, in rising to move the following Amendment:—

"And humbly to pray Her Majesty to refrain from, using the Naval, Military, and Constabulary Forces of the Crown in enforcing ejectments for non-payment of rent in Ireland, until the measures proposed to be submitted to Her Majesty, with regard to the ownership of land in Ireland, have been decided upon by Parliament;"

said, he thought that every reasonable man in that House would see that he was warranted in calling their attention to the very important and practical question raised in his Amendment. He was glad to say that hitherto he had not observed in the House any manifestation of general indignation at the length of the debate. He had, indeed, received assurances from both Conservative and Liberal Members that, so far, there had been nothing unreasonable in the time taken up by Irish Members. There had been a certain amount of impatience manifested out-of-doors at the length at which Irish Members had already debated the Address, chiefly on the part of certain daily public instructors, who were every morning assuring them that they had only one duty to discharge, and that was to cut short their arguments of every kind, and allow the House to proceed as quickly as possible to the important task of imposing a Coercion Bill upon Ireland. This reminded him of a story which he had read of a Highland clansman who, having offended his lord, was ordered to be executed, and who was naturally anxious to postpone the carrying out of the sentence as long as possible. He was suddenly rebuked by his wife, who begged of him to make no further delay; but to go up to the gal- lows and be hanged at once to "please his Grace the Duke." The Irish Members were not so obliging in temper as that, nor disposed to hurry on the work of coercion in that House to please their Graces the Dukes. At the same time, even were there no question of coercion, this Amendment which he had to propose would be introduced, because it dealt with a most practical question concerning the condition of the people of Ireland, and the tranquillity of the country during the next few months. The motive of his Amendment was clear and simple. It was merely that the Crown should cease to use the power of employing an armed force—either military or constabulary—in the carrying out of evictions in Ireland. Almost all the force now used for such a purpose was, in the strict sense of the word, a purely military force. There was really no police force in Ireland, as people understood a police force in this country. They had no force merely concerned in the detection of offences and in the repression of such breaches of the peace as were common to all populations. They had a military body in a military dress, charged with strictly military duties. Every year the Irish police force was under going changes which made it more and more strictly a military body. He was somewhat surprised the other day in Dublin, upon the occasion of the opening of a trial in which several of his hon. Friends were concerned—a trial about the result of which he supposed the Irish Law Officers were already flushed with anticipations of triumph—he was somewhat surprised to see a body of horsemen appointed like some Continental soldiery, well mounted and well armed, with plumes waving in the wind, dashing up at rather a rapid pace against the crowd. He said to a friend of his—"Are Government bringing cavalry here already to use against the people?" His friend replied—"That is not a military force, but the Irish mounted constabulary." He (Mr. Justin M'Carthy) now proposed that this military force should not be employed in carrying out evictions while measures were still under consideration which must some day come before the House, and by means of which they hoped the whole system of eviction would be put an end to for ever. He did not think of asking the Government to introduce any measure on the subject, for he knew what the fate of such a measure, however small or simple, would be in "another place." They did not know how long the House might be engaged before coming to a discussion of that measure, nor how long both Parties, forgetting their traditional differences, might be in happy combination for the purpose of forging chains of coercion for Ireland—very likely not with the hand of a Vulcan, but rather with the hand of a tinker. While all that might be going on, the Irish Members were not bound to wait without asking the Government and the House to do something for the unfortunate Irish tenants who were certain, otherwise, to be evicted in the course of the coming months. An hon. Member said to him very complacently the other night, while speaking on this subject—"Oh, you have no evictions in Ireland; you have not had any for a length of time, and you are not likely to have any during the time to come." Let him first establish the fact that evictions had been frequent, painful, and shocking in Ireland during the past 12 months. That question, at all events, Her Majesty's Government had settled in the Return presented to the House. From that Return they found that during the last year, a period of distress and famine, 10,657 persons—men, women, and children—were evicted from their holdings in Ireland. Of that number about 1,000 persons were re-admitted as tenants, and nearly 5,000 were re-admitted as caretakers. No one knew better than the Prime Minister—for he had clearly explained it to the House last Session—the immense difference between the position of a man re-admitted as a caretaker, and a man in possession of a holding. A man re-admitted as a caretaker had lost every right whatever to the holding, and remained entirely and necessarily at the mercy of the landlord. He did not know whether any Return could give them an exact idea of how many of these 4,000 odd persons who were re-admitted as caretakers were still remaining in that position, or how many of them since that time had been sent adrift on the world. But there remained the fact that during an exceptional year, when the strongest claims existed—he would not say to the mercy, but to the justice of the landlords—more than 5,000 persons were turned out of their homes without being re-admitted either as tenants or caretakers. That, therefore, suggested that there were strong grounds for asking the Government to intervene in the coming months between the unjust landlords and the tenants. The noble Lord the Secretary of State for India the other night made a very remarkable double-edged use of the figures laid before the House. Like the spear of Achilles, they seemed to wound at one end and heal at the other. He began by being very indignant, especially with the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), who had accused the Government of being responsible for all the bloodshed and outrages that had taken place in Ireland. He indignantly reminded the Members of the late Government that under their Tory rule in Ireland they had 10 murders in a year, while under the Liberal rule they had only seven. He (Mr. Justin M'Carthy) began to be hopeful, when he heard the noble Lord's indignant eloquence, that they were not going to have any coercion after all. But, having disposed of the late Government in that indignant manner, the noble Lord next proceeded to show, from the very same figures, how alarming was the condition of affairs in Ireland, and how imperative was the need of instant coercion. The late Prime Minister had written the most successful novel of the present day. He had heard—he did not know whether it was true or not—that another very successful novel had been written by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the University of Cambridge (Mr. Beresford Hope). He was not surprised at the success of the experiment; the surprise would be if the son of the author of "Anastasius" did not write a successful novel. The Secretary of State for India had evidently in the House been trying to see what he could do in the way of a romantic description of Ireland at the present time; and he was apparently qualifying for one branch of the craft, which was called, in homely and popular phrase, "The penny dreadful." He drew an appalling picture of the state of Ireland; he depicted fearful outrages, crimes, and murders, going on at that moment all over the country; and he only saved himself from positive assertion, by the use of the word "perhaps;" by telling the House of all the terrible things that were, "perhaps," then occurring in Ireland. But he (Mr. Justin M'Carthy) would invite the noble Lord's attention to a further use of the word "perhaps" in relation to occurrences which, unfortunately, were only too common in Ireland at the present day. Perhaps, about the time the noble Lord was speaking, men, women, and children were being ruthlessly evicted in Ireland. Perhaps, about that time, women and children were being turned out under the cruel skies of this most inclement January, and left without house or home to shelter them. Perhaps, at that time, the ashes of numberless household fires were being scattered to the winds by the process of eviction. That was a use of the word "perhaps" which he should commend to the attention of the noble Lord when he was next considering the possible condition of things in Ireland—

I rise to Order. I wish to know if the hon. Member is in Order in alluding to a speech which the noble Marquess (the Marquess of Hartington) has delivered in a past debate?

The hon. Member is in Order. At the same time, I wish to point out that the Amendment of the hon. Member is of a very limited character, and that he will not be in Order in travelling over the whole of the former debate.

said, he had no intention to travel over the former debate. The noble Lord commented upon the figures that had been referred to, for the purpose of showing that crime and outrage in Ireland had no connection with the process of eviction. His (Mr. Justin M'Carthy's) argument was offered to the House for the purpose of showing that disturbance and disorder came mainly from the exercise of eviction. He would call the attention of the House to certain cases of disturbance which not even the noble Lord would say were unconnected with the process of eviction. The Irish Members did not deny the existence of disorder and disturbance in Ireland; but their case was that they arose altogether from the system of Land Laws that existed in Ireland, and more especially from the process of eviction; and they contended that if the process of eviction were stayed until remedial legislation was considered, there would be no disorder and disturbance in the coun- try, and no occasion for Coercion Bills. He would call their attention to certain recent cases in which the disturbance was occasioned entirely by an attempt to enforce the right of eviction. At Claremorris, in Mayo, recently, one man was killed and another very seriously wounded, in a disturbance of that class, and the Coroner's Jury brought in a verdict of manslaughter against one policeman, whose name they knew; and against another, whose name was not known to them. Notwithstanding that, the Chief Secretary for Ireland bore his testimony to the fair and right-minded way in which the police force discharged their duty. On that occasion there was, undoubtedly, a very serious disturbance, in which one life was lost and others seriously endangered, and in that affray the police seem to have acted with a recklessness and rashness not usual to them. That affray—that little piece of civil war—which occasioned death to one unfortunate person, and probably mortal injury to more, arose because the armed force of power was used to put into operation a system of eviction, for which hardly any hon. Member in that House would stand up in justification, and which every man must admit should be abolished if any kind of tolerable Land Bill was to be brought before the House. He happened to observe by a report in the newspapers that the policeman against whom the verdict was found for manslaughter had since been allowed out on his own recognizances. He happened to see, also, in another portion of the same paper, a paragraph mentioning the fact that the Land League had voted the sum of £10 to the family of the man who was unfortunately killed in the affray. Perhaps that would be considered as an outrage committed by the Land League. What he asked by his Amendment was, that they should anticipate the state of things which was sure to arise from the exercise of this right of eviction, and withdraw the armed force of power from being used for the purpose. There was another case more recent still, in which a disturbance was caused that might have been serious by reason of the dread on the part of the people of the country that the same right of eviction was about to be enforced by the same military power. It occurred in the county which he had the honour of representing (Longford), where a branch of the Land League had been established for some time, and which, as regarded crime, from the 31st of January to the 30th of November last year, stood as follows:—Firing at the person, 1—he doubted whether it was really an agrarian crime, but, in any case, the man accused was promptly convicted—incendiary fires, 1 case awaiting trial, and 2 in which the offenders escaped; killing and maiming cattle, 1 man awaiting trial; threatening letters, 1 case awaiting trial, and 8 in which the writers were not discovered; resistance to the process of the law, 1 man accused and convicted, and 1 man awaiting trial. That was the state of the county during the past year, and, he supposed, for that, as well as others equally peaceable, exceptional measures would be asked by Her Majesty's Government, and the public at large would be led to believe that it was in a condition of anarchy and civil war. Lately in that county there occurred that which might have resulted in serious disaster had it not been for the prompt and judicious interposition of a Catholic priest and one or two popular and public-spirited men. Lord Granard was issuing some processes to recover certain rents due to him, and the impression went abroad that what was sought was eviction, not the serving of legal processes. Lord Granard was well known to be a very humane and considerate landlord; and he might say that throughout the county during all these troubled times the landlords had been, on the whole, just, considerate, and even generous. At the very time when the newspaper Press here was raging against the Land League he attended two Land League meetings in Longford, at which he only heard the name of one landlord mentioned, and in each case he was named only to be applauded for his generosity. With regard to the disturbance to which he had alluded, he would like to read a letter from one who was present. That letter set forth that there were two days of the disturbance. On the first day the police went out to protect a process-server in the discharge of his disagreeable duty. Seventy processes were to be served, and the server was protected by 100 police. A large crowd, nearly 5,000 in number, of men, women, and children met the police on the road. If there had been any fight it must have ended in serious bloodshed. The stipendiary magistrate had, however, the wisdom to withdraw the police until he could, at all events, obtain stronger assistance. Next day it was more serious. A large number of soldiers—about 100 dragoons and 300 police—were brought out, with ambulance and hospital service corps, as if in preparation for a grand campaign. Resistance at one time seemed inevitable. The police, however, behaved, on the whole, very well. Some of the soldiers were in high spirits, flirting with the girls, and imbibing whiskey, possibly obtained from illicit stills. Fortunately, the people were well-advised; and it having been pointed out to them that it was not eviction, but merely the serving of processes, the affair terminated quietly. This, however, was not due to the action of the authorities, but to the action of private individuals and the Roman Catholic clergy. In this case, he (Mr. Justin M'Carthy) presumed that the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India would admit that there was a distinct connection between the process of eviction and the existence or possibility of disturbance and crime. The right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. John Bright) once used a strong expression with regard to the same right of eviction. He summed up in his clear and admirable style of eloquence, in a speech made in Dublin some years ago, the leading causes of distress and misery and disaffection in Ireland, and spoke as a climax of the process of eviction—"a word which I suspect is hardly known in any other civilized country in the world." It was not very long since the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk (Mr. Charles Russell) pointed out in that House that no such thing as the right of eviction was known either to the Statute Law or to the Common Law of England. Oh, no; it was a peculiar blessing reserved for Ireland. He invited the attention of the House to the condition of the tenantry in parts of Ireland and the rents they paid, for the purpose of showing why this fatal power of eviction should not be allowed to continue as a means of screwing from those miserable people the rack-rents imposed on them. He would first take the county of Galway, it being the first of the counties proclaimed as being in a state of disturbance. He would show the House an account of the rents and valuations of several tenants in the county of Galway. Such cases as the following were frequent:—A man paid £2 a-year for a holding which was valued at 15 s. A man paid £12 a-year for a piece of bog which, according to Griffith's valuation, was only valued at £5 10 s. Men paid £2 10 s. for holdings valued at 10 s. And in one case a man paid £4 for a holding valued only at 10 s. He was assured that these figures contained nothing extraordinary; but were fair indications of the general condition of things in the country. What he wanted the House to consider was whether, seeing that the tenants were so rack-rented in many cases, it would be just or fair, pending the introduction of remedial measures, to allow an inhumane and unjust landlord to use this unjust power of eviction for the purpose of turning out his unfortunate tenants? The word "confiscation" had been made to play an important part during the debate in reference to the suspension of that power of eviction. The House of Commons, like other public bodies, was often a good deal under the domination of phrases. He noticed that over and over again in the course of this discussion Members had spoken of the word "confiscation" as if it settled the question for ever. He heard it stated that the suspension of this power of eviction would amount to a confiscation of the landlord's property. He did not believe that it would. On the contrary, he believed that rents would be better paid if this power were taken away. He would ask the House for one moment to consider whether it was not common enough in all our legislation to enact a law which should compel a certain class—even certain individuals—to make some small sacrifice for the benefit of the community? On that point he could speak with something like knowledge and conviction. There was a certain class of persons in this country whose income was confiscated deliberately by law for the benefit of other classes, and the public in general. That might seem surprising to some hon. Members; but not to one or two who sat near him. There was a class whose property was partly confiscated by law for the benefit of the public. It was a class, he would venture to say, although he happened to belong to it himself, which had done as much for the world as any landlord class or all the landlord classes in all countries—he meant the authors, the writers of books, who, under the Copyright Act, were prevented from bequeathing, for more than a limited number of years to their families, the money they had earned by their honourable labours. However, he held that the landlords' property would not be confiscated, and that they would not suffer but rather gain by the improvement of the system which he recommended in his Amendment. He had read a pamphlet called The Justice of the Land League, written by the Rev. David Humphrys, Roman Catholic curate, which was worth the attention of Members of the House. It had a very appropriate Shaksperian motto. It was—"And our oppression hath made up this League." They had heard that the Roman Catholic clergy only took part in this agitation because they were under the influence of terror. Now, terrorism had many strange ways of showing itself; but he had never known of anyone being terrorized into writing a remarkably clear, coherent, logical, and argumentative essay. In this pamphlet the writer answered the argument that Griffith's valuation did not fairly represent a proper amount of rent at present, because the price of produce had risen since the valuation was made. He showed that if the price of produce had risen, so, also, had the cost of production; and even if the cost of produce had increased in value 100 per cent, so, also, had the cost of production. The hire of labourers and the cost of their support, as well as other items of outlay, had concurrently increased, so that Griffith's valuation now stood as fair as it did when it was first made. He thought he had fairly established that crime and outrage did commonly arise in Ireland because of the exercise of the system of eviction, and even because of the dread in the minds of the people that it was about to be unjustly and harshly exercised. He had shown that there was not that absolute severance between the work of eviction and the growth of disorder which the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India seemed to think. He hoped he had induced the House to think that there was a fair case for asking the Government to suspend the dangerous, formidable, and hateful power of eviction, at least while they were considering what changes they were will- ing to make in the Land Laws affecting Ireland. That was the whole substance and purpose of the demand. It could be granted by Her Majesty's Government without delay, almost by a word, in a moment, and it would, he firmly believed, re-establish order and peace in Ireland, and assist the landlords to get their rents paid more willingly than they were likely to have them under a different condition of things. They were told that a change was about to be introduced of a wide and beneficial nature in the laws that regulated the land system of Ireland. The hon. Member for Cork County (Mr. Shaw) the other night said he still had faith in the Prime Minister. He would at least go so far as to say he would fain still have faith in the Prime Minister; and his opinion of public men must, indeed, be greatly changed when he ceased to have some faith in the Prime Minister, and much faith in the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, as regarded remedial legislation for Ireland. He only hoped the Prime Minister might see to the very heart of this question—might see what a great chance, what a noble opportunity lay now within his reach. Never in their time, never perhaps at any time, had a statesman so great, so splendid a chance within his reach as the Prime Minister had now. Various conditions had forced upon him the choice whether he would, once for all, settle the Irish Land Question or leave it unsettled. He had now the chance of bringing it to a satisfactory and peaceful settlement. He did not create that opportunity. Perhaps if it was allowed to pass it might never be recalled. The right hon. Gentleman was thoroughly acquainted with the great masterpieces of the poetry of classic Greece; but he had not forgotten also to make his mind familiar with the one poem of our century which alone deserved to be named with the foremost works of Grecian Art. He meant the immortal Faust of Goethe. The right hon. Gentleman would remember what Faust declared to be the one object and end of a great career, an object which he considered worth not dying for—he would not have thought that much—but worth living for, and living a long life to carry out. The hero was allowed by "Fate and metaphysical aid" to go through a strange and wondrous career, to exhaust every source of pleasure, to have every throb of ambition satisfied to satiety; and in none of these changes of pleasure, triumph, or passion had he found one single thing worthy of living for, or calculated to make him say that he wished his life prolonged one instant. But he did at last find a motive for wishing to live and work, and what that was the right hon. Gentleman knew well. He had placed within his means the chance of rescuing a great tract of land from barrenness and waste and water, a chance of converting that wilderness into a fruitful and blossoming country, of planting on the face of that land, before sterile and joyless, a happy and a thriving toiling population—a free peasantry, settled for ever on their own free holdings. Could he but accomplish that, the poet's hero said, he would have lived for something, and the trace of his earthly deeds and earthly work would not in all the ages pass away. Well, this enterprize, which the exalted imagination of the poet conceived to be one of the noblest man could undertake, it was actually within the power of the right hon. Gentleman to accomplish. Most cordially did he hope he might accomplish the triumph and deserve the fame. But while he was making up his mind, the Irish Members asked the Government to declare that, at least for the present, the harsh hand and armed power should not be uplifted to maintain a claim which, in the moral sense, was lawless, and which, he trusted, would, before long, be condemned by the law of the land

seconded the Amendment.

Amendment proposed,

At the end thereof, to add the words "and humbly to pray Her Majesty to refrain from using the Naval, Military, and Constabulary Forces of the Crown in enforcing ejectments for non-payment of rent in Ireland, until the measures proposed to be submitted to Her Majesty, with regard to the ownership of land in Ireland, have been decided upon by Parliament."—( Mr. Justin M'Carthy. )

Question proposed, "That those words be there added."

Mr. Speaker, the hon. Gentleman who has moved this Amendment closed his speech with a most eloquent and touching appeal to myself. Divesting that appeal of what was unduly complimentary to me, and reducing it altogether from the region of poetry to that of prose and fact, it was earnestly represented to Her Majesty's Government that they had before them a very grave duty, in the introduction of a measure with the difficult, and most important, and arduous purpose of reforming the Land Laws of Ireland. I must suppose that the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) most sincerely concurred with him, at least, in the appeals he made. But the hon. Member, by his speech and Motion, has interposed a most effective obstacle to our answering that appeal. What is it prevents us proceeding with the measures which we seek to lay before the House? It is the renewal, night after night, of spontaneous debate, aimed at no practical conclusion, capable of producing no practical conclusion, capable of answering no useful object whatever, capable of causing in the people of this Island rather strong feelings of a kind I do not wish to encourage with regard to the singular method in which the proceedings of this House are now conducted; capable of promoting the continued existence of great evils, and of retarding the application of remedies to Ireland, and in utter contradiction, so far as their practical effect is concerned, to the appeal made by the hon. Gentleman, because the measures which he exhorts us to produce he does his best, by the course he adopts, to retard. I do not intend to enter at any length into this debate; but I cannot rise to take part in it without entering my distinct, but respectful protest against its prolongation. The good sense of Parliament and the practical turn which has governed—and I hope will always govern—the political mind of this country have established it as a rule, almost without exception, that the Address to the Throne, in answer to the Speech with which the Session is opened, shall be brought to a conclusion as rapidly as possible. And I will venture to say that if that practice is to be broken down, if the Speech from the Throne itself, instead of being a convenient, decorous, dignified method of meeting between the Sovereign and the people and of initiating the Business of the Session, in every intimation it contains, is to be made the subject of lengthened and renewed debate and of diversified Amendments, that Speech will become no better than a public nuisance; and it will be for the advantage of the country that it should be wholly discontinued. I am sorry, but I am compelled to observe on what is going on. On great occasions the champions of Ireland—certainly not unequal either in fame, talent, or character to those whom she now sends to represent her—have felt themselves compelled—at the time, however, before Ireland had received the same substantial marks, at least, of the regard of Parliament that have distinguished the last few years—to make debates on the Address. I refer to the case of Mr. O'Connell and his Friends in the year 1833. But in the condition of Ireland as it then was, aggravated as it then was in the view of hon. Gentlemen opposite, and the views of hon. Members on this side, although Mr. O'Connell did feel compelled to initiate a lengthened debate upon the Address from the Throne, yet Mr. O'Connell initiated that debate, not for the purpose of retarding—and he did not by one hour retard—the progress of practical legislation. For three nights in that year the House was occupied with the debate on the Address; but we have now reached the eighth night of the debate. The Sovereign has made a most grave and solemn call upon her subjects assembled in Parliament not to adopt, by their answer to the Speech, rash or premature conclusions; but to give to her, through her Government, the opportunity of submitting for practical consideration matters which hon. Members opposite admit to be, and which we all know to be, of the highest interest and importance. It is not our fault that we have not made considerable progress with that work. Had the usual course been pursued, had even a reasonable latitude contented the hon. Gentleman and his Friends, he would have known by this time what it was Her Majesty's Government deemed to be necessary for the restoration of law and order in Ireland; and he would have been in a condition to press, if he pleased, for expeditious progress towards the passage of that Land Bill on which he had set his heart, and which he is now doing everything in his power to prevent. That being so, I must express a hope that, although the hon. Gentleman made a lengthened address, and although he has thought it necessary to illustrate this great Irish crisis by reference to the Law of Copyright, and other matters which I must confess would better have borne delay than the task we have in hand, yet I must express a hope that this debate is approaching, and rapidly approaching, its conclusion. This is not a mere debating Assembly; it is a deliberative Assembly; it is an Assembly which reasons in order to conclude and to act; and the House has the right to expect from its Members that, instead of preventing it fulfilling this function, they shall assist those who are charged with the conduct of the Business of the House in endeavouring to dispose of that grave and complicated task with all the despatch which the difficulty and gravity of the matter may admit of. Let us see what the hon. Gentleman wants. On the eighth night after the meeting of Parliament he asks us to consider a particular Amendment. What is the character of that Amendment? I must own, if I understand it aright, that I heartily rejoice that his speech has been heard with respect and attention, and not merely patience; yet such is the nature of the Amendment itself, that it is really difficult, when we examine its terms, to believe our own eyes and ears. And what is it the hon. Gentleman thinks so valuable that it is necessary to prevent us proceeding in due order to the consideration of the measures for the passing of a Land Bill? His proposal is that we should

"Humbly to pray Her Majesty to refrain from using the Naval, Military, and Constabulary Forces of the Crown in enforcing ejectments for non-payment of rent in Ireland, until the measures proposed to be submitted to Her Majesty, with regard to the ownership of land in Ireland, have been decided upon by Parliament."

What are the Naval, Military, and Constabulary Forces of the Crown? They are the entire force at the disposal of Her Majesty. She has no other forces than these; and the desire and the recommendation of the hon. Gentleman to the House is this—that none of the forces of Her Majesty whatever shall be made use of in Ireland during the time he defines by his Motion for the recovery of that form of debt, for the enforcement of that form of civil obligation which is associated with the word "rent." That is the recommendation of the hon. Gentleman, and that proceeding is a proceeding which he desires to be taken by the Executive Government! It would be sufficiently astonishing if he asked the House to proceed to provide by a summary Act that there should be a suspension of eviction and a suspension of the legal remedy for the recovery of rent for a certain time. But he does not ask that at all; he makes his appeal to the Executive Government, which is charged with the execution of the law. It is the Executive to which belongs the executing of the law. If they do not execute the law—and for what other purpose do they exist?—they must fall at once under the adverse judgment and censure of this House. But the hon. Gentleman, not content with recommending—which of itself would be entirely permissible, and as he might have been tempted to do—consideration, allowance of time, and the adoption of expedients—not content with anything of a secondary character, he actually proposes to the House of Commons that they shall pray the Crown deliberately to renounce the doing of that for which alone the Executive exists. I greatly doubt whether you yourself, Sir, or any one of your Predecessors in the many centuries since that Chair was occupied, ever put a Motion more extraordinary than the proposal that the Executive Government shall advisedly and systematically refrain from the execution of the law for the purpose of enforcing civil obligations, and that proposal made by the hon. Gentleman not in the character—the distinct and independent character—in which many of us are agreeably acquainted with him, of a writer of books, to which he has alluded—but actually embodied in a Motion addressed to the House of Commons; so that he wishes to make the House of Commons and the Crown parties in this affair of suspending the law by a dispensing power outside and against the law, and he proposes to leave the House of Lords the only portion of the Legislature that shall not be involved in the folly and criminality of such procedure. And what is the nature of the arguments which the hon. Gentleman has given us to prove that this most extraordinary course should be taken? He says that evictions are the main cause of crime and disturbance in Ireland. It is not necessary for me to enter into that question, if it be so, and for the present purpose I will not deny it, and in certain circumstances, in certain cases, I might have been disposed to support it; but if that be so—if evictions are the main cause of crime in Ireland, let us proceed to legislate on the subject of the Land Laws. But that is exactly what the hon. Gentleman will not permit us to do. The hon. Gentleman and his Friends have kept us here for eight nights with debates which will lead to no practical result, and which, when the House has received a solemn appeal from the Throne, setting forth the extreme gravity of the circumstances and the urgency of the time, detain us steadily, persistently, from day to day, and will not let us have an opportunity of dealing with any practical remedy whatever. And then, if the general principle of the hon. Gentleman is strange, what sort of encouragement does he give us by the particular instances which he states? He gave us particular instances to support his proposition. It was what has occurred in the county of Longford. And what are the motives presented to us by him to induce us to interfere in the manner he proposes with the general course of the law? Does he tell us of some cruel case of a grinding and tyrannous landlord, who had availed himself of the circumstances of Ireland to obtain fraudulently, one might almost say, from the necessities of his tenants, engagements they could not possibly meet when the time came? No, Sir; nothing of the kind. He has told us himself that the landlords of the county of Longford are, generally speaking, considerate, just, and generous men; and then he illustrates this strange and unheard-of proposition that is now before the House by the particular case of one of those landlords—Lord Granard. Lord Granard, he says, is a kind and generous landlord. Far be it from me to question that for a moment. Well, this just, kind, and generous landlord was, it appears, compelled by the necessities of the case to apply to the civil power to serve processes on persons who would not pay their rents. The hon. Gentleman has not even given us good support for his proposition in any single form or instance. First, the landlord is kind and generous, as the class of landlords in the county are kind and generous. Sir, he has not even told us that these tenants who would not pay their rents are disabled by poverty. He has not even laid before us, in order to give colour to his extraordinary proposal, the vague and bare assertion that it is poverty—the want of means, and not the want of will—that prevents the tenants in this particular case from paying their rents. The hon. Gentleman, without asserting the slightest injustice, without asserting the slightest inability, comes down to the House of Commons and asks us to, I may say—though I am sorry to use the words—asks us to insult the Throne by carrying to the foot of the Throne the proposal that the Queen—sworn at her Coronation to maintain and execute the law of the land—shall, by her own arbitrary will, renounce the executive of the law of the land, to meet the wishes of the hon. Gentleman who has laid down this proposition for our acceptance, and who says that no inconvenience will be experienced, except that the landlords will not get their rents in rapid time, and that, perhaps, there will be, in the case of a few tenants, some little arrears. But, Sir, we are here for serious Business.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to explain. ["Order!"]

The hon. Gentleman will have an opportunity to explain in a moment. I will not detain the House. I must say that it is a very serious consideration—as also almost a ludicrous thing—that the British House of Commons has reached to a point at which it is to be the receiver of proposals like this, and that the liberty of speech, which is its highest and dearest privilege, and its greatest ornament, is too often mistakenly applied for purposes such as this. It is quite impossible to suppose—the hon. Member cannot suppose, if he can bring himself to be serious in making such a suggestion to the House—that the bulk of the House will have the smallest hesitation in emphatically rejecting it. What I must say is, that it is not for the credit of the character of the House of Commons that such proposals should be made—should be used as the engines for the waste of these precious hours—which we are now under a more than ever solemn obligation to employ, without sparing ourselves, and without fear or favour, in considering both what is required for the peace and order of Ireland, and what are the changes which, on the principal of jus- tice to all, ought to be introduced into the Land Laws which govern that country.

wished to say that the right hon. Gentleman had certainly misunderstood the purport of one part of his argument. He had merely instanced a case in Longford—a peaceable county—to show that the fear of eviction was such as to bring the people who were the tenants of just and generous landlords to that mood of mind which might have caused disturbances, but for the interference of the Land League.

In response to the powerful appeal which we have just heard from the right hon. Gentleman, I wish to say for myself, and I am sure I may add for those who sit near me, that we entirely associate ourselves with the sentiments which he has expressed; and I feel that I cannot give a more practical proof of the cordiality of the support which we tender to the right hon. Gentleman on this occasion than by at once resuming my seat.

begged to assure the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister that the extraordinary speech he had just uttered would very considerably alter the position he had hitherto held in Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman had stated that Irish Members had not brought forward any arguments in favour of their recommendations; but had he himself forgotten the 15,000 persons who, he told the House last Session, would be turned on the roadside to starve unless something was done to prevent eviction? Nine short months ago he told them that if a remedy was not speedily found, 15,000 human beings would be cast on the roadside to starve; but now, if they were to wait until the Irish Land Bill dragged its slow length along, before they got a Land Bill, what was to become of those 15,000 persons whom the Prime Minister compassioned last year, but for whom he seemed to have no compassion now? The right hon. Gentleman accused the Irish Members of being the obstacles in the way of legislation; but he said the right hon. Gentleman and his Government were the real obstacles, and he himself was erecting a barrier in the way of doing justice to Ireland more dreadful than could well be conceived, because in the year they passed a Coercion Act there would arise a condition of things in Ireland which would prevent the House from properly considering the Land Question. ["Oh, oh!"] He said that because he knew the people well—if they passed the Coercion Bill, outrages in Ireland would immediately become tenfold more numerous, because there would be such a feeling of vengeance as to make it difficult, if not impossible, for the House to deal with the Land Question. It was a painful thing for any Irish Member to address that House, because hon. Gentlemen did not care for the position of Ireland, and if he had the power he would prefer to deal with the matter in another way. The Prime Minister, in another part of his speech, condemned the action of his hon. Friend in asking the House to suspend the action of the law, and said such a course had never yet been pursued in England. Now, he was not a very deep student of English history; but it seemed to him that the law had often been suspended for the public good, for they did not ask to have it abrogated. Did the Prime Minister never hear of any interference with the Bank Act? All the Irish Members asked was the suspension of an Act which threatened the lives of 30,000 or 40,000 of the Irish people. The right hon. Gentleman complained very bitterly of their prolonging the debate to an unreasonable length. It was very difficult to answer such an accusation. [ Ironical cries of "Hear, hear!"] The explanation, however, was easy. The right hon. Gentleman looked at the matter from an English, the Irish Members from an Irish, point of view; because they knew that the consequences which would follow from coercion would be infinitely more dreadful than the right hon. Gentleman laid before the House. Hon. Members would understand that, when they heard of the massacres and bloodshed that would follow in Ireland after such a Bill. ["Shame!"] They would follow. They whose lives might be endangered by coercion not unnaturally thought that it was right to oppose such a proceeding to the bitter end. The prolongation of the debate was entirely due to the tone and temper of the House, which seemed to offer very little prospect of a consideration of the proposals of the Government in a just and impartial spirit. Therefore, the Irish Members thought it their duty to lay before the House a statement of the mischiefs which would be inflicted on the Irish tenant. With regard to the evictions, it was stated in July last, on the authority of the Prime Minister, that 15,000 individuals would be ejected from their homes without hope of remedy in the course of the present year unless the evictions were checked. What was the position of these 15,000 now? They were living in their homes to-day, thanks not to the English Government, but to the strong arm of the National Land League, which, in spite of the police and military forces of the Crown, had kept these poor people in their homes. The number of people who would be evicted from their homes during the past year were estimated by the Prime Minister at 15,000; but he considered the estimate was extremely low. The right hon. Gentleman had based his estimate on the evictions which had taken place during the last six months of 1879 and the first part of 1880. He had figures to show that for two years after a famine evictions in Ireland went on increasing, and the reason was that the landlord would not evict while famine prevailed, because then he would get no one to take up the farm. It was with astonishment he heard the Chief Secretary express his belief that there would be less agrarianism after the good harvest. The landlords would not evict during the famine; but when the pressure began to pass away they would clear off those men who had fallen into arrear during the famine, knowing that under better prospects they would be sure to get some one to take a vacant farm. In Armagh, in 1846—the year of the Famine—the evictions were 204; in 1849 they had risen to 81; and in 1850 to 615. In Tipperary, his own county, in 1846 they were 327; in 1849 they were 1,266; and in 1850, 771. In Tyrone, in 1846, the evictions were 90; in 1847 they were 490; and in 1848 they were 586; and the Returns for other counties showed a similar state of things. Those figures proved that in the year following a good harvest, when the famine had passed away, there was always an increase of evictions. The Chief Secretary, being new, perhaps, to Irish work, stated he had very good reason to hope and believe that the troubles of Irish agra- rianism would cease after a good harvest; but Irishmen knew perfectly well that they would then begin, and that there would also be evictions where a tenant was not able to pay. Therefore, it was his belief that he did not exaggerate when he said that before next summer, if the power of the Land League were withdrawn, fully 50,000 people would have been evicted. And when the noble Marquess who ruled India so skilfully said evictions had almost ceased during the last six months, his own Colleagues had taken the argument out of his mouth when they said that the law of the Land League was supreme in Ireland—

I wish to point out to the hon. Member that the line of argument which he is now pursuing is not relevant to the Amendment immediately before the House. That Amendment relates to the employment of the Naval, Military, and Constabulary Forces of the Empire in enforcing ejectments, and he is now referring to evictions which have taken place from time to time in Ireland. That subject is not at present before the House.

wished to point out where he was in Order. It was stated that evictions were probable, and he was referring to what was likely to take place if the military were placed at the disposal of the Irish landlords, and were called upon to assist in enforcing evictions. He was sorry if he had said anything that was out of Order. The question was, whether the Irish people were to be handed over to their fate, or were to enjoy the benefits promised under the legislation of the Prime Minister. There was another point which justified the Amendment. The Government based their demand for coercion almost entirely on the number of outrages which had taken place in Ireland, and on the fact that a reign of terror had been established in that country. What ground was there for saying that a reign of terror really existed? The Government had at present 25,000 regular troops in Ireland, 14,000 constabulary, armed as troops, all the magistrates, and their agents. What were the forces at the command of the Land League? They had at their command a very limited executive, and no military and no constabulary. They had no force except their members. He did not think such a humiliating statement had ever been made by a Minister as to state that, with that enormous force at their command, a reign of terror had been established in Ireland. The real fact was that there had been a reign of terror in Ireland for years—the reign of the Government—and when the Land League pointed out to the Irish people a way of escaping from it they instantly accepted it. His own county (Tipperary) was not a very easy one to coerce, and he very much questioned if the Chief Secretary were to-morrow to consult the magistrates there, whether the latter would advise him to enter upon any measures of coercion. He had gone into that county two months ago, and although there was not at the moment a single Land Leaguer in the whole of it he had enrolled 10,000 men. Those were the forces which the Land League now was able to array. This would show the disposition of the people, because he himself had had no means of imposing any reign of terror. But what had been the effect of the general agitation upon that county? They had reduced rents in every part of it. The League ruled supreme, and yet the reign of terror of which so much had been said had no existence in fact. Tipperary, instead of being lawless, was now acknowledged by all, including landlords and priests, to be in a remarkably peaceful condition. Never, indeed, had the county been more orderly. In former times things had been very different, and outrages had frequently occurred; but since the establishment of the local branches of the Land League so great a security had prevailed that not a single person had been shot at—not a single human life taken.

I rise to Order. I wish to ask you, Sir, whether the hon. Member is in Order in telling us of the forces which he has at his command, and that the Land League reigns supreme in Tipperary? I wish to know whether he is not uttering traitorous and treasonable sentiments in boasting that he is upsetting the law of the land?

If the hon. Member accepts the version given by the hon. Member who rose to Order, I am bound to say that the expressions he used were un-Parliamentary; but no Motion having been made to have the words taken down, I can only call the attention of the hon. Member for Tipperary to them.

said, he would submit to the ruling of the Chair in any way which the Speaker might suggest. He had been merely stating what he believed to be a fact; but if he was out of Order he would withdraw any remarks which the Chair ruled to be irregular. The hon. Member was proceeding with his argument, when he was again called to Order by

, who said: I have drawn the attention of the hon. Member to the fact that his observations are not relevant to the Amendment now before the House. The hon. Member, as I now understand, proposes to advert to another matter which has no reference to the Question before the House. I must formally call upon the hon. Member to comply with my direction to keep himself strictly to the Question before the House, which is the employment of the Naval, Military, and Constabulary Forces of the Crown in Ireland.

said, he would endeavour to follow the instructions of the Chair. What he was endeavouring to show was this—that the Government were not bringing before the House the real object for which eviction was contemplated. The Speaker had ruled that part of his argument was out of Order; but his desire was to show that the real object of this coercion was to carry out evictions, and that that was the only object and necessity of coercion. What he was coming to was, that if the Government would consent to the Amendment of his hon. Friend, and agree to suspend evictions for a short period, all the necessity for coercion would pass away, and they might calmly proceed to the consideration of those measures which the Prime Minister was anxious to bring before the House for the amendment of the Land Laws. It was possible, however, that the blood of Ireland was a matter of indifference to the House.

I rise to Order. The hon. Gentleman first withdraws expressions which you, Sir, have instructed him were out of Order, and he is now proceeding in his argument to make use of them as though you had never interfered, and he had never been guilty of a breach of Order. I understood the hon. Member to say, distinctly, that he withdrew the expressions which were objected to—those expressions, according to my note, were—speaking of the Land League, that it was arrayed against Her Majesty's Forces.

"We have (said the hon. Member), 10,000 men arrayed in Tipperary; and we have reduced the rents throughout the country. No landlord has been fired at. The Land League rules supreme in Tipperary."

Reigns supreme.

These were the expressions used; and I submit that if the hon. Gentleman means to withdraw them, he must not afterwards avail himself of their substance in argument.

said, the words which had been taken down by the hon. Member for North Warwickshire entirely misrepresented his statements. The hon. Member had not taken down accurately one single sentence that he (Mr. Dillon) had uttered; and he must say that the course taken by the hon. Member, if followed generally with regard to other Members, would be extremely inconvenient, and expose them to very severe censure. This was the third time he had been interrupted without the interposition of the Speaker, and he considered it most unfair.

If the hon. Member would confine himself, as I have already stated, to the Question before the House, he would meet with no interruption either from hon. Members or from the Chair. He does not confine himself to the immediate Question before the House.

said, the only real necessity for coercion existed in the fact that the landlords contemplated evicting 50,000 tenants. Now, he was not a very warm admirer of the administration of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland, who had failed to conciliate the confidence of the Irish people; but the right hon. Gentleman could hardly be such a fool—["Order!" "Oh, oh!"]—as to suppose that any moderate measures of coercion would suffice to break down the power of the Land League. He was afraid that the Government contemplated more than they showed to the House, and that they had not stated frankly all the considerations that influenced their minds. One of these considerations, he feared, was the enormous number of evictions which they foresaw would happen, and which they were now informed were to come. He thought it would be well for the House to go into this policy with their eyes open. They should know what the Government had in view was not simply the removal of a reign of terror which did not exist—not the mere stoppage of outrage, which, indeed, would be increased tenfold—that it was not for the saving the lives of landlords, which would be placed in tenfold greater peril, that these coercive measures were proposed.

The hon. Member's remarks have nothing to do with the Question before the House, and I must call upon him to confine himself to the Amendment. I have already made this observation several times to the hon. Member, and I must now insist upon the hon. Member complying with my directions.

would conclude by saying that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary knew that the evictions would not be carried out without resistance. The right hon. Gentleman knowing the temper of the people pretty well, he could tell him that this year they would not submit peaceably to force. Indeed, one of the reasons that determined him to support his hon. Friend's Amendment was the conviction that large numbers of the Irish people would attempt to meet force by force, and that a great deal of bloodshed would be the result. The blood of the Irish people would seem to be a matter of absolute indifference to that House. He knew that the tenants would resist eviction by force. As the Premier had sent an additional number of Her Majesty's soldiers into Ireland, he believed the right hon. Gentleman was himself aware that resistance would be made. What use did the right hon. Gentleman mean to make of the troops unless it were the extermination of the people? [ Murmurs. ] At all events, that was what he was afraid of, and time would show whether he was right or wrong. The majority of the Members of the House might think otherwise than they did at present, when they saw, after the lapse of a few months, the number of lives which were involved in the principle of the Amendment.

said, that he had no intention of taking part in that de- bate; but the hon. Member who had last addressed the House had done so, throughout his speech, as the Representative of some other Government than that of the Queen.

I rise to Order. I wish to know what the remarks of the hon. Member for North Warwickshire have to do with the Question before the House?

The hon. Member for North Warwickshire is quite in Order.

continued to say the House had been threatened with civil war unless the policy advocated by a small minority of that House was adopted; for the hon. Member for Tipperary said that if the Government would not persist in their intended policy the blood of many of the people of Ireland would be spared, and the hon. Gentleman had not blushed to say that the lives of the Irish people were a matter of indifference to the House. A grosser calumny upon the House he did not think it was possible for any man to utter. The hon. Member stood in a very peculiar position. He was one of the traversers in a case now proceeding before the Courts of Law in Dublin. It had always been the wholesome habit of the House to avoid in debate referring to any matter which was submitted to the Courts of Law.

I must again rise to Order. I wish to know what the Courts of Law in Dublin have to do with the employment of Her Majesty's Forces in Ireland?

The hon. Member's interruptions are themselves disorderly. The hon. Member for North Warwickshire is in possession of the House.

said, he would appeal to the Speaker as to whether it was not licence and an abuse on the part of the hon. Member, who was arraigned before the Courts, to attempt to take advantage of the good feeling of the House, which precluded other Members from alluding to the matters touching himself which had been referred to the Courts of Law. The hon. Member, who had used such language in the House, as he had never heard before was at that moment under public prosecution; and he humbly submitted that it was not wise on the part of that House, which formed part of the highest tribunal in the country, to allow such language to pass unnoticed.

thought the Irish Members had some reason to complain of the tone assumed by the Prime Minister that evening. So far from the Irish Members being responsible for the undue prolongation of this debate, a great deal of time had been taken up by charges brought against each other by the Government and the Conservative Opposition. Ireland was treated as if it were Zululand or the Cape of Good Hope. Some allowance ought to be made for the deep interest taken in this matter by the Irish people. He maintained that the people of Ireland did not get fair justice; and, instead of getting credit for good intentions, there was a desire to crush them by the English majority. It was the duty of the Government to consider the prolongation of the lives of between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 of people. The Amendment, fairly considered, was simply a proposal that the powers under the control of the Irish Executive should not be applied for the purpose of giving effect to the arbitrary will of the landlords. Taken away from the disguise of the Premier's rhetoric, this proposal was not so divested of common sense and common honesty as the right hon. Gentleman would lead the House to suppose. If the passions of angry landlords were let loose, a large proportion would use the existing law in so arbitrary a manner as to lead to a system of reprisals and the commission of grave outrages.

said, he believed there was a willingness on the part of English Members to discuss to the core everything having reference to Irish grievances; but they objected to the introduction of questions which were outside the subject of discussion. When the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) asserted that the Land League was absolute in certain portions of Ireland, he put forward a position which, if true, was fatal to any government of Ireland. If the Land League were to be the Government of that country, then the Queen's Government ceased to exist, and there must consequently be war between them. He thought Irish Members had little reason to complain of their treatment in the House. English Members were always ready to give full consideration to any expression of opinion on the part of Irish Representatives; but there must be some limit to their speeches. One young Irish Member had spoken the other evening for two hours on one point. Now, if every Member of the House were to exercise his right in the same way, they would not be able to pass the Address by the end of the Session. They had already been discussing this first question for seven or eight days; and if the same course was to be pursued, if Amendment was to be added to Amendment, and every Irish Member claimed the right to express the same thoughts, they would be driven into a condition from which there would be no results. Let the Irish Members put forward a proportionate number of men to represent their views, and, having done that, leave the matter to come to a natural conclusion.

said, he had listened with great attention to the arguments put forward by the Prime Minister. The effect of those arguments was that the Irish Members, by prolonging the debate, were stopping remedial measures for Ireland. He wondered very much that the Prime Minister appeared to ignore the very important fact that between this debate and the Land Bill there intervened another measure—a measure which proposed to destroy the rights and liberties of the Irish people. If the Prime Minister could overlook that fact the Irish Members could not. The Prime Minister had referred to the example of Daniel O'Connell; but O'Connell was, in his time, just as violently abused as the hon. Member for the City of Cork. The time, perhaps, would come when the conduct of his hon. Friend would be held up as an example to future agitators. The question before the House, as they had been reminded, was eviction. It was a sore word in Ireland. It had caused woe, misery, and desolation in that country; and evictions were still going on. He did not see that there was anything opposed to the dictates of humanity in the proposal that evictions should be suspended until remedial measures were brought in. It would not be a great stretch to declare that, pending a settlement, the military and other forces should not be employed for the recovery of rent any more than for the recovery of other debts in Ireland. He would give one instance to show how severely Ireland had suffered from evictions. He would not go back to the period of the Famine, when the people were cleared out by hundreds of thousands. He would take a subsequent period, and only two counties, Meath and Westmeath. In the latter the population, which in 1841 was 141,300, in 1851 fell to 111,409; in 1861 it fell to 90,879; and in 1871 the population was only 78,432. What it was in 1881 they would soon learn. These figures showed a decrease in the single county of 12,477 in the last 10 years; 32,977 in the last 21 years; and 62,868 in the last 30 years. In Meath the population in 1841 was 183,116; in 1851 it was 140,750; in 1861, 110,373; and in 1871, 95,558. These figures showed a decrease in 30 years in that one county of 87,558; in the last 20 years, of 55,192; and in the last 10 years, 14,815. A whole army of people had been cleared out of those two counties. Did these terrible things take place without suffering, without feelings of excitement and vengeance? Certainly not. And if the poor evicted people did not wreak vengeance at home for the measures of oppression and wrongs they had suffered, it was not the law of England that had prevented them, but the influence of the clergy and people of Ireland. Talk of the reign of terror. The reign of evictions was the true reign of terror in Ireland. He could not help calling to mind that the enforcement of the coercive laws would be in the hands of the landlords. Between the passing of those laws and those remedial measures, that was not a very pleasant prospect for the Irish people. A very considerable period might elapse between the passing of the Coercion Act by the House of Commons and the passing of the remedial measures by the House of Lords; and, in the meantime, the Irish people would be exposed to the horrors of exceptional laws. The Ministry was trying to purchase applause from the Opposition at the expense of the liberties of Ireland. He would venture humbly to warn the Government against the course they were adopting. It was one which would not bring peace to Ireland. If they wished to bring peace to that unhappy country let them at once bring in their remedial measures. The statistics on which the Government relied had utterly broken down. No doubt, there had been a temporary increase in crime, but there had been exaggeration. The proceedings of the Government were unworthy of the Prime Minister. During the last elections there had been a great rejoicing at the access of the right hon. Gentleman to power; but that feeling was rapidly disappearing. He must enter his protest against the whole proceedings of Parliament with regard to Ireland.

rose to address the House, when

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

said, the sparseness of attendance was sufficient to prove the amount of consideration and justice which any Irish subject, however much it concerned the domestic happiness and national dignity of the Irish people, received at the hands of an alien Legislature. This Amendment affected closely the happiness of tens of thousands of families in Ireland, and it affected also the rights of property of hundreds of thousands of families in Ireland; and yet when Irish Members endeavoured to plead the cause of their oppressed countrymen, the House of Commons was found to have scarcely 10 Members listening to the discussion. The Amendment appeared to him to be most reasonable and moderate. The reply of the Prime Minister, expressed with unnecessary warmth, was that while the law remained as it now was it must be enforced. The right hon. Gentleman had apparently forgotten his language on a former occasion with regard to the character of these very laws which it was now proposed to enforce by the bayonet and buckshot. He declared that the Members of the Government, including himself, looked forward to a time when it would be impossible to enforce those laws without doing violence to the consciences of those charged with its enforcement. The law was still what it was when those words were uttered, and was the very law against which Irish Members were protesting. The Government had regard to the welfare of some 10,000 or 12,000 landlords exclusively. What the Irish Members, on the other hand, concerned themselves with was the welfare of the people of Ireland generally. It was notorious that under the existing law the landlords were able by means of eviction, or threats of eviction, to exercise a vast amount of oppression upon the people. They thoroughly understood the Horatian maxim— "Captivum occidere noli; serviet utiliter."

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

said, he wondered it had never occurred to the Government to reflect on the results to the police, the military, and the people which might follow from their policy. They were pursuing a course which was fraught with danger. The police were recruited from the class of small farmers, and they sympathized with that class. The Government did not trust the police, and had found it necessary to deal with every member of the force as if he were a foreigner. They sent him from the part of the country where he was born into another part, where he was among strangers; and if he happened to get married and to form connections in the district, they removed him a second time. They could not, however, prevent the Constabulary from being filled with indignation and disgust at the work which they were called on to do, and he had been delighted to hear expressions from members of the force of the indignation which they felt on the subject. With regard to the military, they were sending to Ireland men who were drawn from English and Scotch recruiting fields; but in the same way as in 1829, when the Duke of Wellington found that the army quartered in Ireland was not to be trusted, so he believed that in the present instance it would be eventually discovered that the very men whom they were sending over to dragoon the people into submission to the law would act as useful auxiliaries to the Land League, and would disseminate among their own people more accurate notions of the evils from which the Irish people suffered. While sending English soldiers to Ireland, they were sending Irish troops abroad to fight against the Afghans or the Boers, with whom the great majority of the people heartily sympathized. Under these circumstances, if the Government resorted to coercion, it appeared to him, looking at the matter dispassionately, that it was only natural that the Irish people should make up their minds that, as far as they could, they would prevent all recruiting in Ireland for an Army which was used in such a way. He was not addressing any threats to the House, but was simply expressing his opinion of the natural consequences of the policy on which the Government had entered. He believed that the Irish women, who were as active Land Leaguers as the Irish men, would say to the recruiting sergeants in Ireland that they should not have a single boy from their village for Her Majesty's Army—that, in fact, the recruiting sergeants would be "Boycotted," and before long the Returns from the recruiting centres to the Horse Guards would show that the system of managing the Irish people which had been adopted had brought about a practical paralysis of the recruiting system in Ireland. And, furthermore, he believed the falling off in the number of recruits would extend to the Irish populations in England and Scotland also. Therefore he could not help thinking that the policy of the present Government, whether it related to the Constabulary or the Army, was fraug htwith unwisdom, and could only result in a highly wrought state of feeling among the Irish people, when they found that the soldiers and constabulary were to be employed in enforcing the certainly unjust, though possibly legal claims of the landlords upon them. No matter how much they might attempt to disguise the fact from themselves, it was clear that a spirit of insurrection must be rapidly developed by the persistence in a policy such as the Government had sketched out for themselves. He knew that in the Queen's County they had the materials for insurrection. He had spoken to many and many people there who had suffered from this system of eviction. He never heard one single word approaching to a proposition which savoured of sedition. They knew perfectly well that he would not listen to anything of the kind, if they themselves entertained such sentiments. But he knew from the demeanour and the language of these men what their real sentiments were. He knew there were thousands of men who enter- tained those sentiments at present; but they were in the minority. If the Government showed an earnest desire to act fairly towards the Irish people, they might conciliate them and induce them to believe in a chance of obtaining from the British Government something like justice for Ireland. They were only the minority of the population, and an insignificant minority; but if the Government pursued the course they had entered upon their numbers would be rapidly developed. Complaints had been made as to the length of the speeches which had been made by Irish Members in the course of the present debate; but he ventured to say that by far the longest speeches had been addressed to the House from the Ministerial and Front Opposition Benches. The ex-Attorney General and the ex-Solicitor General, the two right hon. and learned Members for the University of Dublin, had each occupied an hour, and the Solicitor General for Ireland had occupied much more than an hour. For his part, he owed it to the Queen's County te rise upon every occasion of the kind to protest against the system which the Government sought to enforce. The Queen's County in 1855 had 163,000 inhabitants; at the present moment there were not 70,000. So far as he could make out, 83,000 had been swept away by evictions. In the name of the Queen's County, he protested against this further infliction of a murderous system; and though he should, as in duty bound, endeavour to secure a peaceful course of things in the Queen's County, and would, if necessary, be prepared to risk his own life to prevent anything like insurrection in that county; still he must say that he could not find it in his heart to blame any man who, having lived there, and witnessed scenes which had been seen there, were he inclined to join any enterprize, however rash, however foolhardy, which appeared to promise them some way out of their existing misery.

, in answer to the complaints which had been made of the length of time taken up by Irish Members in this debate, reminded the House that such Members had a duty to perform, and had as much right to occupy the time of the House as any other of its Members. If that complaint continued to be urged, they might point out that it was by no feeling or desire of their own that they contined to thrust themselves upon the attention of that House. They were there by compulsion, and it was a most painful thing for them, and for himself personally, to be obliged upon every occasion to be putting themselves at right angles to the other Members of the House; but, being in the House, they meant unflinchingly to discharge the duties intrusted to them—duties which, among other things, impelled them to resist to the uttermost the expulsion of poor miserable tenants from the holdings which they, on many grounds, wished to retain. The condition of Ireland was a disgrace to the people of England, and yet the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham (Mr. John Bright) was anxious that those wretched people should be driven out of their hovels by Her Majesty's troops. ["No!"] Then why did not the right hon. Gentleman vote for the Amendment? It was true that for a long time the people could not pay their rents, and that fact was acknowledged by the Government when they brought in their Disturbance Bill. But when it was thrown out, what did the Government do? They shut up House, and went away for a holiday. They did nothing to help these unfortunate people; but the hon. Members for Ireland had tried to help them. He himself had given three months of his time to stirring up what was called this agitation, and he should be ready to do it again for the same cause. He found that every Irish Member who got up to speak in that House was met with a spirit of hostility, although they represented 5,000,000 of the people. ["No!"] The House seemed to think that the Irish Members had some malign purpose in view. If that feeling continued to be exhibited, the people of Ireland would be driven to desperation, and they were very near to it already; but the Prime Minister could, of course, draft regiments into the country week after week. He wished it was not in the right hon. Gentleman's power to do so—

called the hon. Member to Order. He should speak to the Amendment before the House, to which his observations had no reference.

said, he was ready to bow to the Speaker's decision; but all he wanted to show was that the landlords had facilities enough already for getting rid of the tenants; but now they were to receive the additional assistance of Her Majesty's soldiers and sailors, and, he supposed, Volunteers, and that was a matter which the Irish Members felt they were bound to resist at all hazards. If such a thing were done in any village in England as that tenants should be evicted with the aid of Her Majesty's troops, what would be said by hon. and right hon. Gentlemen? But it was said that the Irish Members took up a great deal of the time of the House. He freely admitted that they did, and it was possible that more of the time of the House would yet be taken up by them; and for this reason—that they were there to safeguard 5,000,000 of people, and that they were determined to make the House feel the injustice of the measure which Her Majesty's Government proposed to bring in. What would hon. Members opposite have said if a Coercion Bill had been brought in by a Tory Government? Why, a turn of the handle would have been given to the Birmingham caucus machine. In that House, and throughout England, the Tories would be denounced, and an effort would be made to "Boycott" the Government. Why was the heart of the great English people not stirred at the present moment? Why were the mouths of hon. Gentlemen shut? Why, because they had in their mouths the plums of Office—

"As bees on flowers cease to hum,

So Whigs, in Office, straight are dumb."

He contended that hon. Gentlemen opposite were guilty of hypocrisy in adopting the course they were pursuing. They spoke with two voices—one at the hustings, and another when they got to that House.

observed, that hon. Members on that side might feel very much at ease as to the charge of hypocrisy which had been brought against them by the hon. Member who had just sat down. The charge, too, that they were indifferent to the condition of the Irish people was wholly unfounded and erroneous. There was the warmest sympathy towards Ireland on the Liberal Benches. They were as anxious, if not more so, to do justice to Ireland in the truest and best sense than the Irish Members themselves. The benefits which Ireland had hitherto received had been at the hands of the Liberal Party, and he felt sure additional benefit in the present instance would be obtained from the same quarter. Nor was it just to assert that Irish Members received but scant attention from the House, for the eighth night of the Session they had had almost to themselves. With respect to the Amendment, it simply meant that there were to be no more evictions—a very pleasant doctrine for gentlemen who travelled through Ireland and preached that landlords should be expatriated. But was it fair or just? Had the landlords no right to the property they possessed, or to the protection of the law? How, he asked, were the owners of landed property to live if they did not get their rents? On that subject they had heard nothing from the Irish Members. If force was to be no more employed in maintaining the rights of landlords, he supposed the land must be given up entirely to the tenants and the landlords expatriated. Perhaps in this unhappy country, in which, according to Irish Members, there was more crime than there was in Ireland, they might be received into the work houses. A good deal was said about the voice of Ireland; but what about the voice of England? Whenever there had been an opportunity of eliciting public opinion in England it had been against the policy of the Irish Members and in favour of the Government. The Irish Members professed to be anxious to know what the Government Land Bill would be; and yet, with the curious perversity characteristic of the country, they put all sorts of obstacles in the way of that Bill being brought in.

said, that while the Irish Members could not refuse to listen to advice given in the kind and gentle spirit of the last speaker, they would make their own estimate of the value of that advice. The hon. Member had echoed the complaint of the Prime Minister, made at an early period of the evening, and which seemed to him (Mr. O'Connor Power) to have derived no additional force whatever from the support which the hon. Member had given to it. He had listened to the complaint of the Prime Minister, and he felt that in his experience of seven or eight Sessions of Parliament he never heard a complaint that was so groundless in its character. If they perused the list of those who took part in the debate on the Address, they would find that a large number of the Members were English Members; and he was sure it would be in the recollection of the House that the Solicitor General for Ireland occupied as much of the time of the House in the delivery of his speech as would satisfy any six Irish Gentlemen. He believed the hon. and learned Gentleman occupied two hours and a-half in delivering his views to the House; and he would not have called attention to the fact were it not for the purpose of rebutting the allegation that the Irish Members had wasted the time of the House. The hon. and learned Gentleman had lost a golden opportunity in connection with the State trials in Dublin, and, no doubt, he had laboured conscientiously in the preparation of his speech, portions of which were more suited to the atmosphere of a Court of Law than to that of a Legislative Assembly. The Prime Minister spoke of the debate of last week as a spontaneous debate. The Prime Minister was very subtle, and it was not for a person of his (Mr. O'Connor Power's) limited intellectual power to define with any confidence the meaning which the right hon. Gentleman attached to that phrase; but if "a spontaneous debate" had a plain and common meaning, he supposed it was a debate not brought forth by the force of opposite arguments; in fact, the accusations amounted to this—that the discussion of the Amendment of his hon. Friend the Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) last week was onesided throughout. He ventured to say that the Prime Minister happened not to be a very good authority upon that subject, because, owing to a circumstance which they all deplored, his temporary illness, the right hon. Gentleman had not the advantage of seeing how many sided the debate, was and how useful it had been in elucidating some of the most important features of the Irish Land Question. The right hon. Gentleman complained also that the Government should have been called upon to assent to the proposal of the hon. Member for Longford, and said that the Irish Members were preventing the Government from applying a remedy to the social condition of Ireland in reference to the Land Question. If Her Majesty's Government were ready with their Bill he could scarcely conceive that they would be so reticent in their declarations on the subject before the House. Up to the present time the House had not received the slightest inkling of the intentions of the Government in reference to that important question; and he ventured to say that, judging from all former precedents, an announcement indicating the broad lines upon which the Government intended to legislate in reference to the Irish Land Question might afford them some reason for abridging, as far as they could, the present preliminary discussion. But, with the indulgence of the House, he would call attention to a very remarkable feature of the question raised by the Prime Minister. If the patience of Her Majesty's Government was completely exhausted by the length to which the debate had extended, how was it that it was left to the Prime Minister to come down from his sick room to give expression to the indignation of the Government? During the seven nights during which they debated the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Cork, not a single Member of the Government made any complaint of waste of time; and he must say that if he were inclined to be swayed by the argument of the Prime Minister, he would be inclined to accuse the right hon. Gentleman's Colleagues of a gross dereliction of duty in having allowed the debate to go on hopelessly without protesting a word against the alleged waste of time. He was afraid that the indignation of the right hon. Gentleman was spontaneous. He was afraid that the indignation was extemporised for the occasion; and he was bound to say that the Prime Minister himself, when he reconsidered the subject and made himself acquainted with the character of the debate, would regret very much the speech he had delivered. The right hon. Gentleman dealt very severely, and, in his opinion, very unjustly with the arguments of the hon. Member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy). The hon. Member for Longford, in moving his Amendment that evening, based his case principally upon the existence of rack-renting in the county of Galway and other places which he specially brought under the notice of the House. In the course of his speech the hon. Member for Longford referred incident- tally to the county which he represented, and he described it as a model county, where the tenants were prosperous and the landlords fair and moderate—the two things generally went together. But how did the Prime Minister deal with his speech? He got up and told the House that the hon. Member based his whole case on the condition of the county Longford, entirely ignoring the references of the hon. Member to rack-renting which prevailed in the county Galway, which was the strong reason he put forth for asking the Government to refrain from employing the Military or Constabulary Forces of the Crown in carrying out evictions. He did not mean to say that the Prime Minister wilfully misrepresented his hon. Friend; but he was bound to say that a grosser misrepresentation of the character of the speech which was delivered that evening by the hon. Member for Longford he never heard. He did not wish to pay his hon. Friend the bad compliment of saying that the Prime Minister was asleep during the essential portions of his speech. That was, however, the only supposition upon which he could acquit the right hon. Gentleman of having wilfully and grossly misrepresented the argument which the hon. Member submitted to the consideration of the House. If it was true that the Irish Members had occupied the attention of the House on this question it did not seem to him that the offence would be one of a gross character. Hon. Members should recollect that it was an Irish question; that if there was any force in the Constitutional method which the English Government themselves had adopted for eliciting public opinion they should remember that the Irish Members were the Constitutional Representatives of Irish opinion, and unless the Government proceeded on the principle that they were free to deal with the Irish Question without adequately considering that opinion he did not think they could complain of the part the Irish Members had hitherto taken in those discussions; and of all men he could not understand the Prime Minister making a complaint of that character. He had a vivid recollection of the many times which the right hon. Gentleman occupied the time of the House when he was in Opposition upon questions of far less importance than Parliament had been called together six weeks before the usual time to discuss. He well remembered how the right hon. Gentleman occupied the time of the House for hours upon hours on the grievances of remote peoples for whose government, for whose freedom, and for whose peace and prosperity not a single Member of that House was responsible. Now, however, the Prime Minister had discovered that the weapon which he used himself in his day of Opposition might be equally convenient to Members now in Opposition, and he wished to wrest from their hands that very weapon which enabled himself to carve his way to power. The right hon. Gentleman elicited the applause of the House when he stated that it was the Business of the Government to execute the law, and that Her Majesty's Government were obliged to use the forces of the Crown in carrying out evictions. The Prime Minister had appealed to the traditions of past times at the expense of himself and his Colleagues, and had complimented the Irish Representatives of the past on their legislative wisdom. He venerated the name of O'Connell, whose spirit the right hon. Gentleman had invoked in the attempt to abridge the oratory of the Irish Members; but the right hon. Gentleman did not tell them that the Law Officers of the Crown had found the law elastic enough to include O'Connell in their net, although he was the expounder of the famous maxim that he who commits a crime gives strength to the enemy. Yes; and he spent some of the best of his latter days in a prison cell because of the strength of the Constitutional agitation he carried on in Ireland. One of the earliest political speeches he (Mr. O'Connor Power) had read was an address by the Prime Minister, in which he complimented another of his distinguished countrymen—Edmund Burke. Against the dictum of the Prime Minister he now quoted Edmund Burke, who, in his essay entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, made this remark:—

"The question with me is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. I am not determining a point of law. I am restoring tranquillity; and the general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of government they are fitted for."

There was discontent in Ireland; and in reference to the process of eviction he (Mr. O'Connor Power) laid it down that the doctrine of the enforcement of the law was not always the absolute duty of the Executive. He felt it his duty to support his hon. Friend the Member for Longford. He himself represented a county in some of the baronies of which as many as 6,000 evictions had been carried out in the famine year, which deprived Ireland of nearly 2,500,000 of her population. The Government was now big with the promise of repressive powers; they thought of another Westmeath Act; they intended to deal with the discontent in Ireland in connection with this question; but the political consequences of allowing the landlords of Ireland to exercise the absolute power of eviction would be very serious in the immediate future. The rejection of this Amendment, especially accompanied by the language which the Prime Minister had used, would have the most serious effects in Ireland. The Times said on the last great exodus that "the Irish had gone with a vengeance." But the expatriated in America had leagued themselves together in a great confederacy extending from New York to California. Another similar movement was taking place, and foreshadowed a time of trouble to the English Government. He did not indulge in menace; but he called attention to facts which no wise statesman, anxious to lay the foundations of justice and mutual peace between Great Britain and Ireland, could shut his eyes to. He had intended to bring down an Irish-American newspaper, The Irish World, published at New York. That was a newspaper which the right hon. Gentleman, considering his position as responsible Minister for Ireland, might well employ some time in reading. He did not mean that the right hon. Gentleman should accept all that was stated in that paper; but he would find in it some useful information. It appeared that within the last week 54 new branches of the Land League had been established in the City of New York and its vicinity. That fact suggested that if they stopped agitation in Ireland they would, as a consequence, stimulate it in America, and agitation carried on beyond their jurisdiction was likely to be of a far more dangerous character than agitation in a country under their constant supervision and amenable to their laws. He did not mean to say that it would result in the disintegration of the Empire, or that the Irish in America would come over in a magnificent fleet and lay the Crown of England in the dust; but it was a serious matter to have 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 of people whose minds were full of the memories of the wrongs inflicted upon them by the very process of evictions now going on in Ireland, and to see that Her Majesty's Government looked on the whole affair as something scarcely deserving of passing notice. ["No, no!"] The right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin did not take quite so hopeful a view with regard to Irish disaffection as Gentlemen on the Treasury Bench. The right hon. and learned Gentleman described the condition of things as a danger to the Empire. Now Her Majesty's Government were taking the utmost efficacious means of intensifying that danger and enlarging its scope and area. Why was it that 1,500,000 of Irish people inhabiting the English and Scotch towns, by political combination, were so constantly frustrating the designs of English public men and disturbing the balance of Parties? It all arose from the unrestrained power of eviction exercised by Irish landlords, who drove those people from their homes and told them they did so under the sanction of British law. It must be plain to everybody that it was Ireland's connection with England which was the source of her misfortunes with reference to her tenure of land. If Ireland were 1,000 miles away from Great Britain he could conceive very well the issue of the struggle now going on. History would repeat itself. In great struggles where a small section of the community had exercised arbitrary power, without justice and mercy, the people had risen in their might, destroyed that power, and superseded by it a Constitution of their own.

I must appeal to the hon. Member to keep to the Amendment before the House. He is wandering wide of the Question.

said, he would endeavour to show the precise application of the considerations he was submitting to the House. If Ireland were in that position, unquestionably the tenantry of Ireland would not be in the power of the landlords; but now the landlords knew they could rely on the Government to carry out evictions. He could not contemplate without abhorrence any collision between large classes of people which would deluge the land with blood, even though the result might lead to the greater happiness of the greater number. But if Ireland were not connected with England this question would never have arisen, because the landlords would have shared in the fortunes and the struggles of the rest of their countrymen. A Member of Her Majesty's Government (Mr. Evelyn Ashley), addressing his constituents at Gosport recently, and speaking on the subject of Irish emigration, said—

"The Irish people were undoubtedly idle and improvident; but for this they were not wholly to blame. They married at 18, and after having families of 13 they expected to be millionaires and Rothschilds."

Official figures might be quoted to prove conclusively that the Secretary to the Board of Trade was entirely wrong. He held in his hand a very interesting pamphlet on this subject by Mr. Pim, a solicitor of Dublin, which he would place at the disposal of the hon. Gentleman, from which it appeared that in 1879 there were twice as many marriages in proportion to population in England and Wales as there were in Ireland in the same year.

The character of the Irish people is not the Question before the House. I call upon the hon. Member to confine himself to the Amendment, which relates to the employment of the Naval, Military, and Constabulary Forces of the Crown.

said, that if he was to understand that he was not entitled to illustrate his argument by a reference to these figures, then, of course, he would bow to the right hon. Gentleman's decision; but he did not take the right hon. Gentleman to rule in that sense. If the right hon. Gentleman did rule in that sense, he had only to signify his pleasure, and he (Mr. O'Connor Power) would at once bow to it.

I am bound to tell the hon. Member distinctly that the line of argument he is now pursuing is not relevant to the Question before the House.

said, there were only too many arguments in favour of the Amendment, and they were likely to have several discussions on the subject. He would now confine himself to giving the most direct contradiction to the statement of the Secretary to the Board of Trade. The Prime Minister, and those who had written up his policy in the Press, had justified it by reference to the policy of previous distinguished statesmen. Instead of grappling with difficulties of this kind in a thorough-going manner, it had too often been the habit of Parliament to deal with Irish questions in a hand-to-mouth fashion. He need not refer, in illustration, to the well-known declaration of the Duke of Wellington, when he recommended the passing of the Emancipation Bill on the ground that it would prevent civil war. But the policy of Sir Robert Peel had been so often appealed to that he hoped the House would give him its indulgence while he read a short extract from a speech of that statesman in Parliament. He said—

"You must in some way or other break up that formidable confederacy which exists against the British Government and British connection. I do not believe you can break it up by force,"

Now they were employing force in the odious process of evictions in Ireland. The contention of the Irish Members was that neither law nor justice would suffer by suspending evictions for a short time. If the tenantry of Ireland had with held their rents, as the landlord organs alleged, in some cases for two years, it could not be a great hardship to leave the matter as it was for a few months longer, until the land proposals of the Government had been discussed by the House. Sir Robert Peel went on to say that they could do much to break up the confederacy by acting in a spirit of kindness, forbearance, and generosity. The concluding and most important words of the speech referred to the dispute then going on with the United States over the Oregon question. Sir Robert Peel, after announcing the terms of a firm declaration which he had sent to the American Government, added—

"I own to you that when I was called upon to make that declaration, I recollected with satisfaction and consolation that on the day before I had sent a message of peace to Ireland."

It was noticeable that three of the most eminent statesmen of our century, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and the present Prime Minister, all had to use a disguised threat in order to induce the Government to do an act of justice to Ireland. His contention was that they were not bound by any rule of duty to assist landlords in carrying out the process of eviction pending the consideration of any proposals the Government had to submit. If they did give assistance they would incur a grave responsibility. They would be going with buckshot and bayonets against a people who were agitated to an extreme degree, struggling for rights which the Government acknowledged had been too long withheld. There was no question now as to the extent of the land grievance in Ireland. There was no doubt that, in some shape or form, the power of eviction so recklessly carried out must be abridged; and he asked them with what face they could send their armed men into the midst of a maddened people with a sense of the wrongs they had suffered for a long period, and which Parliament had been unable to redress. The land system of Ireland and the system of eviction was the handiwork of Parliament; and he charged them before the civilized world with being responsible for all the mischief it had wrought in the past, and upon their heads, and not upon the heads of the Irish Members, would rest the innocent blood which he was afraid would be shed in any future contest that they might force upon that unfortunate, down-trodden, but still, thank God, unconquered people.

In rising to support the Motion of my hon. Friend the Member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy), I wish to utter a strong protest against the tone and character of the speech of the Prime Minister. I regret exceedingly that the right hon. Gentleman should have allowed himself to be carried away by his feelings into the delivery of that speech. The speech is unjust and ungenerous to the Irish Members, trying to do their duty in this House in the face of great odds, and to the Irish people, struggling against the great odds of your power to keep themselves in the land of their birth. I say I regret that the Prime Minister should have been hurried into these utterances, and that he should have attempted to stifle free and full discussion in this House, not for the first time, in reference to the Irish Land Question. I can recollect an occasion when he attempted to put to silence one of the Members of the Irish Party. These, then, are my charges, and I think I shall be able to prove that his speech was unjust and ungenerous, and that he has made ineffectual attempt to stifle discussion. The wildest shrieks of some of the men, instructors of public opinion, to whom the Prime Minister certainly does not owe his position, could not have exceeded the over-ridden character of, and the apparent indifference with, the real state of affairs manifested in the speech of the Prime Minister. What did he say? He told us that if the Irish Members, sitting in Opposition, had taken a reasonable attitude, and had not wasted the time of the House for eight nights, he would have been able to have given us his cordial approbation. I do not think a grosser exaggeration was ever uttered by a Member of this House, all things considered, than that the Irish Members had kept the House sitting for eight nights. We have been warned for some days past by the tone of the utterances of the noble Marquess (the Marquess of Hartington), and especially of the Metropolitan Press, that an attempt would be made to charge us with Obstruction in this debate, and in view of that I have taken the precaution to have notes taken of the time occupied by the Irish Members belonging to the Party of Opposition in the debate on the Queen's Speech, and I find that during the six or seven Sittings they only occupied something about 12 hours of the time of the House. I appeal to the sense of fair play that, no doubt, is entertained by the majority of the Members of this House, if 12 hours, considering the circumstances of the case, that we come from another country, with which you are very imperfectly acquainted, and in reference to which you have very imperfect means of obtaining information about, if 12 hours was an unreasonable time for Irish Members to occupy in order to state their case? Consider the difficulties with which we have to contend. It has been repeatedly stated that the Irish Members with whom I have the honour of acting are men of ordinary, and not extraordinary, talent and oratorical powers. We have to contend with all the talent of England and Scotland. We have also to contend adversely against the verdict which was given against us in advance. When I commenced the task I did not feel very sanguine; but I thought it was our duty to do our best to inform the public and the House of the true state of affairs. We had great ability and oratorical powers on both sides of the House against us, and we had many misapprehensions to remove, which hon. Members of this House are much interested in creating and perpetrating for the selfish interests of their own class. I can understand that you must be exceedingly prejudiced against us; that many things we do and say must be hard for you to see and listen to; and it is, in fact, almost a hopeless task for us to attempt to remove the prejudices that exist on every side, and the misapprehensions that surround Irish questions—it is almost a hopeless task; and this may be the last Session that you will have any large body of the Irish Members coming to this House and striving to carry on this work. Already in Ireland there are many who say—"What is the use of going to the House of Commons at all?" It would be far more dignified for Irish Members to retire in a body by themselves than tell their countrymen that it is a farce to seek redress from the English Parliament.

The hon. Member must be aware that the observations he is now making have no relevance to the Amendment before the House.

I was endeavouring, Mr. Speaker, before I proceed to the exact terms of the Amendment, to answer the speech of the Prime Minister, and to show that there was no foundation for the charge he had made against us of endeavouring unduly to protract the discussion. However, I think, perhaps, I have gone sufficiently into the matter, and I will proceed to refer to the Amendment of my hon. Friend; but first I would ask you to allow me to remove some misapprehensions which have arisen in the minds of many hon. Members of this House with regard to my position in this land movement. I have been charged several times, and the impression seems exceedingly prevalent, with desiring to make the land movement of Ireland a lever for disintegrating the Empire. ["Hear, hear!"] I am very glad if I have stated the idea that prevails correctly, and I admit that iso- lated sentences which have been read from time to time from my speeches are, taken by themselves, capable of that construction. But these sentences have usually been taken from speeches which I have delivered from platforms in the open air; from speeches of a very brief character, in which I was unable to explain thoroughly the position which I then, assumed, and I still hold; and it is obvious that if you cull one or two sentences in that way they are likely to be misunderstood. With regard to the integrity of the Empire, and if I speak more candidly upon that subject here than I should venture to do in Ireland, it is because I should be prosecuted for saying in Ireland what I trust I may rely on the generosity and fair play of the Members of this House to allow me to say here.

I rise to Order. I am quite sure that every Member of this House is willing and anxious to hear the hon. Member upon any question which is properly before the House; but I submit that the hon. Member is now making a personal explanation which has no reference whatever to the Amendment before the House.

The observations of the hon. Member were not strictly relevant to the Amendment before the House. At the same time, I did not interpose, because the House is generally indulgent when an hon. Member desires to make a personal explanation and is speaking in reference to his own personal position. I trust that when the hon. Member has concluded that line of observation he will at once address himself to the Amendment before the House.

I feel very grateful to you, Sir, and to the House, for the very kind indulgence with which you allow me to remove the misapprehension which exists, and I promise to do so in as few words as I can. It is quite true that, speaking in Ireland, I have frequently said that the indirect consequences of the land movement would be the doing away with, or the destruction of, English misrule, and the restoration of an Irish Parliament; and I can understand very well that such an expression of opinion, if not gone into very fully, as was the case on those occasions, may have given rise to the idea that prevails in the House that I was seeking to use this land agitation for the purpose of violently destroying the English power in Ireland. But what I have always endeavoured to convey in such speeches is this—that if landlordism in Ireland could be abolished; if the landlords could be deprived of those unjust rights which they now possess under English-made laws, and which they look to England to assist them in maintaining and upholding; if we could, in this way, teach landlords to look to the people, to throw in their own interests in common with the people of their own country, and not look to a power outside Ireland to maintain their rights; if, in short, we could abolish the right of the landlord to inflict injustice upon the Irish tenant; if we could have such a settlement of the Irish Land Question as would prevent the interests of the landlord and tenant from being in antagonism with each other, I believe that the only settlement that would lead to such a result would be a settlement by which the landlord's interest in the land would be abolished, and the land handed over to the tenant, for I cannot conceive how you can ever adjust relations of landlord and tenant in the soil on a system of partnership in such a way as to prevent constantly recurring disputes as to the tenure of the land. If, then, we could abolish landlordism, the Irish landlords and the numerous and powerful classes who depend upon them for a living, they would be no longer tempted to place themselves in a position of antagonism to the rest of their countrymen. There would then remain no class in Ireland interested in the maintenance of English supremacy there; and we should in a natural and peaceable way, without any violent revolution, in my opinion, and without jingle of arms, but by the union of all classes in Ireland, obtain the restoration of our legislative independence. When I say this, I wish also to say, what, perhaps, I ought not to say in this House, and I should not venture to say it in a public meeting in Ireland—I wish to say that I believe it would be the duty of every Irishman, if circumstances could so come about that a fair chance presented itself of obtaining the freedom of his country, I believe it would, under those circumstances, be the duty of every Irishman to do that which it would be the duty of every man to do, and which the people of every country are proud to do—shed his blood; but I do believe it would be a crime to plunge the Irish people into an unequal and useless struggle. I have never gone beyond the usual lines of Constitutional agitation. I believe that if we can abolish the divisions that exist between classes in Ireland, we should obtain by peaceable and Constitutional agitation the right to make our own laws; and under a system of Constitutional government, such as prevails in this country, I believe that right to make their own laws would be practicable, that we should remain friends with England, and that, as Grattan used to say, there would be the link of the Crown between England and Ireland. You would have lost the right to make confusion and mischief in Ireland, and inflict bad and unjust laws upon us, and you would then see that we were not so terribly hostile to you as you found was the case before. I trust I have now shown the House that when I spoke of the land movement being designed to knock away one of the props of English misrule, I intended to indicate my desire for the friendly settlement of the differences between the two countries. I feel convinced that the great reason why hon. Members are so misled about the state of affairs in Ireland, and the great reason why you continue to work injustice to us, is because a powerful, an educated, and a rich class in Ireland are interested in misinforming you about everything concerned with this country. I will now address myself to the substance of My hon. Friend's Amendment. This is a question of grave urgency; but were it not that the Prime Minister intends that the suspension of the Constitution and measures of coercion should precede concession it would not be a question of such urgency. Last year the ejectments in Ireland numbered, in the first quarter, 554 families and 2,748 persons; in the second quarter, 687 families and 1,355 persons; and in the third quarter, 671 families and 3,447 persons. In the fourth quarter, the number was reduced to 198 families and 954 persons, and I notice that the Land League claims that the smallness of the evictions in that quarter is due to its exertions and organization, and to the fact that it was able to induce people to refrain from taking farms from which others were evicted. The coercive legislation introduced by the Government is intended to put down the Land League, and I warn Ministers that if this is done the state of things which existed in Ireland before the establishment of that organization is likely to recur. I ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland whether he contemplates with any other feelings than those of the gravest alarm an increase of evictions similar to that which took place in the first three quarters of last year? Is it not likely that the Irish landlords, enraged, as many of them are, by the action of their tenantry in organizing and refusing to pay unjust rents, will commence to take vengeance upon the tenants as soon as the Land League has been put down, as soon as the liberty of anyone is at the mercy of any common policeman who chooses to perjure himself by swearing false information, as soon as it is possible to put anyone in Ireland in gaol on no charge whatever? There is not the slightest doubt that the Irish landlords will be encouraged to recommence the series of evictions which the Prime Minister so deplored last year. It is exceedingly probable that the landlords will not wait for coercion, but that the very prospect of coercion will encourage them to proceed to eviction, and before very long you will find the eviction figures again exceeding those of the first three quarters of last year. I have a letter from a gentleman who has applied for protection, and who needs protection no more than I need it; but the writer has persuaded the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland that he is in danger, and he has been provided with two constables. In his letter this gentleman says he intends to make Forster send him 2,000 troops to help him in evicting tenants in a Southern county; and he is, so to speak, rubbing his hands at the prospect of having the Habeas Corpus Act suspended, and 2,000 troops to carry on evictions. The feeling of this gentleman is the feeling of thousands and thousands of Irish landlords. They are looking forward to the Bills, which the right hon. Gentleman calls measures for the Protection of Person and Property, to enable them to revenge themselves upon the tenants for the stand they bravely made during the past 12 months against rack-renting and evictions. The Chief Secretary for Ireland, strong as he may consider himself, will find that the Irish landlords, with the Habeas Corpus Act suspended and the Land League put down, a far more terrible enemy to himself and his Government than the Land League. Does the right hon. Gentleman suppose that public opinion in this country, difficult as it is to get at, difficult as it is to move, will not start back affrighted when it sees the first result of the additional powers—an enormous increase of evictions; that the terrible scenes of 1847 and 1848 have been renewed; that the crowbar brigade is again in full swing; and that the landlords have returned to their ancient practices of burning the roofs and levelling the walls of the homes of the people? The experience gained by the right hon. Gentleman in the famine years can hardly have been thrown away. The right hon. Gentleman must have witnessed many evictions. Does he wish that the ejectments now shall be more numerous than any known since the famine years? 1870 was considered a bad year, but the number of ejectments then was only 753; whereas the number of ejectments in the first three quarters of 1880 was very nearly two and a-half times more than that. I really hope the Government will pass some measure tiding over the time before the passing of the Land Act. A very long time must elapse before a Land Bill is passed. The Government does not even now know its own mind. These great questions must necessarily prolong the discussion on the contemplated measures in this House; and it will certainly be many months before you can embody in any Act of Parliament any idea of yours as to remedial measures. In the meantime, what is to become of the Irish tenants threatened with eviction? We are told—"You are standing in the way of remedial legislation, by every night prolonging this debate." The only thing, the only measure that it seems to me we are standing in the way of is the Coercion Bill. Hon. Members must know that the only Bill the Government is certain of passing is the Coercion Bill. With regard to any projects of Reform in Ireland, the Prime Minister must know that he cannot do much. The fate of the little Land Bill of last Ses- sion should be a warning to the right hon. Gentleman before he gives the Irish landlords the terrible weapon of coercion. The Chief Secretary for Ireland must recollect the treatment he received from the landlord party last Session before he attempted to pass a Coercion Bill. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the late Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Gibson) promised to aid the Government in passing a Coercion Bill; "and then," he said, "we shall give a candid consideration to any measure on the Land Question." The Government will soon find, after coercion is agreed to, that the "candid consideration" their Land Bill will receive from the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Dublin University will be constant obstruction in this House; and either its rejection in the House of Lords, or such a whittling of it down as will render the Bill useless. I believe that if the Government had approached the question in a fair and candid spirit they would have been met with an instant diminution of crime in Ireland. Crime is already decreasing, and I am looking forward to the next fortnightly Returns to show a marked diminution of serious crime. At all events, for many weeks there has been no agrarian murder, and the outrages are much less serious than formerly. I have never thought that the cause of the tenant farmer could be benefited by any class of offences but one, and I will candidly admit what that is. It is true, I have never advised the commission of this one; but I have never reprobated it as I have others, and I have taken no practical steps to prevent its commission, as I have in reference to every other class of offences. The only offence against the law which, I think, Irish tenants are justified in committing is the offence of taking possession of holdings from which they have been unjustly evicted; and this, of course, is only excusable, because the law does not protect them. ["Oh!"] There is no active resistance to the law in taking possession of holdings from which they have been unjustly evicted. Just consider the severity of the punishment which is likely to follow this offence. If a man still remains in that possession, he can be taken without bail, and, if convicted, can be sentenced to seven years' penal servitude, or more. That is the terrible punish- ment awaiting them under the White-boy Act for an offence which I cannot regard as an active resistance to the law, an Act which provides the punishment of flogging. I say, if the Irish tenant is willing to suffer for his faith, if he is willing to face the consequences, and retake possession of his holding from which he has been unjustly evicted, that then moral right will sanction the offence against your law. I then would, in conclusion, Mr. Speaker, entreat the Government to look the situation in the face. It is all very well to say that it is impossible to ask the Crown to refrain from using the forces of the Crown against resisting evictions; but is it not possible for the Government to pass some short measure through the House of Commons and send it to the Lords, with the intimation that if it be not carried the Lords may be free to govern Ireland as best they could? I think if the right hon. Gentleman would put that august Assembly in his position for a short while, without the ample means that he has at his disposal for enforcing his will, that the Members opposing it would see that it was, perhaps, not so advisable to resist just and prudent measures of reform. I think that if you suspend evictions in Ireland, if you refrain from passing coercion, that it may be possible for you to go a long way in the settlement of this Irish Land Question; but if you go on the lines you have commenced with, if you apply coercion first, the settlement of the question will be taken out of your hands. It will be impossible to restore the people to the calm state of mind which is necessary, in order to obtain the introduction of gradual reform. I am one of those who believe in the abolition of landlordism; but I should welcome any reform, however small, which tended in that direction, and which did not serve to perpetuate and fix the old and evil lines of feudal tenure in Ireland. I do not suppose for a moment that we shall, during this Session of Parliament, get you to adopt the plan of the Emperor of Russia, who made his suffering serfs owners of their lands, and compensated their landlords by the issue of State paper. I do not suppose we shall be able to persuade the Government immediately to adopt the other equally sensible plan of the King of Prussia, who provided that a certain class of the land in the country should leave the possession of the nobles, and go into that of the tenants.

The hon. Member must confine himself to the Amendment before the House. He is now travelling very wide of it.

I was tempted to think, Mr. Speaker, that I might allude to the matter, because the Amendment of my hon. Friend closes with these words—

"Until the measures to be submitted to Her Majesty, with, regard to the ownership of land in Ireland, have been decided upon by Parliament,"

and I supposed that in a discussion upon the nature and extent of those measures, and the time which they might probably occupy in passing, I should be in Order in recommending to this House the suspension of ejectments until that time might elapse. I intended merely referring to the fact that these things had been done in Prussia, without any intention of going into a detailed description of what had been done. While expressing my belief that it will not be done, that such a measure will not be attempted or intended by Parliament during this Session of Parliament, I wish to recommend to the Government the consideration of some proposal or plan by which the settlement of this question might not be taken entirely out of their hands by the Irish landlords. If you adopt coercion in Ireland, and I do not say this for the purpose of using any threat, but if you adopt coercion in Ireland, the first man that is arrested will be the signal for the suspension of the payment of all rent in Ireland. Such a proposal was made at the end of last Session. I am glad to say that I have successfully resisted it up to the present moment; but it would not be possible for me, if you insist upon taking the leaders of the people and putting a stop to this organization—it will not be possible for me to resist it any longer. The most moderate men in Ireland, the Catholic Bishops and Catholic priests, will recognize its necessity, and you will find yourselves face to face with a far more formidable movement than that which preceded it—most probably a secret movement. Let not the right hon. Gentleman suppose that the tenants, who have found out how to organize themselves, will not be able to carry on an organization in such a way as to baffle any attempt to stop them, in spite of all his spies and policemen. It certainly will. He does not recognize all the nature of the force he has got to deal with. If he finds the situation is intensified; if he finds evictions increase, murders increase, and no rents coming into the pockets of the landlords, then no class in this country or in Ireland will thank him for his pains. I would therefore entreat him to consider this subject, to look at it in a statesmanlike manner. If the Prime Minister has not yet made up his mind as to the nature of the measures to be submitted to Parliament, let him put a stop to this business of ejectment. He could carry out that by the suspension of ejectments, and all that the landlords at the outside would lose would be their rents during that period. All that they would lose would be a certain sum of money during that period; but would it not be better that even the Irish landlords should be without some of their money during the period of two or three months, while Parliament was calmly considering at its ease the settlement of this question, than that they should be horrified by reading, day after day, accounts of outrages and murders? The present movement in Ireland cannot be stopped unless 10,000 or 15,000 persons are arrested. During the last agitation, the Government was obliged to arrest 2,000 persons under the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. For every one who is put in prison, at least five or six or seven will have to leave the country. A fortnight or so after the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act the Government will find that 10,000 persons must be arrested. That is only a small proportion of those who will be obliged to leave the country. The House does not know what the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act means. They do not know what a humiliation everybody feels under it, not knowing whether his liberty or, in many cases, his life is safe. I cannot understand any self-respecting citizen being content to live in a country where that Act is suspended. Englishmen cannot realize what that suspension is, or how it works, because it is so far away from their practical experience. No Ministry could attempt to apply such a measure to England. They can do it in Ireland, because they are the stronger of the two, and because they know that when argument fails they have brute force to rely on. They are engaged in a struggle which they cannot measure; and I entreat the Government, before it goes too far, to pause, and, in the words of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham, to declare, by bringing forward their measures of conciliation and concession first, that "force is no remedy."

Sir, I am most reluctant to take up any part of the time of the House at this stage; but I must confess that I had looked, after the speech to which we have just listened, for some Member of Her Majesty's Government to rise and call the attention of the House to the very serious character of some of the observations which have been addressed to it. I am not sure, and I think you yourself, Sir, intimated so much, that many of the remarks of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) were somewhat wide of the particular Motion before us; but you thought it right to allow the hon. Gentleman, under the particular circumstances which he stated that he stood in, to travel somewhat outside of the Amendment under discussion. I think we must feel that we have gained one advantage by that permission so given to him, because we have had from the lips of the hon. Member, in his place in Parliament, a most distinct avowal of many of those sentiments which have been attributed to him in other places, but which we had not had so distinctly laid before the House of Commons; and I must say that, although I am not disposed to enter into any general discussion on the subject, I think notice ought to be taken of the extraordinary terms which the hon. Gentleman has addressed to this House of Parliament. I refer, Sir, to the manner in which he has spoken, wholly irrespective of the sentiments which he has announced. He has spoken as if he were an equal power addressing the power of the Crown and the Parliament, as if he were—for anything I know he may claim to be—supreme over the organization which is now the virtual ruler of a portion at least of Ireland. He speaks of what he considers to be right and fair and just—of what the particulars are in which the law of this country ought to be obeyed, and what are the portions of it which ought not to be obeyed; and he told us, in the frankest possible manner, that his intentions in all these proceedings have been such as we know have been avowed on other occasions—that they have been directed, not for the redress of particular grievances or inequalities in the Land Laws of Ireland, but to the destruction of a great element of British power in that country, and to the ultimate separation of the Legislature of the two countries. I am sure that the hon. Member will not deny that that is the general tenour of the observations which he made, or that we have now before us a much greater and wider issue than any involved in the question of any amendment of the Land Laws. I have always said that we are perfectly ready to enter into any discussion of those laws, or of any amendment which may be proposed in them by Her Majesty's Government; but, in the first place, we demand that Her Majesty's Government shall take steps—and Parliament will, no doubt, support them—to restore and vindicate law and order. We listened with patience to the debate that was carried on upon the Amendment moved by the hon. Gentleman; and I, for my own part, thought that, although that debate was carried on at very considerable length, and at times, as it appeared, with unnecessary expansiveness, still, under the circumstances of the case, it was but reasonable that the Irish Members should be able fully and fairly to state all that they had to state to the House of Commons. I felt that the question whether Her Majesty's Government were right in advising Her Majesty to call Parliament together at an unusual time and to ask for extraordinary powers should be fairly discussed, and that everything that hon. Members wished to say should be brought forward. It was discussed, and discussed at great length, and frequently with great ability. We were told that the outrages had been exaggerated, that repressive measures are not the proper way to deal with them; and, after hearing the case fully debated, the House decided, by an overwhelming majority of something like seven or eight to one, in favour of the course which the Government proposed. Under these circumstances, it is but decent that we should proceed without further delay to consider the proposals which the Government will have to submit to us. But a speech such as we have just heard waives all questions as to whether the outrages have been exaggerated or not, and seems to be apart from any question of dealing with them either by repressive or remedial measures. It seems to me we are told to listen to the dictation of the organization called the Land League; and when we listen to the hon. Gentleman the Member for the City of Cork speaking with an authority almost co-equal to the Queen of England, it is time this House should enter a protest against doctrines of that kind, and that we should make it known to the people of this country what is the true issue that lies before us.

Allow me, Sir, to assure the House that the only reason why no Member rose from the Treasury Bench when the right hon. Baronet opposite rose was that the Government thought the debate had now gone on so long that it was desirable to take the division. I think there is no loyal subject of the Crown, no matter on which side of the House he sits, who did not consider that the speech of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), which, I suppose, is still ringing in the ears of the House, carried its own refutation with it in an Assembly of loyal subjects. The hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon), and the hon. Member for the City of Cork alike, have repeated doctrines which must have much astonished this House, and which cannot be recognized in any settled and civilized Kingdom. The law of this Realm, as made by the Crown and Parliament, is that which the Government is bound to administer; and the Government which does not enforce the existing law fails in its elementary duty of maintaining the organization of society. What I have learnt in early days—though this new Gospel would unteach it—is that the first duty of a Government is to maintain public order, and to preserve the rights of property and the rights of individual persons. That is the object to which the Government must address itself in the first instance. It appears to me that you might as well give tonics to a fevered patient as, at the present moment, give remedial measures to Ireland, before law and order are restored in that country. I will, in a word, give an illustration which occurs to me by reference to an answer I gave to a Question put to me in this honourable House. I then stated that, in my opinion, the Land Courts held by the Land League were amongst the most illegal and formidable of their operations that have come before us. These Courts prevent tenants from fulfilling their obligations, which they are willing to discharge. It is a libel upon the tenants of Ireland to say that they are all dishonest enough to withhold their rents, and I take leave to say in this honourable House that that statement is unfounded. I have to tell the House of a case in which when it was established that the law of the land is stronger than the law of the Land League, the tenants, when the supremacy of the law had been asserted, came forward and paid their rents, which they were well able to pay, but which they had hitherto been afraid to pay, on account of the Land League, and lodged them in bank to the credit of the landlord.

said, the debate raised great practical issues and a great question of policy. Complaints were made by the Government that the discussion had been unduly prolonged; but it was by no means unprecedented to move an Amendment upon the Address, and to discuss it at much length. In 1841 Mr. Stuart Wortley moved and carried an Amendment to the Address. The debate commenced on the 24th of August, and was not closed until the 27th, having extended over four days. The result of that Amendment was that the Administration of Lord Melbourne went out, and that of Sir Robert Peel was established in its place. A similar course was taken in June, 1859, when, after a debate extending over four days, an Amendment to the Address was carried, and the Government of Lord Derby went out, being replaced by that of Lord Palmerston. In the face of these precedents, it could not be said that the present debate had been unnecessarily prolonged. The House was engaged in an Irish debate, upon which 70 speeches had been delivered, and of those 70 speeches, only 36 had been delivered by Irish Members, and not exclusively by Home Rule Members, but including the speeches of the Liberal Members from Ulster, and Irish Members like the two right hon. and learned Members for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson and Mr. Plunket), who sat on the Conservative Benches. The debate had never for an instant flagged. Several Members constantly endeavoured to catch Mr. Speaker's eye; and, seeing the great eagerness to speak thus manifested, he did not think there was any just cause of complaint as to the prolongation of the debate. By a secret understanding between one of the Home Rule Whips and the Representatives of Her Majesty's Government—he hoped it would be the last secret understanding between them—it was arranged that the discussion on the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) should be closed on Friday night. That arrangement was strictly observed by the Irish Members, and yet Her Majesty's Ministers had now the cheek to come down to the House and abuse the Irish Members for unduly prolonging the debate.

I rise to Order. Is the expression "cheek" Parliamentary?

Mr. SPEAKER motioned to Mr. T. P. O'CONNOR to proceed.

said, he entirely agreed with some of the remarks of the Prime Minister with regard to the terms of the Amendment of the hon. Member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy). He thought that those terms were unfortunate, and that they afforded the right hon. Gentleman an opportunity of answering the Motion by a side issue. It was the duty of the Executive, in ordinary cases, to enforce the law by every means at their disposal; and it was absurd to ask the Government to decline to avail themselves of the Military and Constabulary Forces at their command, in order to enforce the law. Nevertheless, the Amendment was perfectly justifiable, if it were regarded in the light of a protest. The statement of the hon. and learned Solicitor General for Ireland (Mr. W. M. Johnson), that there was no precedent for the Government suspending the law if they thought fit to do so, was altogether inaccurate. If Her Majesty's Ministers chose to enforce the law at the present moment they could expel every Jesuit from the country; and when, in view of the speedy repeal of the Stamp Duties, Charles Dickens and others published newspapers without a stamp, the Government abstained from putting the law in force against them. In point of fact, the Government should have brought in a Suspension of Eviction Bill at once, or have renewed the Compensation for Disturbance Bill. A very important point to bear in mind was that the prospect of remedial legislation was calculated to lead to an increase of eviction, as the landlords would be anxious to make the most of their powers in the interval before their abolition. This contention was borne out by facts and figures. In the three years ending with 1869, the number of evictions amounted to 5,955, the average being under 2,000 per annum. But in 1870, when there was a prospect of remedial legislation, the number of evictions increased to 2,094. Under these circumstances, as there was an increased temptation to evict, it was the duty of Ministers, pending their proposed remedial legislation, to suspend the power of eviction. Instead of taking steps for that purpose, the Government contemplated coercive measures, and were taking action against the movement set on foot by the Land League. If successful in their object, they would deprive the Irish tenants of the only source from whence they could at present expect assistance. The right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister had stated that in times of distress a sentence of eviction came very near to a sentence of starvation. Yet the Returns showed that there had been more than 5,000 evictions, and the right hon. Gentleman had done nothing to prevent them. In 1848, when cruel evictions were carried on, women and children were thrown into the roadway in the middle of the night, to perish of cold and hunger, as, indeed, some of them did perish, Sir Robert Peel expressed his gratitude to an hon. Member for bringing the subject under the notice of Parliament. Instead of imitating Sir Robert Peel, the present Prime Minister attempted to stifle all discussion of the wrongs of the miserable people of Ireland. The whole history of the relations of Ireland with Liberal Ministries in times of distress showed that it was their habit to turn a deaf ear to the complaints of the Irish people, until it was too late to deal with the matters complained of. With an almost absolute certainty of the same terrible scenes being re-enacted, it was not to be expected that the Irish nation would put their trust in a Liberal Ministry. Distress had again overtaken the country. Evictions were daily taking place, and the Prime Minister did nothing to prevent the carrying out of what he himself had pronounced to be, in such a case, a sentence of starvation. On the contrary, he had come down to the House that very night, and complained of the delay that was being interposed in the application of coercion to Ireland. The Minister that moved Heaven and earth to save the peasants of Bulgaria from the cruelty and oppression of the Turks had nothing but coercion for the wretched peasants of Ireland. He could understand the sympathy of the right hon. Gentleman for the people of Bulgaria, if he could see one-half as much sympathy expended by him upon the people of Ireland.

I fail to see the relevancy of the remarks of the hon. Member to the Amendment before the House. They are quite wide of the mark.

would bow at once to the decision of the Chair. If the right hon. Gentleman would allow him to explain, he was only endeavouring to show what the meaning of eviction was in Ireland, because the Motion of his hon. Friend the Member for Longford was intended, if possible, to arrest evictions. He would now read from a Liberal paper— The Radical —a description of a family, which was now threatened with eviction, and of the wretched hovel which they occupied. The hon. Member proceeded to read at some length an account of a visit paid by the correspondent of the newspaper to a family under notice of eviction, which described the miserable condition of the cottage, the only furniture of which was a stool, a box, an iron three-legged pot, and some straw with a sack over it. The writer also described the appearance of the three inmates of the cottage.

I rise to Order. I wish to ask you, Sir, whether the personal appearance of any person has anything to do with the Motion before the House? The hon. Member is now disregarding the ruling you have given from the Chair.

I understand the hon. Member to be describing a case of eviction.

I am describing a case of threatened eviction. I was reading the appearance of a family which is threatened with eviction.

I cannot say that the hon. Member is entirely out of Order. At the same time, I trust that he will strictly confine his remarks to the Question before the House. He is certainly travelling somewhat wide of the Amendment of the hon. Member for Longford. Observations of this kind would have been more in Order when the House was discussing the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Cork.

said, he would accept the hint which the Speaker had been kind enough to give him, and he would omit several sentences in the description of the condition of this poor man and his family. He thought the right hon. Gentleman would find that his remarks were strictly applicable to the Amendment before the House. Three times had the rent of this poor man—whose name was Michael Conolly—been raised for improvements he had made himself. The English Correspondent of The Radical, who gave the description, said that the case was one of moral robbery on the part of a titled landlord, who took 80 per cent above Griffith's valuation. There were other cases equally as bad, said this writer, on the estate of the same landlord. Processes were served, and to enforce them the hero of Mid Lothian and the orator of Black heath would lend the aid of the Military and Constabulary Forces of the Crown, the sole object being to maintain a system far worse than Turkish tyranny and misrule. The case he had been describing was that of a villager, who was one of his constituents, and who had sent him there to speak for him. He would not be fulfilling his duty if on every occasion he did not raise his voice to protest against the cruelty, the tyranny, and the injustice of the present system. If the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister had been sent to that House by the votes of cottier tenants, he would feel it his duty to resist to the last gasp even as powerful a Minister as himself, and to raise his protest against the injustice, tyranny, and death which was being dealt out broadcast to these unfortunate people. It was quite possible that in performing his duty it would be his (Mr. O'Connor's) lotto encounter the hostility of the House. He should, be sorry for that. He disliked putting himself needlessly in hostility to any person; but he was animated by one feeling only, and that was the protection of the lives of the people whose interests he was sent there to serve. It might be said that the action of the Irish Members would create a feeling of hostility against the Irish Members and their cause. It might be that that feeling was excited already. He had little doubt that it was excited. Wherever he went he found the air full of horrid rumours, and the Prime Minister had spoken of that feeling as likely to impede him in the ameliorated legislation he intended to pass. Perhaps it might; but nothing he (Mr. O'Connor) could say to an English audience could have much effect, except to irritate them a little more. If the Prime Minister told English feeling to be hostile to the Irish Members, English feeling would be hostile to the Irish Members. But if the Prime Minister told English feeling to be fair and patient towards the Irish Members, Englishmen, to whom the name of the Prime Minister was justly dear, would be fair and patient. If English feeling went against the Irish Members it would be because the Prime Minister had deliberately excited it against them.

rose to Order. The Amendment before the House dealt with the question of employing the Naval and Military Forces of the Crown and the Constabulary in preventing ejectments in Ireland. The hon. Member was now discussing the coercive measures that were going to be introduced by the Government. He wished to know if the hon. Member was in Order in discussing those measures?

The hon. Member is not entitled to discuss the coercive measures which may be submitted on the Amendment now before the House. Such observations would have been in Order when the House was discussing the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell). The hon. Member had an opportunity of discussing the question on that Amendment.

submitted that he had not said one single word upon the coercion measures of the Government. What he was speaking about was the feeling of the English people, and he was desirous of calling attention to a letter written by the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. John Bright), in which the right hon. Gentleman stated that a feeling and temper might be aroused in the country which would prevent the proposals of Her Majesty's Government from being carried out. But why had not the right hon. Gentleman taken care that no intemperate proposals were made? [ Cries of "Question!"] He believed that he was speaking to the Question. He was answering that part of the Prime Minister's speech in which the right hon. Gentleman made reference to the feeling of the country. Why had the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister that evening, upon false and inaccurate information, accused the Irish Members of having unduly prolonged the discussion? It had been shown by facts that they had not prolonged the debate, and that the majority of the speakers were not Members representing the principles of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell). Therefore, the basis of the homily delivered by the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Gladstone) was proved to be altogether false and in accurate. Yet the right hon. Gentleman, proceeding on this false and inaccurate basis, appealed to public feeling against the Irish Members. Knowing that his appeal would be worth more than ten thousand Irish speeches, the right hon. Gentleman first laid down his inaccurate premisses, and then called upon the people to draw their conclusions from them, knowing well that few English people would take the trouble to examine the premisses, but that all would accept the conclusion. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand would accept the statement of the right hon. Gentleman that the Irish Members had unduly prolonged the debate, and would become inflamed against the Irish Party in consequence. One reasonable, just, and impartial man in every thousand might take the trouble to examine the premisses for himself, and he would find that every particle of the statement of the Prime Minister was disproved by the facts. Out of 70 speeches delivered in the course of the debate only 36 had been delivered by Irishmen, and they represented Irishmen of all classes. The Irish Members agreed to close the discussion on the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Cork on Friday, and at the moment it was brought to a close there were a large number of English Members who were anxious to continue it. He appealed to hon. Members to know whether that was the fact or not? Yet the Prime Minister was exciting a hostile feeling against the Irish Members, and instead of inaugurating a new era of reconciliation between the two nations, they would, on the contrary, see the dawn of a new era of fierce hatreds and hotter passions. Upon the head of the Prime Minister and his Colleagues would rest the heavy responsibility of beginning this new era of national hates, in place of a new era of national reconciliation.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Debate be now adjourned."—( Mr. Lalor. )

Her Majesty's Government cannot consent, without taking the sense of the House, to an adjournment of the debate. I do not propose at this hour to enter into any of the reasons why, in my opinion, this debate has been sufficiently protracted. If hon. Members were open to argument, or to expostulation, I think the speech of my right hon. Friend at the head of the Government in the early part of the evening would have produced some impression upon them. At all events, I shall not attempt, in a speech of weaker language, to repeat the arguments my right hon. Friend used for the purpose of endeavouring to impress upon hon. Members that they are not taking the best means of favourably disposing the House and the country towards them. The hon. Member whose speech preceded the Motion for the adjournment of the debate has said that it was the duty of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. John Bright) to calm any feeling of irritation that might arise in the country against the policy of the Irish Members. I venture to assure the hon. Member that not even those two statesmen to whom I have referred, nor a statesman powerful in the country as the Leader of the Opposition himself, if he added his influence, would be able to calm the feeling of irritation which is arising in this House, and is arising in the country against them. Hon. Members know their own business best; I presume they know the practical object they have in view. Certainly, this discussion can lead to no practical result. It may lead to the postponement of certain measures—to the postponement for a time of measures for the restoration of law and order, which the Government have declared it to be their intention to introduce; and unquestionably it will lead to a considerable postponement of the remedial measures they are about to bring forward. I leave it to the House to judge—I can form no opinion myself—whether hon. Members wish to retard measures of repression or measures of relief and reform.

said, the noble Lord—from what he (Mr. O'Donnell) had learned from his Colleagues—had misapprehended entirely the feelings of the Irish Members, when he accused them of not having been impressed with the speech which had been made by the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government. Hon. Members from Ireland had, on the contrary, been very deeply indeed impressed with the speech, and, having greatly pondered over it, it was their unanimous opinion that it consisted of the rashest possible assertions, coupled with a complete absence of a basis of reliable information. The right hon. Gentleman, instead of endeavouring to impart a tone of calmness to the debate that was to follow, did all he could—at least, in the opinion of the Irish Members—to predispose the House against any argument or expostulation which might be forthcoming in the course of the evening from the Irish Benches. The right hon. Gentleman had spoken as the chief of a powerful army, consisting, on this occasion only, of a close union of two Parties that could only be united in common hostility to Ireland. Knowing the power at his back, the right hon. Gentleman had used it mercilessly against the cause of Ireland. The House responded to the cue that he gave, and the most moderate statements of hon. Members who followed him had been received with almost constant interruptions from the devoted liegemen of the ex-emancipator of Bulgaria. The conduct of the Prime Minister and the fidelity, with which his dictates were followed by those over whom he had complete control, formed one of the strongest reasons in favour of an adjournment of the present heated debate—heated by the Prime Minister —to some other day, by which time, perhaps, reflection would have given the Prime Minister himself the extent of the mischief he had wrought between England and Ireland. No one could deny that the right hon. Gentleman had great power over the Members of his own Party. It might be true that he was losing his power over the constituencies—at least, he had gathered as much from the speech of the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India—but, at any rate, he still, for several very good reasons, possessed power over the rank and file of his own following. Why did not the right hon. Gentleman recommend his followers to listen with attention to the expostulations—to the entreaties if they would—of the Members from Ireland pleading, on one of the last occasions open to them, for the full consideration of the question before the House, before the Ministry had irretrievably committed itself, by the actual introduction of unfortunate measures, to a course which future generations of Irishmen and Englishmen might not improbably rue? The right hon. Gentleman did nothing of the kind. He exercised no pacifying influence over his followers, and his followers were doubtless abandoned to the direction they might receive from their constituents. Well, the sort of influence that was being brought to bear on the constituencies was pretty well known. The right hon. Gentleman ought to know something about it, and his knowledge ought to have armed him with some courage and resolution on the present occasion, for the purpose of securing fair play for the Irish people in this great controversy. He (Mr. O'Donnell) had not done such injustice to any English Member as to imagine for a single moment that a proposal to with hold relief and protection from an enormous number of English people threatened with utter ruin would have been tolerated, or, at any rate, would have been allowed to pass by an English majority, or minority either, without the most protracted, the most stubborn resistance and opposition. He was perfectly sure that whatever might be the opposition offered by Irish Members to anti-Irish legislation for Ireland, ten times more stubborn opposition would be offered by English Members to anti-English legislation for England. Perhaps he might be allowed to correct that expression. Judging from the precedents of past times, Englishmen might prove themselves ten times more stubborn on behalf of England than Irish Members used to prove themselves on behalf of Ireland; but it would be learnt on the present occasion that the sturdiest Englishmen would not be able to pride themselves on the possibility of a more determined defence on behalf of their country than it would be the pride as well as the miserable duty of the Irish Members to assume against the coercive proposals of Her Majesty's Government. He believed that the proposal to adjourn the debate would materially facilitate the conclusion of the debate. The discussion could not terminate to-night, and if it was adjourned, even at this time—after the provocation the Irish Members had received, and the want of consideration which had been shown to the Irish Party—it would, he believed, be found that the obstacles, the perfectly legitimate obstacles, that might otherwise be placed in the way of progress with this particular Business would be removed. He was sure, at any rate, that courtesy from the other side of the House would be responded to with courtesy from that (the Opposition) side. Let hon. Members not take up that word. Were the Irish Members pushed to the last resort in defending the rights of their constituents, the question might be one altogether above the rules of courtesy. They could not deal in compliments when the fundamental liberties of a people were threatened. It would be a disgrace—the foulest disgrace—to any English Party to deal out compliments to men who were dealing out coercion to England. The Irish Members were most willing to meet the courtesy of their English friends or English opponents with courtesy; but there must be a point—if the Government chose to push them to it—at which courtesy must cease on the part of those who were defending a down-trodden and wretched country, whose miserable condition was the direct result of British rule. They were still at the courteous period of discussion, and he would apologize to hon. Gentlemen opposite if he had said anything to strain the courtesy he was anxious to preserve. He hoped the Government would consent to an adjournment without delay, so that an opportunity might be given to the constituencies to judge between the assertions of the right hon. Gentleman at the head of Her Majesty's Government, and the proofs and facts brought forward on the Irish side. The right hon. Gentleman had said that the Irish Members had occupied an altogether disproportionate share of the discussion; and if the debate had concluded at that point, it would have concluded without the English constituencies being reminded that half of all the speeches on this purely Irish question, debated during the past week, were made by English and Scotch Members. Let them have a little time for reflection, and who knew but even the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister might have something more states man like to observe before the debate had completely terminated. He would address an appeal to right hon. Gentlemen who were responsible for the government of this country, and ask them to make use of their high position to stigmatize, in language of just severity, the wholesale dissemination of the foulest and most abominable caricatures of Irish nationality, of Irish national character, and of the Irish Members in that House, which was now taking place from one end of Great Britain to the other. He had not heard from any hon. or right hon. Gentleman a single word in condemnation of all these foul and abominable outrages, which were only worthy of a people sunk to the lowest depths of barbarism and savagery. The right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government, and the noble Lord who had just warned them that the feeling of the people of this country was rising against them, had not—[ Cries of "Divide!" and prolonged interruption. ] It was the English Members who were now interrupting the debate and causing delay.

Order, order.

begged to thank Mr. Speaker for the protection he afforded him. He was saying, when interrupted, that the noble Lord who had admonished the Irish Members should have done his duty and admonished the men who were engaged in the foul work of stirring up English prejudice against Ireland, to cease their dirty trade, at least for the decent reputation of their country.

The Question before the House is the adjournment of the debate. The hon. Member is now speaking to some Question certainly other than the adjournment.

need not assure Mr. Speaker of his readiness always to bow to the rulings of the Chair. He might say that the protracted annoyance systematically kept up by some of the lovers of Order on the other side of the House, had effectually prevented Mr. Speaker from gathering the drift of his last observations. One of his reasons for supporting the adjournment of the debate, was to enable the House to continue the discussion in a less heated frame of mind than that which was induced by the Prime Minister at the commencement of the evening, and still further excited, later on, by the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India. When hon. Members opposite interrupted him with what he could not help calling persistent clamour, he was advocating calmness of discussion, and was asking the noble Lord and the Members of the Government, previous to the resumption of the debate, to address some strong words of reproof and condemnation to the men who were stirring up the blood of England against Ireland—to the publishers of villainous caricatures. [ Cries of "Question!"] That was just the Question. If the noble Lord would do his duty towards calming the heated mind of England, towards repressing the scurrility, the violence, and the scandalous infamy of the attacks showered upon Ireland now, his appeal to the Irish Members would come with much better grace and much greater force. He hoped the adjournment would be granted without irritation and unnecessary delay, and that they might all be able to pursue the debate free from the pre-occupation and fatigues of the present moment.

said, it was quite evident which side of the Cabinet had got the upper hand. He was not at all surprised that the noble Lord, who was at present the Leader of the House, should advocate a policy which could not fail in misrepresenting the Irish cause to Englishmen. He was asking for additional time and additional facilities for this discussion—["Question!"]—and he thought it was very much the Question, although it might not yet have arrived within the comprehension of some hon. Gentlemen opposite, who had been spending the evening elsewhere, and had not attended the debate. He asked for additional time, and he would recommend that course by pointing out to the House the result of a want of information. Ireland had often been misunderstood, and doubtless would be misunderstood again; he thought the House had usually regretted the result of that misunderstanding and if he was not much mistaken it would again regret, before many years—perhaps, before many months—were over, the result of the present misunderstanding. He was not surprised that the same policy which recommended the butchery and bludgeoning in Phœnix Park, when the noble Lord who now sat on the opposite Bench, and whose policy was a territorial policy, and who had now got the upper hand, was then Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. He was not surprised that such a policy should be desired by that school of English politicians to which the noble Lord belonged; but he was surprised that the Prime Minister should have allowed that section to control and to hinder him as to his policy towards Ireland. It looked very much as if the Prime Minister, recognizing his inability and want of force to carry a satisfactory Land Bill for Ireland, was casting about in advance for some excuse to present to the Irish people for his failure a few months hence to do justice to them.

The Motion before the House is the adjournment of the debate. The House has shown, great indulgence in allowing the hon. Member to address himself to that question, and also to the Main Question; but I am bound to say that the hon. Member is far exceeding that indulgence, because he is not speaking to the Amendment which is now before the House.

said, if they were not to be heard, he really did not know for what purpose the Legislative Assembly was to be brought together. The Government were going to strike the Irish people—to strike down their liberty—

I must caution the hon. Member that he is now disregarding the authority of the Chair.

said, they simply claimed the right to be heard. They asked for an extension of time in order that the House might hear them before it debated these unconstitutional measures. They thought that was not an unreasonable request for a nation to make under the circumstances—for the House would please to remember that the Irish people were a nation; and although England had striven for many centuries to deprive her of her nationhood, it had been to this day and, please God, it would remain, unsuccessful.

rose to support the Motion for the adjournment of the debate. The noble Lord the Secretary for India had told the House that the feeling of the country was rising against the Irish Members. But what was the country? The country meant England, and Ireland was left out of the calculation. It was true that the feeling of England was, perhaps, rising against the Irish Members; but there was another country concerned.

I did not say the feeling of the country was rising against the Irish Members, but against the policy the Irish Members were advocating.

again asked what country? England, and only England, came within the purview of the noble Lord. But there was another country concerned in this matter, and the feeling of that country was rising, and it was in favour of the policy advocated by the Irish Members. He protested against this system of ignoring that country, and they, the Irish Members, so far as they could help it, would not allow it to be ignored. Now, why was this great hurry about this Business that night? He would tell the House. The hurry was to pass a Coercion Act for Ireland. A proposition had been made for the suspension of evictions in Ireland. That could not be entertained at all; but a proposition for the suspension of the Constitution in Ireland could be entertained, and was very readily taken up. And, indeed, he did not much wonder at that; for the Constitution in Ireland was a very light weight, and could be very easily suspended. He saw no fair reason why further time should not be given for the discussion of this important subject; and he maintained that, in this contention, the Irish Members had the feeling of their country with them, and they would adhere to it.

Question put.

The House divided: —Ayes 40; Noes 223: Majority 183.—(Div. List, No. 4.)

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn."—( Mr. Molloy. )

I thought it necessary, Sir, that the House should have an opportunity of expressing an opinion whether the debate should be continued or not. The House has now, by a substantial majority, expressed its opinion upon that point. I am well aware that it is in the power of a minority, smaller than that which has just voted, to over-rule the will of the majority except at great inconvenience and discomfort to the majority. I do not say that it may not be necessary at some time or another that some sacrifice of that sort should be incurred. Notwithstanding what has been said by some hon. Members opposite, I can assure the House that nothing is further from the wish of Her Majesty's Ministers, and I believe of the great majority of the House, than to enter unnecessarily and prematurely on anything like a conflict with hon. Members from Ireland. I only hope that those hon. Members will take into consideration the strongly expressed opinion of the House, as shown by the division which has just taken place, that they will, when the debate is resumed, not tax too much the patience of the House, and come to a conclusion within a reasonable time. On the understanding, of course, that this Motion is withdrawn, I wish to state that no further opposition will be offered to the Motion for the adjournment of the debate. I will take this opportunity to say, in order to prevent any misunderstanding, that a similar Motion to that made last week by my right hon. Friend at the head of Her Majesty's Government, will be made by him at half-past 4 o'clock this day—namely, that the Order of the Day for resuming the adjourned debate on the Motion for the Address to Her Majesty have precedence over Notices of Motion set down for the day.

said, that, in order to show the bonâ fides of the Irish Members, no opposition would be offered to the arrangement proposed by the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India, for resuming the debate on that day. He thought that where the Government afforded them facilities for discussion, they should meet the Government by postponing their own Motions. He himself had two important Motions down, for the purpose of giving Her Majesty's Government facilities for making progress with Public Business, and those he should be happy to postpone. He had no doubt that his hon. Friend would withdraw the Motion for the adjournment of the House.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Question, "That the Debate be now adjourned,"—put, and agreed to.

Debate adjourned till To-morrow.

said, he was not in his place when Mr. Speaker called his name, with regard to a Return on the Paper. Might he be allowed to move for the Return then?

I called the hon. Member's name, and he did not answer. The hon. Member will have to give another Notice.