Sir, I beg to move the Motion of which I have given Notice—namely,

"That the Notices of Motion be postponed until after the Order of the Day for resuming the Adjourned Debate on the Motion for an Address to Her Majesty."

I think it right, in making that Motion, to say that there is, I apprehend, nothing in the nature of a Resolution or Standing Order of this House on the subject. At the same time, there is, as far as I am aware, a pretty constant and unbroken usage. I remember three conspicuous cases of this kind; one in 1830, within my own experience; one in 1833, when there was a debate of four days not having reference to any matter that was of urgency for the moment, because the Bill relating to Ireland was not brought into the House of Commons, but into the House of Lords, and, therefore, there was not any urgency for debating the Address, yet the debate was carried on from day to day; one in 1835, when there was an Amendment to the Address, and the debate was carried on three days consecutively; and, lastly, in 1841, when there was an Amendment to the Address, and there, again, the debate was carried on consecutively for four days. Although there is no Rule on the subject, there certainly is a practice, and I think that practice is obviously dictated by a certain sense of propriety that always governs this House in its proceedings. When we are about to convey an assurance to the foot of the Throne at the commencement of the Session—not an assurance pledging ourselves to adopt any particular course upon any matter that may come before us, but an assurance merely pledging us to give a serious and respectful attention to whatever matters Her Majesty may propose for our consideration—there is a feeling that that is Business of a nature that ought to be despatched before we proceed to deal with the general Business of the country. I therefore now make the Motion which stands on the Paper in my name.

said, he did not intend to oppose the Motion, because he recognized the importance of the debate in which they had been engaged for some days past being proceeded with as far as possible uninterruptedly. He and his hon. Friends claimed for themselves nothing more than the right of putting their case before the House, and, through that means, before the public of England. They recognized that the Prime Minister had not up to the present time shown any disposition to prevent their having that opportunity. They trusted that, in return for the concessions they made to the right hon. Gentleman in surrendering a private Members' night, he would continue to give them a full opportunity for a fair discussion of that question. They were convinced, from the antecedents of the right hon. Gentleman, that he would not refuse them that right.

Motion agreed to.

Ordered, That the Notices of Motions be postponed until after the Order of the Day for resuming the Adjourned Debate on the Motion for an Address to Her Majesty.—( Mr. Gladstone. )

said, eight months had elapsed since the hearts of all hon. Members sitting on that side of the House, and of a great many on the other side, as well, he thought, as the hearts of all the people of the Kingdom who loved the liberty of their fellow-subjects, were moved and gratified by the announcement in the Speech from the Throne at the opening of this Parliament that Her Majesty's Government did not consider it necessary to renew the measure of coercion under which the Irish people had previously been labouring. The terms in which the gracious announcement was made had not been referred to during that debate; and, as they were rather peculiar and significant, he would, with the permission of the House, read the sen- tence which referred to the Peace Preservation Act. In the Queen's Speech which was delivered eight months ago Her Majesty said—

"The Peace Preservation Act for Ireland expires on the 1st of June. You will not be asked to renew it. My desire to avoid the evil of exceptional legislation in abridgement of liberty would not induce me to forego in any degree the performance of the first duty of every Government in providing for the security of life and property. But while determined to fulfil this sacred obligation, I am persuaded that the loyalty and good sense of my Irish subjects will justify me in relying on the provisions of the ordinary law, firmly administered, for the maintenance of peace and order."

The case of the Government now was that the Irish people had not responded to that appeal; that the ordinary law had not sufficed to preserve the peace of that portion of Her Majesty's Dominions. On the contrary, they had the sad and, he would say, the humiliating statement brought before them by the Executive Government that agrarian crimes had multiplied in Ireland far beyond the experience of previous years; that the administration of justice had been frustrated by the impossibility of procuring evidence; and that an extended system of terror had been established in various parts of the country, which paralyzed the exercise of almost all private rights, and the performance of civil duties. He was not one of those who could find it in his conscience to stand there and palliate in the slightest degree what had taken place in Ireland during the past eight months. It was impossible, he thought, for any man who valued truth above everything else to deny that in various parts of the country a reign of terror had been established which abrogated all the ordinary rights of private individuals. He was not curious to inquire how many reported agrarian outrages had been found, on inquiry, to be absolute outrages. He was quite aware that in newspapers, particularly in the present day, sensational paragraphs commended themselves to all classes of Her Majesty's subjects. He was also aware that there might be malignant persons who invented outrages for the purpose of bringing discredit upon their fellow-countrymen; but, setting aside with a most liberal hand all these sensational statements, he could not for his life deny that in Ireland at this moment a reign of terror did exist. That reign of terror was not confined simply to those in a superior position in life, but extended in many places to the payers of rent, to the occupiers of land, to the shopkeepers, and others. But, in making that admission, he thought he was entitled to ask whether the promise of Her Majesty's Gracious Speech of the 20th of May had been kept; whether the ordinary law had been administered firmly for the maintenance of the peace? He was also entitled to ask whether the course which was now proposed to them by Her Majesty's Government was that which was most likely to restore order? He could not help answering both those questions in the negative. He believed Her Majesty's Government had administered the law in Ireland in a weak and faltering spirit. He believed, moreover, that the amount of ignorance of the provisions of the present law that had been displayed in the administration of it in Ireland was something astounding. He was not going to make an indictment against Her Majesty's Government, because he was quite willing to make this admission in their favour. He did not think there was ever a Government came into Office which was more inclined to do ample justice to the Irish people than the Government of which the right hon. Gentleman was at the head; but he would go further and say there never was a Government that sat upon either side of the House that was so badly used when it did come into Office. What happened? The Irish people, through their Representatives, having had ample experience of what Tory government meant during six years, determined at the General Election to sink all their peculiar questions, to merge everything in the one object of returning a Liberal Government to power. [Mr. PARNELL: No, no!] For that purpose the great organization called the Home Rule Confederation issued its directions for the management of elections in England to this effect—that no question respecting Home Rule and their peculiar test as to providing for inquiry into the nature of the demands of the Irish people for Home Rule should be put, and they recommended that everything should be done to return a Liberal Government. That also was the desire of the Irish people, and it was founded on the experience which they had undergone for six years past; but the moment the Government was framed, there opened on that side of the House batteries of obstruction and of misrepresentation such as he thought any generous—hearted man could not have commanded. It appeared to him that everything that the Government desired to do was misrepresented, everything they could possibly do was declined, and that the one object of hon. Gentlemen opposite was to discredit the Liberal Administration which they had just returned, and to prevent them from getting an opportunity of fulfilling any one of their promises. So strongly did he feel this, that in the month of July he ventured to write to the great journal of Ireland, The Freeman's Journal, a letter in which he stated before the Irish people that it appeared to him that the object of a number of gentlemen was to worry the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government to death. Within a fortnight of that time the right hon. Gentleman was struck down with the illness which filled the whole nation with grief, and which was occasioned by the strain put upon him by the conduct to which he was subjected by those who professed to be his friends. He was free to admit that the Government made great mistakes at that time. He thought that the Chief Secretary for Ireland made a mistake, for which he ought not readily to be forgiven, in again giving a subsidy to the Irish landlords. If only a portion of that additional £750,000 of Irish money had been lent to the Irish tenants to assist in developing their holdings, he believed an impression would have been made on Ireland most beneficial to the order and security of the nation. Then, again, in another instance the Government made a gigantic blunder when they issued their Land Commission, and did not place upon it tenant farmers in whose interest Land Reform was required. They refused to make the smallest concession in this matter. They constituted their Commission without the first element which ought to have been in it. It was the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. The late Government, in constituting its Commission, took care to put tenant farmers of all the three countries upon it; but it was reserved for a Liberal Government to refuse the request made to them by those who had been inclined to put the best construction upon their motives and actions. The question next arose, had the laws been enforced with firmness and vigour, and, at the same time, moderately? The right hon. Gentleman, the other night, appeared to desire to vindicate his administration of justice in Ireland, especially with regard to the police. He told them especially that some suggestions which were made to him as to the employment of mounted police or soldiers for patrol duty in rural districts were, as he thought, quite absurd. If he did not actually use the word absurd, he left that impression upon those who communicated with him upon the point. What was going on in Ireland at that time? There was an agitation amongst tenants to make them discontented with the bountiful harvest which Providence placed in their hands, and for which their hearts were full of gratitude, and to make them feel that the Government and Parliament had no desire to redress their wrongs. The administration of the law was so much relaxed in Ireland that he could only liken what took place in the country to a barring out in a public school. It seemed to him that the people thoroughly enjoyed at the time the opportunity of putting the law at defiance. They were never interfered with in any of their night meetings which were held in various parts of the country. They were never interfered with or warned against accumulating rifles and guns and revolvers, and firing them off to the fright of Her Majesty's subjects. All that was done was this—the police in Ireland continued their ordinary duties, and protection was given to individuals who applied for it, and who were willing to be guarded by policemen walking by their side night and morning with loaded revolvers. The ordinary duties of the Irish police were to patrol the roads in day time and take up wandering pigs and cows. Most of the summonses that were adjudicated on at the police petty sessions were of that trivial character. The object of the Government should have been to have prevented the people getting the habit of assembling at night for secret and unlawful purposes. It was not that they should have endeavoured to detect them at the time, but to prevent the habit of assembling by employing horse patrols at night. He felt convinced that in the South and West many men would thus have been prevented falling into unhappy courses, and by secret meetings at night bringing themselves, in all probability, very nearly within reach of the law. The most extraordinary exhibition of the administration of law in Ireland was, he thought, that great expedition to relieve Captain Boycott in Mayo. It was almost incredible that Her Majesty's Government should have sent down a large army composed of all branches of Her Majesty's troops to reap a few turnips and crops and take care of a few head of cattle belonging to a gentleman who had been treated most unjustly by his neighbours. That system of putting individuals into a state of excommunication was hateful and abominable. There was nothing, he verily believed, that so intensified the feelings of the people of this country as the system which was called by the hateful name of Boycotting, and which signalized the reign of the Land League in Ireland. There was something so repulsive, so mean, in urging on individuals not so well educated as hon. Gentlemen who had been urging on that system of Boycotting, to render miserable the lives of individuals to whom they had an objection. But he wanted to know where was the Government's knowledge of the Trades' Unions Act during all this time? How was it that they were now putting in operation the Trades' Union Act, and, he would venture to say, not without success? The truth was that the Irish Executive had not been accustomed to look to the ordinary law for the enforcement of order in Ireland. They always looked to some special enactment, and the moment the Peace Preservation Act was permitted to expire the whole Castle officials appeared to be at their wits' end, and did not know how to keep order in the country. He would read a section of the Trades' Union Act. The Act was an Act to prevent conspiracy and to afford protection to property, and was passed in 1875. [The hon. Member then read a section of the Act, which brought within its penalties any person compelling another person to abstain from doing what he might lawfully do, or to do that from which he might lawfully abstain, and any person who used threats or intimidation, or followed another from place to place, or kept watch over him in his house or his place of business for such purposes.] If that Act had been put in operation in a vigorous manner it would have entirely put an end to this system of Boycotting. The Act was specially applicable to Ireland, and the peculiar Courts existing in that country were armed with a special jurisdiction for carrying the Act into effect. Before, therefore, being called upon to put fresh power in the hands of the Government for the repression of outrage, he thought they were entitled to ask, Had that Act been tried in Ireland? If not, why not? If it had been tried, when did it commence to be tried, and when did the Government learn that it existed? He was not going to criticize the conduct of the Government in a hostile spirit, but with the wish and hope of rousing them to a knowledge of the real situation of affairs. He was going, if they would permit him, to give them his advice as to the course they should pursue in this instance. He thought the Government knew as well as any man possibly could what was the cause of all this outrage in Ireland. They knew that it was the miserable condition of the great mass of the people; they knew the starvation of the South and West; they knew the insecurity of the Irish tenants with regard to the enjoyment of the fruits of their toil. Her Majesty's Government, when they called together that House, should not, it appeared to him, have made that vague and unsatisfactory reference to the Land Act of 1870; but the Government should have come forward and stated—"We adopt the principles that were laid down in the speech, of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at Birmingham, and we pledge ourselves to carry out these principles in the reform of the Land Laws." Had the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government made such a declaration, and appealed to the Irish people to save him, to save the Liberal Party, to save them all from the shame and disgrace of resorting to coercive legislation after a period only of eight months' liberty, he believed that that appeal would have been attended with success. He believed that the Irish people would have responded to a generous appeal of that kind. If however, an appeal of that character had failed, the right hon. Gentleman might then have appealed to the House for fresh powers. Now, however, the Government were going to put fetters upon the people, without recognizing he cause of the disease. Surely it did not require anything more than a conversation with the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy to make the Cabinet know what was really the matter with the Irish people. He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) was one of those who had refused to join the Land League, because he refused to tell the Irish people, as they had been told during the past year, that Parliament would not redress their wrongs. On the contrary, in refusing the invitations to attend land meetings, he had invariably, in the most open and candid manner, not made excuses, such as that he was engaged, or that he was about to take a journey, or something of that kind, as a good many other people had done, but he told them that he felt he ought not to attend those meetings, saying that he believed the Government would redress their wrongs. There was a Government now in power, he said, which contained within it those who had always proved themselves the best friends of the Irish people; and he pledged himself, as he would pledge himself for a particular matter in his own person, that they would right their wrongs. What, however, distressed him more than anything else had been the incredulity with which that statement had been received. He had found everywhere among the peasants of Ireland a firm belief that the House of Commons did not wish to do them justice. They believed that the object of the English Government was, in truth, to drive them into the sea. He could not disguise the fact that that was the prevailing impression amongst the Irish tenants. However he might condemn it, however absurd he knew it to be, yet they would never overcome that impression until the House of Commons rose to the occasion, and by Acts of Parliament and by deeds proved to them that it was false. They had often read in the papers during the past few months a wish that a certain gentleman who was called Chinese Gordon, who had been celebrated for pacifying the centre of Africa, should be sent to Ireland for the purpose of administering the law there. Well, Chinese Gordon went to Ireland, and the man who was sent to curse remained to bless. The man that was sent there with the idea that he would see nothing but a disorderly crowd of savages wrote a letter to he Times, in which he stated that in all his wanderings he had never seen people so wretched, so ill-clothed, so ill-housed, so ill-fed as many of the Irish peasants. He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) had himself told the House how, for months and months in every year, a large portion of their fellow-subjects depended for their sustenance upon boiled seaweed, sprinkled with raw Indian meal. That was not the case in periods of famine alone. It was habitual, and they hardly knew a better diet. What were they going to do with these people? Were they going, because through bad influence and advice they had committed outrages in very considerable numbers—["No, no!"]—he would not dispute the question is hon. Friends opposite; but he confessed that he thought the number of outrages committed was considerable. It was an undoubted fact that for the purpose of intimidation things had been done which were entirely foreign to the Irish character. It was, also, an undoubted fact that in a great number of parishes in Ireland there was a secret organization under the auspices of the Land League. ["No, no!"] [Mr. PARNELL: The organization of the Land League is not secret.] He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) was glad to hear that the organization was not secret; but he would tell hon. Members what he meant by secret. He knew several instances in which influence was exercised upon tenants in the same manner as upon the tenants of Colonel King-Harman the other day. He knew instances of tenants who had gone to pay their rents, but who had been met by someone deputed by the Land League who advised them not to pay. Such were the proceedings to which he applied the term secrecy. He believed that in most parishes in Ireland the people had been told, not as had been publicly stated to pay Griffith's valuation, but not to pay any rent at all. He knew himself that the tenants believed that that was what they should do, and he knew also that at that moment there were families of landlords in Ireland as well educated and respectable as any person sitting in that House, who hardly knew where to look for their daily bread. The banks, as had been stated, might well be overflowing with deposits, when according to the hon. Member (Mr. Parnell), £5,000,000 were kept from certain persons who, in common honesty, ought to get at least some of it. That was done under the advice of responsible Members of that House. Anyone who listened to the speech of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), who was at the head of this association, and contrasted it with advice which he had been giving to the people of Ireland day after day, would have believed that they were not listening to the same person. When he saw the hon. Member coming into the House, and when he knew what he had said out of it, he felt inclined to say to him—"Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee, thou art translated." The hon. Member had been advising the unfortunate people that if they stuck fast, not only to the land, but to the bountiful harvest which Almighty God had given them, they would eventually achieve for themselves the possession of that property which at present, at any rate, was shared with somebody else. He had not the slightest objection. On the contrary, he wished that the Irish people should become in much larger numbers owners of their holdings. He wished the evils of land tenure to be put an end to; but what he complained of was that those things which the late Isaac Butt and his Colleagues as well as the Bishops and priests of Ireland recommended for the achievement of Land Reform were being frustrated by the conduct of hon. Members of the House. He had seen himself the change that had taken place in the feelings of the English and Scotch people towards Ireland within the past six or eight months; that change was the substitution of a very bitter feeling for the benevolent sentiments prevalent eight months ago. But he appealed to hon. Members not to permit the Irish people to be judged by the words of those who had recently been their mouthpieces. The Irish people were not ungrateful; and he believed that if the right hon. Gentleman at the head of Her Majesty's Government would rise to the height of the occasion, and would produce for the Irish people a charter of their liberties, in the shape of giving them fixity of tenure in their homes, this present agitation would at once subside. He did not believe in the power even of hon. Members opposite or of the Land League to make the Irish people dishonest. He believed they would rise in the future, as they had in the past, to the conception that there was something higher than the daily bread which they ate. They would remember that they had to account not only to their fellow-man, but to God who created them. The greatest boast of the Irish people during ages of persecution had been a firm belief in a happier future and a happier home hereafter than they had been permitted to enjoy here. The Government was about to deprive them of that hope, because they would deprive them of their self-respect, and when they deprived them of their self-respect they deprived them of that alone which made misery endurable. Before he concluded he was anxious to read to the House a letter which he had received that morning, because it was, perhaps, well that they should see themselves as others saw them. It was from a distinguished man who lived in this country for a great many years, who followed the course of events with unfailing interest; and perhaps the House would be interested in his words when he mentioned that he fought at the battle of Leipsic. This was what he said—

"I was very sorry to read the account of the rebellion of the Boors in your South African Colonies, which, together with the very precarious state of Ireland, will embarrass your statesmen not a little, particularly when America begins to meddle in Irish affairs; and should Oriental matters again provoke a conflict, England would be condemned to resignment, and allow Russia to regain the mastership, not only in Europe, but in Asia. I am, therefore, of opinion that under the present circumstances it would be better that your Ministers in power would rather think of appeasing the Irish people than of crushing them, which will be hard work, particularly if the United States should assist the Irish, whilst no European State would sympathize with England, and Russia would rejoice at her powerless condition. The whole of the civilized world is of opinion that the deplorable state of Ireland is the fruit of English misgovernment, from the first beginning of the subjugation of Ireland, and it is no easy matter to resist public opinion, particularly when nothing more than the interests of power and individual advantages are at stake."

He invited the House to take these words to heart and to inquire as to their truth. At the present moment Ireland was in a state of almost unparalleled excitement, and was the weakness of the Empire. It was not the power of hon. Members who wished to separate the two countries—and there were such Members—it was not their power that brought the country to its present condition; but it was the rooted belief of the Irish people that Parliament cared not for them. He appealed to the House not to pass Coercion Acts hastily; but rather to insist that the Ministry should bring forward its project of Land Reform, should make the homes of the Irish people worth living in, should make the lives of the Irish people less miserable than they had been hitherto, and should endeavour by one supreme effort to knit together all those who looked for the fruition of their hopes to the Constitutional action of that House.

said, that the hon. Member who had just sat down had presented to the House a formidable indictment against the Government, and had also given them some lessons in law and agriculture, which the Government would certainly lay to heart—but only, he feared, for the purpose of avoiding them. The hon. Member was of opinion that the Government had committed a gigantic blunder in voting a fresh subsidy to the Irish landlords; but, as the House knew, the Government in this matter had merely fulfilled an honourable engagement entered into by their Predecessors. The next count in the hon. Member's indictment was that the Land Commission was a great blunder. Was it, he asked, quite respectful on the part of the hon. Member to disparage the result of the labours of the Commission before the appearance of its Report? When the Report appeared they would be in a condition to consider whether the Commission was a competent one; but surely not till then.

complained that the hon. and learned Member imputed to him words which he never used. What he said was that it was a great blunder not to add a tenant farmer to the Commission.

replied that the question whether the omission of a tenant farmer amounted to a blunder could not well be decided before the publication of the Report. The hon. Member also blamed the Government for not having sufficiently supported the Constabulary in the difficult performance of their duties; but the hon. Member had not given, and could not give, a single instance of the kind, and, indeed, the contrary was the fact. The report of the officer at the head of the Constabulary showed that immediately upon the expiration of the Peace Preservation Act the Constabulary was recruited to its full strength. Shortly afterwards the officer to whom he had referred went to the county represented by the hon. Member—Galway—and increased the mounted force, whose duty it was to patrol by night, by 21 additional men; and he increased also the force of the foot police to, he believed, 309, and that was for the purpose of enabling the force to patrol the country by night as well as by day. This they did with so much energy and zeal that the men suffered considerably from their labours. The hon. Gentleman had said that the police were at fault because they did not suppress night meetings; but he (the Solicitor General for Ireland) had never heard of those night meetings until that evening. He wished to know if they had arrived at a state of government in which the Constabulary could walk into every house without any authority because they imagined night meetings were going on? He was a firm supporter of law and order; but he would be the last man to ask the police to do that which neither law nor order called for. It had also been said by the hon. Member for Galway that the police had allowed the people to procure arms; and on that question he could only say that the police had simply permitted the people to do that which they were clearly entitled to do under the law. The duties of the police were to preserve peace and order; and when they did that to the best of their ability they discharged their duty. He did not think that several of the lessons which had been propounded by the hon. Member would be much appreciated in the present position of the case; nor was he of opinion that the House would see the force of the hon. Member's observation that in Galway, or on the border of it, near to which Mr. Boycott's farm was situate, "turnips were reaped with Cavalry sabres." In the first place, turnips were not "reaped," either in Galway or elsewhere, and certainly Cavalry sabres were not known as implements of husbandry. In the last count of his indictment the hon. Member for Galway made a good-humoured but, at the same time, severe attack upon the Office with which he (the Solicitor General for Ireland) was connected—namely, that which had charge of the administration of the law, on the ground that they did not seem to know that there was such an Act as the Trades' Union Act. All he could say was that the Act, so far as he was cognizant, was known to every Irish Member, and especially to such as happened to be in the Commission of the Peace—a position which, he supposed, was occupied by the hon. Member for Galway. The text-book of the Irish magistracy ( Humphrey's Justice of the Peace ), a volume which was easily and cheaply obtainable, clearly and accurately analyzed the Act, and set forth directions for its enforcement, so that if there had been any default in such enforcement in the neighbourhood of Kylemore, it lay at the door of the magistrates for the county of Galway. Having disposed of the charges which had been made against the Government by the hon. Member, he wished to invite the attention of the House, after the somewhat discursive debate which had taken place, to the very serious question now before the Parliament and the country. He had on the previous night listened with great attention to the speech of the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill); but, in saying that, he must also express his regret that the noble Lord should have treated a great question, involving the destinies of Ireland, with the levity which he displayed. The hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), with the ability which had marked him out, in Homeric phrase, as a leader of men, an ability which had been frequently recognized in Parliament, had asked the House to consider an Amendment to the Gracious Speech from the Throne affirming that—

"We humbly assure Her Majesty that we are convinced that the peace and tranquillity of Ireland cannot be promoted by suspending any of the constitutional rights of the Irish people."

That Amendment assumed that peace and tranquillity at present existed in Ireland, and it was on this point that he must join issue with the hon. Mem- ber. The passage in the Queen's Speech upon which the Amendment was moved was in the following words:—

"Proposals will be immediately submitted to you for intrusting me with additional powers necessary, in my judgment, not only for the vindication of order and public law, but likewise to secure on behalf of my subjects protection for life and property and personal liberty of action."

The hon. Member for the City of Cork translated these words into an intention to suspend the Constitutional rights of the Irish people; but he had yet to learn that if peace and tranquillity did not prevail in Ireland it could be any suspension of the Constitutional rights of the people to secure to them "protection for life and property and personal liberty of action." As it appeared to him, it was useless to cry "peace" when there was no peace, or to beg the question. It might, indeed, be enough for him to know that Ireland was deeply agitated, without inquiring as to the particular body or association of men to which such agitation was due: to quote the words of an eloquent English Judge, "when bitter waters are flowing it is not necessary to look for the sources from which they spring." But it was necessary in this case to go to the bottom of the movement. The movement to which he referred had as its object the disintegration of Her Majesty's Empire; and he would refer to facts in support of this position, instead of being content with loose and general statements. In January, 1879, there appeared in a Dublin paper a remarkable letter, which produced a great sensation at the time, from a person named John Devoy, whose boast it was that he had pleaded guilty to a charge of treason-felony in 1867, had been sentenced to penal servitude, and, after serving part of his time, was discharged and went to America. The letter was dated from New York, and was headed "Manifesto of the Council of the I. R. B." Those cabalistic words, as was well known in Ireland, meant the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Of course, at that time the Irish National Land League had no existence whatever under that name. [Mr. PARNELL: What is the date of the letter?] It was dated the 11th of December, 1878, and was published in The Nation on the 4th of January, 1879, with the announcement that it had been addressed to The Free- man's Journal. At the outset of that document, Mr. Devoy wrote—

"The question whether the Advanced Irish National Party—the Party of separation—should continue the policy of isolation from the public life of the country which was inaugurated some 20 years ago by James Stephens and his associates, or return to older methods—methods as old, at least, as the days of the United Irishmen—is agitating the minds of Irish Nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic just now. The object aimed at by the Advanced National Party—the recovery of Ireland's national independence, and the severance of all political connection with England—is one that would require the utmost efforts and the greatest sacrifices on the part of the whole Irish people."

Mr. Devoy then went on to show how and why the Repealers and Nationalists had failed, and went on to write—

"As the battle of Irish freedom must be fought outside Parliament, and as Home Rulers, Repealers, and Nationalists all call the form of autonomy they desire self-government, there should be nothing to prevent them agreeing on a common platform."

Now, what was Mr. Devoy's idea of this common platform? He proceeded—

"No Party or combination of Parties in Ireland can ever hope to win the support of the majority of the people except it honestly proposes a radical reform of the land system. No matter what may be said in favour of individual landlords, the whole system was founded on robbery and fraud, and has been perpetuated by cruelty, injustice, extortion, and hatred of the people."

He prayed the attention of the House to the following passage, as he intended to show the similarity of the language with that of speeches subsequently delivered:—

"Let the Irish landlords be given a last chance of settling the Irish Land Question amicably in this manner, or wait for a solution in which they shall have no part."

At the time this letter was published the Conservative Government was in the plenitude of its power, and must have been perfectly aware of the letter, which created great excitement in Ireland; but no notice was taken of it. That letter was followed by a meeting held at Irish-town, near Claremorris, in the county of Mayo, in April, 1879, which was celebrated in the annals of the Land League, because there that body originated, although not under that name. The Nation of the 3rd of May, describing the meeting, stated that—

"One of the greatest demonstrations ever witnessed in the West of Ireland took place on Sunday last. The object of the meeting was to advocate the protection of the small tenant farmers against the iniquitous extortions of some landlords in that and other localities, and to demand an abatement of the present rent in proportion to the great reduction that has taken place in the value of produce, stock, &c., within the last few years, and which has placed several thousand tenant farmers indebted to a degree that they cannot till their lands, pay their rents, or support their families. Since the days of O'Connell a larger public demonstration has not been witnessed. About 1 o'clock the monster procession started from Claremorris, headed by several thousand men on foot—the men of each district wearing a laurel loaf or green ribbon in hat or coat to distinguish the several contingents. At 11 o'clock a monster contingent of tenant farmers on horseback drew up in front of Hughes's Hotel, showing discipline and order that a Cavalry regiment might feel proud of. They were led on in sections, each having a marshal, who kept his troops well in hand."

The preamble to the resolution passed at that meeting was in the following terms:—

"Whereas the social condition of the Irish people having been reduced, through their subjection to England and its coercive legislation, to a state below that of any civilized country in the world, and whereas the mouthpiece of English public opinion, when speaking of Constitutional misgovernment in late years, having declared that' Government should be for the good of the governed, and that, whatever rules wilfully and persistently postpone the good of their subjects, either in the interests of foreign States, or to assist theories of religion or politics, such rules have thereby forfeited all claim to allegiance'—be it therefore resolved," &c.

Again the House would recognize the features of Mr. Devoy's letter. Well, a speaker at that meeting made this statement—

"I believe it is not on the floor of the English House of Commons, but on the Irish soil, that the real struggle for Irish independence must be fought."

And another speaker, who was very influential with the people of Ireland said—

"The people are the power. Government law, and order are but the slaves of the people for it is from the people as a whole or as a majority they derive their power."

These things took place when the late Government were in Office, and showed the way in which the public mind was being prepared for what soon afterwards took place. Another meeting was held about the same time at Westport, at which it was said that "green banners bearing such mottoes as 'The Land for the People,' 'Down with the Land Robbers,' and 'Ireland for the Irish,' were scattered here and there above the people's heads, and the wearing of green ribbons and rosettes was very general." The hon. Member for the City of Cork spoke at the meeting; and the hon. Gentleman, as he always did, used measured words and deliberate language, and openly and frankly stated what he intended. He said—

"Now, what must we do in order to induce, he landlords to see the position? You must show the landlords that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homesteads and lands."

The meaning of that exhortation was explained by the sentence which fol—lowed—

"You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed, as you were dispossessed in 1847. You must not allow your small holdings to be turned into large ones."

That sentence, uttered to a sympathetic and excitable audience, might be imagined to have created no inconsiderable effect. Now, at that time the public Press had taken up the movement, which was spreading, probably with the view of calling the attention of the Government to it. In The Nation, published in the month of June, he found this passage—

"The agitation for a reduction of rents was marked on Sunday last by a meeting in Westport, which has created widespread attention. As will be seen from a report which we publish in another column, it was very largely attended, the resolutions passed at it were 'strong,' and the speeches were more than usually outspoken. Mr. Parnell's address, especially, seems to have caused considerable excitement in landlord circles, his advice to the tenants to keep a grip of their holdings being deemed to mean something dreadful."

The meetings went on cheerily and merrily, and gathered strength as they went, and in the following month this was the state of affairs and the view that was taken of it in Ireland; and yet he failed to find any action adopted by the then Government. In The Nation of the 25th of June, 1879, he found this passage—

"Somewhat of a 'sensation' has been created throughout the country by the startling language which has been used at the recent meetings of tenant farmers in the West of Ireland. It certainly is something new to find large numbers of that class pledging themselves in open meeting to make common cause and stand together as one man in resistance to any attempted evictions for non-payment of an impossible rent."

That was subsequently defined as being any rent which the tenant did not find it convenient to pay. In that state of things, following Mr. Devoy's outline and filling it in, the seed having been sown and the soil congenial, the crop had grown, and now was the time for the land agitation to be turned into the Land League. He would pass over the meetings which were held during the intervening months; but in the month of October, 1879, the hon. Member for the City of Cork issued a Circular convening a meeting in Dublin—

"To form a central body in connection with the present land agitation," and "for the union on a common platform of the different sections of the people of Ireland,"

for the purpose of the disintegration of the Empire.

There was nothing in the Circular about the disintegration of the Empire.

replied, that the hon. Member was certainly right in saying that there was nothing in the Circular about the disintegration of the Empire. That was the meaning of the words used by Mr. Devoy, whose original plan had been adopted. The land agitation was to consolidate the Party and to disintegrate the Queen's Empire. Well, the Association took a new title, and was thus spoken of on the occasion by the Press—

"No better work for Ireland has been done for a considerable time than was accomplished in Dublin on Tuesday last, when 'The Irish National Land League' was founded. An organized central body was needed to give sustainment to the present land movement. That system is a vile oppression, a blight, and a curse to these countries; but it is in Ireland especially that its evil effects are felt. It plunders, enslaves, and tortures the masses of the people, and is incompatible with their peace and their prosperity. It tends to degrade their very souls. Let them steadily, resolutely, and liberally support the operations of the Irish National Land League, and the day of their emancipation from a hateful and ruinous tyranny is not far distant."

Up to that time the late Government never awoke to the situation, and the agitation was still carried on. On the 15th of the same month—October—a meeting was held, which was thus spoken of in The Nation —

"Last Sunday the West again spoke out on the Land Question. Meetings in furtherance of the and agitation were held in Corofin, county Galway, and in Kilmaine, county Mayo. In the former place the Rev. Father M'Donagh, P. P., and Mr. Davitt were the principal speakers; in the latter Mr. Daly, of Castlebar, and Mr. Louden, of Westport. We need not indicate he character of the speeches or resolutions; sufficient to say that they echoed the cry which has now been ringing throughout the land for he last six months. It is needless to say that the patriotic feeling of the people found expression also in the display of national emblems and of banners bearing patriotic mottoes,"

—he thought he heard hon. Members opposite, in the course of the debate, suggest that the Land League was not born until after the present Government took Office. The article went on—

"While pikemen and horsemen, now invariable features of Western demonstrations, occupied conspicuous positions."

A Government reporter attended that meeting. The Government at last appeared not to be asleep. The noble Lord the Member for Woodstock reproached the present Government for being so absolutely tradesmanlike as to send reporters to meetings; and yet they were only doing what the great Party which at that time guided the destinies of the nation had done in this respect. Then he found this passage—

"At Corofin the Government were represented, as usual, by a detective reporter, who was the occasion of a rather humorous incident at the close of the proceedings. We refer to the fact that the Rev. Father M'Donagh, Mr. Davitt, and another gentleman mystified him considerably by addressing the assembled thousands in Irish."

At length the Government took action, and their successors were reproached with abandoning their prosecutions. But the fact was that there never could have been any real intention on the part of the late Government to carry them on. The Nation thus spoke of the prosecutions—

"After stealthily watching the progress of the land movement for some months, after having had their spies in every crowd and their reporters on every platform, noting every look and every word of the men who took a leading part in the proceedings, the Government have made their spring, and on whom?"

The hon. Member for Cork City never had a greater triumph. He had set the Government at defiance, he had organized the agitation, and they swooped down on some obscure individuals.

"Not on Mr. Parnell, the central figure of the whole movement; not on any of the brave, hearted priests who spoke out on those occasions in the interest of their imperilled flocks. Oh, no; the courage of our rulers was not equal to such a strain; a collision with these gentlemen they would not venture on. They have made a capture of men supposed to be somewhat less formidable. The land meetings, we trust, will go on. Now, more than ever, is there need of them."

Such was the effect of the prosecutions; and the land meetings went on accordingly. But before he referred further to those prosecutions he would draw the attention of the House to another point. The present Government had been charged with inaction, although they had done what the late Government did not attempt to do. He would not say that the charge had now been made by the Members of the late Government who had spoken in the debate, for he must recognize the generosity of the speeches which had been made, and particularly that of the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin the late Attorney General for Ireland; but the charge had been made by some Members of the Party. The late Government did not attempt to interfere with the remarkable Mayo Abbey meeting. It was convened by placards for a fortnight; its object was to denounce individuals; the numbers convened were perilous to the public safety, and yet it was allowed to take place. The Irish Times said—

"The above meeting, which had been placarded all over the county Mayo for the past fortnight, was held yesterday at Mayo Abbey, which is situate about three-and-a-half miles from Balla. The primary object of the meeting, as the placards concerning it declared, was 'to open the eyes of Irishmen to the rascally and traitorous conduct of two self-seeking creatures who, contrary to the unanimously expressed wish of the Irish nation, have grabbed at two farms that have been thrown up to the landlady on her refusal to give a reduction.' The particulars of the case, as far as could be ascertained, are these:—Mr. P. King, Claremorris, who is one of the most extensive farmers in Mayo, rented the above-mentioned two farms from a lady named Mrs. Rutledge Fair. Last November Mr. King, being refused any reduction in the rent he had been paying for them, threw them up. Not more than a week had elapsed after Mr. King's resignation of the farms when they were taken by new tenants, at, it is said, a much higher price than Mr. King had been paying for them. To express disapproval of the conduct of these two men was the object of yesterday's meeting."

The way in which it was done was this—

"Preparatory to the commencement of the speechmaking all the people, horsemen, and footmen, that were present at the meeting, entered one of the fields of one of the farms above referred to, and made a circuit of it, the footmen marching four abreast, and the horsemen two deep. During all this time the air was rent with groaning and hissing for 'the men who took the lands.' The Government reporter, Mr. Stringer, was present, and was a spectator of all the manuœvring. These preliminaries over, the men left the field, and the meeting proper commenced."

The resolution passed was as follows:—

"Whereas, a rack-rent being an unjust tax upon the industry of the tenant farmer, its imposition should be opposed as being tantamount to a legalized robbery on the part of whoever attempts to inflict it; and whereas rack-renting has its principal inducement and chief support in the competition for holdings on the part of the tenant farmers, and the facility with which landlords can dispose of the land of evicted tenants, be it resolved that any person offering a higher rent for land or holdings than paid by previous occupiers, or any party renting or occupying a farm from which another has been evicted for non-payment of excessive rent, or which has been surrendered on grounds of unfair rent, should be looked upon as an enemy to the best interests and social well-being of the people of Ireland, and considered and shunned as a moral leper with whom no tenant farmer or lover of his country's welfare should deal, associate, or hold communication.' (Loud and prolonged applause)."

Did the speaker know what a leper was? If he had travelled in the East he would have known that the most loathsome animal that crawled had a better existence than the outcast leper. The Government took no action, and he was not now censuring them; but he blamed their Party for looking on at all that was going forward before the present Government came into Office, and then charging the present Government with inaction on their part. The Nation of the 7th of February said—

"The Land League is rapidly extending its ramifications through the country. We report to-day the formation of four or five new branches in various parts of the West and South. That there is ample work to be done for all such bodies goes without saying. They are among the best agencies for the distribution of relief; and acts of landlord injustice and oppression, which they are the most competent to expose and denounce, are everywhere abundant. Above all, they can do excellent service in collecting statistics of rack-renting."

And the same paper of the 14th of February announced the formation of 20 branches of the League. Now, reverting to the prosecutions instituted by the late Government, and which had been treated by the Press so contemptuously as he had stated, there could not have been any real intention of following them up. They were commenced in the ordinary way by arresting the defendants, and taking them before a magistrate and swearing informations. A distinguished Government official was sent down to proceed against them, and then the proceedings became a screaming farce in a Court of Justice. When at length the prisoners were committed for trial application was made to remove the indictment to the Court of Queen's Bench. There was nothing to have prevented that being done forthwith; but although the indictment was found on the 11th of December, it was not returned to the Court of Queen's Bench until the 9th of January, a delay of nearly a month. The next step was to issue process to appear, which was issued on the 12th of January; the defendants appeared on the 16th of January, but the usual rule to plead was not served on them till the 31st of that month. At that time there were not two more able lawyers than the then Attorney General and Solicitor General for Ireland, and if they had had instructions to proceed it could hardly have been expected that they would not have moved more rapidly than they had done in the matter. On the 3rd of February the traversers moved for a copy of the indictment, which might in courtesy have been given to them with the rule to plead, and, as they could not be asked to plead before they knew the charges against them, the time for them to plead was extended until they were furnished with copies of the indictment; that was not done until the 21st, and on the 27th they pleaded Not Guilty, and there the record ended. Delay at every step—and in the face of such proceedings he would ask whether there could have been any bonâ fide intention on the part of the Government to prosecute? If there had been, Mr. Parnell must have been included; but the indictment was so framed as to exclude him, and, instead of that, the engine of a State prosecution had been put into operation against obscure individuals. When that was the heritage to which the present Government succeeded, was it to be wondered at that they were advised that these proceedings were not calculated to vindicate the law, or to induce the Irish people to think there was much force in such an administration of justice? Now as to meetings. Did the House know how many meetings had been held before the present Government succeeded to power? Two hundred and three of such meetings had taken place, and the Irish newspapers had announced that nothing could extinguish the land agitation. Taking that state of things into account, what could the present Government do? Were they to attempt to gag free speech; to attempt to put down the right of free discussion? The great Liberal Party had written too many chapters of freedom in the history of the world to permit the Government to do such a thing. The present Government felt bound to take a distinction which the previous Government did not take. They found it necessary to interfere when violence or terror was the object or effect of the meeting; but they did not think it necessary where there was no violence and no terror. Where there was nothing but discussion, even although it might be unlawful, they did not interfere to stop the meeting. A meeting might be unlawful, and every person who attended and took part in it might beliable to be prosecuted and punished, and yet the Government of the day could not interfere to stop it; but a meeting might also, under certain conditions, be an unlawful assembly, so that the moment it was so it would be the duty of the Government to interfere. If they knew beforehand that it involved in any way the elements of violence or terror—if they were reasonably satisfied of that—and a prudent Administration would always take care to have the highest sanction for their action—then it would be the duty of the Government to prohibit it, and cases of that kind had occurred. The noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill) last night made a good-humoured attack on the Government in reference to a Circular which he read, dated the 21st of September, 1880, and really complained that the police did their duty, and nothing more than their duty, and that the Government did not put forward the police where it was unnecessary, either to overawe a meeting or invite collision. He could not see what great objection there could be in the police, who were the servants, not the masters, of the public, not being brought into a position where they might be forced into unnecessary collision. The noble Lord referred with some degree of ridicule to the directions in this Circular. The first instruction was that—

"If the meeting is held in the neighbourhood of a police barrack the men are to be confined therein, and no armed men are to be permitted to appear during the time the meeting is being held, except in case of actual necessity."

He failed to see in what respect that was an erroneous direction to be given to the police, who were the servants of the public. The noble Lord seemed to imply that directions had been issued from Dublin Castle that the police should provoke a collision with the mob.

I said nothing of the kind.

The noble Lord was reported to have said—he read from The Times; but the report in The Times might be incorrect. The noble Lord said—

"The Government having directed the police not to come into collision with the mob had proceeded to censure them in the Circular of December for not having come into collision with the mob."

That is correct.

The noble Lord said he had left the Circular at home in which the police were so censured; he undertook to produce it in half-an-hour; but it was not produced. The noble Lord inferred that the police were directed to come into collision with the mob, because, he said, they were censured for not doing so.

The Circular was dated the 21st of December, and the police were told that the fact of their allowing armed bodies of men to go about the country at night, uninterfered with by the police, caused much discredit to attach to the force.

The noble Lord was now referring to the supposed inaction of the police in not patrolling the district. That subject very early attracted the attention of the Government, and it appeared from official Returns that some of the police were in hospital from overwork, owing to the difficulty of penetrating into districts all but impassable by day, and hardly practicable by night. The sum of the instructions to the police were to protect the persons and property of Her Majesty's subjects, and not to interfere with peaceable meetings. The hon. and learned Member for Dundalk (Mr. C. Russell) had made some charges against the Government, on which he would say a very few words. The hon. and learned Member charged the Government with acting on information derived from understrappers. The hon. and learned Member appeared to have some peculiar means of information, for he undertook to discuss the details of the Land Act and the forthcoming Bill for the better protection of life and property, with the outline of which the House was ignorant. From what source he derived that knowledge he did not know. The Government had not acted on the information of understrappers, but on information of the highest character—on sworn information of credible persons—and when there was time care was taken to verify it also by personal inquiries. He would ask, could the Government do more than that? The hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) asked a Question yesterday, which he should have thought an hon. and learned Member would not have repeated, with reference to proceedings pending before the magistrates. But the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk did so, and questioned the accuracy of the reply he had given. The magistrates, he said, had refused bail by the authority of the Chief Secretary. The fact was that the magistrates had not refused bail, nor was the Chief Secretary in Ireland at the time. He had left Ireland when the transaction occurred. The magistrates had not arrived at the point when the question of bail could be considered. The case was at hearing. The accused were not yet committed for trial. If that event occurred the question of bail would arise; and he (the Solicitor General for Ireland) had said the matter might be referred to a Judge of the Queen's Bench. The hon. and learned Member for Dundalk also read a letter of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, saying it condemned what he called coercion; but he could not see that his proposition was established by that letter, which did not appear to mention the matter at all the hon. Member for the City of Cork contended that what Her Majesty in Her Gracious Speech declared necessary for the vindication of law and order and the protection of life and property was not necessary on two grounds—the one was that the outrages had been manufactured, and the second that the Land League had other objects in view. The hon. Member went on to state that the report in The Times was not correct.

The report was not correct as regards that particular. In other respects the report in The Times is perfectly accurate.

The hon. Member for the City of Cork said the Land League, which took its present shape some 14 or 15 months ago, had in view three objects—(1) to prevent rackrenting; (2) to enable tenants to become owners of their farms by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years; and (3) to facilitate the working of the "Bright Clauses" of the Land Act. Such being the objects of the Land League, as printed and announced in the House of Commons, see how they were carried out in practice. In May, 1880, there was a meeting held at Irishtown to commemorate the anniversary of the meeting held at the same place in April, 1879. It was what was called a peaceable meeting. There were two banners on the platform, on one was emblazoned a round tower and a wolf dog, with the words, "Defend your Birthrights." The other banner had a pike-head, with the words, "Down with Land Bobbers." At that meeting was proclaimed what had been called the new gospel for Ireland. One member of the League said—

"In the past you have been the weaker party. The landlords had the Government with them. Now you have triumphed both over the landlords and the Government, and by your action you have made the landlords the weaker party. Then, in the name of reason, in the name of justice, and of common sense, let the landlords go to the wall."

And the hon. Member for Cork City (Mr. Parnell), after referring to the poverty and want of the winter of 1879, said—

"If, under these circumstances, with this dark prospect before you, you had the courage and determination to follow our advice and stand by your rights, surely you will now, when the goal is almost in sight, be as brave as you were 12 months ago. Surely you will renew the pledge you made 12 months ago on these historic plains—that you will keep a firm grip of your holdings, that you will refuse to pay any unjust rent, and that you will stand by this struggle until the lands have passed into the possession of the people. The Irish National Land League was then a struggling institution; our people were then starving. To-day the National Land League is known all over the world."

Such was the state of things in Ireland when the present Government succeeded to Office. From the way in which the case had been presented to that House and elsewhere, it would appear as if this was a new agitation which sprang into existence immediately when the present Government came into Office. He thought he had shown, at all events, what was the heritage transmitted to the present Government. It was alleged that no effort was made by them to interfere with the movement, or to preserve life and property. But it should be remembered that the Government had to deal with the state of things which they found existing on taking Office; and were they to blame for what they had done? If the Government had not trenched on the rights of free discussion, was that a matter for censure of a Liberal Government? If they had protected life and property, under circumstances in which violence was apprehended, were they to be blamed for taking that care? If they had not followed the course they had taken, at their doors would have lain the consequences. He would now quote a little more of the new gospel from the same source to show the teaching of the movement. Speaking at a meeting in Cork, on the 3rd of October, 1880, another speaker said—

"It is our part to teach the people of Ireland what their natural rights are with respect to the land of Ireland. We will have no tampering with landlordism. That institution, created for the purpose of maintaining English rule in Ireland, and in the interests of the few against the many, will have to fall."

In the same month of October this was the language used—

"What you have to do to put down eviction is this—to show the landlords that eviction won't pay, because the farm from which the tenant has been once evicted shall henceforth be left to the crows, for no man shall touch it."

In the same month of October the last speaker informed his audience what he considered was the duty of an honest man to society—

"I next call upon you to provide, first of all, for your wives and your children, as being those towards whom your first duty is due. When you have provided for them you can give back what you got from those men—those traders who, when you were in distress, furnished you with that which you required; and when you have done that—when you have secured that which is properly and justly your own—then you may think of the rents and the landlords. (Boos.) I tell you, if you can afford to pay the valuation, and no more, you ought to tender it. If you cannot pay sufficient to satisfy the landlord, after you have kept sufficient to secure you in your holdings, then I advise you to stick to your money. It is probable that if you pay what will not satisfy him, you will lose both money and land. Remember what I have already told you. Keep a firm grip of the land; and if you should be evicted, don't go away to America—stop in the neighbourhood of your own homes, watching the first opportunity of regaining possession."

What was the meaning to the mind of an excited audience of such language as—"Keep your money, stick to your lands, and if you are evicted stop near your farms and take possession again as soon as you can?" That meant, in language known to the law, "Take forcible possession." At a meeting in Galway this was the language used—

"I would not have taken off my coat and have gone to this work if I had not known that we were laying the foundation by this movement for the restoration of our national independence."

And the speaker went on to say that each tenant farmer, when he kept a grip of his holding, should feel that he was doing good to his neighbours at large, and that he was helping to break down British domination in Ireland. What did that mean? It meant dismemberment of the Empire. It was not enough to have a new gospel; that gospel had a glossary, and while the glossary and practice were taught to the people at the meetings the text was read to the House of Commons. The Land League did not confine its teaching to prose; it had also published some stirring ballads called Lays of the Land League, and when me excitement had passed away they might, like the Jacobite songs of old, form part of the literature of the time; but in the meantime they were dangerous. He would quote one stanza from one of the ballads—

"No! we shall leave untilled, unsown,

The lands, however fair,

From which an honest man was thrown

Upon the roadside bare;

As if a curse was on the spot

That saw such hateful deeds,

"We'll leave the empty house to rot,

The fields to choke with weeds.

"These are the things that shall be done,

So swears our banded host—

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Ghost."

Such was the teaching which the Land League scattered through Ireland. Now with regard to the results of this agitation. In the whole of Ireland, up to the 3rd of November, 1880, from the 1st of January of the same year, there were 73 cases only of every description of indictable agrarian crime in which the offenders had been convicted. He was not comparing now cases in which there had been convictions with cases in which there had been acquittals; 117 represented the entire of the tried agrarian cases in the whole of Ireland for 11 months in which there was no conviction. Out of 1,718 agrarian crimes 1,481 could never be traced to any individual. [Mr. BIGGAR: Hear, hear!] The catalogue of those crimes began with murder, and there were eight murders. ["Hear, hear!"] Eight murders, and some hon. Member cried "Hear, hear!" Was life so cheap in Ireland that they were able to arrive at the belief that killing was no murder? [ Cries of "What about England?"] He was speaking of Ireland, not of England. In England murder was detected, and not 30 per cent of the crimes committed in England were undetected, while in Ireland the proportion of detected crimes was not 5 per cent.

asked whether the hon. and learned Member referred solely to agrarian crime?

said, certainly, and that the statistics were in the hands of the hon. Member. Next he might mention the cases of incendiary fires and arson, which, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman the senior Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Plunket) had said, especially affected the homes of the poor, who were afraid to apply for compensation from the county under the Grand Jury law for loss by incendiary fires, for well they knew their own houses were nearly always thatched. He then passed to threatening letters and intimidating notices, of which there were 851. Hon. Members would observe the phrase he had used, by which he did not mean letters that might be written by any idiot and sent through the post; but in those figures were comprised such notices as a man might find upon his mutilated cattle, or upon the door of his homestead, notices slipped into his hand as he left the fair by some cloaked figure that could not be traced, or pushed under the door when his house was empty, or such a notice as the rude drawing of a coffin that would be left behind in a house after it had been stormed by a party of armed men. If such crime was not alarming, he did not know what actions could be so described. Under the head of intimidation he included such acts of violence as the forcible entry of a man's house in the middle of the night, and the compulsory administration of an oath to prevent the tenant from paying his rent, or threat to prevent him from doing so. And that was only one kind of intimidation. Mr. Justice Barry, a most genial and popular Judge, and one not likely to exaggerate the facts, was obliged to postpone a trial for murder at the City of Waterford Winter Assizes, because he was satisfied by affidavits that, owing to the influence of the Land League, jurors could not be found who could give the case a fair and impartial trial. In the next Province, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald had used expressions with reference to the Land League for which he had been much attacked in that House. That being so, he begged to defend the character of the Irish Bench. On that Bench were men distinguished for learning and integrity, and distinguished among them all was Mr. Justice Fitzgerald, both now on the Bench and formerly at the Bar. Now, when that learned Judge, under the sanction of his oath as Judge, and sitting alone to administer the law of the country, made a statement, the result of his own judicial experience, and referred to facts that had been brought to his own judicial notice, it was rather too much for any hon. Member to say that he did not believe him. The hon. Member for the City of Cork had appealed to him (the Solicitor General for Ireland) as to the integrity of Cork juries. He had for years practised before them, and their reputation in Ireland was that a City of Cork common jury was as good as a special jury in other parts of the country; but there stood the fact that, in the in- stance on which Mr. Justice Fitzgerald had commented, external influences had been too strong even for such a jury. And not only the juries, but the witnesses also, were intimidated. Over and over again it had been found impossible to induce witnesses to come to the table; and a most signal proof of intimidation was that they had denied in Court their statements in their previously sworn informations. He might fairly ask what was this agency that favoured the perpetration of crimes and shielded the offenders? At the end of last September, a wife was waiting for her husband, and children were watching for their father. They did not know that the cloaked shadow was standing before them, that Lord Mountmorres was lying murdered by the roadside. [ A laugh from below the Gangway. ] It might be an object of ridicule to some hon. Member; but he did not envy the feelings of those who ridiculed the widow and the orphans. One week after that murder, the following language was used at a Land League meeting in Gal way:—

"On this day week I had the great honour of attending a meeting at Clonbur. Well, when I arrived in Clonbur I had the pleasure of hearing that some great land robber was murdered or had shot himself. The Government of England were mourning because Mountmorres was shot. I do not approve murdering anyone; but I say the Government of England did not go into mourning when the people were starving."

The speech was not by a Member of the House.

Certainly not; and the hon. Member for the City of Galway was, he was sure, one of the last to countenance such language. He would like, however, to hear the opinion of hon. Gentlemen on a speech made by an hon. Member of the House, in which the following passage occurred:—

"We do not believe it is at all necessary to shoot a landlord, and we do not encourage it—on the contrary, we deprecate it; but, as I have said "before, we are not bound to go watching every poor fellow in the country that is driven to desperation. We are not going to watch and preach sermons to them. Let the men that drive other men to desperation take care of themselves. I must protest against the Archbishop saddling us with the responsibility of every assassination that takes place in the country. He has no more right to do it than anyone else has a right to do it. They speak of this country because one poor fellow named Mouutmorres was shot the other day. (Groans.) Well, I would not like to be the man that shot Lord Mountmorres at all. What we have and what the Land League has to try is to show you another road besides shooting these men, because they are not worth shooting."

It was not that it was criminal to take life, it was not the Gospel which our old-fashioned fathers and mothers taught. It was the new gospel—"Don't shoot the man'," and why? "Because he is not worth shooting!" In another part of the same speech he found a similar doctrine preached with reference to the landlords—

"In France, up to a few years ago, until the year 1793, they had the landlords there. Well, I suppose, a great many of you have heard of the French Revolution. The French people were a sensitive people, and they took a method of getting rid of their landlords that, unfortunately, we cannot take. No, my friends, we are not able at present to take that method. I wish we were. (Cheers.) I wish we were, and it is not here I would be to—day."

rose to Order. He wanted to know whether it was in Order to repeat here the speeches which had been made at the prosecution of traversers in the Four Courts at Dublin? Listening to the hon. and learned Gentleman, he could hardly believe he was sitting in Parliament at all. It was merely a repetition of the accusations brought forward by the Attorney General at the trial, and the case ought not to be tried twice over.

said, the speech he was referring to was not that of any of the traversers in the prosecution. He had endeavoured to avoid that, as far as possible, in every case except the one in which he declined to disclose the name to the hon. Member for Galway. This debate had been brought on by the traversers in the prosecution. Still he had avoided, as far as he could, mentioning the traversers, and had not mentioned names. As, however, this debate had been brought about by the traversers, they must take the consequences of it. This was the way in which the French peasantry treated their landlords, according to another speaker on another occasion and the teaching of the new gospel—

"The French peasantry offered their feudal landlords a fair compensation for the land. They did not accept it, and then the peasantry of France gave them the compensation they so richly deserved—a ropes-end at every crossing."

In the face of that, could the hon. Member for the City of Cork ask the House to believe that, because he had read out in that House what were called innocent resolutions, therefore this state of things was all imaginary and crime did not exist in Ireland? And was the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk (Mr. Charles Russell) so ignorant of the current literature and events of the day as to be able to assure the House that these meetings were perfectly innocent, perfectly legal, and perfectly harmless? He would ask hon. Members to draw the inference for themselves. There were at this moment in almost every part of Ireland, assemblies which went through all the forms of a Court. He had had in his hands one of the summonses, and he would give it to the House. It was addressed to a lady, and it ran as follows:—

"You are hereby informed that complaint has been made again at you respecting the treatment of your tenant at … and you are required to attend the meeting of the branch of the Land League to be held at … on [such a day], where you will receive an impartial hearing. If you fail or neglect to attend, the rules of the Land League will be put in force against you with the utmost rigour."

It was signed by the hon. secretary, and endorsed with the names of the president, the vice president, and the members of the committee who constituted the Court. Unfortunately, this summons was not brought to the notice of the authorities in time to enable them to take any effectual measures. [Mr. PARNELL: Where was this?] He must be excused from mentioning the place. The lady had fled from her property. In cases of this kind it was, of course, impossible to disclose names, places, and dates, but he had them all in his possession; and he asked the House to take the statements from him, as he dared not, and would not, allow the names and other particulars to be disclosed. He would now read the sentence of one of these Courts, in the case of a man who had a small farm, and who carried on a little business. He had been brought up in the old-fashioned notion that it was his duty to fulfil his obligations, and he had the audacity to pay his rent. Yes, in the month of December he had the dishonesty to pay the September rent, because he could afford to do it, and because his landlord could not do without it. He was summoned to the local Court, his offence tried, and here was the result. The offence with which he was charged was "paying his rent"—three words, nothing more. He was called in, and the sentence read to him. He was fined; but although he would not mention the amount, as it would disclose the circumstances, he might say that the man paid the money on the spot. He was, however, informed by a member of the Court that he had got off very easily, as he ought to have been fined in a much larger sum, and his business ought to have been suspended for a limited time. With these things going on all over the country, were they to be told that there was no intimidation crushing out all the energy and honesty of the country? He agreed with the hon. Member for the City of Cork that these were not the published resolutions of the Land League. If the resolutions of the Land League were carried out in their integrity as the hon. Member put them on paper, he would not pronounce judgment on them. On the contrary, he believed the liberties of this country had been won by free discussion; and if the members of the Land League confined themselves to discussion within the law the Government would forget its duty to the public and to the Crown if it ventured to interfere with them. The greatest Minister that ever held the reins of power, in vindicating the liberty of the subject with reference to general warrants, said that though a peasant lived in a straw-thatched cabin, which was entered by the elements from heaven, yet even the King himself—and that King was George III.—dared not cross its threshold except under the authority of the law; and certainly no Government would attempt to strain the law and to stifle public discussion. It was terrible, however, that in a Christian land, that under the Constitution of which they boasted, life should be rendered so insufferable as they found it in Ireland—that this man was to be cast out as a loathsome leper, that that man was every moment to carry his life in his hand; 153 persons in Ireland so held their lives at present. And then, again, there were 29 cases of mutilation of animals last month.

asked how many cases there were altogether?

remarked that, taking the total, there were not more than 70 cases.

Good Heavens! Had we come to this—that 70 cases of mutilation of animals constituted no crime? The dumb animals were mutilated because the behests of the Land League had not been obeyed, and because their owners had been honest enough to pay their rent.

How many cases have there been in England?

asked what had that to do with crime in Ireland? In England the cases were detected, and witnesses were not afraid to come forward and bear testimony. In England there were citizens who even arrested, and assisted in arresting, criminals, and who did not wait for the police, but who came forward of their own accord. He wished with all his heart he could support the Amendment, and believe that these outrages were a myth; but when he knew that what was called peace was but the prostration of fear, when he knew that what was called tranquillity was only the paralysis of terror, he felt it was time to ask some remedy for so terrible a state of things. He agreed with the hon. Member for Cork City that a policy of coercion was to be deprecated; but it was a policy of coercion and terrorism that was now ruling Ireland. Here was a specimen of the Land League teaching—

"Now, what are you to do to a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? ('Kill him,' and 'Shoot him,' were uttered by the crowd.) I think I heard somebody say,'Shoot him.' But I wish to point out to you a very much better way, a more Christian and a more charitable way, which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him—

"Shun" was suggested; but the reporter said the word was" show;" and it was indeed a much stronger word than "shun"—

"You must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop-counter, you must show him in the fair and in the marketplace, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he was a leper of old—you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed; and you may depend upon it if the population of a county in Ireland carry out this doctrine that there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men within the county, and to transgress your 'unwritten code of laws.'"

The "unwritten code of laws" of the Land League! Not their published resolutions—not the innocent statements put forward in that House—but their common law code of terror and coercion, of murder and mutilation, of threatening notices and nightly outrage. That was the code they governed by. It was to relieve the country from this frightful incubus, stifling everything that was good within it, and encouraging that which was evil and bad, that the Government measure would be directed. There was no coercion, as he understood it, in a law for protecting life and property against the wrong-doer. There was no coercion in a law which reserved to Her Majesty's subjects the right of free action within the limits of the law. As he understood it, a law merely to repress the wicked and the wrongdoer, and to enable the upright and the loyal and the law-abiding man to live in peace and quietness, was not coercion. They were not to imagine from the gloominess of the statements he had made that things were past remedy. He was old enough to recollect times as bad almost as these, when Ireland had suffered almost every misfortune from heaven and from man that was ever recorded in any book of imagination. She had been scourged by famine, stung by want, and maddened by despair; she had been the prey of adventurers; she had been betrayed by the sons whom she trusted; she had been pierced by the reed on which she had leant; and she had come out of it all. She had had times of peace and happiness, and emerged from disaster and trouble, when that which was good had been evoked by righteous laws, and that which was bad had been reproved and coerced by righteous laws—if that could be called coercion. In the midst of her present troubles it was not, he believed, beyond the power of that honourable House to—

"Minister to a mind diseas'd:

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;

Raze out the written troubles of the brain."

But, to do that, they must first—

"Cleanse the stuff'd besom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart."

Ireland called upon this honourable House to protect life and property, to restrain violence and injury, to enable honest men to act honestly, and to prevent dishonest men from acting dishonestly. On the other hand, she called upon this honourable House to amend this land law system, which had caused so much heartburning, and which they on both sides of the House wished for ever to set at rest by just and proper legislation. It was a great and noble Party on this side of the House—[ Derisive cheers from the Opposition ]—aye, he was not ashamed of his Party; it was a great and noble Party. Tell him of a chapter of freedom that was written in the history of the country, and he would tell them that in that chapter the Liberal Party had borne the principal part. On the other side of the House was a great and noble Party too. They inherited great traditions, and they had impressed their principles on great events. Then let them all take heart and act together, and, if they possibly could, let them bring peace to a distracted country, and let none hereafter be able to say that the Queen's writ did not run in Munster, and that an honest man could not live in Ireland.

said, the House was indebted to the hon. and learned Gentleman the Solicitor General for Ireland for diversifying, if not enlivening, the debate, by the speech he had just delivered—a speech which, if it had not been prepared for the Law Courts of Dublin, was from first to last more calculated to influence the jury now sitting before the tribunal in Dublin than the calm and deliberate judgment of the House of Commons. As a forensic effort, he considered it creditable; but it had altogether failed, as had previous speeches in the debate, to convince him that the coercive policy which Her Majesty's Government was about to recommend was founded upon justice, truth, and reason. The Prime Minister did not, of course, address himself to the justification of coercion, but rather to a defence of the general policy foreshadowed in Her Majesty's Speech. The Chief Secretary for Ireland did more directly address himself to the subject—matter of the Amendment; and whilst he did his best he, at all events, failed to convince him (Mr. M'Coan). The hon. Member for Galway (Mr. Mitchell Henry), he ventured to think, had taken a farewell of his constituents in the extraordinary speech he had addressed to the House—a speech which he should never have expected from one who had identified himself with Irish politics. He was pleased, however, to think that the hon. Member for Galway, though a nominal Home Ruler, was not an Irishman. He had listened to the speeches of the right hon. and learned Gentlemen the Members for the University of Dublin with a genuine feeling of admiration for their brilliancy and intellectual strength, but, at the same time, with a feeling also of sorrow and shame. He could not help deploring that two such distinguished Irishmen should, he would not say have prostituted, but have misused, their splendid faculties in order to traduce and vilify their native country. He had felt amused at the speech of the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill); but then his Lordship was a chartered libertine, who, with characteristic audacity, shrank from attacking no one. He was, however, more than amused when he heard that noble Lord speak so authoritatively on the state of affairs in Ireland in corroboration of what had been stated by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin, for the noble Lord's personal observation in Ireland had been a very limited one, extending only to a short visit which he made to a friend in the county of Kildare during the Recess; so that all he saw of the country was the view he was able to obtain out of the window of a railway carriage in his journey from Dublin to Athy. Of agrarian crime he could have seen none, for Kildare was as free as Middlesex from offences of that character. He was, however, more than compensated when he listened to the speech of the hon. Member for County Cork (Mr. Shaw), who had spoken with earnestness, knowledge, sound sense, and a thorough regard for truth, when he stated that the accounts of Irish crime which had been blazoned forth in the newspapers had been grossly exaggerated. From his own observation during a visit of two months spent in Wexford, Carlow, and Wicklow, he could confirm all that had been said by his hon. Friend, and he did so with the greatest assurance, inasmuch as having attended the quarter sessions in those counties he had heard the assistant barrister compliment the grand juries upon the peaceful conditions of those counties. The hon. and learned Member for Dundalk (Mr. Charles Russell) had borne similar testimony of equal value and authority. Listening to this debate, he (Mr. M'Coan) could not help feeling that the Government had entirely failed to prove the necessity for coercion, or, that if coercion were necessary, that the Bill they proposed to bring in was adequate to deal with it. The people of Ireland were bitterly disappointed at the announcement in Her Majesty's Speech that it was intended to ask Parliament for arbitrary powers. He had understood that an agreement had been entered into between the Government and the Irish Members last Session to the effect that if the latter would do their best to preserve peace and tranquillity in Ireland during the Recess, the former would not resort to coercion, but would bring in a large and comprehensive measure of justice to the Irish people. The Irish Members had performed their part of the contract; but the Government, urged on by the panic which prevailed among the Conservative Party, had instituted the State prosecutions now going on. These were a mistake and a blunder, which were sure to result in ignominious miscarriage; and he gathered from the speech of Mr. Shaw Lefevre at Reading, early in December, that even then Her Majesty's Government foresaw the defeat which awaits them in the Four Courts, and had made up their mind to have recourse to coercive legislation. He contended that the ordinary law of Ireland was amply sufficient to meet the state of things in that country. A Return of crimes up to the 1st January had been presented to the House, and there were no offences there recorded which were not fully covered by the Chief Secretary's first Circular to the Irish magistrates. If that were so, there could be no necessity for further legislation. But, even assuming that outrages were being committed, that only showed that the law was not being properly applied, either through the ignorance of the magistrates or the inefficiency of the police. The Returns for 11 months showed that there had been a total of 1,718 so-called agrarian offences in Ireland. Of that total of 1,718, eight, unhappily, were murders; but he ventured to remind the House that of those not more than two, or at most three, could be described as agrarian crimes, while the murders committed in England and Scotland during the same period could be counted by the dozen. He would be the last man in the world to speak without abhorrence of the spilling of the blood of any person, still more if the crime were committed in cold blood for any social purpose whatever. During the Recess he had occasion to address some public meetings in Ireland, and from first to last he had preached abstinence from crime of every sort. He had expressed his confidence that justice would be done to Ireland by Her Majesty's Government, and urged on his audiences that the worst course in their own interest the people could adopt would be to commit crime of any kind. In 11 months there had been assaults, not very aggravated, upon the police. There had also been assaults upon bailiffs and process-servers—incidents which had always been as common as rain showers in Ireland, and probably would be as common to the end. Of these 1,718 offences, some were for illegally cutting off the wool of sheep. That was put down as an agrarian "outrage," one of the grounds, forsooth, on which Her Majesty's Government asked Parliament to give them extra-Constitutional powers. But of the whole 1,718, more than half—namely, 851—consisted of what? Of those miserable threatening letters of which they had heard so much. He was not aware that a single outrage had resulted from the delivery of such letters. Written by cowards to frighten cowards, they broke no bones and drew no blood. He contended that they supplied no ground for putting every man's liberty at the discretion of the police; and that Irish Members would be justified in offering, by every means they could employ, the most strenuous opposition to any measure for suspending the Constitition of Ireland. Nothing that he could say in opposition to the principle of coercion would, he knew, have any effect on the House; but he could appeal to an authority who commanded the respect of every Member of the House. He found that so far back as 1866 a very eminent Member of that House, now sitting on the Treasury Bench, spoke on the subject of coercive legislation. He said that—

"Sixty-five years ago this country attempted to govern Ireland, and that the English and Irish people were told that if we once got rid of the Irish Parliament we should be stronger. Now, during those 65 years only three considerable measures were passed for Ireland. One was Catholic Emancipation; but that measure, so just, was only passed because the Chief Minister of the day, a great soldier, dreaded the danger of a civil war. Twice in his Parliamentary life measures for the suspension of the civil rights of the Irish people had been brought into Parliament and passed with extreme and unusual rapidity."

Yet the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Bright), who, 14 years ago made that speech, was a party to the present application for exceptional powers to coerce Ireland. The fact was an enigma which he could not pretend to solve—how the eminent public man, who, in 1866, spoke so strongly against coercive legislation, could reconcile it to his feelings and his conscience to assent now to what he then so vehemently condemned. In conclusion, he would earnestly appeal to the Prime Minister even now to consider the unhappy decision at which he had arrived, and, instead of bullets and buckshot, to give a just and a generous land reform to the Irish people, who would repay him with a rich measure of gratitude for conferring on them so great a boon. Dispensing with coercion, let him redress acknowledged grievances, and he would not only add another stone to the monument to his own great fame, but would promote the well-being and happiness of the Irish nation. It was because he felt that appeals made to the generous sentiments of the Prime Minister were not made in vain, that he earnestly urged on the right hon. Gentleman to make some large concession to right and justice. He might also appeal to a lower motive, and assure him that the concession would immensely facilitate the government of Ireland by his own Administration by securing the co-operation of the Irish Party in evoking out of the present disorder prosperity and obedience to the law. If, on the other hand, he unfortunately proceeded to carry out these coercive threats, he would do much to make Ireland ungovernable by any Administration whatever. Without at all intending to use the language of menace, he warned the right hon. Gentleman that if he persisted in suspending the liberties of the Irish people he would impose on their Representatives the very highest obligation not only to oppose his Administration, but to make Ireland ungovernable by any British Administration until justice was done. They would, indeed, sanction no approach to crime; but they would organize a passive resistance of the Irish people to English law which nothing could overcome. He entreated the Prime Minister, then, not to be carried away by the doubtful alliance now tendered to him by the Opposition, which was, in fact, the best argument against a policy of coercion, for the Party who offered him their alliance were the landlords, the very class which had brought Ireland to its present position. Let him rather conciliate the wavering loyalty of hon. Gentlemen below the Ministerial Gangway. If he did this, and met the Irish Representatives in a spirit of generous conciliation, the Irish problem might be soon and satisfactorily solved.

rose to address the House, when—

Notice taken that 40 Members were not present; House counted, and 40 Members being found present,

, resuming, said, he rose with embarrassment to explain the vote which he was about to give. He regretted extremely that he felt compelled to part from his allegiance to Her Majesty's Ministers, and he did so with a feeling of very profound regret. He gave the Government the fullest credit for an earnest desire to deal with the affairs of Ireland in a truly generous and satisfactory manner, and during the recent Recess he stated that he did not believe there ever sat on those Benches a Government more fully desirous of doing all that was possible to remedy the grievances of Ireland. When, last Session, the Government announced that they intended to govern Ireland without exceptional legislation, he felt that at last the time had come when the Government, relying on its own strength and the integrity of its own purpose, was prepared to place Ireland on an equal footing with the rest of the Empire. That he looked upon as a bold and courageous policy, and he believed that the Government, notwithstanding all that had taken place, would have eventually justified these expectations if sufficient time had been given, and if measures suitable to the necessities of the case had been put into operation. At the close of last year, at a period when the country was passing out of a state of things which, if not so bad as actual famine, was at least one of great pressure and extreme distress in many parts of the country, Her Majesty's Ministers devised a measure which recommended itself to the majority of that House. He did not think that that measure, an "opus infraustum atque infelix, was, in its essence, the one which was best suited to the condition of the country; but it was undoubtedly a great effort to meet the circumstances of the case. He must say that those who threw out that measure took upon their shoulders a great responsibility, for which they had largely to answer in the present crisis. Notwithstanding the statement of the Solicitor General for Ireland, which historically followed up the progress of the agitation that had brought about this crisis, he (Dr. Lyons) would ask the House to bear in mind that, in comparison with other periods of excitement in Ireland, it had been one of singularly rapid progress, of preternatural growth, and had galvanized into a condition of unusual excitement the people of that country. In these respects it differed from all previous agitations. But it should be clearly borne in mind that during the lengthened debates in that House the minds of the Irish people had been raised to an unusual degree of expectation; and it was natural that a proportionate feeling of widespread indignation should prevail at the rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance (Ireland) Bill, and that they should have found themselves driven into the movement which had had such singular success during the past four months. So far as it lay in his power, he, as an humble Member of that House, had endeavoured to bring before the House a proposal of a somewhat extended character, so as to relieve the intense pressure of the situation. Those who knew intimately the condition of Ireland at that time could not possibly conceive that £16,000,000 of rental could be wrung from the country in a single year, though that year was prosperous. It would be in the recollection of the House that he (Dr. Lyons) had, so far as the Forms of the House permitted, recommended that a loan of £2,000,000 should be advanced, under special conditions, to the tenant farmers, on the security of their holdings, to enable them to in part pay their rents, and thus meet the demands of their landlords, many of whom were themselves in necessitous circumstances. The country had been drained by the three preceding bad harvests, and therefore it became a question whether the proposal that had been made was not, in the absence of any other, the best for the purpose. He believed, however, it was greatly to be regretted that Her Majesty's Ministers did not then take some alternative measure into their consideration in order to satisfy the wants and necessities and the exalted expectations of the tenant farmers of Ireland. He was glad that the Government had adopted his suggestion in the appointment of the Land Commission; but he could have wished that the idea had been as fully carried out as he had intended. His desire had been that the Commission should go through the length and breadth of the land and make personal inquiries into the actual condition of the farmers and labourers of Ireland. To speak in the language of his own Profession, he could have wished that the duties of the Commissioners had been of a more clinical character. The Commissioners would thus have been able to ascertain the actual condition and the views and opinions of the farmers and labourers of Ireland upon the great question of the hour. It had been said that Parliament ought to have been called together two months earlier, and they had heard from the Prime Minister that as early as September 30 the Government were in a condition to consider the state of the country. If that really was the case, Parliament, he held, ought not to have been dismissed until some measure had been passed to anticipate the state of things which anyone well acquainted with Ireland could foresee, and which he (Dr. Lyons) had predicted, would surely arise. He regretted that the Prime Minister did not follow the example of Ministers in the memorable years of 1831 and 1832, at a much greater crisis than the present, and introduced measures which would be calculated to pacify Ireland. He could only tell the right hon. Gentleman that his name was still a power in Ireland; and had he come forward with large and comprehensive measures of land reform, yet far short of the confiscation demanded by some wild enthusiasts, he would have been sure to meet with a generous reception throughout Ireland, and the magic of his name, accompanied by such measures, would have been sure to satisfy the demands and aspirations of the tenant farmers of that country. He regretted that in the formation of the Ministry over which the right hon. Gentleman presided there was not more of the Irish element to guide him and the other Members of the Cabinet in their decisions with regard to that country. In 1846, a year which was marked in history, there were no less than eight distinguished Irishmen in the Government, three of them being in the Cabinet. Allusion had been made on the Front Treasury Bench to those who were obliged to seek the protection of the constabulary. Well, no doubt, there were many people of excellent character who had found it necessary to have recourse to that protection; but among those who had sought it were many rash and inconsiderate men. Some gentlemen had the most extraordinary ideas of their rights with regard to property. For instance, in one of the distressed districts a gentleman thought fit to apply for his rents 12 days after they were due. Persons who acted on their rights in such a harsh manner could not expect to be very popular. In a disturbed district, which had been recently graphically described by a right hon. Gentleman opposite, rents had, to his knowledge, been cheerfully paid in two cases, and the persons to whom they were paid were the only ones who carried no arms and were in no way protected. These persons knew full well that, after all that had happened in the last three years, it would be impossible to wring from their unfortunate tenants the whole amount due to them, and, like sensible men, they accepted what their tenants could give, which was a large and generous share of what they had to give. These were the only two persons who had received rents in the district in question, and were the only individuals who could go about at night and go amongst the people unarmed and unaffected. They never shut the shutters of their windows, and lived in the affections of their people. The county of Limerick had been referred to as being in a lawless state. What was the condition of things? It had been his fortune during Christmas Vacation to be in the very centre of that county, and he would venture to say that a more peaceable law-abiding people than those he came in contact with did not exist anywhere. He would not undertake to say that there was any community in which there were no sinners; but what he did affirm was, that the majority of these people were living in a condition of peace and contentment in that county, to which so bad a name had been affixed, but which was so secure, that, with a courage worthy of gallant Irishwomen, ladies could go about their districts and pay visits, and enjoy themselves, and go amongst the people, being everywhere regarded with feelings of the greatest amity and affection. Coming to the question of coercion, he desired to express his belief that both the late Government and the present one had relied too much upon the statements of gentlemen placed in circumstances which did not permit of their forming perfectly free and unbiassed opinions. Among such gentlemen were the resident magistrates, for a large number of whom he entertained the highest respect and personal regard. What, he asked, would be the position of a resident magistrate who should take upon himself the responsibility of saying that his district was in such a condition that it could be spared coercive measures, and where an outbreak, however insignificant, subsequently took place? The Irish Executive relied too exclusively on the opinions of the stipendiary magistrates; but he found the Duke of Wellington warning the House of Lords of his time against relying on opinions and reports from that body, and for this reason, that they were partizans. Their reports were undoubtedly of great value; but it was to shift the responsibility from themselves for any Government, Liberal or Conservative, to leave to the stipendiary magistrates the decision of a question of such high State policy as that of coercion. There was one body on whose advice the Irish Government might confidently rely, if it were reformed, extended, and brought into harmony with the convictions of the country. He alluded to the Irish Privy Council. That body, however, as now constituted, was recruited chiefly from the ranks of lawyers, able and distinguished men no doubt, but of all classes they were the one which took the most timid views of affairs. The Government, he hoped, would not overlook the fact that the Lord Mayor and Corporation of Dublin had petitioned the House in favour of a reform of the Land Laws of Ireland; and he might state that the Lord Mayor of Dublin belonged to the consistently extreme Conservative and Protestant party in Ireland, and yet he had been unanimously chosen for the high office which he held. Then, again, there was another important body in Ireland whose opinion ought to be taken and acted on. He alluded to the unpaid magistracy. He, for one, would not assert that they belonged exclusively to the landlord class. They certainly did not, and some of his hon. Friends were not justified in stating that they did. To his own knowledge, within the last 20 years many large additions had been made to that body from persons springing out of the farming classes. He would put in opposition to the opinions of the resident magistracy those of a very considerable number of the unpaid magistracy, and they were that coercive measures were unsuited to the country, were not wanted for the country, and would, in many instances, do harm rather than good. The present condition of Ireland, although, unhappily, one of extreme tension and of a most critical kind, was one which fell far short of requiring such measures as the Government contemplated applying to the country, and was in no manner, he affirmed, so extreme as it had often been. The Duke of Wellington, in the House of Lords, compared the number of outrages which occurred in 1828 and in each subsequent year up to and including 1833, and he showed that whereas in 1828 the number of commitments for offences amounted to 14,000, and in 1833 to 17,000, after the passing of the Coercion Bill of 1834 they rose to over 21,000, and in 1836 to 23,391.

"Of that number (said the Duke), 7,769 were offences against the person, and of these, 843, that is about two a-day, were either cases of murder, of conspiracies to murder, or of man- slaughter slaughter. They were all cases in which human life was attacked or risked."

Now, he (Dr. Lyons) would be told that the Duke of Wellington had himself brought in coercive measures; but what did that illustrious Statesman himself say of such measures a little later on? He used these memorable words—

"We called upon Parliament to grant us extraordinary powers, powers which, perhaps, Parliament ought not to have given."

He would commend those words to the Treasury Bench and to hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite. He would cite another authority, whom the House would not fail to respect. Lord John Russell, in the debates on coercion, spoke as follows:—

"For my own part I should be loth, under any circumstances, to join in passing a Coercion Bill for Ireland. If I saw such a Bill recommended by a majority of the Members for Ireland, on whatever side of the House they sat, I should certainly come to its consideration with feelings very different to those with which I entertain this measure, which all the Irish Members opposite oppose as tyrannical, and which most of the Members behind me denounce as futile. But, Sir, I cannot forget that this is not the first Coercion Bill which Ireland has been supposed to require which we have passed, and which have been so inefficient that there have been repeated appeals to us for novel powers."

Another great Statesman, the late Marquess of Lansdowne, speaking in July, 1837, referred to like statistics to show that coercive legislation had failed as compared with the action of the ordinary law in repressing crime and outrage. The noble Marquess said—

"When noble Lords opposite referred to particular cases, he begged them to compare the average Returns of the last five years, when there was no suspension in the regular state of the law, with the average of the previous five years, when measures of extraordinary severity were had recourse to."

Coming to a still later period, he (Dr. Lyons) would call the attention of the House to the important admission of Lord Lincoln, in 1846, when he said—

"He was not prepared to deny that there had been an extension of robbery of arms within the period since the passing of that Bill—the Arms Bill."

He might quote Sir Robert Peel to the same effect. But what had been the result of such legislation? They found that it had resulted, not in suppressing crime, and not in stopping the attempts to obtain arms by surreptitious means, but that it had resulted in causing the imprisonment of some few individuals who, until their incarceration, had occupied a position of comparative insignificance. The legislation of 1867 only led to the captivity of a number of, till then, unimportant men, though the country was agitated from the centre to the sea. Then, he would ask, whether it could be stated that any considerable measure of success had followed the attempts of the Government to deal with the present agitation? Quite the contrary. There had been now going on for some time in public—God alone knew how much longer it was likely to continue—a trial which was practically a melodramatic performance, and which would only enrich the lawyers; for even if the proceedings came to an end within the next six months, many legal points, and points of a technical character, would have to be reviewed before another tribunal. Why, looking at the matter as it stood up to the present time, as a contest between the Government and the hon. Member for the City of Cork, the hon. Member for the City of Cork had scored enormously by this trial. First of all, since the prosecution money had simply rained upon his head. The Defence Fund had received such support that The Freeman's Journal had actually said,"Don't send any more money." Only £10,000 was called for, but that sum had been more than doubled. That was not the most important result. The prosecution had had the effect of bringing into the field on behalf of the traversers persons of various classes who up to this period had never identified themselves with any movement of the kind. No fewer than 10 Irish Catholic Bishops had expressed sympathy with the hon. Member, and had sent in their subscriptions to the Defence Fund. When they came to discuss the Coercion Bill they would have to consider what amount of moral support these distinguished persons, and those who acted under them, their priests and curates, would bring to bear against the coercion policy. What was the use of a Coercion Bill if it only succeeded in imprisoning a few individuals, while the Archbishops and Bishops of the land were lending their support to the friends of the movement who were not imprisoned? Was the right hon. Gentleman prepared to imitate the great Earl of Kildare, afterwards Lord Deputy, in his contest with the then Archbishop of Cashel, when he burned down the Cathedral of Cashel, and avowed before Henry VIII. he would not have burned the Cathedral, but that he "thought my Lord Archbishop was therein?" He (Dr. Lyons) must here distinctly explain that he had not the slightest sympathy with any part of the violent action that had taken place outside the Land League; but he had the greatest possible sympathy with those hon. Members who were endeavouring, by constitutional means, to alleviate the condition of those unfortunate people who had been reduced to destitution and beggary by the action of the few unjust landlords who brought discredit on the whole order. He would not enter into any special consideration of Her Majesty's Speech further than to remark, in reference to the paragraph that dwelt with the Land Question, he very much regretted that two important subjects that might fairly have been considered were not legible in the Speech—namely, any measure connected with the waste lands of Ireland, or any measure dealing with the great corporate lands. These were two essential elements for consideration in any satisfactory Land Measure, and he regretted that they had not been referred to. At the same time, he felt it was not right to judge the proposals of the Government until they had been brought fully before them. He regretted to say that the conviction had been forced upon him that there did not now exist in the House of Commons that generous feeling and fulness of desire to meet the requirements of the case of Ireland that existed last year, and it would not be so easy for the Government, in the present temper of the House of Commons, to pass a large remedial measure as it was last Session. He felt that the hon. Member for the City of Cork had overstrained his bow, and thus materially damaged the prospects of success for an Irish Land Measure; and he could not but feel surprised at the compliments to the moderation of the hon. Gentleman paid him by the Chief Secretary, after his proposal, re-stated in that House, to take £5,000,000 from the pockets of one set of people in Ireland and transfer them to others. But he still believed in the generosity and wisdom of the House; and he, for one, ventured to think that when the land proposals came fully before them they should be able to construct out of them a measure of considerable value, and of a very extended character. He would only add, in conclusion, that he attached the utmost importance to the clause in the Royal Speech which spoke of the proposed gradual introduction of a tenant proprietary system into Ireland, and his belief was that such a project would be at once feasible and of vast permanent advantage to the country.

said, he believed that all were agreed that the present condition of Ireland had become intolerable, and everyone was ready to support any effectual measure to improve that condition. The difficulty was to decide what the effectual remedy ought to be. The difficulty was greatly increased by the attitude assumed by the Home Rulers, who were playing a desperate game. They were trying to extort concessions which never would and never could be conceded by any Government, whether Conservative, Liberal, or Radical, and the sooner the fact was universally recognized the better would it be for the prosperity of Ireland. The agitation was led by bold and resolute men, and the weapons they employed were terrorism and obstruction. They had succeeded in superseding the government of Her Majesty in Ireland by an organized system of terriorism, while in Parliament they had succeeded in reducing Her Majesty's Government to a state of impotence by an organized system of obstruction. The other day, at a Home Rule meeting, it was resolved that no English or Scotch Parliamentary Business should be allowed to be proceeded with until all the arrears of Irish legislation were disposed of. The experience of last Session led him to believe that an attempt would be made to carry out that resolution, and that it would be made good unless the Government resolutely interfered. He should like to ask, Who were they who for the time had overthrown the government of Her Majesty in Ireland? If the struggle were really one between Celt and Saxon, if it were between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, it would be a very serious matter; but, even then, the universal law of nature would have at length to take its course, and the weakest would have to go to the wall. He was thankful to say that this was not the case. The Gentlemen who acknowledged the hon. Member for the City of Cork as their Leader claimed to be Representatives of Ireland. He maintained they were nothing of the kind. They were Representatives only of the Home Rule Party in Ireland, which was a very different thing; and the greater part of the wealth of the education, and of the intelligence of the country was against them. They were only the Representatives of anarchy and disorder, which the Conservative feeling of England was at length compelled and fully resolved to Put down. Since the Government, though late in the day, had determined to assert their authority, which had been so long in abeyance, and to deal resolutely with the state of affairs in Ireland, it was the duty of Members, wherever they sat, loyally to support them; and he believed they would be supported, except by those whose only policy was hatred of England, and whose aim and object were the dissolution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

said, that as yet no Scotch Member, except the Prime Minister, had spoken in this debate, and he wished to make a few remarks on the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell). The speech of the Solicitor General for Ireland was wanting only in one particular. Having related all the evils that were found to exist in Ireland in 1879, and continuing at the time the present Government acceded to Office, he gave no explanation why the Peace Preservation Act was allowed to drop in 1880; and if all the evils which the hon. and learned Gentleman described existed at the time the Government came into Office the conduct of the Government was incomprehensible, and the statements which had been made to the country by the Prime Minister and others were certainly not justified by the result. There was no doubt, as the hon. Member who has last spoken had said, that all loyal subjects should support Her Majesty's Government in any measures they might bring forward for preserving peace and protecting life and property in Ireland. Those who heard the eloquent speeches of the two right hon. and learned Members for the University of Dublin and of the Solicitor General for Ireland could have no doubt that the state of Ireland was one which required stringent measures. The action of the Government in taking those measures was so far satisfactory. They all knew that persons who ought to have means and to be able to pay their debts were now unable to carry on the ordinary transactions of life, and that a very large proportion of the lower orders were in undoubted misery, being houseless and without food or clothing. Such a condition of society was attended by the most terrible evils, and those evils were intensified by agitators, whom it was the business of Her Majesty's Government to control. But what he objected to was, that in Her Majesty's Gracious Speech, as advised by her Ministers, no remedy was suggested for these intolerable evils. The hon. Member for Mayo (Mr. O'Connor Power) was the one single person who alluded to the only reasonable way in which this question could be dealt with, and that was by judicious emigration. Speaking as a Scotch Member, and with a knowledge of what had occurred in Scotland, he could state that within the last 100 years Scotland had been delivered from evils similar to those which existed in Ireland by judicious emigration. In spite of the arguments of the late John Stuart Mill, he did not understand how Ireland could support a larger population. He should be delighted to see money granted for the reclamation of waste lands; but such reclamation would take some years before the lands could be made productive for the sustenance of the people of Ireland. The emigration suggested by the hon. Member for Mayo was from one part of Ireland to another, from bad to better land; but such a system would not pay. Hon. Members from the other side of the Tweed would agree with him that it was by a similar system that Scotland was at this moment flooded by Irish emigrants. If Members would look to the Returns of the Board of Supervision, they would find that in proportion as the counties of Scotland were nearest to Ireland, so had the paupers in those counties been increasing. In Wigtown, which was nearest to Ireland, they had a state of pauperism, entirely induced by the Irish element, of 1 in 28, and in Kirkcudbright, which was next, of 1 in 30 of the population, and in Ayrshire a similar state of Irish pauperism prevailed. The con- dition of Scotland and Ireland might be very fairly compared. He would not detain the House long in making the comparison, which struck him as being forcible. The area of both was almost identical, that of Scotland being 30,685 square miles, and that of Ireland 31,874. The tilled or cultivated land of Scotland was 4,640,803 acres, that of Ireland 5,203,705. The population of Scotland was 3,593,299, that of Ireland 5,351,060. Separating the urban from the rural population, they found in seven large towns in Scotland a population of 1,188,000, and in seven large towns of Ireland 651,000; so that there were 2,404,000 more of a rural population in Ireland than in Scotland. In addition, the products of the land in Scotland, as measured by the rental, were £18,500,000, while that of Ireland, according to the hon. Member for Dublin (Dr. Lyons), the product of the land was £16,000,000; and though he found it given in Doomsday Book as £13,500,000, he would not contest the accuracy of the hon. Gentleman's figures. Be that as it might, the acreage under tillage in Ireland, which was larger than in Scotland, in any case was less in the product than the acreage of Scotland. Was it not, therefore, evident that until a larger amount of land was under cultivation, or until the cultivation in Ireland improved, it was quite impossible that the 2,000,000 who were starving in Ireland could continue to live in that country except by the charity of others? He wished to put those matters before the House for its consideration, because he believed in a case of that sort, when Ireland had no mining industry, and, except in the North, very little manufactures, little to give in exchange for the food of its people, and that the soil under cultivation only represented about the same amount as that under cultivation in Scotland, emigration was the remedy to be resorted to. In Canada and elsewhere they had great tracts of country where Irish families might be sent, where the Great Pacific Railway was being made; and in the State of Manitoba also there was room for 80,000,000 persons. Therefore, was it not reasonable that a Government which was anxious to govern Ireland rightly, should take care that at least 2,000,000 of the Irish people should go to the Queen's own Dominions, the Dominion of Canada, where, with intelligent industry, they could maintain themselves and their families? When the West Indian Slavery was put an end to, the House did not hesitate to grant £20,000,000 for that purpose; and if the same sum of money was granted for the purpose of conveying to and establishing 2,000,000 Irish emigrants in our own Dominion of Canada, where they could become an industrious population, that money would be well bestowed; and, after all, £20,000,000 was not ½ d. on the Income Tax. [ Laughter. ] Hon. Gentlemen might laugh, but it was a fact—£20,000,000 represented interest at 3 per cent of £600,000 a—year, and the ½ d. Income Tax produced nearly £1,000,000. A larger sum was given for the abolition of Purchase in the Army; that cost nearly £40,000,000. And here they had a starving population in Ireland, when, for half the sum, they could be sent to a country where they could maintain their families, and do good service to the country.

begged to call attention to the exaggerations and misrepresentations of which the English Press had been guilty with respect to the state of Ireland. A large section of the English Press had, he believed, entered into a conspiracy to exasperate the minds of the English people against Ireland. In that, the English papers had most ignoble colleagues in the Irish Press, a portion of which ought to be known by a name which had been applied to a part of the Press in Germany—namely, "the Reptile Press." That Press had done its utmost to assist the English Press in its calumnies against the Irish people; and it was a curious coincidence, if it was a coincidence, that the correspondents of allmost all the English newspapers that kept regular correspondents in Dublin belonged to the staff of Conservative newspapers in Dublin. Why did they do this? Because they knew they would pick up every story about crime and outrage in Ireland, whether true or not, and send it to the London papers. These correspondents never sent over the contradictions of those stories. If the English papers had correspondents who were connected with the popular journals in Ireland, such as The Freeman's Journal, they would receive the contradiction of those calumnies. By such means this country had been thoroughly exasperated against Ireland, as in the year 1848, when the most exaggerated ideas about Ireland were prevalent. At that time he remembered that an Irish gentleman, who had received a generous but unneeded offer of an asylum in the house of an English friend, had replied that nothing unusual was going on—a remark that was, to a great extent, true at the present day. It was to be remembered that while millions of persons read the accounts of outrages, hardly one in a thousand saw the denial of them. And yet most of them were purely imaginary. For example, a gentleman in the West of Ireland was reported to have been shot at; but he was seen in Dublin on the same day, and immediately wrote to the papers denying all the rumours that had been circulated about him. Equally false was a story from County Clare respecting the destruction of hay on the land of a man who had taken a farm contrary to the orders of the local Land League. Those were good and typical instances of imaginary outrages. As for the proposed Coercion Bills, it was generally thought that the imaginary nature of the outrages against which they were directed would render them all but useless. He believed that threatening letters were either written as a joke, or were sent to frighten cowards. He had himself received a threatening letter, which he afterwards discovered to have come from an intimate friend. The offences against cattle, bad as they were, were comparatively few, and in point of number could not compare with those returned monthly by the officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Coercive laws would not prevent "Boycotting;" nor would they be effective in making juries return verdicts, for, generally speaking, the evidence adduced before them was such as in England they would not hang a dog upon. The House was asked the other evening what chance there was of a conviction by juries as they were now constituted. He asked what chance there was up to a few years ago of an acquittal as the juries were then constituted? Up to that time the juries were packed; and perhaps one reason that it was now difficult to get the juries to convict was that the class of persons now serving on juries were so long kept off them, that they had not yet learned to judge of the evidence brought before them. There might be cases in Ireland where crimes were committed and evidence was not brought before the juries; but this was caused by the fidelity of the people to one another that was displayed in all countries where bad and tyrannical laws had been in operation for centuries. But did anyone tell him that when the poor peasantry refused to be tempted by the large rewards offered by the Government that they could, by coercive laws, be compelled to give evidence against criminals? In his opinion, coercion would not have the effect of preventing a single crime or outrage in Ireland. With regard to the refusal to pay rack-rents, which the people were determined to do at present, was he to be told that coercion laws would remedy that? The only way to remedy this was by wise and liberal legislation upon the Land Question; and if hon. Members now opposed to reform helped to promote this legislation, they would be securing to their friends the payment of at least a fair rent. The Prime Minister, rather unfairly, the other night, stated that the majority of those engaged in the land agitation had no connection with land. He would tell the right hon. Gentleman that every man in Ireland had connection with the land, direct or indirect. Land was the only thing on which all classes had to depend since they had been deprived of their manufactures by unjust laws, and when the agricultural classes were depressed all classes were depressed. It was not, therefore, to be wondered at that men not directly connected with land should be engaged in the present agitation. The country would never be made free by Coercion Acts, and never would be made prosperous by partial legislation. The only way to put the country in a healthy and prosperous condition was for the Government to go to work in a thorough and radical manner. They ought not to try to tinker up the Land Act of 1870, for however much it was tinkered there would be holes left in it which a future Parliament would have to tinker up again, and in the interval a period of discontent would exist in Ireland. If at the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act, the Government then in power had made it a wide and comprehensive measure, there would have been no necessity afterwards of patching up the holes they had left in order to admit to Office a Catholic Lord Chancellor and others who were ex- cluded because of their religion. The peace of Ireland was at all times like the peace of a volcano, which might at any moment burst forth; and if the Government left Ireland in the condition in which she had existed for centuries, no one could tell the moment the country might burst into flame again.

said, he had been much and sorrowfully struck by the picture drawn in this debate by the hon. and learned Gentleman the Solicitor General for Ireland (Mr. W. M. Johnson) and other hon. Members, of the disorders, crimes, and cruelties which were practised to some extent in certain parts of Ireland. Now, it was well known that, apart from agrarian offences, the Irish were probably one of the least criminal populations in Europe; and, therefore, a picture of that sort must be regarded as the measure of the injustice which the Irish people had suffered for generations past, and the deeper the colours they were enabled to give to that picture the more it was evident that if this House did its duty it would at once proceed to enact a large measure of justice. There were, it appeared to him, three sections of opinion in the House in regard to the policy which this country ought to or might pursue towards Ireland. There were those who believed that a great remedial measure should be at once proceeded with, and that such a measure would, in the quickest and most satisfactory way, restore order to Ireland; and those, therefore, who had that belief looked with feelings almost of dismay at the recurrence of repressive measures previous to bringing in any Land Act as was proposed by the Government. How large or small that Party might be at this stage of the proceedings they did not know. Secondly, there were those who, represented by the Government, believed that they should proceed at once to enact repressive measures, and that afterwards they should pass a Land Act for Ireland; and, lastly, there was the Party opposite, the Tory Party, which, so far as he understood it, looked for repressive measures, and repressive measures alone. ["No, no!"] Considering the speeches which had been delivered out of the House, and by the most responsible men of the Conservative Party in it, he came to that conclusion. There was for instance, the speech of the Leader of the Party, the right hon. Gentleman the late Chancellor of the Exchequer. He (Mr. Jacob Bright) listened to it attentively, and it did not seem to him to make the slightest admission that there was any grievance or injustice in Ireland. The only reference he made to a remedy was a sneer. Then there was the speech by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the late Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Gibson), an Irishman, and a man of ability and experience. He told them that this movement in favour of security to the tenant farmer for his industry was spreading throughout Ireland; that it was no longer a Catholic movement, but that Catholics and Protestants were joining in it. Ulster, instead of turning her back on the sister Provinces, was united with them in demanding a great measure of reform from this House; and yet the late Attorney General for Ireland spoke as if there was not a grievance in the country, and, of course, not believing in any grievance, did not say a single word with regard to any remedy. The noble Lord the Member for Woodcock—[ Laughter ]—well, he might probably have made a more inaccurate mistake; but he should have said the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill), who was also a Leader in that House, who spoke at great length, as he generally did, and amused the House by his speech, said nothing of any remedy for Ireland. He did not offer any assistance to the Government in carrying a remedy through the House, not even a Land Bill; but he did offer very earnest assistance in the proposal to carry anything like repression. The Conservative Party, as he (Mr. Jacob Bright) understood them, believed that the Irish territorial system was just what it ought to be. Why, the territorial system of Ireland would not and ought not to be tolerated in any country in the world similarly circumstanced. They might tell him, if they liked, that it was to a great extent the system which we had in England; but the English system would have been changed long ago but for the manufacturing and commercial development of this country, which enabled the energy of the people to find employment otherwise than by agricultural pursuits. But when he was told that the English and Irish systems were the same, he must ask the House one question—Did they know of farmers who created their own farms in England, who made the land from the first, cultivated it from being in a state of waste, put up the buildings, and, in fact, who furnished the farm? Did they know of any such case in England in which rents were suddenly and constantly raised, and where the tenant was liable in an hour of misfortune to be evicted in case he did not submit? Practically, therefore, there was a very great and significant difference between the systems of the two countries. He agreed with those who said that in a country where the great majority of the people lived by agriculture, where the land was monopolized by a few hands, that the landowner had no more right to receive the rent which a fierce and hungry competition would give him than a railway company, unfettered by Acts of Parliament, would have a right to charge any price it liked to the travelling public for fares. Now a word as to the policy of the Government. The Government asked to take up the whole time of the House in order, as he understood, that it might pass certain repressive measures, and then they were to proceed with a Land Bill. He wished it had been possible for the Government to ask for the whole time of the House, in the first instance, for the purpose of passing a Land Bill. They would then have seen what the effect of Irish opinion would have been in such a case, and they would only have then to proceed to repression when that great remedy had failed in its effects. But what was the prospect before them? They were about to send repressive measures up to the House of Lords, and when they got there, they would be passed without delay; or, if there were delay, it would be delay in order to intensify the character of the measures. When they sent the Land Bill to the House of Lords, what would the effect be? The Lords would seek to mutilate and impair any such Act which the House of Commons might send to them. Repressive measures would possibly do something to produce outward quiet in Ireland. But if they sent up a Land Bill to the House of Lords, that House would make the fact of this seeming quiet a reason for damaging still more that Land Bill. Repressive measures sometimes really and sometimes only in appearance accomplished the purpose which the Government who proposed them hoped to see accomplished. But sometimes such measures failed, and not only failed, but even produced a prejudicial effect. There was not a man on the Liberal side of the House, there was not an Irish Member of the House, who did not know that a great measure of justice in regard to the land in Ireland would at once produce a marked effect, would diminish the influence of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), and would attract a large portion of the population to the side of law and order. If he might imagine such an unfortunate thing as the possibility of their having two Irelands upon their hands, if in one case repressive measures were tried, and in the other influences were brought to bear in a large measure of justice, he was certain the country which had justice given to it would be the more easily governed and would be restored to order first. He knew that in advocating these views, which were not generally accepted, he had the misfortune to come from a great and populous county which was not saturated by the wisdom of the London Press, and which was a long way removed from the influence of London society. But the people of Manchester acted upon such lights as they had, and it was his firm conviction that if the Government on this occasion had taken a different course, at least so far as the Liberal Party was concerned, and had proceeded first with a Land Bill, they would not only have carried the public opinion of his county with them, but would have aroused in their favour throught the country a generous enthusiasm, which was now out of the question. The Prime Minister, in telling the House how it was that repressive measures had not sooner been resorted to, told them, among other things, that the Government had waited for the results of the trials in a certain event in order to see their effect on Ireland. Well, it was a reasonable thing to wait for these results, to see whether Ireland would be in any degree affected by them. But he thought it would have been a far more reasonable and far more desirable thing to wait for the results of a good Land Law before proposing coercive measures. Everybody knew that the results would have been tenfold better than any results that could possibly come from the State trials. The Land Bill of the Government had been severely criticized by anticipation; but he was not going to criticize a Bill which was not before them, and whose provisions they did not know. He was, however, bound to say that in the part of the House where he sat there had been much disappointment in regard to the Bill. He, himself, however, for one, had confidence in the Government that they would bring a Bill before the House which most reasonable men would think worthy of being accepted. Consider the position of the Ministers who sat upon that Bench. They were about to ask for coercive measures. They told them, and nobody doubted their word, that that was one of the most painful acts of their lives. Having then a great opportunity of passing a measure which might do away hereafter with all necessity for coercive legislation for Ireland, was it possible the Government might not be found equal to the occasion? The right hon. and gallant Gentleman who a little while ago addressed the House, the Member for the Wigton Burghs (Sir John Hay), referred to the question of the poor population of the West of Ireland. He (Mr. Jacob Bright) believed that was the most difficult part of the whole Irish question. So far the Government had given them no light as to what they meant to do there. They knew that the poor people in the West of Ireland were living on plots of land which would not keep them if they paid no rent at all. They knew that these people must be removed and put in better circumstances. The question might be whether they should be removed across the ocean, or should be removed to other parts of their own land. It might be a more economical thing from a money point of view to send them to Canada than to find them plots in Ireland; but this was not merely an economical question. There were other and higher considerations in the matter; and he believed a Government scheme for the reclamation of waste lands in Ireland would produce a great moral as well as a more powerful and immediate effect. He had, in regard to this Irish question, unbounded faith in justice; but he must confess he looked with feelings of distress, which he could not attempt to describe, at the prospect of passing he did not know how many weeks in angry debates in order to obtain repressive measures, for during that time justice would be delayed.

said, the hon. Member who had just sat down (Mr. Jacob Bright) said, among other things, that in his view the Tory Party looked to coercion, and coercion alone, as the remedy for the evils of unhappy Ireland. But in his opinion of the views of the Tory Party the hon. Member misunderstood, even if he did not malign, that considerable section of the House and the country. They might differ as to the necessity for measures of repression; but he (Mr. Chaplin) took leave to say that there was no Member of any Party in that House who did not alike approach the question with greater feelings of sorrow and dismay. He (Mr. Chaplin) differed from the views expressed by the hon. Member; but he hoped that at least, before he sat down, he should be able to convince him that he had done less than justice to the Tory Party. He wished to preface his remarks with a few observations in reply to what had been said in reference to the evils of the Land Question. The hon. Member for the County of Cork (Mr. Shaw), and several other Members who had spoken, seemed to look chiefly to some alteration in the Land Laws for the remedy which they desired. He would not yield to any hon. Member in his sympathy for the sad and suffering people whose miseries had been so fittingly and so eloquently described; but he could not altogether bring himself to agree to the measures which those hon. Members had suggested. On the contrary, he was convinced that it was to the circumstances and the peculiar conditions of the country, rather than to the Land Laws, that the chronic misery and discontent of Ireland were owing. The laws which governed the relations between landlords and tenants in Ireland were more favourable to the tenants than those prevailing in either England or Scotland at the present time. He had the high authority of the Prime Minister for this statement, who in March, 1870, used these words—

"… . a Bill which offers to the farmers and the cottiers of Ireland privileges of occupation such as have never yet been enjoyed in two countries that are admitted to be, as respects the condition of the cultivators of the soil, at the very least among the foremost in the world."—[3 Hansard, cxcix. 1851.]

The more he considered the matter the more he must, with all respect, demur to the proposition of those who held that the discontent and suffering of the Irish people were due to the evils and inhumanity of the Land Laws. The hon. Member for the County of Cork dwelt upon the hardship of the rent being arbitrarily raised; and he (Mr. Chaplin) must say that on that point he went with the hon. Member a very considerable way when it actually occurred. He, however, wished to point out to the House that the arbitrary raising of the rent was the exception, and not the rule, in the vast majority of cases in Ireland. ["No, no!"] The hon. Member for the County of Cork had certainly put a case in support of his views in which the rent had been arbitrarily raised upon improvements effected by the tenant. He (Mr. Chaplin) was not there to-night in any way to palliate or to excuse such an act. But supposing that in such a case the very worst had happened, and the tenant had refused to pay the rent so arbitrarily raised, what would have been his position? As the hon. Member had reminded the House in another portion of his speech—which, perhaps, fell rather short of that consistency which might have been looked for—under the shelter of those splendid measures, as he called them, passed 10 years ago, the position of the tenant would have been this. He would, in the first place, receive full compensation and repayment for every penny of the £300 which the hon. Member had described him as having laid out upon his farm, and, having received that, if his farm were a small one, he would be entitled in addition, over and above the compensation for improvements, to one-third of the value of the fee simple as compensation for disturbance. He therefore maintained that, hard as the case might be, it was not really anything like so hard as it otherwise might appear to the uninitiated; and, under those circumstances, hon. Members should speak on the subject without unduly exaggerating the hardship which the tenant would undergo. It might, however, be said, and, indeed, it had often been said in the course of this debate, that if the tenant were turned out of or left his farm, he had nowhere else to go to, and that the people had nothing else to look to but the land for a livelihood. That was a remark that was perfectly true, and it was that fact which occasioned the unhappiness and the misery of the position of the Irish peasant. That unhappiness and that misery, however, were not owing to unjust laws, but to the peculiar condition of the country. In Ireland, at the present time, the land was the sole resource, and it was that which he meant when he referred to the peculiar condition of the country. If right hon. Gentlemen who sat upon the opposite Bench were really sincere in their desire, as he had no doubt they were, and if hon. Members for Irish constituencies were sincerely desirous permanently to better the condition of that unfortunate country, they must find some other means of livelihood for the people besides that derived from the land. They must encourage and, if necessary, assist the establishment of manufacturing industries in Ireland, and the re-establishment of those which more than 150 years ago were crushed altogether by the selfish commercial policy of England. Something more than that, however, would have to be done. The overcrowding of people upon small and wretched plots of land must be prevented. In many parts of Ireland, if the freehold of his holding were given to the tenant to-morrow, it would not be sufficient to afford him the means of obtaining a decent livelihood even in good years, and in bad seasons it would reduce him to starvation. They must, therefore, find some means to lessen as much as possible that fierce competition for land which had often been described as the curse of Ireland, and which every person who had thought over and had studied this question recognized as the source and root and the very pith and marrow of all the miseries of that unhappy country. The hon. Member for Mayo (Mr. O'Connor Power) the other night had denounced all proposals for emigration; but, for his own part, he (Mr. Chaplin) was convinced that in the provisions of any measure for the permanent improvement of the country emigration must always play a prominent part. He, however, saw no reason why the scheme for the migration of some of the population from overcrowded districts to waste or to semi-waste lands should not result in advantage equally to the district they left and that to which they went. Although hon. Members who sat near him had been taunted with indifference to the sufferings of the people of Ireland, they could tell the hon. Member for Mayo that it was not always those who talked the most who were ready to do the most for the Irish people. As far as he was personally concerned, he could assure the hon. Member that whenever any practical proposal of the nature he had indicated was brought forward it would receive his most earnest support. But the hon. Members for Ireland did not like the Land Bill of the Government. They said it was not what they wanted. Were they, however, quite sure they knew what that Bill was to be? The hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Jacob Bright), he must say, appeared to have smelt a rat; and he (Mr. Chaplin) was not quite, sure that the hon. Member was not right. For his own part, he must say that he thought the Prime Minister ought to have told the House of Commons a great deal more than he did in reference to that Bill, or he should have said nothing at all about it. What the right hon. Gentleman did say seemed to him to be so vague that, as the noble Lord (Lord Randolph Churchill) had said the other night, it might mean anything, or everything, or absolutely nothing at all. He must say that for a man in the position of the Prime Minister, in a crisis like the present, it was too bad that he should be throwing flies in this way to see in what direction the stream ran. What was the case with regard to the Coercion Bill, which they thought the Government had got in their pockets? They had heard a startling announcement upon that point that night. The hon. and learned Gentleman the Solicitor General for Ireland (Mr. W. M. Johnson), at an early period of the evening, appeared to frame an elaborate indictment against the present Leaders of the Opposition because they did not interfere with meetings of the Land League during the time that they were in Office. That he did, as he (Mr. Chaplin) understood him, to defend the conduct of the Government to which he belonged. In the course of his remarkable—and as long as it was remarkable—speech, he used these most significant words when speaking of the Coercion Bill, "of the outline of which I am myself ignorant." What was the meaning of that observation? It was one of the most serious and startling announce- ments ever made to an astonished House ["Oh, oh!"] Were they really to understand that, after the announcements in the Queen's Speech, after all they had heard, after Parliament had been summoned, the Government were still fishing for a Coercion Bill as well as for a Land Bill? Such a thing would be the most daring attempt to practise upon the common sense of the House that he had ever known. The hon. Member for the County of Cork asked for the introduction of what he called regulated rents. Did the hon. Member wish for a system of regulated tenant right as well, and if not, why not? He would recommend the hon. Member to read the speeches of the Prime Minister during the passage of the Land Bill on the subject of regulated rents. He would there find five columns of unanswered argument against any such proposition. He did not say unanswerable arguments, because he declined to commit himself to any opinion upon a Land Bill which was not before him. He would make no further observation upon that point, except to express the sincere regret he felt at finding that there was to be, according to the speech of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), an agitation at Manchester, Birmingham, and elsewhere in the country, for the purpose of putting pressure upon men such as the noble Marquess (the Marquess of Hartington) and his right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary, he supposed, and others who, with rather scant respect, the hon. Member had described as antediluvian Whigs. He rejoiced that at last they were face to face with that Parliament, from summoning which Ministers had, until last week, shrank as from something they feared to meet. It was small wonder that they did so as they pondered over the outcome of their short Recess and the present condition of Ireland. Having made these observations, he should like to turn his attention for a moment to the Address in answer to the Gracious Speech from the Throne. That Speech was a document of considerable length. He thought it was simply a confession of failure by a Ministry of impotence and errors. ["Oh, oh!"] He wondered whether the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster remembered the counsel he gave some time ago, that Ireland should be dealt with with a more desperate determination. Did he think at the time of the danger of his words, of the conflagration which they might raise? What they saw in Ireland to-day was not only crime, violence, and outrage; they had to grapple with rebellion against all law and all order in the country—a rebellion which had, undoubtedly, become most formidable in its aspects and dimensions solely through the sufferance and the supine—not to say criminal—inaction of the Government. The right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister complained the other night that the charges made against him were not precise and sufficiently distinct. He asked what it was that the Government ought to have done, and when ought they to have done it? He (Mr. Chaplin) would answer that question. They ought, undoubtedly, to have renewed the Peace Preservation Act; and, failing that, it was their duty, at the very earliest opportunity, to have done exactly what they said at the end of last Session it would be the duty of the Government to do, and to have done it exactly at the time they said they would do it. First, let him say a word with regard to the non-renewal of the Peace Preservation Act. They knew from his speech in Mid Lothian that the Prime Minister did not think it would be necessary to renew that Act; and it was, no doubt, very natural that he should have entertained that opinion. The right hon. Gentleman had brought all the resources of his intellect and his great powers to the solution of the Irish problem. He had introduced great measures in the interest of Ireland; he had carried them to a triumphant issue; and most certainly he had made demands on Parliament such as no Minister had ever made before, Was he not the Minister who had disestablished the Irish Church? Was he not the Minister who had made such concessions with regard to land that he transferred at one swoop, as was estimated at the time by some persons, one-third of the property of one class to another? And was it possible that all these immense sacrifices had failed to restore prosperity to Ireland? He (Mr. Chaplin) could understand and sympathize with the reluctance of the man who had made these great and tremendous efforts in the hope—the false hope, as it had, unhappily, turned out—to admit that those unparalleled concessions had not given peace and contentment to that country. But with him, as with so many other men, the wish had been father to the thought. That was not the opinion of his Colleagues, or that of, perhaps, the most experienced, and, it might be said without offence to the rest, the most eminent among them. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham had spoken, as it happened, shortly before the General Election on that subject; and he drew a picture of the state of Ireland as startling and alarming as it subsequently proved to have been absolutely true. And so struck were many of them on that (the Opposition) side of the House by his statements, that he (Mr. Chaplin) took on himself, at the earliest opportunity, to rise in the debate on the Address in answer to the Gracious Speech from the Throne, and called the attention of the Prime Minister and that of the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant to the statements of their Colleague; and he said that they wished to know, and the country had a right to know, on what ground, in the face of those announcements, the Government thought it right to dispense with that which, under the circumstances, could only be regarded as an indispensable safeguard of society in Ireland? To that appeal no reply whatever was made; and he must confess that, knowing, as he did, the invariable courtesy which the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland showed to every Member, he was at a loss to account for his silence on that occasion. But he was not at any such loss now. He knew now—they had it on the authority of the right hon. Gentleman's Predecessor (Mr. J. Lowther)—that there was only one answer which he could have made, and it was that he had done it on his own responsibility, in direct defiance of the warning and the advice of the permanent officials who were acquainted with the country, of all the magistrates who had been consulted with scarcely an exception, and of the heads of the police—in fact, of every competent authority in Ireland. Under these circumstances, he must say that he thought the non-renewal of the Peace Preservation Act was not undeserving of blame. Later in the Session there was great uneasiness felt on that (the Opposition) side of the House as to the condition of Ireland, and Questions were put to the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. W. E. Forster) as to the intentions of the Government. The right hon. Gentleman answered—and again he (Mr. Chaplin) considered him wrong in doing so—

"If we find—as we do not believe we shall find—that in the course of the autumn or winter we cannot rely on the existing law, we shall not, in that case, hesitate to call Parliament together for the purpose giving us such additional powers as may be needed to fulfil our first duty, the protection of life and property."—[3 Hansard, cclv. 1846.]

The Government, in saying that, declared that the moment their existing powers were found to be insufficient they would come to Parliament and ask for more. Now, he wanted to know how long the powers in the hands of the Government had been insufficient for the protection of life and property? When did the right hon. Gentleman find that they were insufficient? Were they, or were they not, insufficient at the end of October or the beginning of November, when the Cabinet began to meet? Those were questions to which he respectfully invited an answer from the Government, and until they gave one—and, for the present, he challenged the conduct of the Government on either ground—if they were sufficient in the autumn, how had they failed to secure life and property and to vindicate the law in Ireland? If they were sufficient, and they had neglected to enforce them, what must be their condemnation? If they were not sufficient, could they justify that departure from their pledge? He had not made those criticisms in a Party sense, or with the least desire to embarrass the Government. He did not believe that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland would entertain that opinion himself. But they had before them that which they believed to be their duty as an Opposition. They thought it only right that the country should have the opportunity of knowing, as far as they could put it temperately before them, how it was and by what means they had been brought into their present position. The Government must themselves know that had they done their duty two or three months ago things would not now have been in that terrible plight. He would say nothing further on the point, except to assure the Government that if they were de- termined at the present time to do what hon. Gentlemen on his side believed to be their duty, they on his side of the House would give an earnest, candid, and careful consideration to all remedial measures which they might propose, and assist them to the utmost of their power in passing measures for the protection of life and property. The Prime Minister said the other night that he felt no mortification at the present state of Ireland; but surely there must be some considerations which must lie heavily on the mind of the right hon. Gentleman. They were met a month before the usual time of assembling Parliament, but too late to undo much of the misery which had been brought about during the last few months in Ireland. He would ask the Ministers how and when all this would end?—for that was the question which lay nearest at this moment to the heart of every Member of that House. They might—indeed, they must—make life more secure; they must give peace to the subjects of the Queen; nay, more, they might, perhaps, restore contentment and prosperity to that distracted country; but they could not undo the past. They could not give back the life that had been taken — the victims foully and savagely murdered—nor could they give relief to mutilated and tortured creatures. The task that was before them was beset with danger and difficulty, and the utmost vigilance and caution were required. If the Government acted with firmness and decision, even now, at the eleventh hour, all might yet be well, and they might count upon the loyal and unanimous support of every Member of the Party to which he (Mr. Chaplin) belonged; but what he was afraid of was, if they were to have any further indecision or timidity of counsels, they might see repeated nearer home what was occurring in South Africa, and the blood of the Irish people poured out like water on Irish soil. He prayed that God would grant that a catastrophe so dire and dread might be averted.

Sir, the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down began his speech with some observations, into which I do not think it necessary to follow him to-night, upon the Irish Land Question. We have, I think, matters of sufficient importance raised for our consideration by the Amendment to the Address of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) without anticipating those discussions, which, no doubt, will be prolonged-if ever we are allowed to reach them—those discussions, I mean, of the proposals of Her Majesty's Government respecting the land in Ireland. The hon. Member was not satisfied with a discussion upon the Irish Land Question; he invited the House to follow him into a still more extensive subject—the introduction of manufactures into Ireland, the questions of emigration and migration, and many other subjects connected with the condition of that country. Sir, these topics are too large for me to attempt to follow the hon. Member into them to-night; but this I think I may say—and I think I say it with the agreement of all sides of the House — that the observations of the hon. Member on that part of the subject were marked by a kindly spirit, and gave evidence of his having bestowed some consideration, at all events, upon remedial measures for Ireland, or measures other than those of coercion; and I think it would have been well if the spirit which animated the remarks of the hon. Member upon that branch of the subject had always been shown by hon. Members who sit on his side of the House. The hon. Member made one allusion to the speech of my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General for Ireland which I think it is necessary to correct. The hon. Member said that my hon. and learned Friend had stated to-night that he was absolutely ignorant of the very outlines of the measures which are before the Government—which we intend to propose for the protection of life and property in Ireland. I did not hear the observations of my hon. and learned Friend; but I have his authority for saying that that was not his statement, and that—[ Cries of "Oh, oh!"]—and that as far as possible—[ Continued cries of "Oh, oh!"]—well, if he did say it—and he does not think he did—that was not by any means the impression he intended to convey to the House. What he intended to say was that even the outlines of these measures were not before the House. [ Repeated cries of "Oh, oh!"] I am surprised at these interruptions. The fact is that my hon. and learned Friend is intimately acquainted with every proposal which the Government intend to make on the subject; and it was his most earnest hope that by this time he might have been engaged in the exposition of them. The hon. Member then went on to make what I think is one of the most extraordinary of the many charges that have been made against Her Majesty's present Government—namely, that there had been an indisposition on our part to meet Parliament. Considering the bitter complaints that came from that (the Opposition) side of the House—and not least from the hon. Gentleman himself—about the protracted Session we forced him to undergo last autumn, and considering that it is even now about a month before the ordinary time for assembling Parliament, this should have been about the last charge that should have been urged against the Government. [ Cries of "Oh, oh!"] I am very well aware what the exclamations of dissent from the other side mean, and I shall come to that part of the question by-and-bye. The hon. Member then went on to pronounce one of the most solemn indictments against Her Majesty's Government which it has ever been my duty to listen to. I cannot follow-him through the whole of that weighty indictment; but I must say that, guilty as I felt myself when I heard his solemn tones, and when I learnt from him that do what we could we could never wash away from our guilty hands and our guilty souls the stains of the innocent blood which had been shed through our criminal negligence, it was some consolation to me to turn from the solemn eloquence of the hon. Member, and to refer to the prosaic facts which lay before me. I find that during the year 1879, when Ireland was ruled over by a beneficent Conservative Government, there were 10 agrarian homicides or murders, and that in the year which has just elapsed there were seven. I cannot, therefore, feel the blood of these murdered men rest so heavily on my soul when I think that even the efficient Government that preceded us was not able to protect life to so great an extent as it has been in our power to do. Well, Sir, this is all the doing of the right hon. Gentleman the present Prime Minister, we are told. It is said—"This is the frightful condition of Ireland, notwithstanding the disestablishment of the Irish Church." Will any hon. Member rise at this moment and say he thinks that we should be in a better position to deal with the evils which exist in Ireland at this moment if the Established Church were still in existence? [Mr. R. N. FOWLER: Certainly.] I am afraid this debate will not terminate to-night, and I shall be interested to know on some future occasion in what way any hon. Member, in any part of the House, can imagine that the existence of the Established Church, an institution so popular in Ireland, so congenial, so consonant, and so in accord with the sentiments of the Irish people, would conduce to the preservation of the peace in that country. Well, then, Sir, we are told that we released the Fenian prisoners. Yes; we did release some of them. But that responsibility was shared with us by the late Government; we did not release them all. The late Government completed the work which was begun by the present revolutionary Prime Minister. The late Government is responsible for the release of Mr. Davitt, of whom we have heard something within the last few weeks, and who was certainly not one of the least conspicuous or least dangerous of those Fenian prisoners to whom the hon. Member has referred. The hon. Member concluded, as others who have spoken on that side of the House have done, by tendering to us—after the inevitable lecture—the promise of his most hearty support so long as the Government come up to his notions of the standard of duty. Sir, we have received these promises of support from various quarters. On the first night of the Session, after a lecture as solemn as that we have listened to from the hon. Member for Mid Lincoln, we received from the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition (Sir Stafford Northcote) a promise of his support. And although, of course, we winced under the infliction of punishment, I must acknowledge that that offer of support was given in a cordial and ungrudging spirit, and I thank the right hon. Gentleman for having given it. Last night we received the support—the valuable support—of the noble Lord the Member for Woodstock (Lord Randolph Churchill). I was glad to hear that not only would that support be heartily and cordially given, but that it would be of very considerable numerical extent. Well, while we are grateful for the numerical support which the noble Lord is going to bring us, I cannot say that we feel equally grateful for the moral support which he says it is his intention to tender us. He seems to think that it will assist the present Government in the arduous task which they have before them, when that Government, acting upon what was their idea of the precedents most conformable to the spirit of our Constitution—when they have placed certain leaders of an organization which they believe and are advised is of an illegal character, seeking illegal objects by illegal means—when they have placed these men upon their trial—the noble Lord seems to think that it will assist the Government in its difficulties, and that it will assist the course of government in Ireland, if he endeavours, by every means in his power, to cast ridicule upon the legal proceedings which are at this moment pending, and if he endeavours to show this House, and, of course, the people of Ireland, that these proceedings have never been seriously taken up at all, and that they are not intended to be continued. And having made an observation as, I imagine, in a tone almost of regret, that for the first time in the history of Ireland a political trial is being conducted with a jury which has not been packed, the noble Lord proceeded to offer to the Government further moral support by suggesting that my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland had cast a slur upon the Constabulary in the discharge of their duty. What, Sir, is the proof of that assertion? The only proof brought forward was the issue of that Circular, which, as the noble Lord was told the other night, was only the re-issue of a Circular sent out a few years ago by a Conservative Chief Secretary.

It was not the same Circular.

It was explained the other night, and I am sorry to have to explain it to the noble Lord again, with the omission of a certain paragraph which referred to corporal punishment, and one other alteration—

Read the Circular, [ Cries of "Order!"]

I recollect that the noble Lord, when he was challenged to produce the Circular, did not produce it. If the noble Lord was referring to any other Circular, and if I have misrepresented him, it is only the consequence of his not being able to explain what Circular it was he was referring to. Well, Sir, this very serious charge against my right hon. Friend was supported by another thing. The noble Lord read out at full length a Circular which appeared to afford him a great deal of amusement, but which I do not think the House found as amusing as did the noble Lord. The Circular in question contained a series of what appeared to me to be most sensible instructions issued to the Constabulary for their guidance and conduct in regard to their attendance at land meetings. The noble Lord said the present Government had been trying a series of experiments in Irish government since they came into power. These experiments all appeared to him to be extremely ludicrous; but the most ludicrous of all was what he called the experiment of trying to rule Ireland by the ordinary law. Sir, that is an experiment which Her Majesty's Government are not ashamed of having tried. It is an experiment which they hope they, or their successors, may very soon be able to repeat. Well, Sir, last night, after the noble Lord, we heard two other speeches of a very different character. We heard speeches from the hon. Member for the County of Cork (Mr. Shaw), and from the hon. and learned Member for the Borough of Dundalk (Mr. Charles Russell). The House listened with great attention to those speeches. They not only listened with attention, but I think they listened with some sympathy; but it appeared to me that although those speeches were received with the attention which both the subject and the speeches demanded, they represented rather the natural antipathy and repugnance which are and must be felt by any Member representing an Irish constituency to repressive measures of any character or kind whatever, rather than solid arguments in support of the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), or against those measures which Her Majesty's Government have announced their intention to bring forward. Both of these hon. Members admitted the existence of a dangerous condition of affairs in many parts of Ireland. [ Cries of "No, no!" and "Hear, hear!"] They both made a faint attempt to attribute exaggeration to the descriptions of that condition which had been given.

No, no! [ Cries of "Order!"]

I do not know what the hon. Member is attempting to contradict. I say they did attribute exaggeration. Did they, or did they not? I say that both hon. Members made an attempt to show exaggeration.

A "faint attempt" were the words used.

I certainly said "a faint attempt." I will omit the adjective, and say that both hon. Members made an attempt to prove that the reports which had been laid before this House as to the dangerous condition of some parts of Ireland were exaggerated. Well, Sir, on what evidence did that attempt rest? The hon. Member for the County of Cork (Mr. Shaw) stated that he had travelled over many parts of Ireland, and he had seen no signs of a disturbed condition in any district in which he had been. He had been in many districts, and had seen no sign of it himself. That I can well believe. I believe it may be perfectly possible to travel from one end of Ireland to the other, and to see no outward and visible signs of the terrorism which at present prevails. The hon. Member ought to go into the houses of the victims of this tyranny, and perhaps not even then would he be able to elicit from the inmates of those dwellings a full account of the daily annoyances and nightly terrorism to which they are subjected. But, Sir, what is the proof brought forward by the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk (Mr. Charles Russell)? The hon. and learned Member referred to exaggerations in the newspaper reports. Why did he give the House that amusing and interesting description of the manner in which outrages are reported by the enterprizing agents of an enterprizing news agency? Does the hon. and learned Member suppose that the action which the Government propose to take, and the measures which the Government are going to submit to the House, are founded on newspaper reports, and upon the stories of out- rages concocted by newspaper agents? The proposals which we shall have to make are founded on reports of hard matters of fact—upon dry reports, upon statistics furnished by officers of the Government, by magistrates, by the Constabulary, who have no conceivable motive—[ Cries of "No!"]—yes, by men who have no conceivable motive for invention or exaggeration, to whom this state of things is certainly no credit, however much it may have been out of their power to prevent it. It is upon these reports, it is upon these facts, which have been, or will be, placed upon the Table of the House, and which will be open to be contradicted by any Member of the House, that the measures of the Government will be founded, and not upon any hearsay, or upon any stories concocted by a newspaper agent. Why, Sir, the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk suggested—and I regretted to hear him make the suggestion—that there had been exaggeration, that there had been overcolouring in the charge so frequently referred to by Judge Fitzgerald. On what evidence did the hon. and learned Member found his suggestion that that learned Judge had been biassed by the Grand Jury with whom he had been in association? I believe there is no Judge more impartial, or who is less likely to exaggerate than Mr. Justice Fitzgerald; but if this were not so, would it not have been more worthy of him and the position which the hon. Member occupies in this House to have examined the facts and figures upon which that learned Judge relied, than to have suggested that his impartial mind had been biassed by communications with the Grand Jury? Those hon. Members who have delivered the speeches to which I have referred could only attribute this state of things, the existence of which they could not deny, and which they could only suggest was exaggerated, to a widespread feeling of discontent and disaffection amongst the people, produced and justified, to a certain extent, by the distress which they suffered, and by their repugnance and resistance to bad laws, and, above all, to a bad land system. Sir, I maintain that that assertion has not been proved in any respect. The existence of crime in Ireland cannot be connected in any way whatever with the prevalence of distress, nor with the harsh action of bad Land Laws During the distress of last winter, which we all deplore, and which the House endeavoured to the best of its ability to remedy, crime was at a very low ebb. After the harvest, which is acknowledged by all the Irish Members to have been one of the best with which Ireland was ever blessed, crime greatly increased. That does not seem to me to prove any connection between the increase of crime and the general distress. I will show by-and-bye how far it has been connected with the harsh action of the landlords. It has, undoubtedly, been connected with a widespread agitation for a change of law. Many of us do admit the necessity for some change in the law. There are some of us who approve some of the objects which the Land League set forth or desire to attain. I think we shall all admit that there is a wide distinction between crime which is the result, however much to be regretted, but, perhaps, the natural result, of resistance to unjust and oppressive laws which are pressing at the moment upon the people, between crime committed in actual resistance to the law by a people smarting under its operation, and crime which is deliberately committed for the purpose of bringing about a change in the law. But I think there is no proof, at any rate no proof has yet been given, that the people of Ireland are, as they are asserted to be, accomplices in the state of crime which is now prevailing. We maintain that there exists at this moment in Ireland a state of terrorism and intimidation which prevents the real opinions and feelings of the people being expressed. It is a libel on the people of Ireland to assert that they are the perpetrators of, or the sympathizers with, the crimes the prevalence of which cannot be denied. The hon. and learned Member for Dundalk made use of the well worn saying of Burke, "that he could not draw an indictment against a whole people;" but it would seem that it is hon. Members opposite, who take the same line of argument as the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk, who do draw an indictment against the people of Ireland, and who seek to make them responsible for the commission of crimes with which ninety—nine hundredths of them are utterly unconnected, and which are the work of, as I believe, a small band of persons—of miscreants living upon the agitation which has been excited, and upon the intimidation which undetected proceedings have hitherto enabled them to promote. Although I have been called upon to differ widely from the speeches of the hon. Member for the City of Cork and the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk, I cannot say that I wonder much at, or that I can strongly reprove, those speeches. Every Member of this House feels repugnance at being asked to become a party to any measure interfering with the Constitutional liberty of the subject, and I do not wonder that Members representing Irish constituencies should feel how ungrateful is such a task. But they do not feel as keenly as those who sit upon these Benches the immense responsibility which rests upon them, not only for the redress of acknowledged grievances, but for the assertion of the ordinary law upon which the welfare, safety, and prosperity of the whole community must depend. The hon. and learned Member asks what we should, under like circumstances, do in England? and asserts that it would be impossible, if a similar state of things existed in this country, for the Government to come down to the House and propose any repressive measures. It is impossible to say what would be done in circumstances which do not exist, and which I hope never will exist; but I think it would be safe to say that in the event of such a state of things existing in England this House would apply adequate remedies, whatever they might be. I do not believe for a moment that if such a state of things as exists in Ireland now existed in the agricultural districts of England, the great industrial and commercial interests represented so largely on this side of the House would for one moment tolerate that the law should be openly set at defiance, and that the peace of the country and public confidence should be so shaken as is at present the case in Ireland; and I believe that they would be the first to demand that an adequate remedy should be applied. Both the hon. Members to whom I have referred (Mr. Shaw and Mr. Charles Russell) agree with many of those who have spoken on that side of the House in regretting the indications which have fallen from the Government, both in the Queen's Speech and in the speech of the Prime Minister, as to their intentions with regard to the Land Question. We have heard regret expressed from all quarters of the House at what is supposed to be the intention of the Government to introduce a weak Land Bill. I am not going to discuss that measure to-night; but it is to be regretted that hon. Members should so suddenly jump to conclusions with regard to a measure of which they have certainly heard very little. I am certainly at a loss to know how they are informed that it is a weak Bill. But I must protest against the character of a great deal of the language which I have heard with regard to this legislation in the course of the debate. We are told that our Bill is weak, and also what sort of Bill is necessary. Sometimes it is described as a strong Bill, and at others as a large Bill. But, surely, there are considerations much more important as affecting the Land Bill than its size or strength. It seems to me more important to inquire whether the Bill of the Government will be conformable to the principles of justice; whether it will remove acknowledged grievances; whether it will be based on principles of sound judgment and policy, such as may lay the foundation for a permanent cure, and not a temporary mitigation of the evils which are now admitted to prevail. These seem to me to be subjects which have not been as much considered as the question, whether the Government is about to introduce something that will take Ireland by surprise, and the country, so to speak, by storm. But they are not the considerations which ought to guide the Government in framing a measure of such vast importance. There is an extraordinary inconsistency in the speech of the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk. He paid a just tribute to the achievements of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the legislative proposals which he has made and carried. He described the Land Act of 1870 as a magnificent measure; and yet the hon. and learned Member proceeded the next moment to repudiate, as something utterly inadequate for the present emergency, any Bill founded on its principles. Much has been urged on this question which I am not at all able to follow. Sometimes we are told that our proposals do not come up to the low-water mark of Conservative opinion in Ireland; that the noble Lord the Member for Down has declared in favour of the "three F's;" and not only so, but he has been made the medium of a partial recanta- tion on the part of the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition. I have the greatest possible respect, both for the right hon. Gentleman and the noble Lord the Member for Down; but I have not been accustomed blindly to follow those Gentlemen in political matters, and I cannot understand why hon. Gentlemen who sit behind me should urge, as perfectly conclusive against us, the opinions of the noble Lord and the recantation of the right hon. Gentleman. The hon. Member for Mid Lincolnshire (Mr. Chaplin), following the lines taken by other speakers upon that side of the House, repeated the charge against the Government that they were responsible for the present state of things, in consequence chiefly of their failure last Session to renew the Peace Preservation Act and their delay in summoning Parliament. I will not go at length into these charges; but, whether too late or not, the time has come when some measures for the preservation of order are required. I admit that the charges made against us have been urged with moderation and good temper; and I will say that if there be responsibility, blame, or failure in renewing, or, as it has been in our case, to re-enacting, the Peace Preservation Act, that responsibility must be to a very great extent divided between those who sit on this side of the House and those who sit on the other. We have been told of the information which we found in the archives of the Irish Office when we acceded to Office; but, if I am not mistaken, that information had been in the possession of the late Government from December twelve months, and, therefore, during the three months of the first Session of last year they might have renewed the Bill. They did not, however, think proper to do do so. And if it was difficult for them it would have been absolutely impossible for us. Sir, I do not deny that we did indulge the hope that our intention and desire, openly and boldly expressed, that we might safely trust to the ordinary law to preserve order in Ireland, would have produced a good effect and conduced to its own fulfilment. At all events, we believed that to begin the proceedings of a new Parliament, pledged deeply to do justice, and perhaps something more than justice, to Ireland by a discussion which must be long and irritating, would be the one thing to ruin the chance of doing in this Parliament any good for Ireland. We believed that the feeling produced by the renewal of these discussions would infinitely outweigh the advantages of passing an Act not altogether suitable to present circumstances. We knew we might be disappointed in the hopes we formed; but we were determined that, if we were obliged to propose exceptional measures, we would, when the time came, propose those which would be effectual, and not such as, besides being ineffectual, would be of an irritating character. And, Sir, then we are told that we have grossly neglected our duty in not summoning Parliament two months ago. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the late Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Gibson) said that we had nothing to learn from the Charges of Judge Fitzgerald and Baron Dowse, and that we had all that information in our possession before. But I must remind the right hon. and learned Gentleman of what seems to be very much, forgotten on that side of the House, that measures of this character have not only to be proposed by the Government, but that they have to be passed by Parliament. Parliament is jealous, and rightly jealous, of any interference with Constitutional liberty, and will not, and ought not to, sanction any interference with the forms of liberty, except upon an overwhelming cause for it, being shown and proved beyond the possibility of a doubt. And I would, therefore, point out to the right hon. Gentleman that there is a great difference between facts marshalled and presented to the House in ex parte statements by the Executive Government and those same facts calmly presented to the public after impartial deliberation by the Judges of the land. And I believe that the time which has been allowed to elapse has not been lost, if it enables us to present, as I believe it will, a case for the necessity of these measures in a manner which will commend itself to those on this side of the House, although there are those on the other side who will venture to dispute it. Before I sit down I must refer, for a moment, to the speech of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) when introducing his Amendment. The tone and moderation of that speech have been referred to, and comments have, not unnaturally, been made on the extreme difference between the tone of, and the statements made in, speeches delivered by the hon. Member in this House and those delivered in Ireland. If the hon. Member would deliver the speeches which he makes in this House in Ireland, and the speeches which he makes in Ireland in this House, we should all understand each other a good deal better, and I think, perhaps, it would be better for all parties. But, notwithstanding the moderation which has been so generally observed in the speech of the hon. Member, that speech contains sufficiently startling assertions. The hon. Member stated that crime last year compared favourably with that of other years. Unfortunately, the state of Ireland for many years past has made it necessary to keep accurate and detailed accounts of crime, both of ordinary crime and especially of agrarian crime. And the House must remember that in this case we are dealing, not with ordinary, but with agrarian crime—that is, with a class of crime the motive of which can be distinctly connected with the ownership or occupation of land. Since 1844 accurate accounts have been preserved, and are before the House; and there is not a single year in which the number of agrarian outrages has come nearly up to that which, unfortunately, was reached last year. Up to that time the largest number was in 1845, when it amounted to 1,920; I know that many hon. Members attribute very little importance to threatening letters. I admit that a distinction between threatening letters and outrages should be borne in mind. But the House has been frequently reminded that threatening letters in Ireland are, too often, not the stupid and ignorant jokes which are in this country sometimes practised, but matters of real significance. I have said that in 1845 the number was 1,920; exclusive of the threatening letters to which I have just referred there were 950. Now, what was the number last year? Including threatening letters, 2,573; exclusive of them, 1,246. The number, therefore, is greatly in excess of the largest number that has ever been reached since 1844; and not only is it actually larger, but, relatively to the population, it is very much larger.

asked if the noble Marquess would include the 10,000 evictions among the agrarian outrages?

I will tell the hon. Member something about evictions in a moment. The largest amount of agrarian crime, in proportion to the population, took place during the year which has just elapsed. Has the state of the country, then, with regard to agrarian crime, improved? A Return is on the Table of the House, and if not in the hands of Members, shortly will be so, which shows the number of outrages for every month of every year since 1844. Up to April of last year the number was 67. It gradually rose till, in August, it amounted to 103; in September to 167; in October to 264; in November to 554; and in December to 860. If hon. Members wish to know what are the numbers, exclusive of threatening letters, they are—September, 104; October, 110; November, 217; and December, 382. It cannot be said, I think, after that statement, that agrarian outrage is decreasing; and I am at a loss to conjecture upon what facts the hon. Member for Cork City relies, when he says that the condition of Ireland, as regards agrarian crime last year, compares favourably with other periods in which it has been known to exist. We are told that agrarian outrages are the result of evictions, and caused by the resistance of the people to the harsh exercise of the rights of the landlords. But how does the case stand in that respect? In the first quarter of the year there were 554 evictions, in which there were 64 cases of re-admission as tenants, and 235 as caretakers, making a total of 255 actual evictions. In that same quarter there were 294 agrarian outrages, and 190 exclusive of threatening letters. What was the case in the last quarter? Then there were 198 evictions; but there were 46 re-admissions as tenants, and 63 as caretakers, leaving 89 actual evictions. There were 1,678 crimes, and 709 exclusive of threatening letters; and yet we are told that agrarian outrages, at the present moment, are the result of the harsh exercise of their rights by the landowners. Such a connection has existed, no doubt, in former times. In other times agrarian outrage has been the result of popular resistance to a harsh and perhaps tyrannical exercise of the landlords' rights; but the figures just stated show that it has not been so now. It is impossible to connect the two together; and I contend that, in the present case, we must look to some other cause for the increase of crime in Ireland. The hon. Member for Cork City has said that he admits that there has been a great state of excitement and agitation, and that crime always, to a certain extent, accompanies agitation. The hon. Member speaks of it, and we are glad to hear him and his Friends speak of it as an undesirable adjunct of agitation, which not only discredits, but injures the cause of agitation. I know that the hon. Member and his Friends have dissuaded from crime; but I cannot help thinking that their dissuasion has been somewhat of a mild character. I can hardly think that when the hon. Member for Cork City states, as he is reported to have done at one meeting deprecating agrarian outrage, that such outrages are unnecessary in a well-organized district, that he was passing a very sweeping condemnation of agrarian crime in the unorganized districts. But, however that may be, I am sure we are all glad to hear hon. Members disclaim any desire for the existence of agrarian outrage. I cannot agree with the hon. Member and his Friends that agrarian outrages injure, though they certainly discredit, the cause of land agitation. I think the hon. Member and his Friends do some injustice to the support they receive from those who are implicated in these crimes. What is the operation of the Land League? It comes into a district; branches are established; advice and counsel are given to the tenant farmers. They are advised not to pay any rent at all, or not to pay above a certain valuation, or not more than they find it convenient to pay. That is advice of a not unpalatable character, and the only wonder is that it should not be more universally adopted without any persuasion. But sometimes serious reflection intervenes. Many tenants reflect that they are not so badly off after all. They have a pretty good occupation, their rent is not excessive, and their landlord is not a tyrant. They have successfully passed through bad times, and they hope that better times are in store for them, and they do not like to risk their whole future for what may be a temporary and slight present advantage. They consider, perhaps, that on the whole it would be better to reject the advice, and they pay their full rents. A tenant forms this re- solve and what follows? The next morning, perhaps, his cattle are houghed, his ricks are burnt, and his property is in some way or other injured. He himself, perhaps, is visited in the night, guns are fired through his door or his window; his dwelling, perhaps, entered; he himself pulled out of bed and dragged into the road, and threatened with the most fearful penalties if he does not swear not to repeat the unpardonable offence of paying his full rent to his landlord. I need not go through the description of outrages of this kind, the existence of which cannot be denied, and the terrors of which extend far beyond the area of reported cases. But what is the effect? After one or two of these outrages have taken place in a district, what the hon. Member for Cork City calls "public opinion" among the tenant farmers is greatly strengthened, and the advice of the Land League, which might, perhaps, on further reflection have been disregarded, at all events by some of the tenant farmers, is humbly and submissively accepted. Is that no advantage to the operation of the Land League? That it discredits and disgraces the Land League and the land agitation there can be no question; but it is not quite so clear that it is of no advantage. Why, the fact is that the unwritten law of the League, of which the hon. Member has spoken, is enforced by the same means and by the same sanctions as any other law. It is enforced, in the last resort, by the strong arm. Do we say, Sir, that the law in this country is obeyed solely on account of its majesty and of the respect universally paid to the law, to Parliament, and to the Judges, that it is entirely the moral effect of the law which causes its observance? Do we ignore altogether the services of the police-constable or the gaoler? Do we think that without them the law would be respected, even in this country? So, in Ireland, the advice of the Land League would go for comparatively little; but its unwritten laws are enforced by the strong arm, by those who, I do not say do its bidding, but do its work—the perpetrators of the outrages to which I have referred. They are the instruments of the Land League; and although I have no doubt that hon. Members opposite detest those instruments, I cannot but think that they are useful in assisting to attain the objects which that League has in view. The hon. Member spoke with great moderation of the objects of the Land League. I will not discuss the question whether those objects are legal or not; I have my own opinion on the subject; but the time is late, and the question is the subject of judicial proceedings elsewhere. I understood the hon. Member for the City of Cork, however, to say that he had never counselled the farmers of Ireland to offer any but a passive resistance to the exaction of unjust rents. I have a difficulty in reconciling that with the words that fell from the hon. Member in the same speech, when he said that it was sometimes the highest duty of a citizen to oppose resistance to a law which he knows to be unjust. There are passages in our own history in which men, whom to-day we hold in the highest honour, have opposed such a resistance to the law. But it is a dangerous doctrine to propose. It approaches dangerously near to incitement to rebellion. And I would remind the hon. Member, and those who act with him, that there can be no justification. for such an incitement, except not only a conviction of the justice—the absolute justice—of the cause, but also a reasonable conviction of the probability of success. Does the hon. Member feel that he is so certain to triumph over what he considers an unjust law—and his idea of an unjust law, I think, is very different to that of even the most advanced Members who sit on this side of the House—does he feel so confident in his power to overcome what he considers to be an unjust law, that he considers it his duty to incite, even in the most distant manner, his followers to practise resistance to the law? If he does, he takes a great responsibility, a tremendous responsibility, upon himself. Hon. Members opposite have wisely appealed to the attachment which this House, and all Parties in this House, feel to our Constitutional liberties, and to the forms which guard them. But, attached as we are to those forms, I trust that we are not yet altogether the slaves of form. I trust that, in respecting and vindicating as we do the forms of our Constitution, we are not indifferent to that which is a yet more precious thing — the substance. I have had before, and I fear we may have again, to point out in this House how, in the sacred names of free- dom of debate and liberty of discussion, the Forms of the House have been abused until, for the great majority of hon. Members, there is little freedom of debate and no freedom of action remaining. And so it is in Ireland at this moment. Under the forms of Constitutional liberty the substance is disappearing. It is not, as it is described by some, a condition of anarchy. A law does prevail, but it is not the law of the land. For the law of the land has been substituted the law of the Land League; for the Judge and the magistrate has been substituted an irresponsible committee; for the police constable and the sheriff's officer—for those who work in the service of the law in the full light of day—have been substituted the midnight assassin and the ruffian who invades the humble cottage, disguised, at midnight. From this tyranny there are thousands at this moment suffering, and it is for them, and not for the landlord class alone—it is for hundreds of thousands who desire to gain honestly their living, but cannot do so except in fear of their very lives, that we ask you to give us not permanent, but temporary measures, to restore the substance of liberty, though it may be by a temporary abridgement of some of its forms.

complained that the Government had put up the noble Lord to attempt to bully the Irish Members. [ Cries of "Order!" and "Withdraw!"] Time after time hon. Members had risen; but, no matter on which side they sat, not one of them had attempted to defend the policy of the Government except a paid official of the Crown. The Government had done well to have recourse to the noble Lord—who was the Representative of coercion in the Cabinet—to put him up at that late hour of the night to utter the well-worn menaces, to which they were so well accustomed, of coercion and intimidation against the Irish Members. The noble Lord had informed them that liberty was the portion of Englishmen; that it had been strenuously struggled for in former years; and that they would preserve the substance, and abolish the shadow of it—in other words, he meant to say that the Irish Members, who were really attempting to preserve the substance of liberty and to exclude the shadow, were to be put down at all hazards. In the struggle that was coming, whatever it might be, the Irish Members would not be afraid to face it; and then the Government could invite the Representatives of other countries and other Constitutions to come in and witness the magnificent English Thermopylæ of 500 men against 50. The noble Lord had taunted the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk with saying that the outrages reported from Ireland only came through the channel of The Central News, and he had said that he would give the House dry facts and hard figures in order to show the House the justice of these measures of coercion. But from what authority did he get his facts and figures? Was it from the Representatives of the Irish people in that House? "Was it from that respected body of gentlemen in Ireland — the Roman Catholic and the Protestant clergy? Was it from those other well-known bodies in Ireland that might easily be found if sought for? No. The gentlemen from whom the noble Lord derived his information were the constables and the magistrates. In other words, the Irish Members and the Irish people were put upon their trial, and judgment was to be pronounced against them, when the Judges who sat upon the Bench were the complainants. Who were the magistrates of Ireland? The noble Lord, and the right hon. Gentleman who sat beside him (Sir. W. E. Forster), knew very well who they were; they were the landlords and land agents of Ireland; and they knew also that time after time complaints had been made in the House against the character of the magistracy. It had been pointed out to the House time after time that very few Catholic or trusted gentlemen sat on the Bench. He had seen the other day in the news-papers a Memorial from an important of magistrates in Cavan calling for coercion. Doubtless, the noble Lord had it in his pocket. The very day after there came from a very distinguished gentleman in that county of Cavan, the Catholic Bishop—a gentleman who, he supposed, had the interests of law and order and public morality at heart—an offer to prove, if the Government would give him facilities, that the magistrates of Cavan had stated that which was not the fact. He would like to know what answer was returned to the Bishop, and whether they did or did not intend to grant the Commission asked for? Another statement which had been made by a Member of the Government was that the facts and figures should be put before the House in black and white. No doubt, the House would receive a report from every police-barrack in Ireland; but he would draw attention to a report which had appeared in the public Press of some remarks made by the muchesteemed Judge Fitzgerald at the Cork Assizes. They had reference to the case of an unfortunate boy who was arrested for an alleged outrage; and, in this matter, he should like to ask the Chief Secretary to produce to the House all the information bearing upon it sent up by the police to Dublin Castle, so that hon. Members could form their own opinion of the merits of the case. The boy, David Keefe, was charged with maliciously shooting at his uncle, John Keefe, with intent to wound, and the uncle at the trial stated that he was concerned in the sale of some land that had belonged to the prisoner's father; that, however, there had been no dispute about it; that he saw the prisoner on the land, and that the prisoner had discharged some sort of fire-arm at him, but that he had sustained no wound, that he had seen no smoke and smelt no powder. The Judge ridiculed the affair, and said that for aught they knew the boy might only have fired off a pop-gun. It would be interesting to know what the sub-inspector said the prisoner had fired off. The boy had been kept in gaol three months, and the jury expressed surprise that he should have been incarcerated so long upon such a charge. For three months this lad, who was only 15 or 16 years of age, was kept in confinement, and subjected to the contaminating influences of a prison, deprived of his home and what little comforts he might have had, brought to trial, and dismissed from a charge that the Judge himself described as an absurd one. He (Mr. Healy) challenged the Chief Secretary to produce his police report upon this case. He would give the noble Lord another case—not this time that of a boy, but of a woman, who was kept in confinement for three months, and immediately acquitted on being placed upon her trial. The woman was kept in gaol, notwithstanding the magistrates knew she was enciente when apprehended. These cases showed in some degree the character of the magistracy and of the police on whose information the noble Lord asked the House to suspend the liberties of the Irish people. He would give another instance, and he trusted that the House would forgive him for adverting to it, as it was one in which he was personally interested. He also had had the misfortune to be put in prison on an agrarian charge. He would tell the House how it was done. Two agents in a district, who were both magistrates, came together and induced the stipendiary magistrate to visit a farmer named Manning, an illiterate man, who hardly knew a word of English, and got him to swear an information against him. The poor man was threatened that if he did not swear the information he would be fined £50. Well, who were the magistrates who decided the case and sent it for trial? They were Mr. J. W. Payne, the agent of Lord Bantry; Mr. Barratt, Lord Kenmare's agent; Lord Bantry's son, a late trooper in the Guards; and another military officer. This was the character of the magistracy in Ireland, and these were the sort of men upon whose evidence the noble Lord asked the House to suspend the liberties of the Irish people. He would tell the noble Lord that if his evidence were ten thousand times better than it was, the Irish Members would be justified in resisting to the last gasp any attempt upon the lives and liberties of the Irish people. They had heard a great deal about outrages. He himself knew something about outrages—[ Laughter ]—and, as the House thought that so very funny, he would tell them all about it. He had visited Castletown, Berehaven, and had spent three days there; never, up to that time, having been in the place before. During the visit, he had been informed that a good deal of rick and hay burning was going on. Every one of the people was in sympathy with, and afterwards became members of, the League. He asked them if they had any suspicion as to who burnt their hay, and everyone answered that they had. And against whom had they suspicion? The police of Castletown. One of them told him a very strange thing. Complaint had been made in that House that no police patrols went out at night, and this man told him he informed the sub-inspector of police that every night these patrols were out a hay-rick was burnt; and since they were withdrawn there had been none burnt. And, what was more—as the right hon. Gentleman enjoyed it so much—one of the local men swore an information against the police, and the police found it necessary to demand a sworn investigation on their side. And, to-night, he found the entire state of things in this district corroborated by a Roman Catholic clergyman, who came forward and made a charge against the police. It might be said the police were not interested in outrages in Ireland. If the police were not interested their masters were very much interested. And who were their masters? The magistrates of Ireland, and the landlords, and the men at Dublin Castle, the gentlemen who were continually at the elbow of the right hon. Gentleman opposite, and who were continually dinning into his ears stories. When asked, last year, if his Under Secretary (Mr. Burke) had acted on the advice given him by the right hon. Gentleman, to deal leniently with his tenants, and to refrain from pressing hardly upon them in a bad year, he gave no satisfactory answer. These were the persons interested, and they wanted to keep up the system. Dublin Castle and its precincts was a centre of conspiracy against the mass of the Irish people, by appointing magistrates who were enemies of the people. If they looked at the gentlemen appointed by Dublin Castle, who would they find? Were they men trusted by the people? They would find some landed swell, some evicting gentleman—and he ventured to say there was not an evictor in Ireland who was not on the justice-seat. If the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. W. E. Forster), or the noble Lord opposite (the Marquess of Hartington), had at heart the peace of Ireland, and wished really to probe its wound to the bottom, they would sweep away this pestiferous class who had so long fed on the vitals of the Irish people, and replace them by men. who would hold the scales of justice equally between man and man. The noble Lord had complained that, although the Government Bill had not yet been seen, hon. Members had expressed mistrust and doubt as to its provisions, and as to the bonâ fide intentions of the Government. He did not think the noble Lord need go very far to find the cause of this doubt and distrust of the Ministry. He distrusted it when he found the noble Lord in it; and he distrusted the intentions of any Ministry to propose a good Land Bill for Ireland which had in it a preponderating element of landlords. Their own selfish interests forbade them to pass a good measure for Ireland; and it was the action of men like the noble Lord that created distrust in the intentions of the Government. They had been told—and a great point had been made of it—that in the past six months Ireland had been governed by the ordinary law. He denied that Ireland had been governed by the ordinary law. The House did not know, perhaps, what the ordinary law in Ireland meant. Did they think it was the law as they knew it in England? It was nothing of the sort. They were governed year by year by a series of atrocious Whiteboy Acts which had no place on the English Statute Book—and that was what was called the ordinary law. He would like to see it in force in England, and see how long the English people would stand it. And now, what did the right hon. Gentleman want? He wanted these extraordinary and bloodthirsty enactments, some of which—the one, for instance, under which he (Mr. Healy) was tried—involved a penalty of being once, twice, or thrice privately whipped. These were the statutes of a Liberal Government in Ireland; but the right hon. Gentleman was anxious to abolish flogging in the Army and Navy. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham (Mr. Chamberlain) obstructed that House an entire night, and refused to let the Army Bill go on because there was flogging in the Service; yet these were the laws of Ireland, and they were told that they were governed by the ordinary laws. Another of the ordinary laws was for the suppression of public meetings—that had become a very ordinary law lately. The noble Lord caused many of their fellow-countrymen to be bathed in blood in Phœnix Park. He was tried for it and found guilty; but the noble Lord, on some technical quibble, got out of the scrape. That was one of the ordinary laws the Irish people could not rely on when they got into scrapes. He would like to draw attention to some of the incidents of these cases. He himself attended a meeting which was not proclaimed; it was proclaimed for the following day. The meeting was proceeding in peace; there was no tumult, no attempt to disturb the peace, no incendiary language; when, suddenly, the intelligence came that a special train was coming down—from a distance of 20 or 30 miles—with a body of policemen to disperse the meeting, although there was no proclamation. This special train—which would have to be paid for by the taxpayers in Ireland—arrived, and, so hasty were the gentlemen in command, that though the policemen were fully accoutred, as they always were in Ireland, with knapsacks and blankets, and, of course, buckshot, they were at once formed into military order; they threw down their surplus accoutrements on the muddy ground, and charged upon this riotous assemblage at double-quick, with fixed bayonets and loaded rifles. These were some of the insignia of the ordinary law in Ireland. They might have been holding a meeting not to discuss the Land Question, but to discuss the Boer or the Basuto rebellion; or it might have been a temperance meeting. No question was asked; but the magistrate came up, and said—"If you do not disperse we shall fire on you." That was the ordinary law in Ireland. But it was not good enough for the noble Lord. He wanted something still more extraordinary. He wanted to have their liberties at the disposal of the meanest policeman or the meanest magistrate, the most contemptible magistrate, who might have a personal grudge against any one of them. He wanted them to allow themselves to be thrust into gaol because Policeman X had a falling out with one of them a year ago; and they were threatened with tremendous penalties if they dared to say a word in that House against this message of peace to Ireland. They told the noble Lord that he would find that they were not to be intimidated by him. They told the noble Lord they knew something about Coercion Acts in Ireland. They knew something about going to gaol in Ireland. They knew how to face it. They had lived for the last 20 or 30 years through as many Coercion Acts; and if they lived 20 or 30 years longer they could live through as many more. The House would never be at a loss for a pretext to suspend the lives and liberties of the Irish people; but he was glad to say they had taught the people of Ireland something. They had taught them that, by combining amongst themselves, they were a power which the Government, and its military, and all the forces at its disposal, could not overcome. The people of Ireland felt it; and they would go on teaching them that in that system of combination they had their only salvation.

Motion made, and Question, "That the Debate be now adjourned,"—( Mr. Blennerhassett, )—put, and agreed to.

Debate further adjourned till To-morrow.

moved for a

"Select Committee to inquire into alleged outrages in Ireland, and the effect of distress, and the system of Land Tenure thereon, the present state of the law for the prevention of such outrages, and the manner in which the said law has teen administered."

I must oppose the appointment of this Committee.

Does the right hon. Gentleman oppose?

Yes.

moved the adjournment of the debate, so as to afford the right hon. Gentleman an opportunity of giving some reason why he opposed the appointment of the Committee. He could quite understand the indisposition of the right hon. Gentleman to inquire into the alleged outrages in Ireland.

thought the right hon. Gentleman might be able to inform the House what his reasons were for opposing the appointment of this Committee. He (Mr. Parnell) certainly could not understand why the right hon. Gentleman should desire to hide or to place a cloak over the real state of affairs in Ireland. He thought the people who lived in Ireland were best acquainted with the state of affairs, and he considered that they were entitled to produce evidence before a Select Committee and the House, to prove the falsehood of the statements which had been made on the part of Her Majesty's Government as to the state of things now existing in Ireland. On the present occasion, when he asked that a Committee should be appointed, he thought that some more consideration should be paid to the request of the Irish Members than the cavalier treatment which he had received.

The House is well aware that the reason why we have been summoned much earlier than usual is on account of the conviction the Government have as to the state of things in Ireland, and that the outrages which have been and are being committed in Ireland require exceptional measures. All are aware that the Government are exceedingly anxious at the very earliest moment to state the grounds on which they make that appeal to the House; and they are also aware that that appeal requires a statement on the part of the Government and on the part of myself in bringing the measures forward. The facts connected with these outrages will, of necessity, have to be stated in a Committee of the Whole House, and when they are brought forward their truth will be fully inquired into. The House, I presume, will have to be convinced before they consent to pass the Bills which will be laid before them. Therefore, I can hardly suppose that the hon. Member for the City of Cork really seriously proposes that we should allow ourselves to go into an inquiry previously to hearing the statement which the Government will have to make.

failed to see any ground for objecting to the appointment of the Committee.

said, the Motion of the hon. Member for the City of Cork was one which appeared now for the first time upon the Paper. He wished to know, therefore, whether the Standing Order fixing the half-past 12 o'clock Rule did not apply?

remarked, that the Question now before the House was not the Motion of his hon. Friend the Member for the City of Cork, but the Motion for the adjournment of the debate.

wished to say a word in reference to the point of Order raised by the hon. Gentleman the Under Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Courtney). He apprehended that the objection just taken by the hon. Member was taken too late. He submitted that it should have been taken at the time he (Mr. Parnell) made the Motion for the appointment of a Select Committee.

This Notice appears upon the Paper for the first time to-day.

And I have objected to it, Sir.

said, that since the Motion was made the adjournment of the debate had been moved, and he presumed that that was now the Question before the House.

As the Motion for the appointment of a Select Committee has been objected to, it cannot, under the Standing Orders, be proceeded with now, but must be postponed.

gave Notice that he would put down the Motion for Wednesday.

Motion postponed.

moved for leave to bring in a Bill to amend the Trade Union Act of 1871. He desired to say a word by way of explanation. The Bill proposed to enable the tenant farmers of Ireland to form a combination among themselves, so that they should be able to meet on the same footing as the trades unions authorized by the Act of 1871 in reference to artizans and labourers, who were enabled, in England, to unite together in trades unions. The Bill was of a very simple character, and merely defined the term trades unions, and one or two other terms, so as to include the tenant farmers of Ireland.

objected to the introduction of the Bill.

As the Motion is objected to it cannot be proceeded with.

Motion postponed.

moved for leave to bring in a Bill "to facilitate the creation of a class of small landed proprietors in Ireland."

objected to the introduction of the Bill.

Then it must be postponed.

Motion postponed.

House adjourned at a quarter before Two o'clock.