before Six of the clock, the Chairman reported Progress; Committee to sit again Tomorrow .

I may say that it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government to take the definitive judgment of the House upon this Bill, and not to be defeated by the kind of opposition which has been adopted.

said, the Bill ought not to stand for second reading, as the Rules and Orders of the House had not been complied with. It was a Bill affecting religion, and the condition of its being considered in Committee of the Whole House had not been observed.

said, the objection was fatal, and he apprehended that the hon. Member in charge of the Bill would take the course of moving to discharge the Order, and asking leave to introduce another Bill.

said, that in moving that the Order be discharged, he would apologize for having unwittingly introduced a Bill contrary to the Standing Orders. The Rule had escaped his notice, and apparently it has also escaped the notice of the officials of the House. So important did he consider the question that he would give Notice of his intention to bring the question before the House at the earliest possible moment by way of Resolution.

Moved , "That the Order for the Second Reading be read, and discharged."—( Sir Eardley Wilmot .)

Motion agreed to .

Order discharged : Bill withdrawn .