Sir, I rise to move for leave to bring in a Bill for the protection of person and property in Ireland. I am afraid that I shall be obliged to detain the House much longer than I should have wished; but my task will be less than it otherwise would have been, in consequence of the long debate which we have already had upon the Address. After that debate, I do not think the House will expect me to dwell upon the grounds why we have not brought forward this measure earlier than we now do. That objection has been stated, and I think it has been met. I am aware that it is a very serious matter to ask the House to pass such a measure as I shall have to propose; but I think that I may confine the statement I have to make to showing why, in the view of Her Majesty's Government, the measure I propose to bring in is necessary, and necessary to be passed without delay. On the second night of the debate upon the Address I ventured to state the necessity of this measure on my being able to show that persons and property are unprotected, and that liberty is unsecured in Ireland; and I am aware that I must show both the extent of the evil and the efficiency of the remedy which we propose—that, with our present powers, we cannot give this protection, but that with the powers we ask for we hope to be able to do so. In the first place, there has been much discussion as to the extent of the evil. I believe, notwithstanding what has been said and written on this matter, that hon. Members are not aware—at any rate, numbers of persons in the country are not aware—of the alarming condition of Ireland at the present moment. I am well aware that there have been many exaggerations in the newspapers, and the effect of exaggerations, when they are proved, is that hon. Members and the people generally suppose that there is no truth independent of exaggeration. I can only say that the facts which I shall have to lay before the House have not been gathered from newspaper reports. I do not think I shall quote one; but they are facts, in the truth of which I fully believe, and which, in almost every case, have been furnished to me from official information, and information which we had the opportunity of testing. Let me say one word upon the statistics which are now before the House. Statistics, I know, may be misleading, and I will not detain the House at any length upon them. But, as hon. Members have these statistics in their hands, I will give them very shortly two or three deductions from them. I have given a Return of the total number of agrarian outrages in 1880, which shows that the total number was 2,590. We have a separation of the Returns of agrarian from other crimes in Ireland since the year 1844, but not before, and the highest year during that period previous to 1880 was the first year of the great Famine—namely, 1845. In that year the outrages numbered 1,920. Consequently, last year they were 35 per cent more than they had ever before been recorded to be. I have also thought it right to give the number exclusive of threatening letters, for reasons which I will state presently. Although I do not think that threatening letters are so insignificant a matter as some hon. Members appear to think, I think it as well to keep them separate from other outrages. In 1880—exclusive of threatening letters—the number of agrarian outrages was 1,253; in 1845 they were 950—that is to say, that they were 32 per cent higher last year than they were in the largest year of which we have any special record. Hon. Members are well aware that there is now a great difference in the population. The population of Ireland is now some 5,000,000, compared with 8,000,000 in 1845. Therefore, taking into account the difference of population, the actual agrarian outrages last year, exclusive of threatening letters, were more than double what they were in the worst year we have any record of—namely, the year 1845. Well, Sir, I am also obliged to tell the House that there has been a great increase in the last three months of last year. Exclusive of threatening letters, 719 outrages out of the total of 1,253 for the entire year occurred in the three months of October, November, and December, and, including threatening letters, 1,696 out of 2,590. That is to say, that two-thirds of the total agrarian outrages occurred within the last quarter of the year, and 58 per cent of these exclusive of threatening letters. It is also right to say that the number which occurred in the month of December was more than those for October and November put together. In addition to this there has been a great increase in the extent of area over which the outrages have prevailed. At the time Parliament rose we were uneasy, certainly, about parts of Ireland; but our uneasiness was very much confined to two or three counties, and almost entirely to the province of Connaught—the counties being Mayo and Galway, and to some extent Sligo, Leitrim, and Roscommon. Since that time outrages have spread up and down the country into the counties of Donegal, Kerry, parts of Cork, and eastward, to the very centre of Ireland. In Kerry, for example, there were 298 outrages for the whole year, and 226 of them occurred during the last three months; in Limerick, there were 186 for the year, of which 149 occurred in the last three months; and in Wexford 56, of which 48 occurred in the last three months. It is not merely the number of the outrages that is the most alarming feature; but it is their effect, arising from their character. We must consider their character, their object, and their effect. Now, the chief characteristic of these outrages is intimidation, and the object is obedience to certain commands which have been issued, especially commands not to take farms, and not to pay rent, which have been issued by the Land League. Their effect is fear and terror, and submissive obedience to these orders of the Land League—to the unwritten law that has been framed, as the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) says, by himself and his friends, and of which unwritten law the local Land League Committees are the administrators. The hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) said, last Monday, that the Land League rules supreme, and yet the reign of terror, of which so much has been said, has no existence in fact. Those are the words of the hon. Member for Tipperary. I think I shall be able to show the House that the hon. Member was perfectly right in the first part of his statement, but incorrect in the second. The Land League does reign supreme, but it reigns supreme by threats, and fear, and intimidation. If the House will allow me, I will give a sketch of the different stages of intimidation. First, there is an intimidation which is not ineffective, but which we do not suppose we shall ever meet or attempt to meet. There are hints, warnings, advice, and suggestions; we are aware that these must be passed by. Then comes the threatening letters which the law considers an offence, and visits with a heavy punishment, even amounting in some cases, I believe, to penal servitude. I am quite willing to admit that if the threatening letters are not followed up by action, and if those who receive them do not think that they will be followed up by action, they are mere waste paper. But threatening letters are not always meaningless, and when they do not intimidate enough then begin the outrages upon property and upon person. I will take first the outrages upon property. There are two forms in which these outrages are specially committed—incendiary fires—burning down hayricks or cabins, and the maiming of cattle. Now, incendiary fires, and the outrages connected with incendiary fires, have very largely increased. In the year 1880 they numbered 210, of which 108 occured in the last three months. As to the torture of cattle, it is done, not for the purpose of gratifying any particular love of cruelty on the part of the men who do it, but for the purpose of intimidating their owners; but, I must say, with a reckless disregard of humanity. I was in hopes that the attention which was drawn to that matter during the sitting of Parliament last Session, would have tended to diminish these outrages; but I am sorry to say that that has not been the case. On the contrary, they have increased. In 1880 the number of cases of maiming cattle amounted to 101, and 64 of them occurred in the last three months of the year. The highest year since 1844—namely 1845, when the population was nearly twice as large as it is now, the outrages of this class numbered only 87. Consequently, this very disgusting crime is far more prevalent than it has been in any time since the year 1844. But the outrages upon personal property may not be sufficient; and then come the outrages upon persons, and espe- cially night visits. If hon. Members will look at the Returns, they will find that for the last 10 years intimidation by threatening letters and notices have been separated from other kinds of intimidation. Under the head of "other intimidation," there come actual threatenings by one man to another, which is an illegal act; and that applies to night visits more than to any other form of outrage. A disguised party of men, consisting of 10, 20, or even more, come to a lone farm house at night, drag the farmer out of bed, beat him, and "card" him. I do not know whether hon. Members know what "carding" means, and perhaps I had better explain it. An iron comb, used for agricultural purposes, is applied to a man's naked body, and the torture must be very great. Then the man is threatened and warned against disobeying the orders of the organization any longer. Shots are fired over his head, and sometimes at him. Let hon. Members think of the terror thus produced. Imagine a small farmer in a desolate situation—his house on the side of some hill, or near some bog. There is no help near; no police station is at hand; and the man himself is powerless to resist. Naturally, he submits to this cruel tyranny and intimidation. And no wonder, when such things as these are taking place, that the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) is right, and that the Land League reigns supreme. One such act strikes terror into a whole district, and men reluctant to be drawn into the organization, and who would otherwise be willing to pay their rents, fear to do so. Others will not work for an obnoxious landlord until the law has been set right. For the last 10 years these forms of intimidation have been separated from threatening letters; and the number for the last year was 239—that is, more than the whole number during the previous nine years. There are other serious kinds of intimidation beyond night visits—namely, firing into a dwelling-house, and hon. Members will find that class of outrage placed in the Return under a special heading. The crime of firing into a dwelling-house has greatly increased in number lately. In the year 1880 the number was 67, of which 45 occurred in the last three months of the year. In the first fortnight of this year the number was 12, which is an enormous increase. During the whole of the nine years before last year, there were only 66 outrages of this particular nature, and the highest number since 1844 until last year was 55 in the year 1845, which, as I have already said, is the only year which at all competes with 1880 as far as regards agrarian crime. Now, firing into dwellings means this. A farmer is sitting with his wife and children round his cabin fire, or perhaps he is sleeping in his bed. He hears shots fired; his windows are broken; the shots come into the house, and although they are not fired at him he may be in their way, and may be hit by them. At all events, this is a mode of alarming and intimidating him, and I must say I imagine a most successful one. Some hon. Members have said that, after all, there have been but few cases of murder or attempts at murder. But they were not necessary. The different modes of threatening and of causing fear, which I have described, make it unnecessary to commit murder or to attempt to commit murder. But, after all, there are some persons who are obstinate and who will not be alarmed—both landlords, and to their credit, let me say, farmers and work-folk. The Return of murders would have been very much larger than it is, if it had not happened that we felt it to be our duty, at any expense of trouble and cost of money, to give such men protection. Hon. Members will have seen the Return of the number of persons under personal protection. It is, I think, the largest Return of the kind ever furnished in this country, or, I should imagine, in any civilized country. On the 1st of January this year there were 153 persons under personal protection; and personal protection means having two policemen constantly with them. That is putting them into a state of life to which, I think, great danger would be preferable. I can hardly imagine a man consenting to it. I suppose if I found it necessary to have recourse to personal protection, I should consent to it; but I sometimes wonder how any man can make up his mind to endure it, for it must be almost slavery while it lasts. There were 1,149 persons watched over by policemen for protection. On the 1st of January, 1870, when a good deal of outrage was prevalent, and it was found necessary to pass the Peace Preservation Act, there were only 23 persons under personal police protection. On the 1st of January, 1871, there were 15; on the 1st of January, 1878, 6; and on the 1st of January, 1879, only 6. Now, let me ask, why are these outrages committed? What is their purpose? They are committed for the purpose of preventing men from doing certain things. Well, what are the offences? Here, if the House will allow me—and I hope they will not consider that I am wearying them—I shall think it right to place before them several cases for the purpose of illustrating the object of these outrages. One of the commonest objects is to prevent a man from taking a farm from which the tenant has been evicted, or to prevent a man from working for a landlord who has taken such a farm into his own occupation, or, and this is a new purpose which has been greatly developed lately, to prevent a man from working on a grazing farm in order that grazing farms should cease any longer to be grazing farms and should be let to the small farmers around. I will only give one case with regard to this kind of outrage, although I could give a great many more. In a Report from the county of Sligo, dated the 10th of November last, the sub-inspector of Constabulary reports—

"I have to report that about 10 o'clock p.m. on the 6th inst., an armed party, numbering about 15, entered the house of Peter Keolahan, dragged him to the door, when one of them stabbed him under the eye with some sharp instrument. He was then knocked down and severely kicked, and struck with a spade which happened to be in the house. They then burned him on the back with some iron instrument, which they heated in the fire for that purpose, leaving three marks, one 3 inches long, two others about 2 inches. They then left, telling him not to bring them back, firing shots outside his house going away. On inquiry, I learned that Keolahan had lately worked for a man named Doherty, who had taken possession of a farm from which a man had been removed through becoming embarrassed."

Where was it?

In the county of Sligo. One of the chief objects of these outrages, undoubtedly, is to prevent the payment of any rent which is not allowed by the Land League to be paid—such as the payment of any rent, for instance, over Griffith's valuation, or over whatever rent they—the Land League in Dublin or its committees in the country—may think ought to be paid. I must give to the House two or three cases in regard to the various outrages. I will give one of firing into a house, as it is a fair sample of all the others—

"On the 3rd December at about 1 o'clock a.m., two shots were fired into the dwelling of Jeremiah Sullivan, farmer, by some persons unknown. The muzzles of the guns must have been held close to the window of the bedroom where Sullivan and his wife were sleeping, for the charge of shot pierced the shutter like a bullet, and passed through the curtains of the bed. The only motive for this outrage is that Sullivan paid a portion of his rent, and a notice to this effect was posted on his door by the parties who fired into his house."

I have here the details of several similar cases which have occurred in Clare, Tip-perary, Cavan, Kerry, Galway, Limerick, and Mayo. All of them occurred in the month of December, except two which took place in November. I do not believe that in these cases there was an attempt to kill. But there was in each case an attempt to alarm, and a very successful attempt to alarm. I do not imagine that a man who had had his house fired into would, unless he had more courage than you would expect men in his situation to have, venture next day to do what he had been told not to do. Let me now give another case which occurred at Crossmolina, in the county of Mayo, on the 18th of December. The sub-inspector tells me—

"I have the honour to report that about 8 o'clock p.m. yesterday a party of about 20 men visited the houses of the above-named nine persons. Five men of the party entered each house. One was armed with a double gun, the others with pistols. They asked at each house if they had paid their rent, and said that such of them as were able to pay might pay at the rate of Griffith's valuation, but to pay no more. They swore each man not to enter the shop of William Hogan, of Crossmolina, nor to deal with him. The reason is that Mr. Hogan, who is a respectable grocer, refuses to join the Land League or subscribe to it."

What number of outrages does that Report account for?

I think the number of outrages accounted for would be the number of houses visited. Each one would form a separate crime. I will now proceed to mention a case of sending a threatening letter. This case I give partly in order to show why it is not unreasonable that a man living in these districts should pay attention to a threatening letter. It rarely happen that a person is seriously injured with- out having received a threatening letter beforehand, and, consequently, the receipt of a threatening letter has this unpleasantness attached to it, that it brings the man who receives it within the possibility of an outrage. It is therefore not remarkable, but probable, that persons in these disturbed districts who receive threatening letters should pay attention to them. Here is a case in point which occurred in the county of Galway. The Report states—

"On the night of the 7th of October a threatening notice was posted on the door of the dwelling-house of—'Pay no rents or you will be carded. Mind, now, what I say.' He nevertheless paid his rent."

Now what follows?—

"On the 5th of January this man was returning one evening from a market, two shots were fired at him by someone who had been lying concealed behind a stone wall; and there is no doubt about the outrage. A revolver bullet was found by the police in the rail of the crib or cart he was driving."

I do not know whether the House cares to have any more of these cases or not. Here is another which occurred this year. The sub-inspector reports from Castlebar, in the county of Mayo, on the 4th of January—

"I have to report that at some hour on last night six sheep of the best kind, value from £3 each, were maliciously killed on the lands of Ballinvilla by having the brain of each animal pierced by some sharp instrument through both eyes. The animals were then thrown into a deep ditch. Mr. Powell (the owner) is the agent of Mr. C. Fitzgerald, of Turlough-park, and this outrage is believed to have been committed because he had not given or got for them the rents at Griffith's valuation."

Again, the report of a police-constable, dated Castlerea, January 5, says—

"I beg to state that I received a report this morning, per telegram, of an outrageous attack on Michael Kilkenny's house, John Hanly, and John and Roger Sweeny's houses, by an armed party on the morning of the 3rd instant. I proceeded at once to the scene."

Upon inquiry, he found, to state it shortly, that at about 1 o'clock on the morning of the 3rd, a party of men knocked at the door of Michael Kilkenny. No answer was given. The front door was then forced in. Kilkenny got out of bed, looked through the window, and saw about nine or ten men standing outside. He became very much alarmed, and went out, undressed, through the back door, and ran away into the fields; at the same time he heard shots fired. When the party found that Kilkenny had made his escape, they broke part of the window-sash and two panes of glass. One of them said—"We will come again." At about 2 o'clock on the same morning John Hanly heard a great knocking at his door. He got out of bed, and saw a number of men standing outside. The door was forced in, and one of the men called out his name. The wife answered for him that he was not at home. They said—"Did your husband pay the rent?" She said—"He did, as he got the reduction." They said he had no right to pay it, and they would come again. One shot was fired into the house, but no injury was done. Roger Sweeny says—

"At about 3 o'clock I heard loud knocking at my door, and a person calling out to have it opened. I opened the door, and saw about 20 men outside. One of them asked—'Did I pay my rent?' I said—'I did, as I got the reduction.' I heard one of them say—'Give me the scissors.' On hearing this, I ran up into the room, and left my son to talk to them. There were about six or seven shots fired off. When they were leaving, one of them said—'We will come again.'"

John Sweeny was visited the same night, and asked—"Did he pay his rent?" He said he did, as he had got the reduction from his landlord, and thought it no harm. One of the men told him not to do it again. They left, firing shots, which were from long guns. The constable believes that these outrages were committed by one party, and is strongly of opinion that they were not strangers to the locality, and that some of them were known to the people whose houses they visited; but the people positively refused to swear informations in the matter. Here is another case of a very outrageous character. In the county of Clare, about 6 o'clock p.m., a shot was fired by some person unknown through the kitchen window of the dwelling-house of William O'Donnell, farmer, who refused to join the Land League. O'Donnell, another man, his wife, and five or six children were sitting round the fire. The charge of shot passed over their heads, and lodged, principally, in a dresser opposite the window. One of the grains glanced off and grazed a child slightly on the cheek. She was the only person who received any injury. There was a very bright light in the kitchen at the time, and, from the slanting direction in which the shot was fired, it was evident that it was only intended to frighten the inmates. I strongly suspect O'Donnell would join the Land League the next day. Hon. members will have heard of the Land League Courts. They are held in connection with the local Land League. They are presided over by leading members of that League; they issue summonses, sometimes in writing and sometimes by word of mouth. In some places this has been stopped since the proceedings at Tralee; but this is what they did until two or three weeks ago. They heard complaints and determined upon them; they required people to surrender farms, and they imposed penalties for infringement of the rules of the Land League, and they sometimes directed parties summoned before them to be "Boycotted." Their proceedings are reported in the public papers. I should like to give a little information as to the way in which these courts act. I read from a report of a meeting of the Quin branch Land League—

"On Sunday last (the Sunday before the 18th of December), "a meeting of the above branch was held at their rooms, Quin. Mr. James Quinlivan appeared before the committee to refute the charge of having paid more rent than the Government valuation. In opening the proceedings the Secretary said—'Mr. Quinlivan, there is an accusation registered against you in my book, that of paying your rent which is in excess of Griffiths' valuation.'Mr. Quinlivan—'I have been informed that there was a summons soliciting my presence here on last Sunday; I did not receive that summons. I have been likewise told that great indignation was expressed by the members toward my conduct in not appearing.' Mr. Lawlor—'There were some suggestions on the occasion expressing condemnation of your conduct in treating the summons, which they thought you had received, in such a negligent and defiant manner.' Mr. Quinlivan—'I passed this office on Sunday; I met Mr. Lawlor on the road, and asked him—was there any important business before the committee that day? He answered me in the negative, and as I had pressing business to attend to I went home. I was greatly surprised on learning subsequently that there was a charge against me, so I have availed myself of the first opportunity of freeing myself from that charge. Now, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I beg that the proof which is going to be adduced against me will be brought forward.' The Secretary—'There is no positive proof against you; it is merely hearsay; but as you know how far that will go with the public in injuring a man's character, I think the committee have adopted an advisable course in affording you, as well as others, an opportunity of proving these rumours false.' Mr. Quinlivan—"Here are my documents. They are sufficient, I think, to exculpate me.' The Chairman; They are; and we hold you honourably free from the charge.' Mr. P. Lawlor: I propose that we pass a vote of censure on those unknown persons with whom originated this false rumour; and Mr. Quinlivan having produced satisfactory evidence to honourably free himself, that we elect him a member of our executive committee.'"

In the same paper I find several other cases. There is a case near Ennis where a man is brought up for having bought a sheep from a man who is represented as a land grabber; but he manages somehow to explain, and is let off. Then there is a case in Cork—

"The next was the most important of all the cases under consideration. The local process-server was charged with having served writs for Mr. Sanders. The culprit had to avoid the popular indignation, fled to America. His written apology was produced and the following resolution adopted:—'That we endorse the sentence of expatriation which Mr. Roger Hunt has voluntarily imposed upon himself, for having undertaken the infamous task of serving writs on the tenants of Mr. Sanders, of New Pallas celebrity; that we want words to express our loathing of anyone who assists the oppressor of the tenant; and that as by leaving Mr. Hunt has only forestalled the popular judgment, so we warn him not to return and face the just indignation which would impose upon him a second exile.'"

Then there is another case in the same newspaper—I am quoting from The Nation —

"A couple of Land League investigations have just been held by the Committee of the Maryborough Land League. After a full investigation, the following resolution was arrived at by the Committee:—'That having considered the question that has brought us together, and having heard Mr. Brady's explanation, we are unanimously of opinion that he has not been guilty of any violation of the rules of the Land League. At the same time, we take this opportunity of expressing our determination to accept no excuse on the part of any farmer in the future, who pays a rent that is higher than Griffith's valuation, that being in accordance with the first principles of the Land League.'"

Then there comes an inquiry at Boyle into the cases of some shopkeepers whose names had appeared in a "black list," which was circulated in the neighbourhood. Their cases were also considered. The result of this inquiry was that a man named Edward Cunningham read out a list of the shopkeepers who had not joined the Land League, and moved that they get one week to make up their minds, or be "Boycotted." A few speeches were then delivered, and the meeting broke up—

"To-day the shops of the traders whose names are on the 'black list' are entirely de- serted, and parties seen entering their houses or known to be dealing with them were warned."

Various other acts of intimidation are reported. That, I again say, entirely confirms the statement of the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon), that the Land League rules supreme; but it does not confirm his statement that the League does not rule by fear and terror. Let me read a letter from the county of Leitrim, dated December 7. I cannot give the name of the writer, who says—

"I have to report that, between the hours of 9 and 10 o'clock p.m., on the 7th inst., a party of about 30 men came to the house of—broke in his door, dragged him out on the street, and beat him with sticks on the head and body. The injuries inflicted, however, are not of a serious nature. He has two cuts on the head, and his arms are swollen and discoloured. The party left, and in going away fired some shots. The motive for this outrage is that—paid his rent contrary to the rules of the Land League."

According to his statement, men are appointed in each townland, called Land League constables. Their duty is to watch the doings of the inhabitants, and report to their committee any infringement of the rules of the Land League. The "constable" for the townland where he lives is—and he reported the fact of the former having paid his rent. He says that—

"Some days after he paid the rent he attended a meeting of the Land League Committee, expecting that his case would be tried; but it was not called, and he, therefore, thought they had overlooked his offence. He knows most of the parties who assaulted him; but I could not induce him to disclose any of their names, neither would he consent to swear informations, as, if he did so, he says he would be obliged to quit the country. He is not afraid that any further violence will be offered, except he again breaks some of the rules."

Hitherto I have quoted entirely from official Reports, with the exception of those extracts from The Nation. But I have now to quote a letter from a landlord. I cannot give his name; he is a courageous man, and I do not know that he would object to my naming him. But there is a power of punishing him in Ireland, and I do not wish that he should be punished. He writes this letter—

"I think it right further to say that this entire country has totally changed as regards the feelings of the people in the last two months. Two months ago, in conversing with the tenants, they all said that they had had a most bountiful harvest and expressed themselves contented and prosperous. Since that time there have been weekly meetings of what is termed the branch of the Land League (every Saturday). This body have tried cases, cited tenants before them, ordered farms to be given up, and instituted a most complete reign of terror. The number of undetected outrages giving force to these threats, the few evil-disposed persons have completely cowed the loyal and well-disposed, who see that they have no protection to expect from any quarter, and they have been forced to join the threateners."

The reason why I allude to this is because I wish to call attention to the fact that I had a conversation with the writer, which made more impression upon me than almost anything I heard at the time. In talking over these matters, he mentioned a great outrage committed in his neighbourhood, and said—"I blame myself very much for that outrage." On my asking "Why?" He said, "Because I might have gone to the Land League and proved to them that the charge against him, from their own point of view, was not correct." That is to say, that this court, in carrying out the unwritten law of the Land League, is so powerful in its district that this gentleman actually blamed himself for not going before it in order to protect an individual whom he believed had not offended against its law. I am not going to give the name of this gentleman; but I am perfectly ready to show the letter to any hon. Member, if I am sure that the name of the writer will not be divulged. Thus much for the courts of the Land League. I now come to the position of our own Courts of Law. Hon. Members have a Return giving the total number of agrarian offences in Ireland during the three months ending with January as 2,590, and which also shows the total number of apprehensions in respect of them to have been 295. And here, again, I have taken out the cases of sending threatening letters, because I am aware that it is a crime very difficult of detection. Without them there were 1,153 agrarian offences committed, while the number of apprehensions was 182, or at the rate of 16 per cent only. I now come to the non-agrarian offences in Ireland. I have just received a proof of the Returns, which I hope will be in the hands of hon. Members in the course of a day or two; and from this it appears that the total number of non-agrarian offences committed in that country during the period named was 3,084, while the number of apprehensions numbered 1,269 But here, also, I deduct the cases of sending threatening letters, an offence more common in Ireland than in other parts of the United Kingdom; and I find that, as against 2,657 non-agrarian offences, there were 1,255 apprehensions, representing a rate of 47 per cent. I wish hon. Members to remark that, when dealing with crime of a non-agrarian character, Ireland is no worse in respect of the percentage of apprehensions than the rest of the United Kingdom—in fact, she is rather better, because the average of apprehensions in that country, as compared with offences, is generally something over 50 per cent, while the year before last the apprehensions in England and Scotland were 45 per cent. I say this partly in justice to the police, and in order to show that they do not fail as a detective body except in agrarian cases, in which I would defy any police to succeed. We now come to the subject of convictions in the cases of agrarian offences, upon which I shall not dwell at any great length. Hon. Members have probably read Judge Fitzgerald's Charge to the Grand Jury at Cork at the commencement of the Assizes; but I am not so sure that they have read his Charge at their termination. The learned Judge says—

"I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that there have been very considerable failures of justice, and failures of justice which I do not hesitate to say have been produced by external influences operating upon some of the jury."

The Solicitor General for Ireland has alluded to a very flagrant case. We all remember the outrageous and wicked murder of young Mr. Boyd. Even in that case my hon. and learned Friend had to apply for the postponement of the trial at Waterford, because out of a panel of 205 jurors only 118 answered to their names. And why? Because they dared not come. There were affidavits produced, giving the grounds of their fears. I do not expect hon. Members to pay much attention to my opinion on that point; but what did the learned Judge say at the time?—

"These affidavits are not contradicted. No man professing to be acquainted with the state of feeling in this city has come forward and made an affidavit as to his belief that this apprehension does not exist in the minds of the jurors, that this sense of intimidation does not prevail, or in any manner to suggest that the statements of belief expressed in their affidavits are unfounded."

The learned Judge, consequently, felt he must postpone the trial, and it was postponed. I propose to give the House but very few more cases; but there are one or two to which I must refer. One of them is very illustrative. During the month of December, a man and his wife, returning home in the evening, were attacked on the high road by six men, who threw clothes over their faces to conceal themselves. They called upon the man by name, crying out, "You have paid your rent, and we will give it you." They attacked him, but he escaped. They then cried out—

"Stop the Black Sheep! Hurrah for Home Rule and the Land League! You will catch it."

The man informed the police; but, though he thought he knew the men, declined to swear an information, on the ground that he was afraid. He was a member of the Land League, and had not paid his rent; but they thought he had. He told the sub-inspector of police that if the prosecution went on he would leave with his family for America, and would throw up his farm. So convinced were the magistrates that the man's fear was well founded, and that he was in real danger, that one of them refused to sign the summons, and the other advised the withdrawal of the case. The following letter was written by one of the magistrates to the sub-inspector:—

"I would recommend the withdrawal of this summons against the parties who took part in the assault. The man says he dare not prosecute; it would be as much as his life is worth. The assault was by order of the Land League, because the man paid his rent. The witnesses would prove nothing; they dare not do so. It is a perfect reign of terror, and no one has any authority but the Land League."

He was a landlord.

I dare say he was; but that makes no difference in this case; and I believe the hon. Member does not doubt the story. The House is probably aware that, by law, there is compensation for damages through malicious injury; but I will just give two cases illustrative of the effects of the terror existing in Ireland upon persons entitled to claim such compensation. On the 6th of December, at about 10 o'clock p.m., some persons un- known fired a shot close to the house of Pat Hardiman, farmer, and another shot into his kitchen. The door was pierced by two slugs; but no trace of them could be found. The only motive that can be assigned is to prevent Hardiman from seeking compensation for the loss of his mare, which he alleges was poisoned in August last. In consequence of this outrage he has made no claim. In the other instance, on the 8th of December, at about 9 o'clock, p.m., a pistol shot was fired into the bedroom of Michael Connell, farmer, by some person unknown. Both he and his wife were sitting at the kitchen fire, so that it was believed there was no intention to injure anyone, but merely to frighten Connell into paying a subscription towards defraying the expense of opposing an application from a man named Thomas Ford for compensation for malicious injury to his horse. I must detain the House for a few moments while I say a word with reference to the general lawlessness which proceeds from this state of things. It is not confined to the land only, but is beginning to affect every interest in the country. The law of the land is now replaced by a new and an unwritten law. It is a dangerous thing in any country when the law of the land is replaced by an unwritten law, and I do not know that in Ireland it is not as dangerous to the people as to the people of any other country. Well, we find that the landlords are not the only persons who cannot get what is due to them. In many districts the shopkeepers are unable to issue processes against their debtors. The hon. Member for Tipperary says his county is as perfectly quiet as any district in the country. But this is what I have heard respecting that county within the last two or three days—

"Process-serving is, I may say, at a standstill in this district at present; and I have been informed by several shopkeepers here that they consider it wholly useless to attempt to recover their due by this means, on account of the excited state of the country. The employment of process-servers is, therefore, almost entirely suspended. On the 31st of December, in response to an application from magistrates, We had to employ 74 policemen to protect process-servers serving processes for shop goods supplied."

I now wish to enable hon. Members to realize the state of things in one district. I have informed the House that outrages had much increased in Kerry during the last few months; and earlier in this Session I stated that outrages had everywhere followed the Land League. Before October there were only seven Land League meetings in county Kerry—that is to say, one in each month from. March to September. Since the beginning of October, however, there have been 15, and these have been followed by an enormous increase of crime, and the number of outrages has increased from 226 for the first nine months of the year to 298 during the last three months. The district of Castle Ireland in this county has an area of 11 square miles, with a population of 11,400. The first meeting of the Land League was, I believe, held there on the 10th of October, and was attended by the hon. Members for Queen's County and Cavan. In that district alone, from that date to the 10th of January, there have been 87 outrages of an agrarian character. It would seem that in that district they prefer deeds to threatening letters, which numbered only 14 during the period named. Let me now endeavour to describe the characteristics of the evil with which we have to deal, its mode of action, and its final result. In the first place, the law of the Land League is supreme throughout these districts in Ireland. There is a real reign of terror over the whole country. Men dare not take a farm from which another person has been evicted, or work for a man who has paid his rent, or refuse to join the Land League. Men dare not buy from, or sell to, a person denounced by the League. Men dare not claim compensation for outrages committed upon them, or inform against persons who have actually committed outrages upon them, or prosecute even in cases in which, in the first moment of anger, they have given information. They dare not give evidence with regard to these outrages, either on their own behalf or on behalf of others, and when appointed on juries they dare not convict, even on their oath. The fact is that those who defy the existing law and break it are safe, whilst those who keep it—the honest men, in short—are in danger. After all, all law rests on the power to punish its infraction; but I must acknowledge that in Ireland at the present time there is, for the law of the land, no such power. The law of the land, to a great extent, is powerless, because men fear to prosecute, fear to give evidence, and fear to find honest verdicts; but the unwritten law of the Land League is powerful, because punishment is sure to follow its infraction. Now, take away this power to punish for infraction of this unwritten law, and the unwritten law will become an empty form. The men who plan and perpetrate these outrages I have referred to are men without whose help the speeches of the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell), the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon), or the hon. Member for Cavan (Mr. Biggar), would be harmless exhortation and vapouring. It is these men who have struck terror into the minds of the people in the districts in which their operations have been carried on. And what must we do? "We must strike terror into them, and outrages will then be stopped, persons and property will be protected, and liberty secured. We must arrest these criminals. We do not arrest them now because we cannot do so. They have made themselves safe by the enormity of their crimes and the power which these crimes have enabled them to acquire. Because of the intimidation which they have spread throughout the neighbourhood around them, they commit crimes with impunity, and they know they would be foolish to fear the law when no man dares give evidence against them. It is not that the police do not know who these village tyrants are. The police know perfectly well who plan and perpetrate these outrages, and the perpetrators are perfectly aware of the fact that they are known. These men maybe divided into three categories. There are first those who remain of the old Ribbon and other secret societies of former days; in the second place, there are a large number of Fenians who have taken advantage of the present condition of the country, not so much as caring about the Land Question, but as hoping that trouble will come of it, and in order to promote their own particular views in regard to the government of Ireland; and, in the third place, there are a large number of men who are the mauvais sujets of their neighbourhood. This not infrequently happens—that the most powerful man in a district is a contemptible, dissolute ruffian and blackguard, who, his character being known by all his neighbours, is shunned by every respectable man; but who, nevertheless, is a powerful and active policeman in support of the unwritten law. To what, then, are we driven? Simply to this—to take power to arrest these men and keep them in prison, so that they may be prevented from tyrannizing over their neighbours. I have given, I think, the grounds on which we are reluctantly driven to seek new powers, and having done that, I must next state what it is we propose to do. We propose to take power to enable the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, by his warrant, to arrest any person whom he may reasonably suspect of having, either before or after the passing of this Act, been guilty as principal or accessory, of high treason, treason-felony, or treasonable practices; and also of any crime punishable by law committed in a prescribed district, being an act of violence or intimidation, or the inciting to any such act tending to interfere with or disturb the maintenance of law and order; and we propose that such person may be detained in pursuance of such warrant as a person accused of a crime, but not as a convicted prisoner. Furthermore, we propose that this power for which we ask should extend until the 30th of September in next year. The House will see that power is taken to arrest and detain men suspected of "treasonable practices" throughout Ireland, and on that point I may say that the indulgence of such practices is not the great evil with which we have to contend; but we have information—and I must ask the House to believe me when I say this—that there is danger on this ground, that the men generally known as Fenians are making use of this agitation for purposes which may become dangerous; and that obliges us to ask for the power of arrest to which I allude. But as regards the other offences—those of an agrarian character and against the general maintenance of law and order—we ask for power to make these arrests in such districts as from time to time be prescribed, and in those districts only. I have great hope that it will not be necessary to proclaim any very large number of counties, by reason of the fact that in our belief the steps we shall take in certain counties will have the effect of deterring people in other counties from committing offences. Hon. Members must not suppose for one moment that we have not come to the conclusion that we must ask for these powers with the very greatest reluctance. In the course of the debate on the Address, I said, I believe, that we were well aware of the bad example that such Bills as these gave in the way of precedents for future legislation. We know very well that such measures form a temptation—which is increased with every fresh Bill—to people to rely upon exceptional legislation rather than upon the ordinary law. But what is our position? We have a fearful disease to contend with, and, while there are many powerful drugs which cure the disease, but do not strengthen the constitution, it is better that they should be taken than the patient should die. Well, so much for the precedents for the future, and now, as to the present, what we ask for is—and I will put it in the strongest and most obnoxious form—that at the will of the Lord Lieutenant, and without trial, a man may be subjected to 18 months' imprisonment. If I remain in my present Office, I suppose I shall have the sorrowful duty of assisting the Lord Lieutenant in arriving at decisions under the provisions of this Bill; and I am quite sure that there is not a man who now sits, or who has ever sat on this or the opposite Front Bench, who would not feel the greatest reluctance and the greatest dislike to have such a duty to discharge. But, after all, the House must look at the alternative. There are, in the first place, the Lord Lieutenant and the Irish Secretary who will assist him, charged with this most painful duty of saying which of their fellow-subjects they shall arrest on reasonable suspicion—and I consider that if this Bill is passed we shall be bound, upon our honour, to satisfy ourselves that in the case of all arrests there is reasonable suspicion. We shall act in the full, clear light of public opinion, and under the eyes of a Parliament of a free and Constitutional country—a Parliament not slow to criticize and punish the conduct of those of its servants who transgress their powers. What, I ask, is the alternative? Why, if we do not obtain and use these powers they will be held and exercised by the committees appointed to carry out the unwritten law. It is either the will of the Lord Lieutenant and the Irish Secretary and of a responsible Government thus fenced round and limited which must be para- mount, or the will of the ruffians of a neighbourhood, responsible to no one, or, if responsible at all, to the secret committees who may hire them. The people must either be at the mercy of a responsible Government or at the mercy of village tyrants, the worst men in the district, or of the hired strangers who come in to do their bidding, in which case the liberty of honest men is at an end. We ask that the liberty of these village tyrants and hired ruffians shall be abridged. I call this Bill a Protection Bill; but many hon. Members of this House call it a Coercion Bill. It is not for those who support the unwritten law to talk about coercion. The power of the unwritten law rests on coercion, and coercion alone. We have had some other objections; and I am sorry to say they have come—whether intentionally or unintentionally I know not—in the shape of warnings and threats. The hon. Member for Carlow (Mr. Gray), for instance—and I do not for a moment charge him with intentionally using threats; but I would say that, no doubt, actuated by the greatest honesty of purpose—made a speech which I deeply regretted to hear. The hon. Gentleman said that in his view numerous outrages would follow the passing of the Coercion Bill, and those outrages would not be confined to Ireland, but the Government would have to face a very similar condition of affairs in England. Well, Sir, there is not an hon. Member in this House, except, perhaps, the hon. Member and one or two of his Friends, who will pay any heed to this warning, or fear the outrages if they be attempted. The English people are a law-abiding people; they are not a cowardly people, and are not to be frightened from protecting life and property in Ireland from any fear of secret outrages in England. Well, then, there are provisions with regard to outrages in Ireland. The hon. Member for Tipperary told us that these outrages would, after the passing of this Bill, be ten times more numerous than they had been. I do not believe it. I have seen it stated in some newspapers that this power of arrest utterly failed in 1848 and 1866, that the numbers of agrarian outrages after the Acts of those years were passed were as great as they were before; but hon. Members forget that no power was given by those Acts to make arrests for any agrarian outrage. The arrests were made in those cases for purely political crimes, therefore that illustration utterly fails. But we have another illustration—namely, a similar Act to this Bill, though extending over a much smaller area, and of much smaller proportion. I refer to what was called the Westmeath Act of 1871. That Act did not increase outrages—it caused an enormous diminution of them. It was not thought necessary to make many arrests under it—only 19, I think, were made—and I must say that Lord Cowper and myself will have the experience of Lord Spencer to guide us, and I trust we may be as successful in preventing the necessity for arrests as he was. If I am not mistaken, not one of the arrests made under ths Westmeath Act was complained of as unjust. [An hon. MEMBER: Yes; Casey's.] At any rate, the result of bringing in that Act, and of making it clear that it was to have immediate effect, was not to increase outrages, but to immensely diminish them; and I am glad to say that I see signs already of a similar effect being produced through its having been made known that the Government feel they can no longer allow their law to be ignored and the unwritten law of the Land League to prevail, but that they are determined, with all the power Parliament can give them, to make the power of the Queen respected. Already, I say, we see signs of a diminution in the number of outrages. The improvement at first was only slight; but the outrages are now becoming smaller in number every day. And why are they diminishing? I believe there are two reasons for it. One is that the gentlemen at the head of the Land League are using every power they possess to put a stop to outrages. ["Hear, hear!" from the Irish Members. ] I see that hon. Members opposite assent to that; but why did they not use those powers before? [An. hon. MEMBER: We always did.] Why did you allow the outrages to go on increasing through October, November, and December, and only take steps now to stop them—now, when it is clear that something is going to be done? I do not, however, attribute this diminution altogether to the action of the gentlemen of the Land League, who are much more powerful to incite people to the commission of outrages by careless and reckless speeches than to prevent outrages. I do not mean to say that in their speeches they have always intended to incite; but I think they have scarcely ever, if ever, had a proper sense of their responsibility in the words they have uttered. They are, however, much more powerful to incite to outrages than to control them. But I believe there is another influence at work. As in the case of the Westmeath Act in 1871, so it is now, that the men who plan and execute these outrages desist for fear of being arrested. They are aware that the police know who they are. My belief is, if you pass this Act you will cause an immense diminution of crime. These men will be careful for the first time within the past year or two; they will fear punishment for their misdeeds, and some of them, I have no doubt, will disappear. I trust the House will not for a moment suppose that because of the lull—because of the change that has taken place in the condition of the country during the past three or four days after a fortnight of very great outrage indeed—this power should not be given to Her Majesty's Government. They could not by any possibility make a greater mistake. Hesitation would now make matters far worse than ever. If, after declaring that we will contend with this organization for the purposes of outrage, after saying that we will take power to arrest the men who commit these crimes the House is misled and gives up its intention, we shall be considered as having uttered an empty threat, and these criminals will be more powerful in Ireland than they ever have been before. Well, there was another warning given to us by the hon. Member for the City of Cork. Last Monday he made use of these words—

"If the Government adopts coercion in Ireland the first arrest of a man will be the signal for the suspension of the payment of all rent."

I do not know whether that meant that the hon. Member for Cork and his friends were going to give that order. It looked as if it did; but, if he does give it, it is an order that will be disobeyed. He will not have the power to obtain the enforcement of that order—his policemen will be gone. [An hon. MEMBER: He never said it.] He used the words I have read to the House. I do not believe the hon. Member can prevent rents being paid. There are many honest men in Ireland—we hear of cases day by day of honest men who pay their rent stealthily, and who have done so even after that warning was uttered, and there are reasons enough to make us believe that the hon. Member's threat will prove perfectly futile. I maybe asked why have we not included in the Bill provisions with respect to "exclusive dealing," or "Boycotting," a word with which the English language has recently been enriched. Well, we have decided that it is not necessary to make a new offence. That which is known as "Boycotting" is, in some respects, "exclusive dealing;" and although, as far as I know, that is a moral sin in many cases, it is not a crime. It is no offence; we cannot by law compel a man to buy from another or to sell to another. ["Hear, hear!"] I hear the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Macdonald) cheering, and I doubt not he will not be sorry that in order to meet the evil we do not make a new offence. But let me remind the House that although the experiences of trades unions have been quoted in favour of the Land League, I know of no case in which a trades union has organized an agitation for the prevention of the fulfilment of a contract. You cannot by law prevent a man from buying from whom he chooses and selling to whom he chooses; but you can by law try to prevent a man from so frightening a man that he dare not buy or sell as he wishes. Day after day, when I was in Dublin, people came to me with their stories, of how they were intimidated by this exclusive dealing. Sir, in every case I tried to find out whether it was fear or sympathy that put them in danger. There was one most respectable tradesman whose very word would carry conviction to anyone who saw him—I shall not, of course, mention his name—who came to me and told me that he had been ordered by the Land League to join it. They said to him—"If you do not nobody will work at your mill." He was a conscientious man, and he replied—"I will take the consequences, and whatever happens I will not join it." I asked him this—"Do you think these men will not work for you?" and he said—"I don't think they will." "Why?" I asked—"Is it because they sympathize with the members of the Land League, or because they fear them?" and the reply was—"Because they fear them." Well, it is by the powers that we seek in the present Bill that we shall take away this fear. We know very well what this Boycotting is, as sketched by the hon. Member for Cork City, and what the result of his Christian method is—namely, that a man is not allowed to buy or sell from a certain person, to hold social intercourse with him, or even to sit near him in church. I have no words to express my sense of the cruel nature of that system or the speech in which it was sketched. It is not these words, nor the speech, cruel as might be its intention, which make the people fear; it is not this warning or advice that makes this exclusive dealing so powerful an agency. Men do not fear the order that their neighbours are not to deal with them, or that they are not to deal with their neighbours—they do not fear the words of the hon. Member for Cork; but they fear the ruffian who maims their cattle, who burns down their stackyard, who fires at them fŕom behind a hedge; and with his fellow-ruffians breaks into their house at night or fires shots through their windows. Well, we shall, perhaps, be asked why we have not included in this Bill some power for the exercise of summary jurisdiction. I believe it would be better to put the perpetrators of agrarian offences under such jurisdiction, and to subject them to a small penalty rather than—to speak guardedly—to take the chance of getting a much larger penalty from a jury, seeing what our experience of Irish juries in these cases is. But that must be permanent legislation, and what we want is an immediate temporary remedy to contend against the existing evils. A permanent measure must be one of detail, and would give rise to protracted debate, and that legitimately. We want the power we ask for, and we want it at once. And for this reason—we have separated it from the other Bill which we feel it necessary to bring forward. I may say, with regard to it, that it is an Arms Bill. I will shortly say, with reference to that Bill, that what almost the whole of its clauses is designed to do is, in fact, to put the question of the possession of arms in the same position as that in which it was left by the Act which expired this year. There may be a little more than this; but there is nothing to speak of now. Under that Bill we ask for power to oblige those in possession of arms to get licences for them, to search for them, and to take them away from those who have no licences. I do not deny that this is an undertaking which we did not originally contemplate; but it is, perhaps, unnecessary for me to say much about that now. I admit that the fact of our being forced to bring forward this Arms Bill will be a subject of great disappointment to us all, for reasons which I have already described; but, of course, we must remember that it is the agitation that has made this Disarming Bill far more necessary than it was before if we are to maintain peace and order in Ireland. If we are to blame, for what are we to be blamed? That we have had more hope than we ought to have had in the Irish people and in those who seemed to have their confidence? I have occupied the attention of the House for some time, and I will not detain it much longer. I must say that this has been the most painful duty I ever had to perform. I never expected it; and if I had thought that this duty would have devolved on me, I certainly should not have been Irish Secretary: indeed, I think I may go further and say, that if I had foreseen that this would have been the result of 20 years of Parliamentary life, I think I should have left Parliamentary life alone. But I never was more clear in my life as to the necessity of a duty—I never was more clear than that a man, responsible, as I am, for the administration of the Government of Ireland, ought no longer to have any part or share in any Government which does not fulfil its first duty—the protection of the persons and property, and the security and liberty of the nation. Some persons may say that we have waited a long time before fulfilling this duty; but, after all, there does require to be shown the existence of an extreme evil, unmistakeable as to its depth and extent, and the reality of which it is impossible for a Constitutional Parliament to deny. We have waited until we are able to bring proofs before the House and the country, and I think we have abundantly shown the existence of the evil; and although I believe the enormous majority of this House will share with me the intense reluctance I entertain to perform this duty, nevertheless, this Parliament will assist me in performing it, and the country will support them in so doing. But this House has before it another duty, and that is that while it may feel it to be the duty of Parliament to pass this measure, it is its duty to pass it at once. Every day of delay is a great increase of danger. And there remains still another duty, and with regard to that we must recollect why it is that these outrages, and this agitation, and the existing Land League have been possible. If the evils of the present land system were removed, these things would no longer be possible. I can hardly bring in this Protection Bill—or this Coercion Bill, as some may call it—without recording my belief that this further duty is quite as incumbent on us as the other, because while the one deals with the immediate presence of the evils referred to, the other deals with their future prevention. Some of our friends may be inclined to say—"Remove these evils from the land system before you bring in your Protection Bill." My answer is, that the Irish people cannot wait for protection, and they ought not to wait for protection. It is our business, in the first place, to protect persons and property and liberty; and we cannot either reward crime nor make terms with crime. But while this House is determined to do its duty in this respect, it is, I believe, also determined to thoroughly reform the land system, and to perform that duty also this Session. I suppose we are all cured of making prophecies about the future condition of Ireland. Some of us would think we have been subject to illusions in the matter. I may be sanguine; but still even now I do hope, as regards Ireland, that if this Parliament persistently determines to do its duty, it will eventually obtain success, and achieve the reward it will deserve in seeing that country become a prosperous, a contented, and a tranquil nation.

Motion made, and Question proposed,

"That leave be given to bring in a Bill for the better Protection of Person and Property in Ireland."—( Mr. William Edward Forster. )

, in rising to move the following Amendment:—

"That, in the opinion of this House, it is expedient and desirable, and is most fully in accord with a wise and generous exercise of the undisputed power of this House, and the Empire at large, that remedial legislation on the Land Question in Ireland should take precedence over the Coercive Measures designed by Government, and that Her Majesty's Ministers be requested to reconsider their decision in this regard,"

said, he thought the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland (Mr. W. E. Forster), in almost the last sentence of his able, and he (Dr. Lyons) would say his temperate speech, had supplied him with an almost unanswerable argument in favour of the Motion, which he had now the honour of submitting to the House—for he had conceded the position that, if the evils of the Land system in Ireland were removed, those outrages that he had dwelt upon at such great length would be impossible. It appeared to him, therefore, that that concession having been made, the right hon. Gentleman had destroyed, to a great extent, his arguments in favour of first proceeding to coercive legislation. He knew that in submitting his Amendment he should be received with a large amount of opposition from both sides of the House, because he was well aware that a large majority of hon. Members were in favour of coercion; but he had a duty to perform, and he believed he should be able to 'show that there were no sufficient grounds for proceeding with any coercive measures at all; and, above all, none to justify the putting of coercive measures in the forefront of legislation for Ireland on the present occasion. He would, at the outset, beg leave to state that no one in that House held in greater abhorrence the outrages referred to by the right hon. Gentleman, and which had been committed in Ireland during the past 12 months, and so much in the last three months; but he believed that those outrages and the whole course of action on the part of the people of Ireland had been brought into activity under circumstances which he would not now dwell upon, because, on a late occasion, he had had the honour of bringing them under the notice of the House. Many of them were not specially the result of the agitation which had been going on, but were only offences of a character which might under any other circumstances than those which now existed have been committed. They could not forget the condition of excited expectation to which the country generally was raised by the attempts at legislation during the past year; and he was one of those who believed that in those exalted expectations raised throughout the country would be found not only the true reason why this organization, the Land League, was able to raise its head until, in the words of a right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Canning), it had towered above the potency of the law of the Queen, but also that the tenant farmers fell into despair when they saw no immediate solution of their difficulties. They thus became an easy prey to agitation, and followed out, in too many instances, to their logical but most improper conclusion, the doctrines that were put before them, and outrages followed as a matter of necessity. In saying that, he was not there to palliate either the number or the character of those offences, or their extent throughout the country; but it behoved them to consider whether the condition of things they had to deal with was one that required a suspension of the Constitution, or was one, on the other hand, which could have been dealt with, or could now be dealt with, by the powers of the existing law, if carried into full effect. It certainly surprised him to find that the right hon. Gentleman cited instances in which, with a full knowledge of the crimes committed in particular localities, he refused to put the law in motion. He (Dr. Lyons) confessed that, in reference to one cited by the Chief Secretary, that was one of the most singular instances of a departure from the grave and most obvious duties of the magistracy, where, through fear and intimidation, the magistrates struck their colours to the Land League, and gave them precedence. That case was a most lamentable one to have been cited; and he could hardly imagine how the right hon. Gentleman could bring it forward as a ground for claiming extra powers. He thought also the right hon. Gentleman might have turned to another view of the subject, and placed before the House some of the circumstances which had goaded on the unfortunate people of Ireland, in too many instances, to attempt to seek redress for themselves, and not to have recourse to the ordinary process of law. They had heard last year, in most eloquent and scathing terms, expression given to the results of eviction; but the right hon. Gentleman was silent now upon the theme of those evictions which had played such an important part in stimulating the people of the country during the last five or six months. The right hon. Gentleman had forcibly alluded to one portion of the county Limerick which he (Dr. Lyons) knew well, and depicted a dreadful state of things as existing there. He would venture to supplement that picture by showing that, in that particular district, an eviction under the most cruel circumstances had taken place. The unfortunate man, having a very small holding, was obliged to supplement his earnings by labour, and was some miles off when this occurrence took place. His wife had but a few days before passed her confinement, and two or three, if not more, children, were just recovering from scarlatina. The "crowbar brigade," in the absence of the husband, cast out the helpless wife and the sick children on the road side; and when, late in the evening, the man returned, he found his family in that unfortunate condition, and his family houseless and desolate. In that particular district a feeling of general excitement undoubtedly prevailed, and an outrage of a most fearful character did follow thereon. He did not attempt to palliate such an outrage; but, looking at the immediate cause of that excitement and at the weakness of human nature, it was easy to be understood how such consequences had not very unnaturally followed. The outrages set forth in the Returns, no doubt, presented a formidable picture; but in estimating the amount of crime they must have regard to the proportion it bore to what prevailed in the normal condition of any given country, and also to the state of crime in other countries not supposed to be in a condition of excitement, for it could not be said that any community that ever existed had been known to have been wholly free from crime. Notwithstanding this, however, it would appear from the criminal statistics, that the amount of crime in Ireland committed during a period of great severity on the part of some landlords, and of great popular excitement, compared favourably with the number of offences committed in England and Wales in periods of comparative peace and tranquillity, and the proportion of murders and attempts to murder was actually less.

The proportion would be, to 5,500,000 of population in Ireland, 29; while the proportion to population would be 1 to 750,000. Again, comparing the state of Ireland now with what it was under Earl Grey's Administration in the year 1831, when the agrarian crimes were 9,002, including 242 homicides, they would find, notwithstanding the present agitation, that a vast improvement had taken place in the state of Ireland. Earl Grey did not at the date referred to come down at the end of a month or two to ask for increased power. He said—

"I did not listen to the urgent appeals which were made to me to adopt severe measures in the last Session of Parliament, and I plead guilty to an anxious desire to delay having recourse to them till the latest moment, and until the necessity should be such as to force itself on the conviction of all mankind."

He tried the effect of remedial measures; and it was not until he found that his efforts had failed that he asked Parliament to pass coercive measures. He (Dr. Lyons) regretted that the present Government had not followed a similar course. He was not there, as he said before, to palliate the condition of things in Ireland, or to express any sympathy with the agitation out of which it had arisen; but he did say that a free and Liberal Government would have taken a more noble course in putting forward remedial measures first; and if that course failed in producing tranquillity in the country, they might then, upon every reasonable ground, come to that House and ask for additional powers. There was another point — in former instances when the Government of Ireland found it necessary to have recourse to coercive measures, a preliminary inquiry had nearly always taken place. Since 1801, when Lord Castlereagh first introduced a Bill for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, it would be found that, in nearly every instance, an inquiry by Royal Commission preceded the demand for coercion. The highest Constitutional authority, both English and Irish, might be cited for that course—Sheil, O'Connell, and Spring Rice (afterwards Lord Monteagle) protested against the introduction of coercive measures without previous inquiry. Lord John Russell had opposed coercion, and had pointed out that dreadful things had occurred in Yorkshire and Lancashire, which the Government had not seen proper to meet with the weapons of coercion. That noble Lord asked what would be thought if it were reported that during 12 out of 24 hours in Austria, Russia, or Prussia the population were obliged to sit in their houses without light or fire of any kind? [Mr. JOHN BRIGHT: When was that?] In 1824. In 1819, also, the state of Lancashire was truly awful, yet no suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act took place. In 1832 a Committee of Inquiry into the state of affairs in Ireland was appointed on the Motion of a distinguished Member of that House—he earnestly wished that the hon. Gentleman who bore his name entertained the same Constitutional views, and, with all the true patriotism of his ancestor, had also some of his moderation and wisdom—he alluded to Sir Henry Parnell. Among those examined by that Committee was Sir Hussey Vivian, the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, who advised Parliament to get rid of the cause of the excitement of Ireland, and then the country would be tranquillized, and they would hear no more of the agitation. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland had given more than one instance in which crime was confined to a special locality, and yet he did not appear to have used the measures at his hand to suppress it. The right hon. Gentleman cited the case of Castle Island, with an area of only 11 square miles; but, though he had 25,000 troops and 13,000 police at his disposal, he was not able to keep order in that small district. What was that but a confession of incompetency? If, with all the power at his command, the right hon. Gentleman was unable to bring into order 11 square miles of territory, then he (Dr. Lyons) maintained that no extraordinary coercive legislation on the part of the Government would be able to do so. In the forefront of the Amendment, which he (Dr. Lyons) had ventured to lay before the House, it was suggested that if remedial measures were designed for the country by Her Majesty's Ministers they should give them precedence; but he would now say they might, at all events, take them pari passu with coercive measures. To give expression to his own inner conviction, he believed that if Ireland were ruled with a firm and just hand no coercive legislation would be necessary, and that if the right hon. Gentleman had from the beginning taken a different course—if he had more fully understood, at the outset, the excitable nature of the people he had to deal with—there were many things he might have done, and many things which he might have avoided doing. The right hon. Gentleman was now probably not only a sadder, but a wiser man, and knew that "for every idle word that man shall speak he shall render an account." Many things had escaped from the right hon. Gentleman last year which would have been much better unsaid in the presence of a people singularly excitable, of most acute intelligence, and of determined character. The most immediate way of pacifying Ireland was, he contended, to place before the people a large and comprehensive measure of Land Reform. When that was done, the Government would see that there would not be the slightest need for anything like coercion. Though nothing very definite was known as yet of the contemplated land measure, yet there was something in the air which told the public that it would be of a large and comprehensive, and, at the same time, of a just and generous kind. It would, therefore, have been expedient for the Government to put forward their views on the Land Bill before resorting to coercive measures. He was prepared to give credit to the Prime Minister for an intention to bring forward as large a measure of Land Reform as the present condition of the House admitted. There was no doubt whatever that hon. and right hon. Members sitting on the Opposition Benches would give a thorough support to all coercive measures; but he would ask the Government not to build too much upon that consideration, as there was no assurance that the entente cordiale between the opposite Benches would be maintained when the measure of Land Reform was brought in. For himself, he should not be surprised if, after working these coercive measures through the shoals and quicksands which threatened them, hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite were found assisting in wrecking any remedial measures which might be introduced, if of a large and generous kind. Absit omen. But, it may be said, the Government was strong enough to carry a fair and comprehensive measure of Land Reform. He trusted that would be so; he gave full credit to the Government for their good intentions, and he desired that Ministers should place their plans on this vital subject before the country without delay. Such a statement of the views of the Government was desirable for many reasons, but especially for this—that it would carry to the minds of a great part of the tenant farmers of Ireland the conviction that Her Majesty's Government were unconditionally about to bring in a great measure for the adjustment of questions connected with the land. The people of Ireland were, as a whole, in favour of equity and justice; and, speaking from long personal acquaintance with vast numbers belonging to the tenant class, he could assure the House that the great majority of that class were not yet handed over body and soul to the guidance of the Land League. They had some remarkable proofs of that. He would only refer to one—the striking application made on Friday to the Chief Secretary for Ireland in the name of 22,000 tenants from the North of Ireland. It might also especially be said of the Southern and Western counties of Ireland. But the great mass of the inhabitants, although not slaves of the Land League, were awaiting in the most earnest manner legislation by the Government in the direction of Land Law Reform; and that state of anxious expectation, and the sullen attitude in which they waited for the proposals of the Government, afforded another and a powerful argument against coercion. There was a great danger of driving the people into the arms of the opposite Party, that of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell)—a danger which might, indeed, be avoided if recognized in time, but which would almost of necessity follow the introduction of coercive measures. In, reference to the Arms Bill, briefly alluded to by the Chief Secretary, he would say that it was probable that the peace officers, whose duty it would be to carry out those measures, would unwittingly, perhaps, cause much needless irritation, and especially with regard to the search for arms. He (Dr. Lyons) feared that the exercise of that right of search would produce a great deal of mischief, and that the attempt to disarm the people would be strenuously resisted. The words of the Lords' Protest of 1834 deserved to be here cited against the right of breaking into houses in search for arms—

"Interest, credulity, malevolence, revenge, party violence, and indiscreet zeal, equally with a sense of duty, call it into action."

Since 1844 he had witnessed the operation of all the Coercion Acts, and there had always been much resistance to any attempt to recover from the people any arms which they ordinarily possessed. In 1846 a similar measure was introduced by Lord Lincoln, who was obliged to confess that previous enactments had been found insufficient, and that measure had been more hurtful than all the others. In many instances, arms were sought and demanded from persons who would have been allowed to possess them in any country; the son of a Waterloo officer, for example, being compelled to deliver up his father's sword, while it constantly happened that persons not entitled to carry arms succeeded in concealing them. The dangerous classes, in short, on making plausible representations, succeeded in retaining their weapons, while the loyal and the peaceable were made to give them up. He might ask what immediate necessity for coercion had been demonstrated? They now heard that the magistrates were invested with powers for the suppression of lawlessness, and were using them with good results; but why was not the law vindicated some months ago? The Government by their inaction had permitted the country to be demoralized by allowing all kinds of pernicious doctrines to corrupt the people; and now, at last, when they had to face serious dangers which followed thereon, they came to the House for additional powers to enable them to cope with a state of things, which the ordinary powers of the law, as he maintained, if energetically used, should have been ample to deal with. He trusted that those powers which the Government possessed would not be idly used against imaginary antagonists, and that the Government did not credit the existence of any organized conspiracy in Ireland to resist the law by armed force. They had strategically occupied the country with troops as though a general rising in force were apprehended; while, in point of fact, the real danger was of a totally different kind, and such as might be dealt with by ordinary legal processes. He thought he had conclusively shown that it would be expedient and desirable for a measure of Land Reform to take precedence of a measure of coercion. Let Ministers remember what was said in the other House by the Duke of Wellington, after having himself employed coercive measures for Ireland, speaking of "powers which," he said, "perhaps the House ought not to have given." He (Dr. Lyons) was well acquainted with Ireland and its characteristics; and he ventured to affirm that at present there was nothing like an organized conspiracy having in view any armed insurrection or forcible resistance to the Crown. There was no necessity to provide legislation to meet local instances of resistance to the law. It was the local condition of things which the Government should be prepared to meet with a full and rigid exercise of the powers they already possessed. He would conclude by appealing to the Government, even at that eleventh hour, to first place before both countries a clear and full view of the remedial measures they proposed to bring forward. If only they were well considered and sufficiently extensive, they would at once remove the grievance and the danger, for he believed the coercive measures, even if subsequently passed, would then be found to be quite unnecessary. Once more, therefore, he appealed to the Government to bring forward their measures of Land Reform before they attempted coercion in Ireland. Actuated by that view, he appealed to Her Majesty's Government to adopt that course, by which he did not think they would be compromised; and he was persuaded—and he did not represent his own individual opinions, but those also of very many persons of great experience throughout the country—that a great measure of Land Reform in Ireland would at once have a tranquillizing effect upon the people. It was admitted by everyone whose opinion was entitled to weight that the Land Question was at the bottom of all the present agitation in Ireland, and nothing else so stirred the people; and it was in a measure of Land Reform that an effectual remedy should be sought for the ills which now afflicted Ireland.

, in seconding the Amendment, said, that although he believed that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland and the Government fully intended to pursue the line of legislation which they thought would most conduce to restore order in Ireland, and that, too, in the shortest time, yet he was convinced that it was a gross mistake to introduce, in the first instance, a Coercion Bill instead of a remedial measure. As an Ulster Member, representing a county which was absolutely free from crime, it could not be said that he had any sympathy with agitation of an illegal or unconstitutional character; but, at the same time, he felt deeply that the crimes which had been committed concurrently with that agitation, some cases of which had been wrongfully attributed to it, had, in most instances, resulted from the injustice sanctioned by the law of England. All men of candour must at once admit that that was the main cause of the agitation which was at present going on in the country. During the debate on the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, a noble Lord admitted that the condition of Ireland in many respects was pitiable. And in what respect was it so? The Irish people had deserved well of England in her wars and in her Senate; but they were at present, notwithstanding the well-intended provisions of the Land Act of 1870, subject to eviction and oppression at the hands of the landlords. They had no security of tenure in the soil; no certainty of retaining their homesteads, around which their affections clung; no spot, as a rule, in their native land where they could rest beyond the fear of man. The Land Act of 1870 was intended by its authors to remove some of those grievances; but the measure was mutilated by other hands. The right of the landlord to evict remained. The great statesman who brought in that measure was frustrated in his good intentions, and at present eviction was merely a consideration of pounds, shillings, and pence under that Act.

I must point out to the hon. Member that the Land Act of 1870 is not the Question before the House. He is going very fully into that question, and to do so is clearly irrelevant to the subject before the House.

bowed to the Speaker's ruling, and said, that his object was to show that the agitation at present existing was against the injustice arising from the Land Laws in Ireland, even after the modification of the Act of 1870; and that remedial measures for the Irish people must be brought in and passed through the House before peace and order could be restored in that country. Previous to the Land Act of 1870 there was a very formidable agitation in Ireland, based precisely upon the same wrongs that the present agitation endeavoured to remove, and that agitation had continued until now; but the late Government had not only refused to bring in any measure of radical reform calculated to remove the grievance, but they had insulted the common sense of the Irish people, who were exasperated by the offer of such paltry palliatives as the Bill of Lord Arthur Hill-Trevor, and the electioneering Bill of the senior hon. Member for Tyrone (Mr. Macartney).

rose to Order, and asked was not the hon. Gentleman going outside the Question before the House?

I have already intimated that the hon. Member is not speaking to the Question before the House; and I must, at the same time, remind him that he is violating one of the rules of debate in reading his speech.

submitted to the Speaker whether, as the Amendment suggested that remedial measures on the Land Question ought to take precedence over coercion, its terms would not cover the remarks of the hon Member?

I did not interrupt the hon. Member until he went into details on the Land Question; and, in doing so, I consider that he was clearly out of Order.

said, he would again bow most respectfully to the ruling of the Chair. The reason why many persons in Ireland, who deplored illegal agitation, joined the Land League, was because they saw no other refuge; they had no hand of sympathy reached out to them from England; they saw no attempt made by Parliament to take away those evils under which they had for centuries groaned; and they were glad to adopt any expedient, and to unite themselves with anybody, in order to protect themselves from injustice and "wrong. It was said that there were not unjust evictions at present; but he had within the past few days, in Irish Courts of Justice, been present at several cases in which he saw that the result of respectful appeals for consideration by the tenants was the immediate service of dozens of ejectments. In the face of that, it was said that this present agitation should be crushed out before a remedy was applied. He could tell ton. Members that no power on earth would be able to crush the oppressed spirit of the Irish people, and that the only way to make them peaceable subjects of the Queen was to remove the grievances under which they laboured. He believed conscientiously that the mistake which the Government was now making, and which they would live to regret, was not of their own will, but that they were coerced into it by those who wished to see the Irish people under theiron heel before applying any remedy to the grievances which they complained of. He believed the Executive Government were now asking for unconstitutional power to punish the Irish people for evils which the government of the country in the past had produced. Surely the proper and rational course to take would be to remove the evils which had produced bitterness and turmoil, rather than to punish the people for that which was the inevitable outcome of injustice and cruelty. The Prime Minister said, in 1870, that for many years Ireland had been carrying on a struggle with those who were opposed to her; it was a struggle of weakness against strength; but in every case the end of the struggle was that weakness triumphed and strength lay prostrate. History was about to repeat itself. The Irish people now, as in the past, were resisting strength and much misrepresentation. Surely it had not come to this—that the right ton. Gentleman, whose eloquent words he had quoted, was about to use un reasoning repression, instead of holding out the olive branch? He implored the Government, before further exasperation was produced, to give them, by wise and considerate legislation, a feeling' of safety and security—to assure them that they had the sympathy of England; and that in the union of both countries their common welfare lay, instead of adopting measures of repression and cruel force, which would give an impetus to the present agitation, and deepen and embitter those feelings which they all deplored. Until the Irish people had that feeling of security and contentment, no coercive measures and no armed force would restore her to that condition in which they all wished to see her. He warned the Government that the people of Ireland were looking with an earnest and anxious eye at the movements of that House, and the measures which Her Majesty's Government were about to bring in for the restoration of peace and order in that country; and he could tell them that that day there would be a feeling of disappointment throughout the hills of Ulster when it was found that the Government, from which so much was expected, had introduced a measure of coercion which might work the ruin of many of the Queen's loyal and industrious subjects.

Amendment proposed,

To leave out from the word "That" to the end of the Question, in order to add the words "in the opinion of this House, it is expedient and desirable, and is most fully in accord with a wise and generous exercise of the undisputed power of this House, and the Empire at large, that remedial legislation on the Land Question in Ireland should take precedence over the Coercive Measures designed by Government, and that Her Majesty's Ministers be requested to reconsider their decision in this regard,"—( Dr. Lyons, )

—instead thereof.

Question proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."

said, the speech which he had heard that evening from the Chief Secretary for Ireland was one of the most powerful he had ever heard that right hon. Gentleman deliver in that House.

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

, resuming, said, the right hon. Gentleman had stated that the information upon which he founded the measure which he was proposing to the House was not based upon the reports of newspapers. But it was based entirely on the reports of the paid officials of Dublin Castle, in whose eyes it was a merit to find out and report cases by way of evidence of their activity. Therefore, he (Mr. Dillon) took his stand in that House for the liberties of the Irish people, declaring that the liberties of the Irish people would be voted away on the evidence of a lot of police spies. There was one thing that he had to thank the Chief Secretary for Ireland for, and that was the retrospective clause, which was meant, he presumed, to incarcerate himself and the other traversers at the State Trials now pending, so that, when they returned to Ireland to share the fate of the Irish people, they would be the first upon whom that clause would be put in operation. The right hon. Gentleman put forward, as his first ground, the fact that the outrages in Ireland had enormously increased during the last three months, and that the area over which the Land League reigned had also enormously increased; but he had failed to show the House why it was so. There was not a child in Ireland who would not have told him the reason. Before the reaping of the harvest, quiet prevailed, because there was nothing to fight for; but as soon as the harvest was reaped, the struggle for life and death began, the question being whether it should go to pay arrears of rent or whether it should be used as food by the people. That was the reason why the area of disturbance and outrage had extended. There was also another reason. The Irish people found that the Government would give them no protection when they saw the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, wretched as that was, sent back, and heard that the law was to have its course. Then they knew they were to have no protection. What would be the effect of the law having its course? He acknowledged that the law had not had its course, and he was proud to believe he was one of the miscreants who had been instrumental in preventing the law from taking its course in Ireland. It was not simply a question of eviction, but there were thousands of families who would be left to the charity of foreign nations after they had paid their rents to the Irish landlords. He would give a case. In the county of Mayo there was a Nobleman who last year, never seeing his Irish estates, drew £27,000 from the poor tenants, not a man of whom but had to obtain food by means of American charity during the whole of the winter. That noble Lord, he knew, had drawn £200,000 from those poor tenants, and yet he never subscribed one shilling to feed his starving tenantry. Last year he offered a reduction of 5 s. in the pound, and he levied his rents to the amount of £18,000. He (Mr. Dillon) went on that Nobleman's estate, and warned the people not to let that state of things be repeated; and he was glad to say that he had not had one shilling up to the present time. It would be a crime and an iniquity on the part of that House to give that Nobleman power to tear away from those poor people the money which, from his (Mr. Dillon's) own certain knowledge, if they were forced to pay, would leave them without the wherewithal to get food. There was another reason why the outrages had increased during the past three months. The people had in their possession their food for the winter; they were advised by the League to hold that food, and he was not ashamed of having given the advice. It was not owing to the organization of the Land League or to the spread of the power of the Land League only that the outrages had increased, but it was owing to the fact that the harvest was reaped. The right hon. Gentleman had based some part of his case upon outrages taking the form of threatening letters. He denounced that as one of the most cowardly forms of outrage, and with that he (Mr. Dillon) agreed, and no man in the land had denounced it more strenuously, and from the outset he had used his influence to stop it; but it was an outrage in no way due to the Land League. It was a relic of past ages of misfortune, and the result of habits formed at a time when there was no League to put forward the tenant's case, and when they had nothing to look to but secret societies and the terror these could create by outrage; but the object of the League had been systematically to put an end to secret socie- ties, and the means they used to teach the people to achieve their object was by open combination. This writing of threatening letters was a degraded and shameful habit, engrafted into the nature of the people, who had learned, by bitter experience, to look to nothing but the wild justice of revenge for protection. He had heard landlords say that throughout Tipperary there were thousands of homes which owed the fact of their existence to the fear of murder and outrage which cowed ill-disposed landlords. Such a state of things he much deplored; but the League had never connived at it. But who was more to blame—the poor peasant, who, in the desperation of despair, had recourse to this, or the intelligent, enlightened Parliament, which denied him the means of protection? The right hon. Gentleman roused a feeling of sympathy when he spoke of the poor tenant on the lonely hill-side or in the bog to whom he was going to give protection against the terror of the Land League. Now, he knew this class of tenant better than the right hon. Gentleman, and he would venture to say that that class would not thank the Government. There was a visit which inspired the tenant with more terrors than ever did a midnight party to intimidate him. What he wanted was protection from the terrorism of the "crowbar brigade." If the Bill did what the right hon. Gentleman expected—but which he (Mr. Dillon) did not expect from it—then at one sweep would at least 10,000 families be left homeless and hopeless; and what could then be expected but that, driven to desperation, they would pass from the Land League and its legitimate agencies to crimes of revenge? The right hon. Gentleman had admitted that crime in Ireland had been of a mitigated character; but he would have crimes of revenge committed by despairing men who had before them the fate to which the Irish farmer preferred death. He (Mr. Dillon) declared deliberately, having spent most of his life among Irish farmers, that if the House drove the Irish farmers to a state of despair, they could not expect anything but outrage and murder; and it would take the form, not of intimidation, but of revenge of despairing men. The right hon. Gentleman had, absolutely felt com- pelled to make some kind of excuse for the small number of murders committed in Ireland. They would find that in any previous period which could be compared with this there were five times more murders in one county than there had been all through the country this year. He remembered a Return of 50 murders and homicides in the county of Kilkenny one year, and this year there were only five or six in Ireland; and he had reason to believe that the most brutal of these were not agrarian. The right hon. Gentleman endeavoured to explain that, and said the Return would have been much larger had it not been for the unprecedented amount of personal protection. He protested against that argument. He protested strongly against the insinuation that the Irish people would have murdered a number of people who were now alive but for the intervention of the police. The House had learned on what baseless supposition police protection was given. They knew by what little causes some people were frightened in a time of panic. The smallest thing—a threatening letter, an evil conscience, the knowledge of having done wrong, of having evicted or being about to evict a tenant—would induce men to apply for protection from fear of murder. He was quite willing they should have it; but he denied the right of the right hon. Gentleman to bring his charge of wholesale intended murder against the peasantry of Ireland. The history of Irish agrarian affairs showed that police protection did not save men from murder. The opportunity was found in spite of it; but he (Mr. Dillon) believed that in nine-tenths of these cases police protection was given on insufficient grounds. With regard to the last form of agrarian crime—that known as night visiting—he admitted it, and he regretted it. When he was in Ireland, before Parliament met, he used all his influence, and he hoped successfully, to put an end to it in the part of the country in which he lived; but the Land League did not directly or indirectly encourage night visiting, and never had done so. It was a relic of the White-boy days, just as threatening letters were. The Land League could not be expected in one year to undo the habits learned in centuries of wrong and misrule. Ribbonmen and Whiteboys had influence in Ireland, he admitted; but it was being abated by the National Land League. They had used all the influence their position in the country gave them to put an end to threatening letters and to outrages generally, and above all to night visits, which he admitted to be a most intolerable form of outrage; but the right hon. Gentleman with 25,000 soldiers, 14,000 policemen, and the whole machinery and terrorism of the law at his back, could not repress these forms of crime, and had to ask for further power. How then could it be wondered at that the Land League had not entirely eradicated these outrages? But he (Mr. Dillon) was convinced that night visiting would be much less in itself and less cruel than it had been, as the result of the influence of the League; and, even now, the right hon. Gentleman had not been able to show that a single man's ears had been cut off; yet we had seen it stated by an Irish landlord in an English periodical that that was a matter of daily occurrence. He came to the last class of outrages, the houghing of cattle. Was the right hon. Gentleman aware that a century ago the people of Ireland were taught to regard cattle as their enemy? Three times, settlements of the Irish people in the West of the Shannon had been exterminated to make room for cattle; and in the latter part of the 18th century the Irish people in that district rose up en masse, led by gentlemen of education, and in one night houghed 5,000 cattle. Dean Swift—for in Dean Swift's day the war was going on—said that Don Quixote was thought a madman, because he mistook a flock of sheep for his enemy; but it was his opinion the Irish were insane when they made the same mistake. This war against cattle had been going on for 200 years. Cruelty to cattle in Ireland must not be judged by an English standard. Thousands on thousands of people in the district he referred to had been exterminated, and thousands of acres of the best soil torn from the Irish people, who were driven to the mountains and the bogs in order that cattle might be pastured on the land. The occupants of these crowded mountain farms, which were said to be the source of Irish misery, looked down upon the fertile plains of Roscommon and Galway, where their ancestors had happy homes and large farms—and could you wonder that the spirit of despera- tion arose in such a peasantry, or that cattle were regarded as the enemies of the people? He (Mr. Dillon) did not palliate these offences; but he pleaded for the character of the Irish people, who regarded this as a war of self-defence, and knew that cattle had been the most effective weapon of tyranny and extirpation. The right hon. Gentleman spoke of the supremacy of "dissolute ruffians;" and, from the manner in which that expression was received, the House seemed to consider it the fair description. Yet they had enrolled as members of the Land League over 1,000 Catholic priests, besides a number of Presbyterian ministers, Unitarian ministers, Methodists, &c. In the whole of his large constituency, he (Mr. Dillon) did not think there was a single branch of the League in which there were not two or three priests acting as president, vice president, and secretary; and did the right hon. Gentleman mean to say that the parish clergy all over Ireland would lend themselves to establish the reign of the dissolute ruffians of a faction? Half the Catholic priests in Ireland were enrolled in the Land League, and three-quarters of the Irish Catholic clergy and Bishops had given their assurances of their warm approval. The right hon. Gentleman had boasted that the basis of his case was purely official. Would he consider it a proud boast to say that all the knowledge he had of England was derived from official sources? Not long ago a Presbyterian clergyman delivered a lecture in his own meeting-house, to his own congregation, in the County Down, in which he entirely approved of the Land League from beginning to end. This was a respectable man and an able speaker, and were they to condemn him as advocating the rule of dissolute ruffianism? In fact, leaving out the landlords, nine-tenths of the Irish people sided with the League; and unless hon. Members were prepared to declare that all the inhabitants of the country, with the exception of the landlords, were dissolute ruffians, they could not accept the statement of the right hon. Gentleman as correct. The right hon. Gentleman said he could not find words to describe his sense of the cruelty of the speech of his (Mr. Dillon's) hon. Friend the Member for the City of Cork. In his judgment, the right hon. Gentleman gave a one-sided view of the pur- port of that speech, which was really a humane one, it being intended to save the lives of thousands of people, who, as the Prime Minister had observed, were sentenced to death by the Land system. He was not ashamed to say that he had comparatively little sympathy with the sufferings of the shopkeepers caused by the loss to their trade. Many of the shookeepers were very mean men, who used to take farms from which tenants had been unjustly evicted. They thought that the present, like previous popular movements, would be crushed; but the exclusive dealing system had now brought a good many of them to reason. If he thought that the right hon. Gentleman only meant to put down outrages, his opposition to this Coercion Bill would be of a very different character; but what the right hon. Gentleman really wanted to destroy was the supremacy of the Land League. There was a vast difference, which the right hon. Gentleman had endeavoured to slur over, between outrage and the supremacy of the League. He (Mr. Dillon) abominated outrage as much as the right hon. Gentleman. He would do all he could to suppress outrage; but he would do all he could to maintain the supremacy of the Land League, and he knew that the first use that the right hon. Gentleman would make of the Coercion Bill would be to break the supremacy of the Land League. If he had a doubt, that doubt would be removed by the rumours which were coming thick that the landlords were already exulting on their return to power. It was true that the Land League had done much to stop evictions, and he was glad to say that West of the Shannon they had made the evictions almost impossible; and the cause of the exultation of the Irish landlords was not that outrage would be stopped, but that they would be able to carry out evictions. He believed he did not exaggerate when he said that there were at the present moment 40,000 families in Ireland who were liable to eviction, and yet the Prime Minister of England was content to advise those 40,000 families to wait patiently for remedial measures being passed. Why, of what avail would it be to those unhappy persons that remedial measures were passed after they had been turned out of house and home? What would be the use of introducing remedial measures at the end of a long and tedious Session? Their need was most pressing. He had not heard of a single convincing argument that the coercive measure would break down the supremacy of the Land League. No; the League was now a firm and just power, which was not to be so easily overturned. It was the firm belief of the Irish people that it was the stand which the Land League had made that alone prevented them from being evicted. Notwithstanding the appeal after appeal that had been made to them, the Government had refused to bring in any measure that would suspend the right of eviction. Why did they wish to strike down the protecting arm of the poor tenants, and to deliver them bound hand and foot over to their landlords? It would be a disgrace to England in the eyes of Europe if she consented to hand over the power of her Army to the landlords in Ireland to enable them to grind down and crush their tenantry. And yet the Ministry of the day were content to apply the clôture to the Parliament of England and to destroy the rights of minorities, rather than to do justice to the Sister Country. He warned the Government that if once they entered into this downward course the minds of men would grow more and more excited on this subject. He was astonished that some moderate men in the House, who really meant to maintain a good understanding between the people of the two countries, did not come forward and tell the Government that they were taking the wrong course. If, however, it was the intention of the Government to attempt to disarm the people of Ireland, to place the power of a Draconic law in the hands of the authorities of Dublin Castle, and to use the power of the Army to enable the landlords to keep their yoke on the necks of their tenants, they would fail in their object. Let them pass an Act suspending eviction in Ireland, and there would be no need to pass a Coercive Bill. Both parties would rest on their arms and outrages would cease, and peace would descend upon that distracted country. But if they adopted the opposite course and trusted in coercion, he warned them that they had a larger and more powerful organization to deal with in the Land League than they supposed. Hon. Members opposite were entirely in the dark with reference to the ramifications of the Land League, and coercive measures would make the rule of that Association supreme from the North to the South of Ireland. Let the Government thoroughly reform the Land Laws, and the necessity of the League would cease to exist. But at present it would exist, and actively, and no coercive measures would put it down. Hon. Members might look incredulous; but he could assure them that these Bills would not put a stop to the supremacy of the Land League, because that was a larger organization to deal with than this House seemed to be aware of. Coercion Acts would be powerless against the ramifications of the Land League. They would simply make their rule supreme from Cape Clear to Fairhead, in Antrim. If they went on passing Bills such as these they would not be able to stop there; they must go further, and, in the words of Lord Inchiquin, they would have to "proclaim martial law." His Lordship had shown the hands of the landlords when he made that statement. They would soon come to the House and ask for martial law and the suspension of trial by jury. They knew that an Arms Act would not affect the League, as they fought without arms. The landlords were only waiting till they could demonstrate the necessity of still further measures of coercion than the Government were now contemplating; and did the Government know at whom they would be striking? He should like to ask the Chief Secretary for Ireland what he intended to do with the priests? Amongst the Land League members were many priests. Were they going to arrest the priests, if these Bills passed? On the other hand, he would ask were the priests likely to desert the Land League because of the passing of these Coercion Acts? All he could say was, if the priests did desert the people now, the Church of Rome would receive the heaviest blow she had ever yet received. If they arrested a single priest in the county of Tipperary, they must arrest the Archbishop of Cashel, who was one of the most ardent Land Leaguers in the whole of Ireland. He was a man of courage, although he did not talk much, and he (Mr. Dillon) was convinced if this Bill passed, the Archbishop would place himself at the head of the Land League. The Government would hesitate before they placed them- selves in such a position that they must arrest half the priesthood of Ireland, or must subject themselves to the derision of Europe. If he was not very much mistaken, the Government would also lave a very great number of Presbyterian ministers to deal with. He himself had very great success in the Province of Ulster, when he was pushing the League there; but at the same time it was not quite the success he had anticipated, owing to the fact that there remained in the minds of the Ulster people a confidence that the Government were likely to do something which would relieve the distress, and so put an end to the grievances of the Irish people. He tried in vain at the time to prove to the people that their confidence was baseless; but he had no doubt that, after the passing of this Bill, it would be unnecessary for him to waste breath in urging the same point. It was said of turn (Mr. Dillon) on previous occasions that he had used a sort of threat that the members of the Land League over whom he had any influence would take arms against the operation of a possible Coercion Bill; but that was simply a misconstruction that had been put upon his words. All he meant to say, and, as far as he remembered, all he did say, was that his people were not easily terrorized over. He had succeeded in establishing over 60 branches of the Land League in Ulster, in spite of the threats which were made against him if he ventured into the Province; and, speaking from his own knowledge, he had no hesitation in saying that the threats of violence came, not from the tenant members of the League, but from the landlords, who feared lest their absolute right over their tenants might be interfered with in any way. The right hon. Gentleman seemed to forget that the other side had tried the game. Did they ever hear of the case of "Boycotting" which took place with respect to a minister of the Church of England in the County Fermanagh? He was not a member of the Land League; but because he had raised his voice to prevent his people from going to create disturbance at their land meetings, he was "Boycotted" by the landlords. The right hon. Gentleman had based his argument in support of his Bill upon the failure of the ordinary law in the country; but, in this, he missed the mark, for it cut two ways. The house of the British Government in Ireland was built up by the forces of the bayonets of England; and when the stream of their influence, not of their terrorism, beat against the house it fell, and, in the words of the Gospel, "Great was the ruin of that house." Let not the right hon. Gentleman imagine that he could re-establish the house by passing a Coercion Bill. The only way of setting it up again was by going forward and digging the foundations on which to rear a new Government, finding out why it was the law was so hated by the people, that it nearly wrecked the whole structure of their power. The real reason was, that English rule in Ireland had been built upon an entire disregard of Irish feeling and opinion; and he warned the Government, before entering on a course of coercive legislation, to bear in mind that for years past English rule had caused the hearts of the Irish people to yearn after Washington rather than London. They had no confidence in England. They loved the United States of America; and he ventured to say that if the Irish people could be polled at the present moment, three-fourths of them would vote in favour of annexation to the United States in preference to continuing in union with England, and would willingly send over their Representatives to that country. If that could be achieved, was there a Member of that House who did not know that there would be peace and prosperity in Ireland, and that Ireland would become one of the wealthiest and happiest countries in the world? The law had destroyed all loyalty to the connection between England and Ireland. The minds of the Irish people were turning every day more longingly over the Atlantic, where the people were recognised and treated with sympathy and kindness, turning to a country where they might have a just and large share of directing the fates of one of the greatest nations ever seen; and no course could be devised that would tend stronger to turn the minds of the people of Ireland more and more in the direction of America than the course which the Government had now entered upon, a course which they knew not themselves. They were entering on a struggle with a power which was very great in Ireland; but once they had committed themselves to a struggle with that power, they could not draw back until they crushed it.

said, he intended, in the strongest possible manner, to oppose the measure introduced by the Government, and to support the Amendment of the hon. Member for the City of Dublin (Dr. Lyons). He was not, however, so sure that he should have taken that course if the House had, in the first place, been favoured with some statement as to the provisions of the proposed Government Land Bill. He could well understand the great reluctance with which a Gentleman of the reputation of the Chief Secretary for Ireland had made the proposition he had made; and if he (Mr. Bradlaugh) entered in the strongest terms his dissent from the course the Government had taken, and his desire to support the Amendment, it was because he felt the occasion was one on which no one should remain silent, when measures of coercion were proposed in the way they had been proposed. He was warranted in supporting that Amendment by no less an authority than the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. W. E. Forster) himself. If his memory did not deceive him, the right hon. Gentleman, in the last Session of Parliament, intimated that the Government would try and govern Ireland with the law as they found it; and he also intimated that, if they found themselves unable to do that, they should then suggest that it should be accompanied by some measure of remedial legislation. It was possible that he had allowed his hopes of what the Government would do to find weight in translating the words of the Chief Secretary; but so he understood him. He knew the Government had means of information which were not within his reach; but if their information only amounted to what the right hon. Gentleman had told the House, he must say there was no case made out by the right hon. Gentleman to entitle him to ask for measures of coercion for Ireland. In doing what he (Mr. Bradlaugh) was doing now he was only following the traditions of the Party to which the right hon. Gentleman and the majority of the present Government belonged, for they had always opposed legislation which was intended to punish rather than to redress. He submitted that there was evidence before them to show that the evil complained of in Ireland was not evil created by the Land League, or evil created during the last two months, but evil arising from the conduct of unfair landlords towards their tenants. He believed that the Chief Secretary for Ireland had altogether failed to show that the ordinary law was not sufficient to put down the offences which he had mentioned in support of his case. There had not been any offence stated that evening which the law was not strong enough to deal with. Every outrage named was already punishable. The illegal courts of the Land League could have been prosecuted under the provisions of that law; and the right hon. Gentleman himself admitted that since proceedings had been instituted against certain members of the Land League for setting up Land League courts in Ireland—a proceeding which they must all hold to be illegal—that species of crime had diminished. No hon. Member of the House would, he thought, be found to deny the fact that all kinds of illegal proceedings should be strongly reprobated. The Government, through the right hon. Gentleman, said that they could make no terms with lawlessness; that while in Ireland criminals were few, the sufferers were many. Were they sure that they were not about to make terms with fear and panic? Were they sure they were not making terms with the landed interest opposite, who preferred a policy of force to a policy of justice, and who had made the misery of the people out of which the crime spoken of had grown? It was not asserted that the ordinary law was insufficient for all purposes; what was asserted was, that evidence could not be obtained to support prosecutions, and that jurymen could not be found to convict. But what did that show? It showed that the national feeling was with the crime—not all crime, for it was admitted that in respect of non-agrarian crime Ireland stood higher than England did. Why was it that there was one class of crime sheltered by the people of Ireland? It was because the people had come by experience to think that the Government gave them no protection, and that the law afforded them no remedy for their grievances. Everyone knew how the Act brought in by the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government in 1870 had been crippled and mutilated, and how it had been frustrated by men who said that the Constitution should be suspended at present, and that, instead of being subjected to remedial legislation, the people of Ireland should be subjected to 18 months' imprisonment for any crime charged against them, not before a Court of Law, but before a magistrate, and upon the mere whim of some nobody to whom the carrying out of portion of the extraordinary powers of the Government would be entrusted. It was not upon the word of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland that a man was to be deprived of his liberty, but it was upon the word of some petty constable. He believed that the right hon. Gentleman would take all the precautions in his power in applying this law; but what effectual precautions against wrongdoing could be taken when arbitrary power was brought to bear upon individual liberty? Neither the right hon. Gentleman nor the noble Lord at the head of the Irish Government could personally examine the details of every case. They must trust to others, and these, in turn, to others, until at last, perhaps, private malice might strike the one whom this House had stripped of his Constitutional right. The right hon. Gentleman said there were three classes of men who committed the agrarian crimes which they all wished to put down and prevent. It could not be the interest of anyone sitting in that Legislature to defend, excuse, or palliate crime: it was the duty of all men to address themselves to its reduction. The first class of men said to be implicated in this agrarian crime were those who belonged to old secret societies; the second, those who belonged to new secret societies; and the third, idle and very dissolute persons, who were spoken of by the right hon. Gentleman as the ruffians of their district. He agreed with the right hon. Gentleman as to the first two; but if there were idle and dissolute and illconditioned men concerned in the movement, it was extremely difficult to explain why the general crime of the country had not swollen as well as that called agrarian. Were they quite sure that the crimes the ruffians and the dissolute persons committed were agrarian crimes; or, if they were, that they were crimes for which the Land League were responsible, or for which the people generally should be stigmatized and condemned? There was scarcely one of the offences mentioned by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland that he (Mr. Bradlaugh) did not admit to be a crime of the highest degree. But just as they had Rebeccaite outrages in Wales, poaching crimes in certain districts, and other classes of crimes in various parts of England and Scotland, growing out of alleged grievances, might it not be, as he asserted it was, that all this reluctance to convict agrarian offenders showed that the people did not consider it a crime, but as something which had grown out of agrarian wrong, and which they were justified in shielding in the absence of remedial legislation? Why should not efforts be made by Her Majesty's Government to redress it? They were making, or about to make, terms with the landlords, who depended upon force—with those who had themselves created the mischief. It was not the Land League that built the wretched hovels in which the suffering people of Ireland dwelt; it was the misery and suffering which he saw in hundreds of Irish cabins last year which had created that organ. For his part, he wished to have crime suppressed. The English people were determined to stand by the present Government thoroughly; but they asked what was the Government about to do to remedy the wrongs of the people as well as to punish the criminals to be found among them? The late Earl Russell said in that House, when he was Lord John Russell, and speaking on a measure similar to the present, that to be useful any such measure ought to be accompanied by a remedial measure; adding—

"When they took into consideration these crimes, they should also ask themselves at the same time "whether the law of landlord and tenant could not be improved."

When asking the Government for powers against midnight assassins, they ought to be armed with powers to remedy the the evils out of which midnight assassinations sprung. Sir Robert Peel, too, said, upon a similar occasion—" You must show that all the ordinary laws have been exhausted;" and he (Mr. Bradlaugh) ventured to say that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland had not shown that. He had not shown that the proportion of acquittals in relation to convictions in Ireland had been greater than the proportion in England. The right hon. Gentleman had not shown that the state of crime in Ireland was such as to justify the case he attempted to make out. Comparing the statistics now presented to the House with those presented by Sir Robert Peel, he (Mr. Bradlaugh) found that whereas only three murders appeared to have been committed in the period embraced by the present Returns, Sir Robert Peel showed 139. No doubt, Sir Robert Peel included in his list cases that were not agrarian; but could the right hon. Gentleman distinguish between agrarian and non-agrarian offences, any more than Sir Robert did in making out his strong case? Sir Robert Peel had 483 cases of attacking dwelling-houses; the present Chief Secretary for Ireland had only 15. Sir Robert Peel had 138 cases of firing into dwelling-houses, and the present Returns showed but 67. He, furthermore, looked with suspicion on some of the cases reported at present, when he found that those whose duty it was to report them were not at all discouraged by their superiors. He (Mr. Bradlaugh) did not pretend that any case of crime that had been mentioned here in the right hon. Gentleman's speech had been invented, nor had the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government displayed any disposition to listen too greedily to the reports of officials; but a great many other people had. One speech had been made in that House which was characterized by exaggeration of everything that had happened in Ireland, and such a speech disposed one to mistrust almost every landlord magistrate. He appealed to the Government, as representing the Liberal Party in this matter, to be strong enough even to be generous. He did not ask them to be just; he asked them to be generous. He did not ask them to be just, because the measure of justice might be too retributive; but he did appeal to them to remember the many wrongs that in times past they had inflicted upon the Irish people—the exorbitant rents, for instance, under which they had groaned for many a year, although even wrong had sprang from it. It was the duty of the Government, he strongly felt, to hold the sword in one hand and the palm-branch in the other; but now they only held the sword in the one hand and fire in the other. At the same time, they told the people of Ireland that good should come one day; but, he asked, how were these poor unfortunate people to believe them when they last year beheld a small measure, which the Government brought forward as one of mercy and of justice, mockingly kicked out in "another place?"

said, that if the Amendment was pressed to a division he should support it. The powerful and impressive argument of the last speaker must have convinced everyone who gave him a fair and impartial hearing of the absolute necessity of at least sending remedial measures in advance of coercion. He could not, however, accept the kind of alternative suggested by the hon. Member for Dublin (Dr. Lyons), and he should feel bound to vote against coercion, no matter what remedies the Government had in store for the suffering people of Ireland, because the Chief Secretary had made out no case whatever for coercion. He was quite aware it was unusual to oppose the asking for leave to bring in a Bill, and its first reading; but although it was an unusual course to adopt under ordinary conditions, it had, over and over again, been the determination of Parties and of individual Members to oppose the introduction of a Bill where there was a strong feeling against its principle—a strong conviction that the Bill was unnecessary and uncalled for. On many occasions distinguished Members had taken the lead in refusing the first reading of a measure. When the famous Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was introduced the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham (Mr. John Bright) declared, in the strongest terms, his determination to withhold his consent to the Bill being laid even on the Table. The right hon. Gentleman then said—

"However much a Minister may succeed in gratifying the passions or in satisfying the prejudices of his followers and supporters out-of-doors, I see nothing but evil in the course he is pursuing, and therefore I, at the commencement, must withhold my consent from the introduction of this most mischievous Bill."

These words might well be applied to the present case. The debate on the introduction of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was continued for a whole week, and in the Division List of those who voted against the measure was the honoured name of Mr. Cobden, the not less distinguished name of Mr. Bright, and the name of Mr. Milner Gibson, then a leading Liberal Member of the House, and one who, in the debate on the introduction of the Bill, said—

"If it were to be the last vote he would give in the House, he would do his utmost to prevent even the first reading of so objectionable a measure."

Now, the Chief Secretary made out nothing like a substantial case for proposing such a comprehensive alteration of the law as that contained in his Bill. It had been shown by the Answers to the Questions put to the Chief Secretary that very evening, that the Government possessed immense power in Ireland. They had, it seemed, power to drag four poor boys out of bed and cast them into a distant prison for shouting "land-grabber" after somebody on a road; and, by a Question put to the Solicitor General for Ireland, they learned that the magistrates in Ireland had now the power to prevent and disperse any meeting whatever; and they had it on what, he supposed, was good legal authority that if a number of men persisted in holding a meeting after they had been warned not to hold it, a magistrate was fully within his right, and even within his duty, in directing the men to be fired upon.

), said, he had made no such statement. The hon. Member had entirely misunderstood him.

, continuing, said, that, at any rate, the magistrates had the power to prevent any meeting at which men were to speak whose eloquence they did not wish to reach the public ear. Was that not a tolerably strong and stringent power to place in the hands of any magistrate? In the face of such facts, he desired to know on what ground Ministers could ask for greater powers? Was it alleged that there was increase of crime, or that agrarian outrages were now going on? In making out his case, the Chief Secretary was obliged to divorce the present from the past. But however far back they got into the history of the country, they found the same struggle going on between the possessors of the land and the peasants who claimed some right to live as well as to labour on it. Never before had agrarian dispute and controversy been carried on with less of serious outrage than at present. Never before had such an agitation been carried on with a more marked and distinct tendency to rise wholly to the level of open and manly combination and discussion. Irishmen were as much opposed to outrage as the people of any nationality. The Irish Members were as strongly opposed to the commission of outrages as anyone in the House—as even the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary was. They had never failed to reprobate those outrages; but they knew that the intelligent and respectable farmers they addressed had nothing to do with them, and had no control, direct or indirect, over them. Those outrages were the work of the scum and residuum that belonged to every movement; they were the work of cowardly assassins, who sought to avenge their private wrongs under the guise of devotion to the Land League. The crime of houghing cattle was no new crime; it might be traced back to the time of the Norman Invasion. It was even more than once referred to in Scripture. But it was diminishing in Ireland under the action of the Land League. If, however, it should still go on, he failed to see by what process under this Coercion Bill the right hon. Gentleman proposed to put a stop to it. Did the right hon. Gentleman imagine those things were done in the open day, that the act of vengeance was proclaimed in advance from the market cross with the accompaniment of bands of music? Did he not know he had failed hitherto in bringing almost any of the people who did those deeds to justice, and how could an Act assist him to obtain a clue to those midnight offences which they all deplored? The right hon. Gentleman threw the veil of obscurity over most of his facts and details. When they asked for facts to justify such a change in the Constitutional Law of the country, he told them he would not mention names; but it was surely of some importance that the House should examine the cases brought forward to learn how much exaggeration there was in many a statement, and how insignificant and unimportant it became when brought into light out of the mists of secrecy. The right hon. Gentleman seemed ashamed to say much about threatening letters. Threatening letters were a mode of terrorism familiar to London police magistrates. They were constantly receiving them; but they did not, like some Irish Judges, read them with solemn emphasis from the Bench, to call attention to their own heroic virtue. An attempt had been made to connect the Land League in some mystic way with threatening letters. He would express an absolute conviction that no body of men in the country more entirely disapproved threatening letters than the leaders of the Land League. On these grounds the right hon. Gentleman rested his whole case. He admired the courage with which the right hon. Gentleman faced his triumphant Conservative enemies when he told the House of Commons that the Peace Preservation Act, if it had not been allowed to expire, would have done all that was wanted. The right hon. Gentleman had also complained that the Land League had superseded the law of the land; but what must be the condition of things in Ireland when an unwritten law, framed by a few men previously without influence, and some of them utterly obscure, admittedly superseded the law that the Government of England tried to carry out with all its force? There could be no stronger argument for some change in the system of land tenure in Ireland. But the right hon. Gentleman believed there was something like a Fenian armed rebellion about to break out in England. He did not know on what evidence the right hon. Gentleman spoke; but if he had been persuaded to believe such a statement, he was the only man who knew or professed to know anything of Ireland who entertained such an opinion. When coercion was last applied to Ireland, the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster denounced what he called the ever - ready and ever - poisonous medicine of coercion. Yet it could not be denied that at that time there was something like a cause for dread of armed insurrection in Ireland. The American Civil War had then scarcely ceased; a great number of men of Irish birth or extraction in America had learned the use of arms; they were animated by the same feelings as many of their countrymen at home; they were unwilling to return to the pursuits of a peaceful life; and, fired by the recent habitude of war, a whole swarm of them came across to Ireland ready and prepared for insurrection. At that time the feeling between this country and the United States was strained to the uttermost; Americans, Northern and Southern, were alike jealous of the course taken by this country in the Civil War; there was a great international question awaiting settlement. It was the firm conviction of vast numbers of men on both sides of the Atlantic, that the Alabama Controversy would most assurely lead to war. Under conditions so stimulating it was natural that there should be something like an organized conspiracy, though it turned out not to be very formidable. But the state of things was entirely different now. There had long been peace in America, there was a friendly feeling between the United States and this country, and not one of the peculiar symptoms existed which, at that time gave the semblance of excuse for the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. If the right hon. Gentleman really believed in an insurrection about to break forth, it must only be because he had taken his information exclusively from official sources. He lived in Dublin very much as an Austrian Governor of Lombardy or Venice lived in one of those Provinces before their emancipation. At that time the Austrians held just so much of Italian soil as their soldiers were encamped on. The right hon. Gentleman knew now just as much of the condition of Ireland as his official intelligence covered. Who but the right hon. Gentleman's officials were conjuring up this apparition of Civil War? Let this Coercion Bill be passed, and it would not answer any one of the ends for which the right hon. Gentleman intended it. It would do nothing whatever for the restoration of peace. It would not enable him to reach any one of the secret dangers of which he now complained, to stop one midnight outrage, or hold the hand of one single assassin. What it would enable the right hon. Gentleman to do was this—a, thing which he and every other hon. Member would one day regret—it would enable him to put down open, honourable, and outspoken agitation, to reach the members of the Land League whenever he wanted to get at them, for they would not skulk behind hedges nor fly from the police-constable. His measure had in it something new indeed to their criminal legislation, for it was to be retrospective, in order that when his grand State Trial failed, he might then use his newly-forged weapon against the men whom an Irish Court of Law was unable or unwilling to find guilty. But the right hon. Gentleman could go further. He could suppress public meetings and free speech, and all the Land League had done in that way he had a good chance of undoing. The leading members of the Land League made it their ambition to close the era of conspiracy in Ireland; the right hon. Gentleman would now re-open that era. While these ends were being carried out, remedial legislation was to lie unprepared and unproduced. It was in vain to appeal to Irish Members and tell them they ought to be silent and put up with anything in the shape of coercive legislation, as, if they only kept quiet, they would have remedial legislation some time. They knew they were going to have coercive legislation; it would be welcomed in that House, and carried by acclamation in "another place." But what security was there, what word of promise had the Prime Minister to give them, that if his remedial measures were worth accepting that House would carry them? Did they not know that his present friends and allies, who were joined with his followers in a conspiracy of silence, would denounce him as soon as his Land Bill was laid before the House? All the combined ingenuity of his Cabinet could not so prune down the Land Bill as to make it gain the acceptance of Gentlemen on the Conservative Benches of the House. Whatever English Liberal Members might do, whatever the bulk of English Eadicals, whose creed once used to be that coercion was always to be condemned, might do, it must be the duty of Irish Members to resist this measure to the uttermost, and it would be to the honour of every one of them to have given it the most determined, earnest, and persevering opposition.

was sure the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland would absolve him from the least wish in the world to embarrass or thrust additional difficulties in the way of Her Majesty's Government at the present time; but, notwithstand- ing that, he respectfully submitted a fervent hope that the Government would not treat lightly the suggestion which was placed before them in the Motion of his hon. Friend the Member for Dublin (Dr. Lyons). The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, in the able speech which he addressed to the House that evening, with the assistance of information at his command which every Government possessed, and which information was denied to private Members, of course laid a statement before the House as to the condition of Ireland, which, however it might be treated by hon. Members on different sides of the House, must be acknowledged by every person to be sad in the extreme. The least unpleasant portion of that speech, if he understood the right hon. Gentleman correctly, was, that the operations of the measure of coercion would only be required in certain proscribed districts; and it was pleasant to him to hope strongly that the county which he had the honour to represent would not come within the scope of the proscribed districts. When crimes were committed, whether in Ireland, whether in England, whether in the Transvaal, or anywhere else, if they could be proved to have been committed, it was the first and primary duty of the Government to put them down. If the landlords of Ireland were only just and right, the Ulster farmers, whom he had the honour to represent, would be, as in times past, the very first men to come forward and say, "Help us to put all lawlessness down." But unless remedial measures in some way or other went along with the coercive measures, the Ulster tenant farmers would look upon the present action of the Government very gravely. He was quite sure now that there was not a man in that House who viewed the proposed Bill with greater detestation than the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland; and yet, notwithstanding that, he ventured to tell him that the Irish would simply regard such a Bill as the present, unless accompanied with remedial measures, as simply an engine for the collection of rents—an engine, indeed, for the collection of unfair rents. If it were an engine for the collection of fair rent, such fair rent as he trusted the new Bill would fix, he would look upon that, together with the people of Ireland, with pleasure. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of 220,000 Protestant farmers who signed the Memorial which he and several hon. Members presented to the Chief Secretary the other night. He should very much like to hear some words on the part of the Government, so that his constituents should have some assurance before he responded to the request of the Whip to go into the Lobby to vote for a Government Coercion Bill. It might be said, and it was an argument which had been addressed to him, that landlords had no intention of making use of the power under this Coercion Bill, if passed, in carrying out evictions, and that evictions would continue to be less frequent until the Land Bill was passed. He sincerely hoped that it might be so, and he believed that in the majority of cases it would be so; but, at the same time, between the passing of the Coercion Bill and the passing of the Land Bill there would remain an interval of time which would give the revengeful or the greedy landlords power to enforce unfair rents, which, with the promised Land Bill so near, it would be a pity that Parliament should permit. Lord Cranbrook made a speech at Lincoln on Saturday, in which he said the idea of the Land League was, "We will bind the strong man and then we will take his goods; "but his opinion was that the strong man would bind them. Now, that was just the fear of the tenant farmers in Ireland. If this Coercion Bill were passed, they would think the strong man was once more coming to bind them. They would not understand the Land Bill," so near in promise," if he might quote Scripture, as well as the noble Lord. They would think Satan had been bound, and was now loosed for a season. That would be their way of looking at it. He was not insensible to the position of landlords at the present time. It was very serious. He knew many gentlemen, and ladies, too, with moderate incomes of £300 or £500 a-year, who were, in consequence of not receiving their rents, placed in positions of extreme and deplorable difficulty. But, at the same time, persons in their position could make provision for a few months at least. They could by some means exist and avoid bankruptcy; but with the tenant farmers, impoverished by unfair rents in times past, it would be a very different thing. Shipwreck was at all times a most harrowing thing, but never more so than when the mariner was in sight of port. It must have been a slip of the tongue when an hon. Member said there was no hand held out to help the tenant farmer. There was a hand held out to him, a firm, strong hand, that of the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government; but it would be a pity if one family who would not be evicted under the new Land Bill should be evicted now before that Bill was passed. It would be as if the good ship, after weathering many storms, had foundered on entering harbour. Not only for the sake of the tenant farmers in Ireland, but for the sake of their own good name and fame, he would implore Her Majesty's Government to give full consideration to the proposal of the hon. Member for Dublin.

said, he thought that the course taken by the hon. Member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy) needed no excuse or apology. No measure had ever been before the House which, they were bound to consider with greater care and deliberation. But although he (Mr. Davey) felt the greatest possible distaste for measures of coercion, nevertheless he felt himself obliged on the present occasion to support the proposal of the Government. The objection to exceptional legislation, applicable only to a part of the United Kingdom, lay on the surface. It was a reproach to the ordinary law that our rights and liberties, of which we were so justly proud, should be suspended whenever the vessel of the State got out of smooth waters. Such legislation was demoralizing to those upon whom it was exercised, and demoralizing to those who were charged with the execution of it. To the former it was demoralizing, because it taught them that under the ordinary law they might exercise a license which the ordinary law ought to be, and he believed was, sufficient to restrain. It was demoralizing to those whose duty it was to execute the law, because it taught them whenever they were in a difficulty to cry out for exceptional legislation, instead of making the best use of those instruments which the ordinary law placed in their hands. He thought there was also another objection to exceptional legislation of this kind, because experience showed that if you once adopted legislation of this kind in Ireland it was extremely difficult to carry on the government of that country without it. Were it not for the action and the attitude of the Land League in Ireland, were it not for what had been said and done in and out of the House since the commencenent of the Session, he should feel much greater hesitation about this legislation than he did. The question, however, was, Had the Chief Secretary for Ireland made out a case for the Bill which he asked leave to introduce? He thought the right hon. Gentleman had. He did not say that there might not be exaggeration; but he thought the right hon. Gentleman had made out this, that there was an organization in Ireland which set itself up against and above the ordinary law, and which the ordinary laws were unable to reach—firstly, because you could not get witnesses to give evidence; and, secondly, because you could not get juries to convict. That being so, we had this further circumstance, that this state of things was the result of a league, a formidable and remarkable organization—an organization of the most widespread character, and directed by men of determination and ability. The impression left upon his mind by what he had read and what he had heard in and out of that House was, that the ultimate object of the leaders of that organization was not to reform the Land Laws, but to repeal in some form the Union. That being so, should they play into the hands of the leaders of the Land League? He answered, No. He preferred to place his confidence in a Minister; and he asked Members on the Liberal side of the House to place their confidence in a Minister whom they had helped to place in power—who, as far as he knew, had done nothing to forfeit their confidence. He believed that the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government felt the objection to legislation of this kind quite as strongly as any Member on that side of the House. He thought they might trust that the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government and the Chief Secretary for Ireland would exercise with judgment, discretion, and moderation, the large powers which they asked for. But he must confess he should have been glad if the Government had been able to give the House some notion of the re- forms which they intended to propose in the Land Laws of Ireland. He did not intend to separate himself from them on this occasion, because they had thought the arguments against taking that course more powerful than those in favour of it. He had confidence that the Government did intend to bring in a measure which would hold out some promise of a permanent settlement of the Land Question in Ireland. When the House met this Session there was a strong desire, at least, among Members sitting on his side, generally to support the Government in any measure it might bring forward, however drastic in character, which held out the prospect of being a permanent settlement of the Irish Land Question. What they wanted was a permanent settlement of that question. They were fully sensible that a measure such as they were now discussing would not constitute a remedy, and that the strength of agitation, by which alone it lived, was the existence of that grievance which required remedying by legislation. But he did not feel that they were called upon to postpone a measure such as the Chief Secretary now proposed, because those remedial measures could not be at once introduced. He was bound, however, to say that he only voted for those coercive measures because he believed that remedial measures were to be brought in. In conclusion, he pointed out to hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway opposite that he could quite conceive that a feeling of exasperation might be excited on his side of the House which might render it impossible for the Government to pass those remedial measures to which they looked forward with hope. He did not wish to impute motives to hon. Members; but he should like to feel more confidence than he did feel that it was the aim and the policy of hon. Gentlemen in the quarter of the House to which he had referred that the Government should be able to pass those measures.

It is not my intention, Sir, to trespass at any length on the time of the House; but I think that, under the circumstances of the very remarkable proposal now made by the Government, it is but due to them, as well as due to the House that I should say a very few words with regard to the views which we who sit in this part of the House take of the proposal which has been brought before us of course, when any Government comes forward with so strong a proposition as that of suspending a portion of the law which is justly regarded as the charter of the liberties of the subject, it is the duty of all independent Members of Parliament to watch very carefully and to criticize very narrowly the ground which may be laid for asking for such legislation. We know, unfortunately, that demands have, from time to time, had to be made by successive Governments for exceptional powers of this description, and we are perfectly prepared, on all occasions when the Executive Government, on its own responsibility, comes forward and states to Parliament that it is necessary to ask for such exceptional powers, to examine the claim thus made, and to deal with it in such a manner as the circumstances may seem to require. I do not intend to follow the Chief Secretary for Ireland in the speech which he addressed to us early in the evening. I only wish to say that, so far as I myself and others near me are concerned, we listened to that speech with very great interest, and with very great sympathy with the right hon. Gentleman in many parts of it; and we could not but feel that although, if we were disposed to be critical, we might regret that earlier steps had not been taken on this matter, still that it would be ungenerous and unwise at this moment to be going back on questions of that sort. We would rather consider the case as it has been laid before us to-night, and the action which the House of Commons is now recommended to take. Well, Sir, I feel not the slightest hesitation in expressing my own opinion that the case laid before us by the right hon. Gentleman was only sadly too strong and more than sufficient to prove the necessity of the demand which he made. And I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that, to the best of my belief, he will receive from those who sit on this side of the House all proper support in the progress of the measure. But, Sir, we are called upon, by the Amendment which has been laid before us, and we are challenged by the speech of the hon. and learned Gentleman who has just sat down, to say that at the same time, or before this exceptional legislation is called for, the Government ought to place before us and to make some proposals with regard to what are called remedial measures of Land Reform. Now, on that point I am as ready a any man in the House to say that I am prepared to consider, and consider with perfect candour, any proposals which may be made to us for legislation on the Land Laws of Ireland, either of the character which we have heard mentioned in various discussions, or of such other character as the Government on its responsibility may recommend to us. We are most anxious that the Land Laws of that country should be of such a nature as really to suit the necessities of the people, and to provide, as far as possible, for the proper cultivation of the soil, and for the maintenance of a happy and contented population upon it. I will say, in passing, that I do not believe these ends are to be obtained by the violation of sound principles. I believe, on the contrary, that if you really are aiming at the permanent settlement of that question, as the hon. and learned Gentleman who spoke last says he desires to do, you can have no permanent settlement of it that is not founded on true principles. And it would be dangerous, if there were no other objections to such a course, to have proposals of Land Reform preceding those for bringing about the peace and quiet of the country, because you would be likely to make those proposals, not with reference to their intrinsic soundness and fairness, but with a view of disarming the promoters of lawlessness and of disorder. Having said so much, I desire to express my deep conviction that the Government are taking the right course in first of all establishing law and order. Until you have established law and order, you cannot consider these other questions. And, painful as it must be to us all, painful as it must be, not only to the Government to introduce, but painful to every Member of the House to support, a measure of the character which we have had described to us, I say, without fear or hesitation, that I believe it to be the duty of Parliament, and that it is the kindest act which we can do towards the people of Ireland themselves, that we should firmly, and without hesitation, support the proposal which has now been laid before us. I will not attempt to weaken the statement made by the right hon. Gentleman by adding anything else to it. I know perfectly well it would be in the power of myself and of scores of other Members to add case after case, and proof after proof, if necessary, to those which the right hon. Gentleman has put before us. It is not that the right hon. Gentleman has overstated his case. I believe firmly that that case has been stated with great moderation and great temperance, and, even so stated, it appears to me to afford ample foundation for the measure proposed.

regretted that the right hon. Gentleman the First Lord of the Treasury had declined to give the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) any information as to the nature of the provisions of the intended measure of Land Reform, and had stated that the Government felt itself bound in the first instance to proceed with coercive legislation. He by no means underrated the difficulties with which the Government had to contend, nor was he prepared to dispute that they were adopting a wise course in proposing measures for the restoration of law and order in Ireland. They had made out a strong case for coercion, and they possessed sources of information which were not open to a private Member. At the same time, he would have felt far more satisfaction in voting for the Government measures if they had thought it right to indicate in some degree the course which they intended to adopt on the Land Question. There was a firm conviction in the minds not only of Irish but of English and Scotch Members, that any attempt to deal with the Land Question by merely extending the principles of the Land Act of 1870, would fail as a remedy for the disturbed state of Ireland. He was not prepared to say that the Government were not right in coming to the House to ask for additional powers; but, while he said that, and while he thought they were justified, to use the words of Black-stone, in asking the "nation to part with its liberty for a while, in order to preserve it for ever," they ought also to give some indication of the remedy they intended to propose. The argument of the Government appeared to be this—"We must have this coercion; the law requires to be vindicated; the local committees which usurp the Queen's authority and supremacy in Ireland must be put down." They said—"You know our intentions; entrust us with these powers first." Well, a cer- tain place was said to be paved with good intentions. They were asked to have faith in Her Majesty's Government, and to have hope in them—to follow the leading of hon. Members who sat on the Treasury Benches, and go blindfold in any direction they might advise. He confessed that, for his own part, he felt inclined to draw down the bandage from his eyes and to look a little forward. The suggestion contained in the Amendment which he (Mr. Litton) had placed on the Paper, but which unfortunately he was, by the Rules of the House, unable to move, was a suggestion which, if it could be adopted, would, he thought, reconcile in a large measure numbers of people, not merely in Ireland, but many Liberal Members who sat near him, to the proposal of Her Majesty's Government. And why? Because they would have recognised that a just and wise principle was adopted for tiding over the difficulties and distress which would arise in the period that must intervene before the views of the Government were formulated and placed before the House. The hon. Member for Northampton (Mr. Bradlaugh) said he did not ask the Government for justice, but for generosity. He (Mr. Litton) reversed that sentiment. He did not ask them for generosity, but for justice; and he asked it as an encouragement to the tenants of Ireland who had kept within the law, as an encouragement to the honest man to continue to walk within the path of honesty, and as an encouragement to the loyal man to continue a law-abiding man, and to respect and regard the law. But the condition of things in Ireland was such that, looking forward to the interval that would have to elapse before a Land Bill could be satisfactorily passed through this and the other House of Parliament, they would have a period of suspense, in which a fear of injustice and of wrong might tempt persons to transgress the law. It was the duty of the House to help the Irish people forward in observance of law, rather than to punish them for breaking the law. No doubt, it was the duty of Her Majesty's Government to enforce the law; but it was a far higher and more noble duty to prevent the law from being broken during the interval that must elapse before the Government Bill could be passed. If the object of the Govern- ment was to confer certain rights and privileges upon the Irish tenants, and to secure such rights and privileges by a Land Act, why, in the name of justice, were certain of them to be deprived of these benefits in the interval which must elapse before a Land Act conferred those rights and while the Government were passing coercive measures? He did not believe that the landlords of Ireland deserved the harsh language which had been applied to them. He believed they had shown great indulgence to their tenantry; that they had laboured under pressure, and been forced to take measures they were unwilling to take; that they had claims on them which they felt themselves called upon to discharge; and that they were incapable, as a class, of taking advantage of the period that would elapse before the Land Act could be passed for evicting their tenants. But, while he believed that to be true of the general class of landlords in Ireland, he was far from saying that there were not landlords in Ireland who would readily take advantage of the position, and feel themselves justified in trimming their sails and preparing for the storm which they foresaw was to follow. Such landlords would willingly take advantage of their present rights in order to deprive their tenantry of their prospective rights. He, therefore, respectfully asked Her Majesty's Government if it was too late to insert a short clause in the Bill, by which that protection would be given to the tenant farmers which was proposed to be given by the Act of last year? It was with that object that he had placed his Amendment upon the Paper. No doubt, it would be said that the circumstances of Ireland last year were exceptional. There had since been an abundant harvest—better than had been known for many years—but there still existed in some districts considerable distress; and Her Majesty's Government would have performed an act, not merely of grace, but of justice, if they had adopted the principle they carried successfully through the House of Commons in the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, and which, for a second time, they endorsed by allowing the Bill of the hon. Member for Galway (Major Nolan), which had the same object, to be read a second time. He appealed to the Government to adopt the principle of his Amendment. He could not say that he entertained any hope of his appeal being successful; but, on behalf of those who might be deprived of their rights within the next few months, he felt, seeing that the Bill was introduced as a Bill for the protection of persons and property, that some protection might be afforded to the persons and property of the large class of tenant farmers who would come under the operation of the Act, and who might be cruelly oppressed by the enforcement of the legal rights of a harsh and tyrannical landlord. What was wanted was a provision similar to that which was contained in the Compensation for Disturbance Bill of last year; and he regretted that Her Majesty's Government had not seen their way to the adoption of such a provision, which would simply cover the period which must necessarily elapse before a satisfactory, wise, and just Land Act was passed. Such a provision would, he believed, lead the people of Ireland to recognize that their best interests were bound up with the welfare of the United Kingdom.

said, the hon. Member who had just addressed the House reminded the Government that there was such a thing as the protection of a tenant's life and property in Ireland. The present Bill was not to protect the landlord's property, but to protect the existing licence of the landlords to seize the property of the tenants of Ireland. That was exactly the main object and purpose of the Bill of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary. He had listened, with a thorough apprehension of his position to the speech of the Leader of the Opposition (Sir Stafford Northcote), and a thorough approval of the manner in which, from the right hon. Gentleman's point of view, he would discharge the functions of that position. Unlike the action of Her Majesty's Government, the action of the Conservative Opposition was perfectly consistent; and they only did their duty to their Party in maintaining their consistency on the present occasion. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Conservative Opposition stated that he would support the Liberal Administration in hurrying a Coercion Bill through the House, in order to enable the landlords to execute their legal rights without further delay, and that when the remedial measures of the Government were introduced he would be prepared to consider them. He had no doubt that the supporters of the right hon. Gentleman, and his political co-religionists in "another place," would keep on considering the remedial measures of Her. Majesty's Government, while the Irish landlords were robbing their tenants of their rights and property from one end of the Kingdom to another. When they compared the consistency of the Conservative Party with the action of Her Majesty's Government—when they compared the bearing and policy of the Conservative Party, in Office and out of Office, with the conduct and bearing of the Liberal Party in Office and out of Office, he certainly thought there were few examples of political misconduct which could be compared with that of the present holders of the Treasury Bench in depriving the rightful owners of their right to sit upon it. According to all the principles of political honesty, the Government of Lord Beaconsfield ought to be sitting on that Bench that night. Perhaps it might be some consolation to Her Majesty's Government, under the scathing sympathy of the Leaders of the Opposition, to find that they had secured the warm support of the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. H. Davey). He (Mr. O'Donnell) congratulated Her Majesty's Government on the phenomenon of seeing, what was exceedingly rare to find, a Liberal lawyer expressing confidence in the head of a Liberal Administration. Looking at the whole programme of the Administration in relation to Ireland, it seemed that Her Majesty's Government had been reading in the police intelligence the details of some horrible incidents. The Government were in the position of a person importuned for assistance by some unfortunate mendicant, and their course of action might be described by the phrase "Give her a kick and throw her a sixpence." The Chief Secretary volunteered to give the kick to the poor mendicant, and the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government was reported as promising to throw her a sixpence on some future occasion, although, probably, after all he would only throw her a halfpenny. He did not wish to speak too strongly in respect to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his political performances. He was aware of the position in which the right hon. Gentleman was placed; that, notwithstanding all his airs of innocence, he was but the echo of Dublin Castle speaking as the trumpet of officialism in Ireland. But while he was anxious to speak as gently as possible of so frail and feeble an administrative official, as everybody who had watched the career of the right hon. Gentleman knew him to be—[ Cries of "No!"] He admitted that the right hon. Gentleman might have a certain amount of ability in steering with the current, and that he was endeavouring to steer with the current on the present occasion; but he was bound to say, from all he had been able to gather from his Colleagues in the representation of Ireland—for, unfortunately or fortunately, he had been unable to listen himself to the charges of the right hon. Gentleman against Ireland—from all he heard it was the unanimous opinion of the Irish Members that the innocence of the right hon. Gentleman had been imposed upon in order to make him the vehicle of publishing to Europe as foul a catalogue of libels as were ever published by any English Minister even against the character of the Irish people. Last year the Government admitted the necessity of staying the hand of the evicting landlord. They were fully aware that at present the necessity for such a step was far greater. Why had they changed their attitude and policy of last year? The only reason was that a Liberal Ministry were always changing their opinions, and were constantly repudiating to-morrow what they did to-day. Her Majesty's Government proposed to bring in a series of coercive measures for Ireland. One set was aimed at agrarian crimes, and another set was aimed at political crimes. Her Majesty's Government, through the mouth of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland, professed to apprehend an outbreak of Fenianism or an armed rebellion in Ireland. He concurred with the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) that the suggestion of an insurrection was an afterthought of Dublin officialism to justify the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and quietly insinuated into the ear of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland in the hope and expectation that it would fill up the many gaping chasms in the case of the right hon. Gentleman. He assured the House that he (Mr. O'Donnell), and many of his Friends, were loyal Constitutionalists, even although they had no love for the Act of Union. But although he was a Constitutionalist, he confessed that among his most cherished acquaintances, among the most sincere and respected of his friends, were a number of Irish Nationalists, who did not conceal from anyone their desire to separate Ireland completely from Great Britain under an independent National Government. Hon. Members on that side of the House would bear him out as to the intenseness of this conviction among the Irish Party; but they were also aware that it was a stupid and ridiculous libel on the common sense of these men to suggest that they desired an insurrection against the authority of the British Government at the present time. There was no more approach towards an insurrection in Ireland against England in the present day than there was five years ago. If the Government were going to embark in a serious Continental war on behalf of the Greeks or of the Montenegrin nose-slicers, while they had no compassion for cattle mutilators in Ireland—if they were about to defy the world in arms on behalf of some Homeric crotchet or other, then it was quite possible that they might be on the brink of a Fenian insurrection; and that measures for bringing about an insurrection in Ireland would immediately be taken. But that was no more the case to-day than it was five years ago; than must continue to be likely so long as nothing had been done to remedy the just demands of the Irish nationality. As he had said, it would be very different if Her Majesty's Government were about to engage in foreign complications, which would bring against England the enmity of any Power of the first magnitude; but no danger of that kind need be apprehended while England remained at peace. As it was, the ridiculous information which the Chief Secretary for Ireland had obtained from some policeman X, that there was going to be an insurrection in Ireland, upon which he based his request to Parliament to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, was as false and unfounded as the story of the Cock Lane Ghost. They were told, however, that they were to have a special application of despotism against the commission of agrarian crimes, as distinguished from political crimes in Ireland. He wished to remind the House that under the political crimes that were to be dealt with by the general powers to be conferred on the Lord Lieutenant were included not only treason and felony, but sedition. Now, Her Majesty's Government, through legal officers quite worthy of them, had been endeavouring to persuade a Dublin Jury, for a considerable time past, that the stirring up of class against class was seditious, so that men might be thrown into prison for sedition, when, in reality, all the offence they had committed had been to hold up to the scorn of a public meeting some rascally evictor. This was, however, really an afterthought; the real object of suspending Constitutional liberty in Ireland being to allow the Government, under the head of political offences, to punish men who had been guilty of nothing more than defending the agrarian rights of the Irish tenantry. He now came to the question of the coercive measures to be directed against agrarian crimes. He believed, in his conscience, that by far the greatest part of the indignation vented by landlord sympathizers against the present condition of Ireland was not vented against these crimes, but against the uncriminal, but powerful organization of the Land League. What they would like, above all things, was, that there should be a terrible outbreak of agrarian crime so as to give the Government more ground than they had at present for trampling on the liberties of the Irish people. He was sorry to hear from the Liberal Benches that a number of hon. Gentlemen on that side of the House supported the Government because they thought that peaceable action of the Land League was the real object of the coercive measures of the Government! It was said that the Land League was supreme over the ordinary law in Ireland. He was very happy to see that it was supreme over the ordinary law in Ireland. The Liberal Party, in years passed by, were happy to see the Government of the day brought to their knees by the Corn Law League. Her Majesty's Ministers did not dare to bring in a coercive measure against England in consequence of the action of the Corn Law League. What did the Government believe would be the necessary action of coercive legislation in regard to agrarian offences? It was all very well to say that the area exposed to the action of the powers of the Lord Lieutenant was to be strictly limited by the Lord Lieutenant's good pleasure. Was it not notorious that the figure of speech which attributed to the Crown of Great Britain the government of this country was fifty thousand times more a fiction when it attributed to the Lord Lieutenant the government of Ireland? The Lord Lieutenant was a most insignificant person. He (Mr. O'Donnell) had even forgotten his name. [An hon. MEMBER: Earl Cowper.] Whether it was Earl Cowper, or Lord Melbourne, or the Earl of Beaconsfield, or my Lord Tom Noddy, was a matter of very little consequence, as the Lord Lieutenant had nothing whatever to do with the government of Ireland. He always went to some understrapper for information, and in that way the information reached the Chief Secretary, who dutifully expounded it to the horrified Benches of the Liberal Party. The Lord Lieutenant would proclaim precisely such districts as he was told to proclaim by Under Secretary Burke and the Commander of the Irish Constabulary, duly supplemented by the Reports of the local magistrates, who were all of them landlords. The Liberal Members were sympathetic, and showed their great respect for the reserve which the Chief Secretary of the Lord Lieutenant was professedly obliged to maintain on the matter. The Liberal Party affected to feel that it would be to expose myriads of innocent persons to the execution of the Land League decrees if the Chief Secretary for Ireland breathed a syllable that would tend to establish their identity. That was the alleged reason for the reticence of the right hon. Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman could not mention the names of ten magistrates in any part of Ireland on whose authority the liberty of tens of thousands of the people of Ireland were to be taken away without mentioning the names of half-a-dozen, at least, who were robbers of the property of the tenants, notorious scoundrels who, in any land in which justice was administered, would be at the hulks or in the penitentiary. There were still living among the magistrates of Ireland hun- dreds of men whose souls were heavy with the deeds of plunder and death they had done in the past to Ireland, and who were not now repentant of the work they had done. He could not draw any distinction between the man who committed a murder openly and directly and the man who did an act which he knew would surely lead to death. In numberless acts the magistrates of Ireland did acts which condemned to death the most helpless and frail of the Irish people. Yet these were the men who were to proclaim Ireland, and to work the good pleasure of the Lord Lieutenant. These were the men who were to obtain the full powers of coercing Ireland. These were the men who were to execute the full powers of coercion which they themselves had demanded in their own selfish interests, being at once petitioners, judges, and executioners of their own case. Was any speech ever delivered by a member of a disloyal association in Ireland so pregnant with incitements to disloyalty as the speech of the right hon. Gentleman who represented Her Majesty's Government in Ireland. Even the Liberal Members for Ulster—and it was evident how bitter it went against their very souls to embarrass a Liberal Administration—even they had, with unanimous voice, told the Government there was imminent danger that during the interval between the passing of the Coercion Act and the passing of a Land Act, which the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Conservative Opposition, and all his Colleagues here and in "another place," were to consider sufficiently long—during that interval there was most imminent danger that the landlord thieves of Ireland would seize their last chance of robbing their unprotected tenantry. Her Majesty's Government said they wished to put down outrages in Ireland. For the sake of argument he admitted that they did. But he found that, including threatening letters, a large number of which were written by magistrates and policemen, there had been only a couple of thousand alleged agrarian offences committed in Ireland from three or four cases of the gravest kind down to a couple of cases of sheep-shearing. Her Majesty's Government were aware that during the same period 10,000 persons were evicted under a law which was unrighteous during the same period in Ireland. In 5,000 cases the tenantry had been turned out of their homes, among them being cases of women and children, and Her Majesty's Government—this great Liberal Government, the knights-errant of Europe—had not a word to say as to the necessity of putting a stop to these outrages, or to bring the criminals who committed them to justice. The policy of Her Majesty's Government might, to some Liberals, seem to be a policy of remedy, if it was carried out according to its present promise. It was, however, simply a policy to empower the landlords to drive their tenants to "Hell or Con-naught," while the Land Bill was being debated and thrown out in "another place." He had watched over the career of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland during the last two months with paternal interest. It so happened that last year, confident in the good intentions of the right hon. Gentleman, although he knew the weakness of the character of the right hon. Gentleman, he went in opposition to some of his dearest and most cherished Colleagues, and insisted on giving the utmost possible benefit of a doubt to a Liberal Administration; but before the Session closed he had foretold the future and mapped out the career of the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister. On the 24th of August he told the right hon. Gentleman what he might do and what he could not do. At that time, after all the failures and protestations about the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister seemed to have forgotten Ireland when he was going about Turk hunting and Albanian hunting in the East; and he (Mr. O'Donnell) told the Chief Secretary what the necessary consequence of his desertion by his powerful Chief would be. He said—

"You yourselves have admitted the actual necessity of checking eviction, and now that your only measure for checking eviction has been cast out in 'another place,' you propose, after having said that we were within measureable distance of civil war, that the approaching winter will be a terrible trial and temptation to the Irish tenantry exposed to wholesale robbery—you propose to drop all further consideration of the Irish case until next Session, while you go away to look after the cession of Dulcigno and other matters more near to your philanthropic heart."

He then added—

"Here is the necessary result of your abandonment by your Chief. The situation in Ireland will still grow worse, and in the absence of remedial measures discontent will arise in Ireland, irritation will arise in England, and you will be compelled next Session to meet the Parliament of these Kingdoms with a mere Tory measure of coercion."

He said, on the 24th August last, to the right ton. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, that sooner than cling to a portfolio under such circumstances of political discredit it would be better for him a hundred times, if he had any hope, even in his own selfish interest, of maintaining a reputation for any kind of statesmanship, to say to his Colleagues in the Cabinet—"Give me instant means of supplying even a temporary remedy for the miseries of Ireland, or I surrender the responsibility of the position which you do not help me to maintain." He would not say the right hon. Gentleman slunk from, but shunned, that manly and honest course; but whether the course he had taken had been more manly and more honest it was for the country to judge. Even hon. Gentlemen of the Opposition, who overwhelmed him at that moment with their patronage and most contemptuous assistance, recognized at the end of last Session the hobble into which the right hon. Gentleman's desire of clinging to his portfolio was bringing him. At the end of last Session the right hon. Gentleman had in his right hand the fate of the Liberal Party. He could even have dictated terms to the despotic Member for Mid Lothian himself. But he preferred to let Ireland drift; to leave the protection of the Irish tenantry to the Land League, who had nobly done their work; to evade his own responsibilities, and to cry "Amen!" to the Græco-Oriental prayers of the Premier. And what was the consequence? There sat the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant a hopelessly discredited politician, for whom there was no future. There was not a Member in all the Liberal Party who would intrust him with a position of responsibility anywhere except in Ireland. If hon. Members were willing to try the experiment, he could say, on the part of the Irish nation, that they would be happy to make them a present of the right hon. Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman on the present occasion had pursued very much the same tactics of making things as comfortable as he could for himself as he had done before. Yet he would be just as unfortunate in his present attempt to evade responsibility. He had put his hand to the work of provocation to civil war in Ireland, to the provocation of insurrection, rebellion, and permanent disaffection on the part of her people. The right hon. Gentleman did not know it; he never knew anything in time. He did not know what he ought to have done last year, nor did he know what he ought to do at that moment. He had accepted the Tory programme which had been administered to him for weeks and months past by the officials at Dublin Castle, who had never concealed in Dublin society their hearty enjoyment of the amusement which the proceedings of the right hon. Gentleman afforded them; and after having accepted that programme of Dublin Toryism, what was to be his reward? His present Coercive Bill, as the hon. Member for Tipperary had predicted, would be a failure. He might have the courage to shun the demands of the Archbishop of Cashel, the Bishop of Waterford, and the Bishop of Meath, for an open and public investigation of the crimes alleged by the magistrates, who had sent up their trumped-up yarn defaming the people of Cavan. The right hon. Gentleman had been challenged by Dr. Conaty to a public investigation, who offered to bear half the expense if the result turned against himself, if he did not convict the landlord magistrates of Cavan of falsehood to their faces. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford—for they must begin to accustom him to the unofficial position to which he was destined—declined this offer. The Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant preferred to take the words of these landlord magistrates in their own interests, and proclaim the county of Cavan, rather than grant the public investigation. Would, he asked, any Member of the most powerful Cabinet that ever sat in England dare to pass coercive measures against an English county on the mere official testimony of magistrates, if a sworn investigation were first demanded by a respectable body of the inhabitants? When such investigation had taken place, and not until then, would coercive measures be passed against an English county. He had an account of the manner in which, on the representations of similar magistrates such regulations as were to carry out and initiate the proposed system in Ireland would act. The Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant proclaimed the county of Donegal on the representations of some of the worst landlords in Ireland; and when public meeting after public meeting, and indignation meeting after indignation meeting, had been held to demand a public investigation on sworn testimony, or a withdrawal of the proclamation, the Lord Lieutenant refused either the investigation or the withdrawal of the proclamation which placed the comfort and personal liberty of the people, in many cases, in the power of their worst oppressors. Did Her Majesty's Government imagine that these Coercion Bills would be successful against the Land League? In the first place, he had not been able to understand the precise reason why they objected to the Land League. Was it because it committed outrages? It was enough to say that the Government could not bring forward a single colourable instance in which outrage had been approved by any member of the Land League. It was well known that all its members were against outrages. Was the Government opposed to the open and lawful combination of the Irish tenantry, or did they accept the theory that British rule in Ireland would sooner be lost if, instead of conspiracies, there should exist open and lawful combination? In that case, let them look at the facts of the case, for they were attempting, as the English Government attempted in 1798, the hounding on of the people into the meshes of criminal conspiracy. There must be some vent for the feelings of the people either in combination or in secret conspiracy. Was it in these days of communication and publicity, and of freedom of so many kinds, that the Government could hope by any sort of coercion to put a stop to the Land League and convert it into a conspiracy? What had the Land League to do in order to be triumphant but to continue to impress upon the Irish tenantry the absolute necessity of combining against the taking of farms on which an unjust eviction had taken place, and for which an unjust rent was demanded? It was not necessary to hold public meetings in Ireland for this purpose. The work could be done here in England, where the heads of the Land League could consult. Scores of able men would be ready to conduct the necessary operations, give the necessary advice, and from English places of meeting, before Irish audiences, would send on the wings of the Press words of scorn and defiance for renegade Liberalism. He pleaded that evening on behalf of 40,000 peasant families that would be affected under the operation of these coercive laws. It was on behalf of hundreds and thousands of honest and innocent men in Ireland who, for having, perhaps, offended some local landlord, some "petty tyrant of their fields," some official understrapper, or some spiteful bum-bailiff, would be taken away from their families and cast into the good keeping of the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. Again, what was likely to be the abiding effect of these measures? Suppose the Government crammed the gaols with ten or twenty thousand suspects, arrested on the fiat of the local magistracy; suppose they kept them there for 18 months, during which their families were subjected to starvation. Would that conciliate the Irish people? Had Michael Davitt been conciliated by his being kept for so many years in prison along with the greatest scoundrels in England? No. The Government were sowing the dragon's teeth, which not, indeed, next week were going to spring up in the form of the imaginary insurrection of the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. But assuredly when one of those crises arrived, such as came upon England under the younger Pitt, the Government were preparing troubles for that day. Of course, their rising resources would probably allow them to dispense with Irish loyalty, for they could hire the Swazi, the Ghoorka, and all the blackguardism of three Continents; but he recommended the Government, at such a time, not to try an experiment with Irish valour or with Irish intelligence. He had always expressed his confidence that a system of free government for Ireland would be compatible with the interests both of that country and Great Britain.

I must point out that the hon. Member is now travelling out of Order.

was endeavouring to expose the want of proof in support of the policy of Her Majesty's Government. He had heard some expression of confidence from the Liberal Benches in the policy of the Government, but no proofs of its necessity; and he was about to say it would be better to avoid coercion than to introduce measures which would be fatal to the objects proposed by Government, and most dangerous to the permanent interests of the Empire. Her Majesty's Government had expressed their resolution to proceed with no remedial measures for Ireland until they had first safely placed the Irish tenantry under the heel of their landlords. The hon. Member drew attention to the pride and pleasure with which the right hon. Gentleman brought forward this programme, upon which he had consulted none of the Representatives of Ireland. The proposed legislation reminded him of another piece of deplorable legislation committed by the same Gentleman. He remembered when the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Mid Lothian brought in his University Education fiasco some years ago, when he was Leader of the Liberal Administration, in his opening speech he declared to the fervent, admiring Liberalism of that day—which did not save him, a few months afterwards, from electoral consequences—that that Bill had the inestimable advantage that he had not consulted the Leaders of the Irish people upon it. He had got it all out of his own head, and it had the fate of a Bill which a pretended Constitutional Minister ventured to bring in under such circumstances. They learnt a lesson of unconstitutionalism, if from anyone, from the right hon. Gentleman. He proposed to bring in his remedial legislation; but when the most respected and venerable of the Members for Ireland—when the venerable patriot the Member for Tipperary asked for a single indication of the nature of the all-important legislation to be applied to Ireland—the right hon. Gentleman, as proud as if he were doing some smatch work for Russia, replied that he had not to satisfy the Members for Ireland by giving any indication of the nature of the legislation which his high-mightiness proposed for Ireland. That was the language of a master of many Cossacks. Evil communica- tions corrupted good manners — and the communications which the right hon. Gentleman had been cultivating in his efforts to thwart Lord Beaconsfield might have generated an unexpected tendency towards the introduction of a Cossack policy. Her Majesty's Government, in refusing to consult the Irish Party, had ostentatiously insulted the Irish Representatives, the men who were responsible for the peace of Ireland, and who were entitled to be consulted on the wants of Ireland. The representation of Ireland in that House was thus openly treated as a sham, imposed upon the Irish people by England; and when the Prime Minister insulted the Representatives of Ireland by declining to consult them beforehand, or to inform them of the nature of the remedies he was about to apply to the grievances of their constituencies, he acted as a traitor to his Sovereign.

The hon. Member is now exceeding the licence of Parliamentary debate.

said, if the right hon. Gentleman deliberately refused—and gloried in the refusal—to inform the Representatives of Ireland of the nature of his proposals, then, in a crisis like the present, he was most false to his obligations to the three Kingdoms.

Instead of withdrawing the observation on which I commented, it seems to me that the hon. Member is repeating it. I call upon the hon. Member to withdraw the observation.

said, if the epithet "traitor" implied too strongly a personal statement—

Mr. Speaker, I rise to Order. You, Sir, have ruled that a certain expression should be withdrawn by the hon. Member, and I expect the House will require your ruling to be respected.

would withdraw the word "traitor;" but he said that the policy of the Prime Minister was incompatible with his duty to the three Kingdoms. He violated the first principles of Constitutionalism, and he justified the predictions of the gloomiest pessimist on the subject. He told the Irish Representatives that their representation was a sham, and that he had no intention of consulting them; that he would not consult them, and would place the Irish constituencies bound, fettered, and helpless at the feet of despotic coercion, and not give them the slightest glimpse of the remedial measures which were required for the Irish grievances. He might withdraw the word he had used with regard to Ireland; but if he used it with regard to similar conduct on the part of the Premier upon an English question, although he might be compelled to withdraw it, tens of thousands of Englishmen would say "Aye" to it. Let them try it; let them venture to bring in a measure of coercion for England, and boast that remedial measures required for the removal of some English grievance had been concocted without consultation with the English Representatives. Such a measure would not pass before the House had felt that the Minister introducing it was condemned by public opinion. The right hon. Gentleman had set the worst example to unconstitutionalists in Ireland—if there were such. The Chief Secretary for Ireland had endeavoured to justify the attitude of the Prime Minister by reference to anonymous reports of interested landlords; but that was mockery superadded to the insult which the conduct of the Premier had offered to the people of Ireland.

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

Debate adjourned till To-morrow.