asked the Postmaster General, Whether any disqualification exists to prevent sub-postmasters applying for vacancies in the Post Office, where the salary is over £120 a year, and the vacancy is advertised in the Post Office Circular?

Sir, in reply to my hon. Friend, I have to state that sub-postmasters are eligible for appointment to all postmaster ships in the gift of the Postmaster General. The reason why sub-postmasters are not more frequently appointed is that, whenever a postmaster-ship is vacant, there are always a great number of eligible candidates who devote their whole time to the service, and it is considered that they have a prior claim.

asked if he was to understand that there was no ob- jection to sub-postmasters making application for such vacancies?

said, they were invited to do so: The vacancy was advertised in the Post Office Circular, and sub-postmasters had a perfect right to make application, and they frequently did so.

asked the Postmaster General, Whether the carriage of the mail to Clonmel by the Southern Line, instead of round by Limerick Junction, would accelerate the mail service of Clonmel by one hour and a half; whether the stoppage of the mail train at Thurles would cause a delay in the Cork mails of more than five minutes; and, whether he will not cause the day mails to and from Clonmel to be carried by the Southern Line?

The question of accelerating the provincial mails in Ireland is at the present time engaging the attention of the Department; and I shall be very glad, if it is found practicable, to improve the mail service in the district referred to by the hon. Member.

asked whether there was any objection to stop the mail train at the junction, and throw out the mails for the towns south of that point?

said, that was one of the suggestions they were at present considering; but he feared that as there was no train between the towns to meet the mails, that would not be much improvement. But the whole subject would receive careful consideration.

asked the Secretary of State for War, Whether the Expeditionary Force, or any part of it, is to rendezvous at Limasol, and if Cyprus is to be used as a place of arms during the operations in the East?

The right hon. and gallant Baronet asks me a hypothetical Question—that is to say, to what use Cyprus will be devoted in the event of an Expeditionary Force going to the East? I must decline to violate two well-established rules, as I should do if I answered this Question. The one is not to answer any hypothetical Ques- tions, and the other not to give information as to military movements. Perhaps I may, at the same time, say that the words "place of arms," or place d' armes, have been so differently interpreted that, under any circumstances, I should hesitate to apply them to a particular station.

asked the Secretary of State for War, Whether the Military preparations recently ordered will cause an excess of expenditure beyond that contemplated in the Estimates already presented to Parliament; and, if so, whether, and when, it is intended to propose a Vote of Credit, or a Supplementary Estimate, to meet such excess?

Sir, in reply to the right hon. Gentleman, I have to state that the arrangements which it has been necessary to make in anticipation of preparing troops for active service have led me to vary somewhat the current programme, especially in regard to purchasing stores in anticipation of later requirements during the 3'ear. Should these arrangements not be followed by the troops being employed on active service, I do not at present anticipate any excess over the printed Estimates, as there will be, in that case, savings on certain Votes, especially on that for the Autumn Manœuvres, which have been abandoned. If I should be disappointed in this respect, and it should appear that any excess on the Estimates will result from the preparations, a Supplementary Vote will be proposed. Of course, in the event of active operations, it would be at once necessary to ask Parliament for a considerable Vote.

asked Mr. Attorney General, Whether, during the administration of the late Government, steps were taken in view of a criminal prosecution of the directors of the St. John del Rey Mining Company for the working of a large number of slaves in their mines, and evidence obtained for that purpose; and, whether the Law Officers of the Crown intend to proceed with the prosecution?

, in reply, said, he could not state what steps were taken by the late Government; but a case had been laid before the Solicitor General and himself by the Treasury, in order to determine whether 'a criminal prosecution should be instituted against the Directors of the Company. His learned Friend and himself had come to the conclusion that the conduct of the Directors was very reprehensible, that they had taken advantage of slave labour, and broken not only their moral obligation not to employ such labour, but an express agreement that the slaves should be set at liberty. But with respect to a criminal prosecution, great difficulties presented themselves. In the first place, the original purchase of slaves occurred 40 years ago, and many of the persons concerned in it were now dead. Secondly, the documents which would have to be put in evidence, in order to prove the guilt of those who had purchased the slaves and maintained them in a state of slavery, were not within the jurisdiction of our Courts, even if they were in existence at all. It was found impossible to take even the preliminary steps, and, therefore, they had advised that there was no chance of maintaining such a prosecution with success.

said, he thought there would be no difficulty in obtaining the necessary information. It was by no means unusual for British subjects in slave-owning countries to have slaves.

said, the question was one of the transfer and purchase of slaves. The prosecution would have been instituted if there had been any likelihood of its being successful.

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Whether the Irish Executive have resolved not to call into requisition the services of extra police in connection with the celebrations of the Orange anniversary to-morrow through the province of Ulster; whether circulars have been issued to the Orange brethren, instructing them to go armed, and whether the celebrations are so arranged in many cases as to direct the march of the Orange processionists through districts peopled by Roman Catholics; and, whether the Executive intend to take any special steps in view of such a prospect?

Sir, His Excellency has gone carefully through all the reports received from magistrates and police respecting the anniversary tomorrow, and he has directed a large number of police to be despatched to those districts in which disturbances are apprehended, and has also sent several Resident Magistrates to the said districts, as well as one to Belfast. Men are held in readiness to go to Belfast should they be demanded by the Resident Magistrate. In some cases, through the action of the magistrates, processions likely to lead to disturbance have been abandoned. An hon. Member has just placed in my hands a telegram from the Town Clerk of Belfast, in which he says that no orders or circulars such as are referred to in the Question have been issued. All is expected to pass off quietly. I hope the hon. Member will consider that assurance satisfactory.

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Whether the Irish Government intend to continue to use the Protection of Life and Property Act of last year after the Crimes Prevention Bill shall have been passed into Law?

The Protection of Person and Property Act continues in force until the 30th of September next. The Lord Lieutenant will continue to use it in every case where he deems it necessary to do so.

asked the President of the Board of Trade, When the Papers on the subject of the Scandinavian Emigrant Traffic and Lodging House Accommodation in Hull will be ready?

, in reply, said, the Papers in preparation about the Scandinavian emigrant traffic were ready and in print, but they had very little information in regard to the Hull lodging-houses. He would place himself in communication with the Local Government Board, and see if he could get any information.

asked whether the remainder of the Papers could not be laid on the Table?

said, he would consider that matter.

asked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, If the Government has received any report of the inquiry into the riot at Alexandria on June 11th?

Sir, Her Majesty's Government have received no Report from the Commission of Inquiry into the recent riots at Alexandria, and they are not aware that any such Report exists. I have, however, myself had a conversation with an English barrister who was a member of the Commission, and who has furnished the Foreign Office with notes which will form the basis for further inquiries.

Has the Government received any information that will enable it to make a demand for reparation?

Sir, the information in our possession is very far from complete. Telegrams have been addressed to various points by the Colonial Office, including Malta and Cyprus, for the collection of information from refugees from Egypt; but the information obtained is in too incomplete a form to enable me to say anything further. The matter will be submitted to the Law Officers on the receipt of details.

asked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, If there is any objection to laying further Papers relating to Egypt upon the Table at once, at all events down to the meeting of the Conference?

Sir, further Papers relating to Egypt, and bringing the Correspondence up to the meeting of the Conference, will be laid upon the Table as soon as possible.

On what day?

Probably on Thursday or Friday of next week.

When will the despatch relating to the conversation with M. Challemel-Lacour be laid on the Table?

I have asked my noble Friend the Foreign Secretary whether he wished it to be laid separately or not on the Table, and he said he did not wish it to be laid separately.

I beg to remind the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government that he promised that we should be able to have a discussion on the Egyptian Question about the middle of July. We shall require the Papers before that.

The Egyptian Papers are extremely bulky, and I do not think it would be possible to lay them on the Table before Thursday or Friday next week. We hope they will be distributed to the House on the Saturday following.

What is the proper place in the Papers for the despatch to which I refer?

I do not know the exact place, but Lord Granville does not desire any of these Papers to be laid on the Table separately.

The despatch to which I refer must have been written about the month of February. The Papers that are to be laid on the Table are subsequent to that date.

I understood my hon. Friend to refer to a despatch correcting the impression which had been formed of the conversation with M. Challemel-Lacour. I now see that he refers to the account of the conversation itself. That, of course, will have to be laid before Parliament separately.

asked the First Lord of the Treasury, Whether, having regard to the interpretation placed by himself on the fifty-fifth section of the twenty-first and twenty-second Victoria, chapter one hundred and six, on the 27th of May 1878, when he stated that the Law had been flatly, plainly, and egregiously broken by the Government, he intends to obtain the "previous" consent of Parliament before advising Her Majesty to employ her Indian forces in Egypt?

Sir, the contingency to which the hon. and learned Gentleman refers has not arrived. Her Majesty has not been advised to employ her Indian Forces in Egypt. If that contingency should arise, and if the conduct of the Government or my conduct should be in conflict with the opinion of which the hon. and learned Gentleman reminds me, I have no doubt that the hon. and learned Gentleman will be in his place to exercise his right.

asked if Her Majesty had been advised to get ready her Indian Forces in case of necessity?

asked the First Lord of the Treasury, If the Government are taking any, and, if so, what, steps to relieve the British subjects that have taken refuge in Malta and Cyprus, and if he is aware of the very superior facilities furnished by the Greek and Italian Governments for the removal of Greek and Italian subjects from Egypt to that furnished by the British Government to British subjects?

With respect, Sir, to the refugees in Malta, I gave an answer yesterday, and I do not think I have anything to add to that answer. With respect to the refugees in Cyprus, we have this information. About 2,500 have arrived, mainly natives of Cyprus, many of whom have friends in the island. The monasteries have been largely used for the purpose of housing them; and I believe their condition is pretty satisfactory. Cases of destitution have only quite occasionally been reported. With regard to the facilities furnished by the Greek and Italian Governments, I have seen the statements in the newspapers; but we have no information which would enable us to give an answer.

I wish to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty whether he has any information to give the House as to the progress of the bombardment reported to have taken place at Alexandria, and especially if he can state whether any of Her Majesty's ships have received any damage, and whether any casualties have taken place among the crews?

Sir, the Admiralty have received some telegrams in the course of this day. They came from Mr. Moore, secretary to the Admiral commanding-in-chief, who is on board the telegraph-ship Chiltern, lying off Alexandria. We are not aware whether the telegrams were prepared in communication with the Admiral, but we presume they were not. At 7 o'clock this morning this telegram was received—

"Alexandria, 7.10 a.m., July 11.—Tuesday, Seven, Morning. Ships have opened fire on the forts. Ships in following positions:—Alexandria, Sultan, Superb, under weigh on a NE by E line from 1,500 to 1,900 yards W½ N Eunostos Lighthouse. Inflexible in Central Pass 3,700 yards N by W of Mexs Fort. Teméraire in Central Pass, 3,500 NNW Mexs. Penelope, Invincible (nag), Monarch, 1,000 to 1,300 yards W by N Mexs."

I may here say that Mexs commands the exit and entrance to Alexandria Harbour. The telegram proceeds to say—

"Unarmoured ships under weigh, working guns to best advantage, annoying Mexs. Return fire from forts weak and ineffective, Hecla has arrived."

At 8 oclock this morning we received the following:—

"8.40 a.m.—Tuesday, eight, morning. Bombardment continues; heavy explosion in Fort Marsa-el-Kanat; return fire from forts slackening. French Squadron sailed last evening, leaving Bison and Hirondelle off the port."

At 11 a.m. we received this—

"Alexandria, July 11, 11 a.m.—Forts on isthmus comparatively silenced. Moncrieff near Lighthouse and one gun, Fort Ada replying about 10 rounds an hour. Alexandria, Sultan, and Superb at anchor returning fire. Unarmoured ships warmly engaged inside Fort Marabout. Egyptian practice apparently very indifferent."

That opinion, of course, must be taken as the opinion of the sender of the telegram. Then, at 1.30 p.m., we received this—

"1.30 p.m.—Magazine Fort Ada blown up."

We have no information as to the damage to the ships or as to casualties. That information will, no doubt, come in the course of time from the Admiral himself; but we presume that his secretary, who, as I have said, is on the telegraph-ship off Alexandria, will not be aware of any details that may occur among the ships of the Fleet.

With your permission, Sir, I beg to give Notice that I shall repeat the Question at 10 minutes to 7 o'clock this evening, in case there is any further information.

I beg to state that I have had placed in the Newspaper Boom a chart of Alexandria, showing the position of the different places mentioned in these telegrams.

I should like to ask the Prime Minister the following Question. He may be able to answer it now, but if not I shall put it on the Paper. I wish to ask whether there was not an understanding among the Powers represented at the Conference now sitting at Constantinople that no separate action should be taken by any one Power pending the deliberations of the Conference; whether the bombardment of Alexandria by our Fleet is not a violation of such understanding; and whether any communications have been addressed by the Representatives of the other Powers to the British authorities in regard to the bombardment?

Sir, there was a general understanding among the members of the Conference at Constantinople to the effect mentioned by my hon. Friend. But from that understanding was expressly, and at the time, excepted the class of cases under which this bombardment would fall. I, therefore, unhesitatingly say that there is no question in this measure of bombardment of any departure from that understanding. I am not aware of any representation having been made by any of the Powers to the effect described by hon. Friend.

Is the Conference still sitting?

Yes, Sir; I make no doubt of that. We are still receiving telegrams, although we have not received any for the last few hours.

The Conference adjourned for a day or two, in order to receive the replies of the Powers to a proposal that had been made.

I wish to ask—if the Question can be answered without prejudice to the Public Service—whether the right hon. Gentleman can corroborate the reports that we are making preparation in India for the despatch of troops?

I adhere to the general rule, and in conformity with universal practice, and without any discourtesy to the hon. Gentleman, I must reply that it would not be compatible with my public duty to answer the Question.

Until what time has the Conference been adjourned?

The Conference adjourned some days ago, until the Powers had replied to the proposition put before them. Affirmative replies have been received from, I think, almost all the Powers.

Has any communication or remonstrance been received by Her Majesty's Government from the Turkish Government as to the bombardment?

It would be better for Notice to be given of this Question. Several communications have passed in view of the probable bombardment; but those were previous to the actual opening of fire.

I beg to ask the Prime Minister whether there is any reservation in the understanding between the Powers at the Conference as to the landing of troops in Egypt?

The hon. Member had better give Notice of that Question.

About these Papers, Sir; the Prime Minister promised that we should have them by the first week in July. Could we, at all events, have the Instructions which were given to our Plenipotentiary at the Conference, so that we may know what ground we are standing upon?

I very much doubt whether it will be possible to give the later and more detailed Instructions to our Plenipotentiary while the Conference is sitting. They will not be, in fact, included in the Papers which I have promised. They are of a character which will render it impossible to lay them on the Table while the Conference is sitting.

The right hon. Gentleman opposite (Sir E. Assheton Cross) has alluded to a promise given by the Government at the beginning of this month—namely, that a discussion may be taken on the Egyptian matter. It appears that all parties are satisfied—at least the two Front Benches are satisfied—but there is a Party which is not satisfied. I want to know what opportunity there will be for discussing the Egyptian matter, and at what time the Government will see fit to allow the House to discuss it?

I beg to remind my hon. Friend of the only specific promise which it was my duty to give. It was that about the middle of July—in other words next week—Her Majesty's Government will think it their duty, even if not obliged by necessity, to submit the question of Supply. That is apart from any general discussion founded on any Motion expressing the opinion of a largo body in the House. As regards an opportunity of discussing that question, that answer is the answer I have already given.

How does the right hon. Gentleman expect that we can discuss the question before we have the Papers?

I have never given any pledge with regard to any Papers of a later date than the end of May, and the promise given by my hon. Friend the Under Secretary as regards new Papers is distinct and independent from that which I gave.

Is it not a fact that it was said there might be a discussion in the middle of July on the general Egyptian policy of the Government? If so, we shall require, before that, some time to read the Papers.

I have nothing to add, Sir, to what I have already stated. The Papers which I promised take us down to the end of May, and these Papers I expected to be in the hands of the House in the first week of July. I believe that they are now in the hands of Members. There can be a discussion upon them, and I said we should propose Supply about the time I have mentioned.

said, there was no question of principle between the noble Lord and the Government; but the Amendment seemed to go somewhat further than the statement made by his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for War, to which the noble Lord had referred. If the landlord required payment of the rent earlier, he had his usual powers, and could resort to the exercise of such powers. That was a matter altogether outside the Bill; but, as far as the proposals of the Bill were concerned, it was quite enough if the rent had been satisfied at the date when the matter came before the Court.

said, he did not see how it was possible for the Committee to adopt these vague and uncertain words. What did the words "customary date" mean? On some estates it might be customary to fix a date for the payment of rent, while on other estates it was not. According to the custom of some estates, there was a hanging time, leaving the rent due in November to stand over until the following May, while upon other estates there was no such hanging date, and it was required that the rent should be paid in November.

said, he did not think that the matter was clear or satisfactory as the clause now stood. Sub-section (a) was of immense importance, bearing in mind the statement made last night by the Secretary of State for War. That statement was perfectly clear and intelligible, and the object of the Amendment of his noble Friend (Lord George Hamilton) was to make Sub-section (a) what it should be, and complete in itself. The first condition was that the rent of the particular year should be satisfied either by a cash payment or an arrangement with the landlord, or in any other mode that was deemed satisfactory. His noble Friend, in order to make the matter complete in itself, and to make it clear that there should not be a hard-and-fast line, and that the rent should not be paid at the very hour it became due, proposed to put in the words actually used by the Secretary of State for War last night—namely,"at the customary date." But there was no magic in those words, which simply meant the time at which the rent was usually paid. His (Mr. Gibson's) point was that the sub-section should be made complete, and that it was not necessary to have any subsequent gloss upon it, which would be certainly left if it were retained in its present shape. As to Subsections 3 and 4, he confessed that, for the life of him, he could not understand them. He had read them carefully that morning in the light which the right hon. Gentleman had thrown upon them; but he had failed to reconcile the statements of the Government in regard to those sub-sections with the Bill itself. When they came to Sub-section 3 it would be found that it was a perfectly worthless and useless sub-section, except that its object was to readjust the sub-section the Committee were now engaged upon. It might be that, in 1881, the landlord might have accepted in full discharge 50 per cent of the arrears accrued in 1879; but that was a transaction of 1879, and not of 1881, and it would be so stated on the receipt given upon the understanding and arrangement come to between the parties. Therefore, such an acceptance ought not to be placed to the credit of the year 1881; and he wanted to know if the Government intended to apply this unnatural construction to the payment of arrears? His own opinion was that such a construction would be absurd, ridiculous, and grossly unjust; and he wanted a clear statement from the Government as to whether they contemplated any such possibility.

said, the question which had just been raised by the right hon. and learned Gentleman had nothing whatever to do with the Amendment of the noble Lord. The Amendment of the noble Lord raised a very small point in comparison with that raised by the right hon. Gentleman, and it was one upon which the Government had distinctly given their reasons for not accepting it. When they came to Subsection 3 the subject might be reopened.

said, he understood the Government to attach importance to the payment of rent in the year 1881, and his noble Friend's Amendment would carry out that object of the Government. Any person who had paid his rent in a good year like 1881, and had resisted the allurements of illegal organizations to keep it back, would be placed at a disadvantage by the Bill as it stood. In point of fact, those who had lent their aid to the discouragement of the schemes of the Land League would be deprived of all the benefit of the Act, and he gathered that it was the object of the Government to help those who had paid their rents and had resisted illegal organizations. If that really was the object of the Government, they ought to accept the Amendment.

said, there was nothing in the clause to preclude arrangements such as that suggested as between landlord and tenant, or to deprive a landlord of his ordinary remedy. There was no really fixed time for the payment of rents on Irish estates; but there was a certain lax practice prevailing in regard to the payment of rents. No hard-and-fast line was drawn; but if they were not paid at the particular time when they were considered to be due the landlord had his ordinary remedy.

said, the hon. Member for Monaghan (Mr. Givan) pointed out that the landlord would not be precluded from the employment of his ordinary remedy. Now, what did that mean? It meant that if a tenant did not pay the rent, he would receive notice to quit and be evicted. He thought it was the object of the Bill to stop evictions. Nevertheless, when he ventured to point out an unquestionable flaw in the 1st sub-section of the clause, and which he proposed to amend, the Government told him that it was a point of minor and secondary importance. He was aware that in the North of Ireland there was considerable anxiety as to the date of the payment of rent, but his object was to prevent unnecessarily harsh steps being taken, and to make it perfectly clear to the tenant what the date was at which he must comply with one of the preliminary conditions of this section. He had proposed an Amendment last night giving ample time for this purpose—namely, about 10 months. This should be quite long enough a period to enable the tenant to satisfy the rent of the preceding year; but the Amendment he had proposed was not accepted, and, acting on the suggestion of the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for War, he now proposed to insert the words, "at the customary date." If, in consequence of the Government declining to make the obligation of the tenant perfectly clear, they forced the Government to take proceedings against the tenant with the view of enforcing payment or evicting him, the Government alone would be responsible for it.

said, he had followed the observations of the noble Lord, and thought he understood his meaning; but the noble Lord had described as the object of the Government that which was not their object at all. The noble Lord said the object of the Bill was to prevent evictions. The object of the Bill was not to prevent all evictions, but to prevent evictions for the non-payment of arrears of rent. That was the sole point at issue, and if they travelled beyond that they would be at sea.

said, he would withdraw the Amendment.

proposed an Amendment to provide that the payment of arrears should be a bonâ fide payment. He said he should have been glad if he could have proposed an Amendment last evening, substituting the word "paid" for the word "satisfied." He had been struck on considering Sub-section (a) by the fact that the language of the Government uniformly throughout the Bill was that the payment was to be made by the tenant; and, if lie remembered rightly, when the right hon. Gentleman opposite introduced the Bill, the payment of a year's rent by the tenant was made a condition precedent to his accepting the benefits of the Bill, and was relied upon as affording an important security before any portion of the public funds were advanced. If that were so, it might have been expected that the language of the clause would run in this way, "that the rent payable in respect of the year has been paid;" but the word used was "satisfied," and not "paid." His noble Friend (Lord George Hamilton) had relied upon the use of the word "satisfied" by the Secretary of State for War in the discussion of last evening, and he had proposed to add to it the words, "at the customary date." When he looked at Sub-section 4, he found an interpretation there given of the word "satisfied." The sub-section said—

"A remission by the landlord of the whole, or any part of the rent, payable in respect of the year expiring as aforesaid shall be deemed to be a satisfaction of the amount of rent so remitted."

Therefore, it was hold out to the owners and occupiers of the land that they had only to agree between themselves that no rent should be asked for or paid in respect of the year so expiring, and thereupon they would be in a condition to apply to the Government for the payment of the year's rent out of the public funds. If all he had heard as to the impecunious condition of these tenants were true, it was only reasonable to suppose, as was stated in a letter to The Times of that morning, that they were no more capable of paying a year's rent than they were of paying off the National Debt. If that were so, what was the use of this issue of public funds, which could be of no advantage either to the tenant or the landlord? He must say it seemed to him not only to render possible a collusive arrangement between the owner and occupier of a small tenancy, but really to invite such collusion, with the view of securing the payment of the public money in discharge of the arrears. For his own part, he had relied very much on the idea that by the issue of public money for wiping out the arrears, advantage might be conferred upon the tenants, and he entirely agreed with the view expressed by the Prime Minister yesterday, when the right hon. Gentleman complained of the mischievous practice of adding up arrears against the tenant from year to year, the tenant being entirely unable to pay the money due for the current year's rent out of that year's profits and receipts. He was quite willing to consent to an Arrears Bill on the basis of getting rid of this objectionable practice, which was certainly not a practice adopted in England; but if the tenant were unable to pay any considerable portion of the year's rent, his business could not be considered a going concern, and it did not seem to him (Mr. Sclater-Booth) in any way expedient that the resources of the State should be ladled out for the support of such a person, or for the retention of his holding. He gathered from the speech which had been made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster), on a previous occasion, that this clause was to operate as a means of getting rid of hopeless arrears; but if it were really meant to relieve landlords by the use of public money, let them have it so stated, and they would know what they were about. He should object to anything of the sort, and he was curious to hear how the Government would justify the language of Subsection 4, which gave an interpretation of the word "satisfied." He now proposed to qualify that interpretation by adding the words,"bonâ fide payment." A bonâ fide payment was a difficult thing to define or describe; but the Commissioners, taking a common-sense view of the matter, would understand what was meant by a bonâ fide payment in respect of rent. The Commissioners would know directly whether it was merely an illusory payment, a nominal payment, or no payment at all, or whether it was a really bonâ fide payment.

said, the right hon. Gentleman himself had referred to Sub-section 4 of the Bill, by which it was intended to explain what would constitute satisfaction. Why, then, import the consideration of the matter into an earlier portion of the clause, seeing that it was adverted to in a later portion? The right hon. Gentleman would see that to enter upon the discussion now would only confuse and prolong the labours of the Committee. He would only say at the present moment that it was intended by the Government that the satisfaction should be a bonâ fide payment. He hoped the Amendment would not be pressed.

thought the right hon. Gentleman was scarcely correct in saying that the Amendment of his right hon. Friend (Mr. Sclater-Booth) ought to be deferred until the 4th sub-section. If his right hon. Friend proposed subsequently to amend the 4th sub-section, and deferred the present Amendment until that sub-section was reached, he might be met at once with the statement that the point had been already practically settled by the Committee in passing the words now under consideration. That would be the natural conclusion at which everyone would arrive. His right hon. Friend wished to prevent a collusion between the landlord and the tenant by which the whole or any part of the rent due would be forgiven in order to enable the parties to obtain the funds granted by the State. He was afraid that the mouth of his right hon. Friend might be stopped if he did not press the Amendment now. The matter was one of immense importance, at whatever time the Amendment might be taken, and he ventured to say that the present was the proper time. What his right hon. Friend drew the attention of the Committee to was the fact that collusive transactions might be entered into between the parties, and the payment of rent might not be really a bonâ fide payment, but a transaction altogether behind the back of the Commission and of the taxpayer, and altogether outside the scope of the Bill, and that by means of such devices improper demands might be made upon the public purse. Surely, that was an important matter which should not be passed over by the Committee, and he trusted that it would be fully discussed at whatever might be considered the proper time.

said, that all these Amendments had quite clearly one object, and that object was to defeat the intentions of the Bill. He should like to ask the two right hon. Gentlemen opposite who had taken part in the discussion, who was to be satisfied in this way? Was it not the man who ought to receive the money—namely, the landlord? Whether the landlord took only a proportion, or insisted upon his full right, was a matter which could not concern anybody who wished really to protect the tenant. He wished to know from the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Hants (Mr. Sclater-Booth) whether he had considered this point, that if he insisted upon the tenant having made what he called a bonâ fide payment, he meant that that payment should be a substantial sum, because, if so, it would amount to the penalty of eviction upon 100,000 or 150,000 persons within the next few months in the West of Ireland. Was the right hon. Gentleman prepared to encounter such a state of things? If he was so prepared, then he (Mr. Mitchell Henry) would say that the landlords and people who had to live in Ireland would not be able to live at peace with their neighbours. He therefore trusted that the Committee would not accept any of these Amendments, however simple they might appear at first sight, but that they would regard them as—what, in fact, they were—indirect attempts to defeat the Bill.

said, he would appeal to the right hon. Gentleman opposite (Mr. Sclater-Booth) to take the advice of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), who stated last night that the word "satisfied" was the correct word.

said, that what he had stated was that the word "paid" or the word "satisfied" would be correct; and, personally, he did not think it unreasonable to allow the landlord voluntarily to make his own arrangements. If the landlord, with his eyes open with respect to particular arrears, desired to make an arrangement with his tenant he would leave him perfectly free to do so.

said, he had listened attentively to the discussion, and after the explanation of the word "satisfied" given by the Prime Minister, he thought the proper Amendment would be to insert the words, "has or has not been Satisfied.

said, he had no wish to divide the Committee on the Amendment if there was a general desire that it should not be pressed; but he would give Notice of an Amendment on the subject later on. He objected to the practice of allowing Amendments to stand over until a further stage of the Bill. There was nothing in the Amendment which, in his opinion, would pre- vent the landlord from giving the tenant all or part of the rent; but what he contended was that transactions of a colourable nature ought not to be permitted for the purpose of obtaining from the Government a sum of money out of the public funds, and nothing had fallen from the Government to intimate that precautions would be taken to guard against such a proceeding.

Before I put the Question, I wish to say that I have listened attentively to the remarks of the hon. Member, in order to see if I understood the meaning of the Amendment. As I understand it—but I may be wrong—the hon. Member intends this as a Proviso to exclude the tenants of under £10 from the operation of Sub-section (a,) in the Proviso that they shall not be bound to pay a year's rent.

said, it was an alternative to the conditions contained in the clause. He proposed to exclude tenants of under £10 from the obligation of satisfying the rent before they could obtain the benefit of the provisions of the Bill.

Do I understand that it is a Proviso that a certain class of persons shall not be bound to pay rent. If that be so, I do not think that the Amendment would be in Order.

said, that that was not the object of the Amendment; but its purpose was to make one of the preliminary conditions of the application to the Commission proof that the holding was valued at not more than £10 a-year.

Then I do not think I can exclude it on the point of Order.

said, that, of course, he fully accepted the ruling of the Chair in regard to the formal character of the Amendment; but he had no doubt the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) would be prepared to hear him say that the Government could not accede to it, and on more grounds than one. In his opinion, the Amendment would give the Bill the appearance of having been framed, contrary to the intentions of the Government, in a spirit of hostility towards the landlords, whereas they had declared otherwise, although he could not say their declaration had had much effect on hon. Members on the other side of the House in regard to their reception of the Bill. They had endeavoured to found the Bill on principles of equity, and even of liberality, towards the landlords. [Cries of "Oh!"] He was sorry to hear that interruption; but he had arrived at the conclusion that there was no opinion, however innocent, that could be given by a Minister in his place, that was not liable to an interruption, such as, until within the last few years, was totally unknown in Parliament. He made that statement to the House for the information of those whom it might concern. The Government had endeavoured to balance together the various considerations, and to make the Bill operate with uniform fairness to all parties; but it was quite obvious, to take no other objection to it, that if indiscriminate indulgence were allowed to the tenants it would immensely increase the temptation which they had endeavoured to exclude as far as they possibly could—he did not say they had absolutely excluded it—namely, the temptation to the tenant to pretend inability to pay. For these reasons Her Majesty's Government could not accept the Amendment.

said, the Amendment he was about to move was introductory to his second Amendment on the next page of the Notice Paper, and the object of it was to eliminate from the Bill an element of injustice. The Prime Minister, on introducing the Bill to the House, had laid down the axiom that if the Bill was to be compulsory it must be just. That principle, he believed, would be at once accepted by every right-minded man. He was anxious to point out that the clause, as it stood without the Amendment which he proposed, would not carry out this principle. The Bill proposed to enforce the liquidation of arrears of the years 1878, 1879, and 1880. Of course, this was a very startling proposal, and the justification of that project lay in the exceptionally bad seasons and other circumstances connected with those three years. With regard to those particular arrears, it might be admitted that the argument was just; but he would point out that this justification would not extend to arrears antecedent to the year 1878, when there had been a series of good seasons. Now, unless the Bill was modified in the direction of his Amendment, a very great injustice would be done, and a large number of landlords, and especially to that class who were most deserving of consideration—namely, those who, in the midst of distress which existed in Ireland, on the appeal of the Government, had not pressed their claims upon the tenants, and increased the difficulty and embarrassment of the times. A certain number of landlords had responded to the appeal of the Government, and the consequence was that an amount of arrears antecedent to the period he had referred to remained unpaid. Now, he put it to the Committee whether, in consequence of those landlords having listened to the appeal of the Government, it was right that they should find the arrears in question entirely confiscated without any consideration whatever being shown them? He would for a moment stop to consider the ways in which many of those arrears had arisen. In some cases, the tenants would go to their landlords and say they had had to provide for the expense of emigration for some of the members of their family; another would say he had married off his daughters, and had to provide their portions; others had bought stocks, or had become security for their neighbours. It was upon grounds of this kind that the tenants applied to the landlords for further time for the payment of their rents. In consequence of these appeals, the landlord would not press for the rents, looking to the security of the tenant right. On almost every large estate in Ireland there was a certain amount of arrears antecedent to the years of distress. Well, when the years of distress came, those arrears were dealt with by landlords in different ways. There was the indulgent landlord, who refrained from pressing his claims, and there was the exacting landlord, who, even in the time of distress, showed no indulgence, and got his arrears paid by the tenants out of the money at the bank by the sale of stock or otherwise. Now, it was proposed by this Bill to give those landlords who so got their arrears an amount of compensation which, in their case, would be very fair. The Government offered them something like 5s. in the pound on the three years' arrears, which, no doubt, they might fairly accept. But his complaint was that the same terms were offered to the landlords to whom he had referred as having refrained from pressing their claims at the request of the Government. If no modification were made in the direction of his Amendment, it would be simply saying to these landlords—"You have been allowing your antecedent arrears to remain over on the faith of the tenant right; that tenant right was a security which we ourselves pointed out to you as giving an additional security for arrears; but we shall now strike down that security: we will sponge out the arrears and declare the tenant whitewashed." The arrears, in fact, would be confiscated. Now, he put it to the Committee whether this was in accordance with the principle that, if this measure were to be compulsory, it must also be just? He would now take two classes of tenants—the thrifty, industrious tenant and the careless and thriftless tenant. With regard to the industrious tenant, he would be placed in this position—that, although he had strained every nerve to keep his tenant right free from incumbrance, if this Bill were left as it then stood, he would be in no better position than the man who drank away his money as fast as he could get it instead of paying his debts. That could not but have a demoralizing effect, and would certainly be a discouragement to industry, inasmuch as it would show the industrious tenant that all his self-denial and thrift had been exercised in vain, and that they were about to place his thriftless neighbour in as good a position as he was himself. He ventured to say that this was not in accordance with the principle laid down with reference to this Bill, and that the lesson which the landlord would learn from it was that he must never make any concession whatever to his tenants—that he must never meet their wishes for temporary accommodation by allowing his rents to stand over. The consequence of this would be that the rents would henceforth be exacted to the day. Now, he would point out that the landlords had been in the habit of charging no interest upon the rents allowed to stand over, and that was the reason why the tenants so much preferred to go to the landlord and ask time for payment rather than go to the bank and raise the money at a cost of from 6 to 10 per cent. It would be a great disadvantage to the tenant if the kindly relations—if the practice on the part of indulgent landlords of considering the convenience of their tenants in giving them time—were to be brought to an end; and he hoped, therefore, that he might appeal to the Government to give a favourable consideration to the Amendment which he proposed. That Amendment would not impair the efficacy of the Bill so far as its main object was concerned, that object, as he understood it, being to check evictions. He did not propose to give the landlord power of eviction for these antecedent arrears; but he asked that they should be secured, and that the landlord should only derive any benefit from them when the tenant came to sell his interest. If that principle were adopted, it would remove another objection to the Bill—namely, its demoralizing effect, because the industrious tenant would be still in a better position than the tenant who allowed his tenant right to become incumbered. That surely was an important point, and upon it he felt very strongly. He had given his support to the Bill up to the present moment, but he could not sanction that which he believed to be injustice; and, therefore, unless some concession were made in the direction of the Amendment which he begged to move, he should be unable to give any further support to the Bill.

said, he had listened with considerable interest to the speech of his hon. Friend, and he was bound to say that he had never listened to one which less persuaded him that the object of it could possibly be adopted by the Committee. The speech of his hon. Friend was interesting, inasmuch as it shadowed forth new matter in connection with the arrears in Ireland; and the Amendment which it introduced, when taken in connection with the other Amendment which the hon. Member had on the Paper, pointed to a method of dealing with a portion of the Irish difficulty. It had been carefully considered, and, had it been earlier introduced, he thought the hon. Member might have found himself in consonance with a certain portion of the House; but it was impossible for the Amendment proposed now to be considered by the Government, because it undoubtedly struck at the principal object which the Government proposed to themselves in dealing with this matter. The point of the Amendment seemed to be to make the arrears of rent begin where the Government intended they should leave off. The Amendment proposed to make the arrears commence at the last gale day of 1879.

I beg pardon; that is a misprint in the Notice Paper; it should be 1877.

The hon. Member proposed that the arrears of rent up to 1878 should come within the operation of this Bill, and that those before that period should not be wiped out, but should remain—a certain amount of them, at any rate—as a debt guaranteed by the tenant right, and which, when that tenant right was sold, should be paid to the landlord. The hon. Member said that the main object of the Bill was to check eviction. He admitted that that was one object of the Bill; but it was not the only object. Besides checking eviction, it was intended to give some hope to the tenant who had suffered during the bad years in Ireland, and some indication that he was a free man, and that in his hard life he was not to be entirely ground down. But the Amendment of the hon. Member would leave him under a heavy burden, which, when he desired to turn his tenant right into money for the benefit of his children at home, or their support in a new country, would reduce the value of that tenant right almost to nothing. Again, in principle he thought the hon. Member's proposal was untenable, because, if the Government once began paying arrears, he asked which arrears ought to be paid first? Surely, in all cases of debt the universal sense of mankind was in favour of a period of limitation; and it was invariably held that the new debt should be paid in preference to the old. To consider a debt of extremely long standing as of equal importance with one of recent date was obviously against all principle in the matter of accounts and liquida- tion; and, certainly, to consider an old debt as an equally grave and serious matter as a more recent one was against all principles of legislation, whatever it might be with regard to the principles of morality. Again, this view of the case might also be defended upon the grounds of morality, because, if there was anything which could demoralize those relations which ought to exist between man and man, it was to encourage the idea that to allow long arrears to run up was a proceeding which could not be blamed from a moral point of view. The Government felt very much for those landlords who, in bad years, had remitted rents to their tenants; but they also considered that, taking the landlords of Ireland as a whole, the outstanding arrears were compulsory rather than voluntary. As a rule, they were unable to recover their rents to a very great extent during those bad years; and, therefore, the Government could not feel that, on the whole, they were doing an injustice to the landlords in Ireland. What the hon. Member said with regard to the industry and thrift on the part of some tenants very well deserved a hearing; and had the speech of the hon. Member been delivered on the second reading, he believed it would have constituted a powerful argument as directed against this Bill, and he had no doubt that the votes of some hon. Members would have been influenced in consequence. But on the present occasion he thought it would be hardly a logical and convenient method to adopt for hon. Members to vote in favour of an Amendment which would have the effect of wrecking the Bill. He hoped the hon. Member for Water-ford County would not press his Amendment to a division.

said, the right hon. Gentleman had spoken of the most valuable possession of the tenant being secured. As he did not quite understand what this meant, perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would kindly explain.

said, he referred to the tenant right. If the right hon. Gentleman would look forward on the Notice Paper he would see a very interesting and carefully drawn Amendment by the hon. Gentleman who had just moved, which would explain the meaning of his remarks.

said, the right hon. Gentleman had declared that the Amendment came too late; but he must remind the Committee that justice in this matter was of more importance than time. He thought this serious appeal on the part of the hon. Member for Waterford County had not been treated as it deserved. It was quite true that the speech of the hon. Member was of an interesting character; but there was something beyond that to be considered in connection with it, and it was that he himself was one of those indulgent landlords who had listened too readily to the various excuses put forward by his tenants for the purpose of gaining time, and it was because he was suffering from the effects of his own kindness that he now came forward to ask the Committee to consider this reasonable Amendment. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant had spoken of the tenant parting with his possession. But who gave him that possession? Why, it was conferred on him last year by that House; and was it not simple justice that when property had been created for the tenants of Ireland out of the property of the landlords it should be charged with the payment of some portion of the antecedent arrears? He thought if justice was altogether to be dispensed with in the application of this measure, that appeals to justice should be abandoned once for all in defence of it.

said, that it had been stated by the Government on introducing this Bill, and by the supporters of the Bill itself, that it was intended to facilitate the working of the Land Act of last Session. He would point out to the Committee that the object of the Amendment he was about to move was to facilitate the working of this Bill when it passed into law. The Committee would see that there were certain preliminary stops to be taken by the Land Commission before this Bill would apply. For instance, they had to see that the rent payable in respect to the year 1881 had been satisfied, and that antecedent arrears of rent were due to the landlord. Now, he proposed that when the Land Commission had satisfied itself that those antecedent arrears were due to the landlord, the inquiry on the part of the Land Commission should go no further—that the Land Commission should assume that the tenant was unable to discharge such antecedent arrears. He maintained that this assumption might be fairly made by the Land Commission. The Committee would notice that at the end of the 1st clause he proposed to add a Proviso that when the landlord should receive an intimation from the Land Commission that there was a certain sum available for him he should then have power, if he thought proper, to move the Land Commission to inquire into the financial condition of the tenant. He wanted to throw the onus of such a step entirely on the landlord. Nothing in the world was easier than to lay down principles which were true in the abstract, which had a fine logical sound, and which captivated the understanding through the ear. But they were bound to ask themselves whether everything relating to the case with which they wore dealing had been treated in accordance with strict principle? It was impossible to conceive any greater violence to the principles of political economy than resulted from the system of rack-renting which troubled Ireland; and he contended that in endeavouring to compensate for that injustice there was no violation of principle whatever. Why wore the Irish tenants in arrear? Was it because they were robbers, or because they were habitually lazy? For neither of these reasons. They were now in arrear owing to the combined influences of bad harvests and rack-renting. Rack-renting, he maintained, was the chief cause of their being in arrear, because, if their resources had not been impaired by years of unjust exaction, it was impossible to suppose that two, or three, or four years of bad harvests would have utterly destroyed those resources. In justification of the Amendment he was about to move, he wished to say that this system of rack-renting had been of long standing; it had existed there from time immemorial, and in the year 1790 an Irish nobleman, who was not particularly given to taking an indulgent view of his countrymen, used these words—

"I am very well acquainted with the Province of Minister, and I know that it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry of that Province. I know that the unhappy tenantry are ground to powder by the rents they have to Pay"

Now, what was true of the tenantry of the Province of Munster in 1790 could be said with perfect truth of the tenantry of every Province in Ireland at the present time. Again, in the year 1836, he found Lord Derby, in the course of a debate upon the Irish Poor Law in that House, saying—

"He should have been most desirous of seeing a Bill introduced, by which the poor rate levied might have acted as an absolute cheek upon that which he held to be one of the greatest evils of Ireland, viz., the exorbitant rents fixed upon it. For now a landlord imposed a rent of 50s., knowing, at the same time, that he could not get more than 40s., but trusting to what he could screw out of the tenant, while the poor tenant, from the great competition for land, undertook to pay 50s., knowing well, at the same time, that he could pay no such sum."

In fact, as Lord Derby said "elsewhere," the tenant had to pay the rent in some way, and, in consequence, he was obliged to live in a state of starvation. Again, in order to prove that rack-renting had come down to the present time, it was only necessary to turn to the decisions of the Land Commission, and to the reductions of rent which the landlords themselves were every day making to their tenants out of Court. Now, he contended that it was quite impossible for hon. Members in that Committee to free themselves from responsibility for the state of things which existed in Ireland. For years they and their predecessors had resisted all attempts to bring about a just settlement of the Land Question. They had supplied the Irish landlords with that physical force which enabled them to extort exorbitant rents from their unfortunate tenants. It was true that the law sanctioned rack-renting; but it did not follow that the Irish tenantry were obliged to accept that plea in satisfaction of all their claims for redress. Now, his object, as he had already pointed out, was to facilitate the working of this Bill, and he contended that all that the Land Commission ought to inquire into was, as to whether the tenant really owed his landlord antecedent arrears. Supposing the Land Commission decided to make payment to the tenant on behalf of the landlord, what did this miserable concession amount to when contrasted with the rack-renting of generations? He trusted the Government would agree to his proposal that the Court should merely in-onirointo the fact of the tenant's owing money to the landlord. He was especially anxious upon this point, because he hoped they were about to have on the soil of Ireland a population to whom they could turn round and say that legislation had done for them all that legislation could possibly do. For these reasons, he hoped the Government would not make a stand upon a point which, in simple truth, had no foundation in justice.

said, he was sure the hon. Member would see that the Government could not admit the Amendment he had just moved without departing from the elementary conditions of their proposal. If inability was to be proved, that inability was just matter for the cognizance of the public authorities, and it was not right that the Government should leave that matter entirely as between the landlord and the tenant, because, in cases where a tenant falsely professed inability, the landlord would be the main resource for showing that he was able to pay, for if the tenant were able to pay, the landlord would think he was not bound to make the sacrifice which this Bill called upon him to make. He was sure his hon. Friend must be convinced that all along he had not considered this matter from the most popular point of view. The Land Act of last year included this very condition—namely, proof by the tenant of his inability to pay; and he could not state too frankly that Her Majesty's Government would not take the responsibility of asking for the application of a public fund with the contingency of a grant from the Consolidated Fund for the purpose of discharging arrears which the tenant himself might be able to pay. It was the bounden duty of the Government to have the inability of the tenant to pay ascertained. He might also say that, although the very general inability of large masses of the smaller tenants in certain parts of Ireland to pay these arrears constituted the whole basis of the Bill, the mere fact of the existence of great arrears in Ireland would not justify it. The Government thought the Bill justified, because, although there might a certain proportion of the tenants in arrears, yet there was a very large number of tenants unable to pay, and they felt that the line between ability and inability in this matter was one which ought to be maintained.

said, he thought that arrears ought to be blotted out once for all. He was, however, sure he could not move the House from the decision they had arrived at; but there appeared to prevail amongst hon. Members an opinion that there were to be two investigations. That, however, was not the case. But he thought they had a right to know what the character of the investigation was to be. He had no wish to create difficulties; but if the investigation was to be of a legal character, he was bound to say that it would prove to be another source of confusion and delay. If the Government were determined to have this investigation, which he regarded as a sham, and as placing a premium on dishonesty, he said they had a right to ask to whom—to how many Courts—it was to be delegated.

said, the investigation would, undoubtedly, lead to long delays. He suggested a provision should be inserted in the clause that the tender of one year's rent should be a bar to all action on the part of landlords where ejectment proceedings had been commenced.

said, that no provision had been made to meet what would amount almost to a certainty under this Act. Application would be made by the tenant, and a certain time would elapse during which the application would be considered; in the meantime great pressure would be put upon the tenant by all his other creditors to liquidate their claims, and, if necessary, to place him in a position to come under the Act by giving them the money upon which the landlord would otherwise have the first claim. It would soon become a notorious fact that in a short time he would receive a certain sum of money from the Government, and the shopkeepers and money-lenders would at once make demands upon him for their debts. Now, he submitted that a man who had money at the bank sufficient to discharge his liability to the landlord ought not to claim a year's rent under the Act. In order to prevent this he begged to move the Amendment of which he had given Notice, and sincerely trusted the Government would accede to it.

said, the hon. Gentleman opposite seemed to think the strongest reasons existed for the insertion of the Amendment he had just moved; but he was bound to confess that he did not see any reason to justify its acceptance. There were, no doubt, practical objections to the Bill, and some difficulties with regard to its operation, not the least of these latter being presented by the investigation to be made by the Land Commission. While the Government said the Bill was a necessity, they admitted that it would entail great labour, expense, and some delay. Now, it seemed to him that by the Amendment before the Committee the hon. Gentleman proposed to substitute two investigations for one. He proposed that the Court should be bound to ascertain at the time when the adjudication was made that the tenant was then unable to pay, and also to go back to a former date and examine as to whether any change had taken place in the circumstances of the tenant. The hon. Member must himself admit that this would constitute a large addition to the labour, delay, and expense of investigation. Again, he thought the case a most improbable one, in which there was likely to be abuse of the Act in the manner indicated. The hon. Member said the tenant might have money at the bank, which might be appropriated to the payment of debts to shopkeepers or moneylenders. But, supposing that money were appropriated to the payment of his lawful debts by the tenant, he was not prepared to say that such payment was such a sin on the part of the man as to disqualify him from receiving the benefit of the Act. What was really material was the man's inability to pay at the time the application was made. Her Majesty's Government wore willing that a proper investigation should be made; but they objected to add gratuitously to the difficulties of working the Bill, which it appeared to him they would be doing by acceding to the hon. Member's proposal.

said, he thought the motive which actuated his hon. Friend in proposing this Amendment was one which deserved more consideration from the Government than, as he gathered from the speech of the right hon. Gentleman opposite, it was likely to receive. The right hon. Gentleman appeared to draw a distinction—a rather unfair one in his opinion—between the lawful debts of the tenant and his debt to the landlord for arrears of rent. Now, he understood his hon. Friend to argue that a notice of application to the Court would, in fact, be notice to the creditors to come down on the unfortunate tenant for the purpose of squeezing him to the utmost for the whole of their debts, which at present the law considers as secondary to the debt due to the landlord; and that, when the Court decided the matter, the landlord would be the sufferer, because the money which ought to have paid the rent would then become applicable to the payment of debts of a secondary character. That was undoubtedly a hardship to the landlord, while, at the same time, the tenant was in no way benefited by it. He hoped there would be an opportunity of discussing the point raised by his hon. Friend at some time during the passage of the Bill through Committee. He thought, however, that the question as to when the investigation should be made—whether at the time of application or adjudication—was better raised by the Amendment of which the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin had given Notice; and, therefore, he suggested that the present Amendment should not be pressed.

said, he had no wish that the time of the Committee should be occupied in twice discussing the same question; and, therefore, he was willing to ask leave to withdraw his Amendment. But he wished to point out that the payment of the creditors other than the landlord would go on in the cases indicated in the face of those tenants who had paid their rents, and would constitute a premium on dishonesty which the right hon. Gentleman, he believed, never intended.

said, the object of the Amendment he was about to move was to make a distinction, so far as the benefit of the Bill was concerned, between the two classes of tenants mentioned a short time since by the hon. Member for Waterford (Mr. Villiers Stuart)—the thrifty and industrious tenants, and those who spent their money as fast as they received it. He desired to make it clear that the former class were to be relieved from the effects of bad seasons, and that it was not intended to relieve the latter from their liability under circumstances such as had been referred to. He thought it clear that inability to pay was not alone a sufficient claim to a relief in its nature exceptional. Suppose a man, in consequence of dissolute and drunken habits, never were to sow seed in his ground. It was obvious that such a man would be "unable" to pay rent, still more unable to pay off arrears. Would it be contended that, for such a man, his arrears were to be discharged out of the taxation of the nation? Surely not.

said, he was afraid he must decline to accept this Amendment, on grounds which were the same as those which applied in the case of that which was last before the Committee—namely, that it proposed a very large extension indeed of the Amendment necessary to be made. It added largely and gravely to that difficulty, which was the main difficulty of the Bill—that was to say, the ascertaining of the tenant's inability to pay, a difficulty which the Government had encountered for the most serious moral and social reasons. But he could see no ground why those moral and social reasons should carry them so far as to adopt the words proposed by his hon. Friend. Now, there was no doubt of the fact that with regard to the great bulk of those whose cases this Bill would include, they were unable to pay owing to the failure of crops or disasters to stock, or other causes beyond their control. He quite agreed with his hon. Friend that it would be an excellent thing to exclude the drunkard, the unthrifty, and worthless fellow from the benefit of many Acts of Parliament; but it was hardly in the power of the Legislature to do it, and it was not very important that it should be done in a case of this kind; because the cases of persons who had ruined themselves from excess were quite exceptional, and the process of distinguishing and separating would be such that the labour entailed by the invidious nature, and the whole character of the investigation, would far more than outweigh the infinitesimal advantage to be derived from it.

said, no doubt it was an important fact that some inquiry was to be made under the provisions of the Bill. There must be investigation if the Government were to justify themselves in the face of those who looked after the interest of the taxpayers. And, inquiry being necessary, however inconvenient, in the name of common sense, let it be a real and not a sham inquiry. If the Government intended that this money was to be had simply for the asking, they might as well enact that everybody who applied for it was unable to pay. The Amendment before the Committee said that the incapacity to pay should be by reason of the two points stated; but the Prime Minister had gone beyond them altogether, and his remarks had led him into a series of considerations that might be very well aired before a Social Science Congress, but which had nothing whatever to do with the Amendment before the Committee. The hon. Member who introduced the Amendment never suggested that it should be inquired into whether a man was moral in his habits, or whether he was reduced to present distress by drunkenness. For his own part, he considered the Amendment dealt with subjects that might very well be the subject of inquiry on the part of the Land Commission, and he thought it should be seriously and gravely treated by the Committee. They could not, in considering this Bill, and the circumstances under which it was presented, ignore what had been going on in Ireland for the last 18 months, and what was still going on there. It was no good to shut their eyes and pretend not to see what everyone outside the House saw very well. Everyone admitted that there ought to be discri- mination with regard to the circumstances and position of the applicants under this Act. Some tenants, owing to the failure of crops, disasters to stock, and without any fault on their own part, were entitled to receive every sympathy; and if any just and wise measure were proposed to relieve them from arrears, and keep them in possession of their farms, it ought to receive fair consideration. But there were other tenants who had had no failure of crops or disasters to stock, but who, with distinct fault on their own part, had hearkened to the teachings of the Land League; and he contended that these men ought not to he allowed to stand shoulder to shoulder with the innocent tenants to participate in the national largesse. Therefore, he said, whether it was convenient or inconvenient, it was necessary that this should be a real inquiry; that the Commissioners should satisfy themselves, as they could do by inquiry carried on in the neighbourhood, whether the people who applied were those who had abstained from paying rent in obedience to the "no rent" manifesto, or whether they were of the class who had formerly paid their rents from gale day to gale day, and who, in recent years, from real or pretended terror, or sympathy, joined the League, refused to pay, and fell into arrears in consequence. Was it to be tolerated or suggested that tenants of that class had the same right to the relief afforded by this Bill as the tenants who had fallen into arrears in consequence of the failure of crops, or disasters to stock, and without fault of their own? If the inquiry were to be real and such as the taxpayers of the country had a right to expect, he ventured to say that the topics suggested by the Amendment ought to be considered and judged of by the Committee. Words something similar to these were submitted to the judgment of the House by the Government in the Compensation for Disturbance Bill. It was admitted, of course, that the process would occupy some time, and the exercise of some discretion on the part of the tribunal; but it was considered that the relief proposed should not be given without consideration of the circumstances under which the inability to pay had arisen. Was it not fair that the Land Commission should consider, not only whether the applicant was unable to pay, but whether he was unable to pay honestly, from no fault of his own, or dishonestly, because he had united himself with a criminal agitation, and from that time refused to carry out the obligations which previously he had reasonably and fairly endeavoured to discharge? If some safeguard of the kind proposed were not put into the Bill it would be both unjust and demoralizing. Could anyone conceive, in the wildest stretch of imagination, more demoralizing teaching than to say to a man—"You deliberately did not pay your debts, not because you could not do so, but because you thought you could evade the law under the œgis of criminal terrorism to which you wilfully bowed your head; but having fallen into arrears in. consequence, we will now come in and help you, equally with the honest man, and while there are some classes to be helped who are poor, courageous, and honest, you will also be assisted who have been dishonest and cowardly?" If this were to be a real inquiry—one that would satisfy the public, must not some discrimination be shown with regard to these different classes of applicants? The only mode which had been suggested of arriving at that end was that contained in the Amendment before the Committee. If the Government could indicate some other means of discriminating between the two classes of tenants referred to, he would be ready to consider it; but, in the absence of any better proposal, he should support the Amendment of the hon. Member for Pembroke.

said, the right hon. and learned Gentleman seemed only to be quarrelling with words, because he did not entirely approve of the Amendment before the Committee in its present form. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said if the Government did not approve the words they should alter the Amendment. But he (Mr. Gladstone) had stated his objection to the Amendment in the words in which it was expressed, and those were words which imposed two conditions—one being that the inability should arise by reason of the failure of crops or disasters to stock; the other, that there should be no fault on the part of the applicant. He had pointed out that it was inexpedient in the highest degree to in- sist that the tenant's inability should be without fault on his own part, and in doing so he had referred to the case where the moral conduct of a man had reduced him to destitution. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said the Government had not proposed anything which he approved for dealing with this matter; but, if that were so, why did not he put forward a suggestion of his own? The right hon. and learned Gentleman was clearly supporting an Amendment which he did not approve. Again, the right hon. and learned Gentleman throughout his speech had frequently used the expression—"If there is to be a real inquiry." But the Amendment had nothing to do with the reality of the inquiry; it had to do with its scope and intent only. The inquiry into the tenant's inability was a real inquiry, quite apart from the question whether or not they were to examine into the cause. He believed the right hon. and learned Gentleman would not dispute that, and, if so, it justified him in putting aside the portion of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's speech which referred to the reality of the inquiry. And now he must point out that the right hon. and learned Gentleman went a little further. The right hon. and learned Gentleman admitted there was to be no inquiry into morality, so that the drunkard and thief, or the drunken fellow generally, was to have no difficulty placed in his way. The right hon. and learned Gentleman had said let them enact on the face of the Bill that which they really meant to enact. If he (Mr. Gladstone) understood him rightly, what the right hon. and learned Gentleman meant was, that the man who was really unable to pay his rent at the time of the investigation, but who was at one time able to pay, and did not pay, owing to the instigation of the Land League, ought to be excluded from the benefit of this Act. He had endeavoured to understand the right hon. and learned Gentleman, and that was what he understood him to mean. He thought he was quite correct, for the speech of the right hon. and learned Gentleman admitted of no other conclusion. He could only observe, that if that had better appear on the face of the Bill, the right hon. and learned Gentleman had better move a Proviso, which it was quite easy to suggest, providing that in case it should ap- pear that a man, unable to discharge these arrears——

I have an Amendment to that effect lower down.

asked why, in that case, the right hon. and learned Gentleman did not wait until his own Amendment came up, instead of wasting his animated advocacy on an Amendment of which he did not approve? He would not hesitate to go great lengths with the right hon. and learned Gentleman in condemning the conduct of that class of people who held their harvests, or kept their rents in their pockets when they were able to pay them, under any instigation whatever. But even with regard to those he would draw some distinction which the right hon. and learned Gentleman did not draw, because many of the people acted under terror; and if he (Mr. Gladstone) could separate those who acted under terror and those who proceeded wilfully, he might go a long way with the right hon. and learned Gentleman opposite. After what he (Mr. Gladstone) had said, and after what the right hon. and learned Gentleman himself (Mr. Gibson) seemed to admit, it was evident that they ought not to proceed by the acceptance of the words now before them.

said, that this clause was really a premium to idleness. Suppose some idle tenants did nothing but stand about with their hands in their pockets, like many of the "corner boys"—which he thought men who loitered about street corners were called—suppose they came to the Land Commissioners, and said, "they had got no money, and they had got a holding for which they were unable to pay rent," were the taxpayers of Great Britain to put their hands into their pockets and pay taxes towards the idleness of those men? It appeared to him (Colonel Barne) that some Amendment of this sort was necessary to avoid that contingency. The words at the end of the Amendment of the hon. Member (Mr. H. Allen),"and without fault on his own part," would entirely cover that contingency, and it seemed to him the Amendment ought to be accepted by the Committee. He trusted the hon. Member would press his Amendment, which should certainly receive his (Colonel Barne's) support.

said, they must assume that the Land Commis- sioners would exercise common sense in the discharge of their duties, and if they found a gross case of fraud, they would not find it necessary to make an advance. Under the circumstances, he could not think that the Amendment was necessary.

said, he had listened to the two speeches made by the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister; but he had not heard the right hon. Gentleman use one argument, or give one reason, against the Amendment. he spoke of the extent and scope of the inquiry, but he urged no valid argument against the Amendment as a whole. If the Amendment was not accepted, or some qualification put in in regard to the man unable to pay rent, the Committee would find themselves in rather a strange position. Suppose for a moment a man was unable to pay his rent, although he had met with no failure of crops and had not suffered any disaster to stock, and there had been no fault on his own part. What was the natural con-elusion? He had had a fortunate time and good seasons, and still he was unable to pay. It was evident he was living in a holding for which he could never pay rent even under the most favourable circumstances. He thought that such a qualification as was now proposed was absolutely necessary in the clause to prevent cases of fraud arising.

said, the hon. Member who spoke last had gone a little beyond the subject which was immediately before the Committee. The main point which the Committee would be interested in deciding was this, whether those who had held the harvest should be entitled or not to the boon which was going to be conferred. He thought this was a fair issue which was raised by the Amendment of the hon. Gentleman (Mr. H. Allen). Would the Government be disposed, if it were possible to find language to express it clearly, to insert a provision that those who by any wilful default of their own found themselves now unable to pay their debts, should not be entitled to this great boon? He would suggest the adoption of some words of this kind—that those "who were unable by failure of crops and not by any wilful default of their own." He had no particular liking for those words, and he would be perfectly satisfied if the Government would accept the principle of his suggestion, and say that they would consider the point. He believed that the words "wilful default" would guard against the terrorism of which the Prime Minister had spoken.

said, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen) had talked about men holding the harvest, and other hon. Members had spoken about the instigation of the Land League in regard to the holding of the harvest. When, however, did the Land League tell the Irish people to hold the harvest? Why, they told them to do so in 1880, after the famine—after the Members of the House of Commons had voted public money to feed the Irish people and kept them from starvation. They advised the people to hold the harvest in 1880, when this House had acknowledged, and the English public had acknowledged, that in large districts for months and months, thousands and thousands of families—he might almost say hundreds of thousands of families—were living on a few pence a-day. That was the occasion on which the Land League told the people to hold the harvest. What did men mean when they talked about this Bill coming to the help of people who had not paid their rents in consequence of the advice of the Land League? If hon. Members would recollect, they must know that the Land League never advised any tenants in Ireland not to pay their rents until last autumn. According to the provision of this Bill the tenant must have paid his rent on the last gale day, 1881, and, certainly, at that time, the Land League had not advised any tenant not to pay rent, and it had not, as it had now, spread its influence throughout Ireland. It was perfectly absurd—and it was only spoken in ignorance—to talk about the Land League either terrorizing the people or advising them not to pay their rents previous to the year 1881. It was in the autumn of 1881 that they told the tenants not to pay their rents, and it was only then for the first time that such a charge was made against the Land League. As he understood the Bill, before any tenant could claim any advantage under it, he must have satisfied the landlord in respect of the rent of the year 1881, and, therefore, it was of no avail to say that people had acted upon the instigation of the Land League.

said, he did not think the Committee would accept the assurance of the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon), that there was no wilful non-payment of rent in Ireland before the date to which the Bill applied. It appeared to him (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach) that there was great force in the suggestion of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen), and therefore he would venture to move an Amendment on the Amendment now before the Committee, in order to carry the suggestion into effect. Instead of the word "fault," in the second line of the Amendment, he would move to insert the words "wilful default." The Amendment would then read—' "by reason of failure of crops or disaster to stock, and without wilful default on his own part," and he thought it was one which might fairly be accepted by Her Majesty's Government, as really containing, both in its spirit and in its letter, what hitherto they had always understood to be the intention of the Government by this Bill.

trusted the Government, even on the recommendation of so important a Member as the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen), and also on the recommendation of the right hon. Gentleman opposite (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach), would not consent to turn the Bill into a system of Political inquisition. Nothing could be more certain to defeat the object of the Bill and more sure to raise up fresh agitation of a violent kind than the adoption of the principle of retrospective action with any semblance of vengeance. He was not here to defend in any manner the action of the Land League. He had openly denounced the "no rent" manifesto, and he did not intend to defend the Gentlemen who had taken a violent course in Ireland during the last two or three years. He regretted their action exceedingly; but to attempt to introduce into the Bill the principle of retrospective vengeance upon the unfortunate victims of that agitation would be utterly disastrous. The great object of this Bill, if it had any political or social object at all, was that it should act as a healing measure throughout the country. He did not believe it had been framed in the best and wisest way; but still the Government were entitled to great credit for having attempted to deal with a great Irish question in the way which to them seemed best for the country. He maintained that the chief object was to inquire whether any individual tenant, who came forward to claim relief, was actually, at the time he claimed relief, unable to pay his rent. This was really the main and sole issue before them, and to attempt to mix up any other question with this would be to utterly wreck the Bill. What would be the effect if they omitted a large number of people from the benefits of the Bill? He quite agreed with what the Prime Minister had said, that a great number of persons did not pay their rents because of terror; but what became of the money in the meantime was an entirely different question. It was quite proper that a close inquiry should be made whether the tenant had now got the money or not. Many of them had misspent the money, and it was not now forthcoming. That was another question. Were the Committee to leave any considerable number of men, who were technically entitled to relief under the Bill, out in the cold? If they were left out in the cold what would become of them? They would become a prey to agitation, and feelings would arise of the most violent and unfortunate kind. He trusted the Government would stand firm on the proposal now before them, and not yield to the representation of even so important a Member as the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen).

said, he must point out that it was quite impossible to dispose of this question satisfactorily at the present moment, and upon the present Amendment. He had come down to the House prepared to discuss any Amendment that had been before them, and, amongst others, to discuss the Amendment of the right hon. and learned Gentleman opposite, the junior Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson); but a question had been raised of con- siderable importance and of the utmost delicacy, in respect to which he should be exceeding his discretion if he attempted to give an opinion without consulting his Colleagues. Although the question might not be one of very large operation, yet the principle involved was one of extreme difficulty; and he would also observe that it was not properly before them now. The Amendment of the right hon. Gentleman did not bring it properly before them, because he still left in the Bill a double condition—a condition that there should have been no failure of crops or disaster to stock, and no wilful default on the part of the tenant. The Act of 1880 offered no precedent whatever on this matter. It was an Act fully in favour of the tenant—a one-sided Act—upon the necessity of the case undoubtedly in favour of the tenant, and without any sort of compensation or consideration to the landlord. The fact that Parliament thought it necessary to limit that to failure of crops was no proof that this ought to be limited to failure of crops. Supposing it had been due to harvest employment in England, these words would prevent any relief being offered the tenant. He thought that the right hon. Gentleman would see that the question was really one deserving of the most serious examination, and that it was not fairly raised by the Amendment, oven with the improvements the right hon. Gentleman had introduced in it. He hoped they would be allowed to dispose of it now, and deal with the question in another form.

said, he thought his duty to his constituents obliged him to insist upon this question being discussed and decided at the present stage of the Bill. What was it they were asked to do, if the Government would not provide that wilful default in the payment of rent should not be included in the term inability under the Bill? What was it they were likely to find themselves compelled to do, when the Bill was interpreted by the tribunals to which it had to be referred? Just this, and nothing else—that the money of the loyal taxpayers of Great Britain and Ireland would be given to those whose debts to their landlords were due, not to poverty, but to the fact that they had been members of a criminal organization. The right hon. Gen- tleman had told the Committee that this was a matter that it was necessary for him to consider with his Colleagues before he could decide how it should be dealt with in this Bill. Why, was it possible that Her Majesty's Government had brought in this measure without full consideration and without the knowledge that this question would arise? If the Government had listened to any one of the speeches which had been made on the second reading of the Bill, or on the Motion to go into Committee, they must have recognized throughout those speeches a dread on the part of Members on both sides of the House that the Bill might be so interpreted as to bring about a result which he should have supposed Her Majesty's Government and the whole House, except some hon. Members sitting below the Gangway, would entirely disapprove. It was absolutely necessary that they should have some definition of inability inserted in this clause of the Bill; and if Her Majesty's Government did not approve of the words now before them, he would ask them to suggest some other words that would guard them from what they dreaded. They had an example before them which none of them ought to forget of what could be done by legislation of this kind, in which the interpretation of a Statute was left to the discretion of a Court without any rules for its guidance. Did anybody suppose when the Land Act of last Session was passing through Parliament that the section of that Act relating to the fixing of fair rents would be interpreted as it had been? Would anyone assert that this Act would have become law in the shape in which it did become law; that it would even have passed through that House in its present incomplete form, if there had been the slightest idea that it would have been thus interpreted in a manner contrary to the express declarations of Members of Her Majesty's Government, who said there was no risk of the results which were now found to have taken place? And now they were told by the right hon. Gentleman, when it was asked that the benefits of this Bill should be denied to members of the Land League, or to those who had been willing coadjutors of the Land League, that the question was one which required great consideration. The right hon. Gentle- man did not even tell them that he would take care that this Bill should not be interpreted in their favour; and yet he pressed this Committee to pass a clause which might have in its present shape such an effect as he had described, with no further declaration of opinion on his (the Prime Minister's) part than that this question merited the consideration of Her Majesty's Government. The right hon. Gentleman had said that, after all, the words of the Amendment did not cover every case.

I beg your pardon; I did not say so. I said they covered a great deal more than they ought to cover.

said, he had misunderstood the right hon. Gentleman, who had, however, said that the words of the Bill of 1880 would not include the case of persons whose misfortune had resulted from the failure of employment in England, and, therefore, would not in themselves be perfect. Surely such a question as the precise words of a definition might, if necessary, be very well again entertained on Report. But he did hope they would not part with the question of principle now unless something definite was arrived at; and that now they saw how true it was that the Government had adopted the measures of hon. Gentlemen sitting on the Irish Benches below the Gangway, they would take care that, at any rate, this Bill should not pass the House of Commons in its present shape as a measure which commended itself to the British Parliament.

said, he must say he was rather surprised at the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, who had discussed the matter in a temper in which it had not been discussed in the House before. He (Mr. Gladstone) did not understand why all this heat should be imported into a discussion. He was not aware of having said anything or having suggested anything to justify it. He had simply said that the question which was raised by the Amendment of the right hon. Gentleman opposite (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach) was a question that was not upon the Paper, nor among the Amendments standing on the Paper for discussion to-day; that it was a matter of such importance and delicacy that he desired to have the opportunity of considering it before he ventured to give the views of the Government upon it. The right hon. Gentleman opposite then rose in great heat, and said that because he (Mr. Gladstone) had asked for time to consider the question, which he regarded as of great delieacy and importance, and which was not placed before them by the Amendment—that because he asked for time and the power of consulting with his Colleagues before he gave a final judgment, it was plain he had done nothing but accept the dictation of the Land League. Was not that speaking with heat? His right hon. Friend the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen) referred to the matter in a totally different spirit. He said that it was, in his opinion, right that those whose inability to pay their rents had arisen from wilful default on their own part, should be punished for that wilful default by exclusion from the benefits of the Act. To introduce anything final in the operation of a measure of this kind was a serious matter, and that was all he (Mr. Gladstone) stated, and, being a serious matter, he asked the House to give him the power of considering it. That was the offence which had drawn down upon him the condemnation of the right hon. Gentleman; but he must bear it as he best could. It was quite true that the question had never occurred to him and his Colleagues; it had not occurred to him in considering the numerous points of difficulty that wore connected with the framing of this Bill—it had never occurred to them to examine the question whether it was worth while to introduce such words as were now proposed; but he had told the right hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. Gibson) that he perfectly agreed with him as to the view which was to be taken of the offence of those who wilfully withheld their rents when they were able to pay them. The Executive had done their best to make those people pay their rents. He had shown conclusive reasons why they should not require as a condition of receiving relief that the parties should prove that their distress had arisen by reason of failure of crops or disaster to stock. And the right hon. Gentleman invited him to put this into the Bill, in order to strike it out on Report. [Sir MICHAEL HICKS-BEACH: No, no!] What was the proposal? The proposal was that they should adopt the Amend- ment as it stood, and consider it further on Report.

I said it might be further considered with a view to modification.

said, the right hon. Gentleman told them it was a matter for further consideration, and yet when he (Mr. Gladstone) wanted time for further consideration, the right hon. Gentleman would not give it to him. It was plain that the right hon. Gentleman insisted that he (Mr. Gladstone) should adopt a variety of mischievous words, in order that he might reconsider them on Report. He was not inclined to introduce into the Bill that no inability should be taken into consideration unless it was by reason of failure of crops or disaster to stock, because, although this would be, no doubt, the general description of a vast number of cases of inability to pay rent, there would be a great number of cases of inability arising from other causes which would thereby be excluded. He, therefore, wanted time to consider the Amendment fully; and certainly if he was not fit to be trusted upon a point of this kind, it was plain that he was not fitted for any of those functions which had been placed in his hands.

said, the position which the Prime Minister took up was really a very extraordinary and a very embarrassing one. He could not understand what the right hon. Gentleman meant by saying that this was a point which had only just been brought before them, and that there was no Notice on the Paper. It was, of course, conceivable that in the midst of other occupations the right hon. Gentleman might not have paid full attention to the Notices that had been given on the Paper, and might not have studied what their exact meaning was; but that was no reason why the right hon. Gentleman should interpose to prevent the Committee, who were acquainted with and who did understand the point, discussing with freedom the very important suggestion which was contained in the Amendment of the hon. Member for Pembrokeshire (Mr. H. Allen), and of deciding upon it now. The precise wording of the Amendment of the hon. Gentleman was, perhaps, open to some question, and was open to further discussion on Report, if necessary; but the principle upon which the hon. Member's Amendment was founded appeared to be one that was perfectly clear to anybody who took the trouble to consider what it meant. They knew perfectly well that from the beginning of all those questions with regard to compensation or the remission of arrears which they had had before them, one of the most difficult points was what was meant by inability. And it was evident from the state of the Notice Paper that many hon. Members had felt that it was impossible to leave this matter entirely loose, and to be decided according to the discretion of a tribunal—the composition of which they did not know, but with regard to which they certainly felt some slight uneasines. The hon. Member for Pembrokeshire (Mr. H. Allen) tried to grapple with this difficulty; and he placed upon the Paper a proposition affirming that it should be proved that inability to pay had arisen by reason of certain failures, and through no fault of the tenant himself. It might be that the hon. Member had not enumerated all the causes of failure which ought to be taken into account. That was very possible; and the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister had suggested one which ought to be enumerated. There might even be others, which might be suggested in Committee, or which might be suggested at a later stage of the Bill; but that part of the hon. Member's Amendment was wholly distinct from the second part of it—namely, that there should be no fault on the part of the tenant himself. Did the right hon. Gentleman think that those words had no meaning in them at all? Was it possible that anybody could read those words without recognizing their meaning or their object?

I referred to those words when the right hon. Gentleman was not present.

said, that, of course, he was in a difficulty owing to his being absent from the House when the Prime Minister was speaking; but what he understood was that the right hon. Gentleman did not appear to comprehend fully the purport and meaning of the words which were on the Paper, because he said fault on the part of the tenant might imply bad and intemperate habits, or slovenly farming, or many other things. The Committee had those words before them, and they could judge as well as the hon. Member for Pembrokeshire (Mr. H. Allen) or anybody else what those words covered. Fault on the part of the tenant might consist in carelessness or drunkenness, and the like, and these causes must be taken into consideration; the words must also cover the fault of a tenant wasting his money or employing it to improper uses, and they must cover the case of the man who had dissipated his means by attracting to himself those associations which had the art of extracting a good deal of money from his pocket. But "without fault on his part" was a point which undoubtedly covered the case which was put by the Amendment that had been suggested by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen); and whether it was upon the face of the Amendment or not, it was a point which must have occurred, and which certainly ought to have occurred, to Her Majesty's Government when they were framing this Bill. Was this meant to be a boon given to those who had taken no active part in the "no rent" movement, or was it not? If it was not intended to be a boon to them, it was quite reasonable and proper that the Bill should contain a provision excluding such persons from its benefits. It was not proposed to fine them, but it was only proposed to exclude them from the benefits which were to be given at the expense of other people. Who were those other people? They were, in the first place, the landlords, and, in the second place, the taxpayers of this country. He thought nothing could be more unjustifiable than that the Government should bring in a Bill of this character involving such a very novel proposition as this Bill did, without having considered the question now under discussion. The question was now, at all events, well before them; they had the means of pronouncing an opinion upon it; and if the Government thought it necessary at a later stage to make any further condition to clear up the point which was raised by the first part of the hon. Member's Amendment, they would be perfectly able to do so. It did seem to him that they were in a position now to decide the question of wilful default, and, being in that position, there was no reason whatever why a decision should not be arrived at.

said, that if the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Devon (Sir Stafford North-cote) was anxious to take a division now, he (Mr. H. Shield) was prepared to state his opinions strongly as to the unadvisability of adopting the Amendment either in its original or present, shape. By common consent an inquiry was to be made as to the circumstances of a man before he was entitled to relief under the Bill. That inquiry was to be as to his ability or otherwise to pay, and the man who came out of that inquiry successfully would come out with a certificate that he was unable to pay. What hon. Members opposite seemed to require was that if a man came out of the inquiry successfully he should come out with a certificate not only that he was not able to pay, but with a certificate of good conduct in times past, and especially that he had not hearkened to the teachings of the Land League. He did not think that such a process as that would facilitate at all the progress of the Bill. He understood the right hon. Baronet (Sir Stafford Northcote) to positively reprove the Prime Minister because he did not discover in the words "fault on his own part," that there might be involved in those words that reprobation of the Land League to which this House was so ready to give expression. The reproach of the right hon. Baronet was wholly unfounded. His hon. Friend (Mr. H. Allen) expounded his own Amendment, and had said not one word about the Land League; he was desirous that the men who were unable to pay their rent through failure of crops or a disaster to stock, or through no fault of their own, should receive the boon which the Bill conferred; but his hon. Friend—and he honoured him for it—did not allow himself to travel into those regions of heat into which the right hon. Baronet the Member for East Gloucestershire (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach) so readily plunged, and into which he was anxious to drag the Committee after him. He might encourage the right hon. Baronet and the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), whose object plainly was that the men who had belonged to the Land League should not be benefited by the Bill-—he might encourage them to think that this was already provided for, for if the men had hearkened to the teachings of the Land League, what was the lesson that had been taught them?—"Don't pay your rent." If they had hearkened to that while they had money in their pocket, and the fact could he ascertained, their inability to pay their rent would be at once disproved, and they would be denied all share in the benefits of the Bill. He thought the Committee would do well to limit the inquiry. It was proper to inquire if a man had any money in the hank which he had not disclosed, or whether he had other means which he had secreted; such inquiries were perfectly relevant; but he did not think they ought to inquire whether a man had hearkened to the teachings of the Land League or not, as such an inquiry would not be only irrelevant, but grossly mischievous.

said, he would not interfere if he thought he stood in the way of a division; but as he saw there wore several hon. Gentlemen disposed to consider the matter a little further, perhaps he might be permitted to address a few words to the Committee upon the Amendment. He objected to the Amendment, because he was anxious, like the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), that there should be a real and full inquiry, and his objection to the Amendment was based upon the ground that the words of the Amendment would fetter the decision of the Court, and, instead of ex-tending, would narrow the character of the inquiry, and it was for that reason that it specified certain legitimate causes for the non-payment of rent, but did not exhaust, according to the impression of the right hon. Baronet the Leader of the Conservative Opposition, the number of legitimate causes for the non-payment of rent. In what position was the Committee at the present time? It was, first of all, in this position, that it was asked to pass an Amendment ostensibly for the purpose of making an inquiry into the inability of the tenant to pay—for the purpose of making a real and full inquiry, and the acceptance of the Amendment that was presented to them on those grounds would defeat its own purpose. He thought the Committee would do well to recognize the scope of the proposal made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen). He was in favour of the right hon. Gentleman's proposal, because it really meant what it said, and it would carry out in the fullest and best manner the professed object of hon. Gentlemen on the Opposition side of the House. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon laid down a very simple proposition—namely, that the tenant who had failed to pay his rent by wilful default should not be entitled to the benefits of this Bill. He would like to ask the right hon. Baronet (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach"), who moved the Amendment on the Amendment, whether he wished to exclude from the benefits of the Bill a tenant of any other class? The suggestion of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen) had been substantially agreed to by the Prime Minister. [Criea of "No, no!"] He understood the Prime Minister to say that he would insert some such provision in the Bill. ["No!"] He certainly understood the Prime Minister to say that he deemed the suggestion of the right hon. Gentleman worthy of mature examination; and he was not prepared at the present time to state any objection to it. He might have drawn a wrong inference from the declaration of the Prime Minister, who distinctly objected to put in the words" failure of crops and disaster to stock, "or to enumerate the legitimate causes for the non-payment of rent. That being so, it seemed to him to be a waste of time to discuss the matter further. It seemed to him they were invited to carry on a discussion when the Leaders of both sides were not really decided as to the point in dispute; and he would, therefore, respectfully suggest that they should come at once to a decision on this question, or that the Amendment should be withdrawn, on the understanding that, at a later stage, the Government would declare its decision in refer-once to the suggestion made to the Committee by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen).

said, the Government had stated that they were willing to consider this matter, and, therefore, those who were really anxious that a clause of this kind should be inserted, and receive the full consideration of the Government, could not desire that a division should be taken on the question now. It appeared to him that the great anxiety for a division was out of place when the Government were unable to state to their followers what view they would ultimately take; and, in his (Mr. Goschen's) opinion, great prejudice was often done to the object of an Amendment by forcing a division when a portion of the House preferred to have it deferred.

said, he quite agreed with his right hon. Friend (Mr. Goschen) that it would be well to await the final decision of the Government; but he confessed he saw immense difficult}' in the way of carrying out the proposal which his right hon. Friend had made. He understood that the main question before them was, whether they should introduce in this sub-section words to the effect that the tenant was unable, from wilful default on his own part, to discharge the antecedent arrears. What did this really mean? The antecedent arrears were arrears that were due before November, 1880. Well, this surely meant that the Commissioners, in order to be satisfied that the man was unable to pay his antecedent arrears, was to go back to the history of the year expiring in 1880. He believed it would be almost impossible to do that; and he believed that if they attempted to do it, they would provoke an amount of ill-feeling, and probably of hard swearing, that would make it absolutely impracticable to hold the inquiry. The object of those who were supporting the Amendment was to meet the case of those tenants who would have been able to pay their rents if they had not listened to the teachings of the Land League, and who, having spent the money, were now unable to pay. He presumed that was their object. To a very great extent it was not in many cases that those persons existed, because the successful teaching of the Land League not to pay rent and to hold the harvest applied to rent that was due after that time; and, therefore, the question was not a very practical one. No one who knew the condition of the parishes in Ireland could suppose that gentlemen could be sent out who could be able, with a degree of thoroughness, to go into an inquiry of the exact condition of affairs in 1880. He stated, when he troubled the House on the second reading of this Bill, that he thought that what happened in the course of the spring of this year had very much diminished the danger which they all acknowledged existed in that measure. He believed that most people who were able to pay rent had paid it. In some cases the people had felt they dare not pay it, and the Committee had now to deal with the arrears of persons who were really unable to pay. To attempt an inquiry as to how they became unable to pay the antecedent arrears would be almost impossible, because now so much time had elapsed. If the inquiry were to be made into the circumstances of the present year, the thing would be very different. He believed that on inquiry it would be found that many of the people of Connaught and Mayo were unable to pay the arrears because they could not get employment. How did those people pay their rack rents? Not out of the produce of their own soil, but out of the produce of English and Scotch soil; and owing to the state of the harvest in England, and the change in cultivation, they had not been able lately to earn as much as formerly. They might just as well have no Bill at all as not to consider the cases of such people; and he really thought that if they were to accompany this Bill with a kind of inquisition, as was proposed, they had better drop the Bill altogether.

said, he thought the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen) had adopted pretty much the same action with regard to this Bill as he (Mr. Newdegate) had done. He had not voted on the principal stage of the Bill because he wanted to know the real nature of the measure, and this, as yet, had not been fully explained. It appeared to him that if they voted against the Government now they would place themselves in a certain minority, and would be voting on a matter which Her Majesty's Government had said they had not fully considered, and the difficulties as to which the Prime Minister had said had not suggested themselves to the Government. They would, as might be inferred from the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen), be paying the money of the people of England and Scotland to sanction a system of fraudulent bankruptcy. He thought he might infer this from the speech made by the hon. Member near him, and especially from that of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Tippe-rary (Mr. Dillon). Feeling that it was dangerous to be committed unadvisedly to evil principles in the matter of landed property, he should certainly vote for the deferring of the conditions of this measure until it had been duly weighed by Her Majesty's Government.

said, one main cause of arrears had been completely overlooked by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen), and that was that for years past the tenants of Ireland had been required to pay exorbitant rents. The right hon. Gentleman had expressed a deep interest in the pockets and welfare of the English taxpayers; but the English taxpayers must remember that their pockets were not being drawn upon to pay landlords the money that was justly due to them. He thought it would be the duty of Her Majesty's Government, when they had taken further time to consider this matter, to include in the causes of failure the requirement on the part of the tenants to pay exorbitant rent.

said, he hoped that the speech of his right hon. Friend the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) had proved to the Committee that it would be unwise now, or at any future time, for the Government to give countenance to so mischievous an Amendment as was now proposed. His right hon. Friend had clearly shown that the arrears which were to be dealt with had accrued up to the year 1880, and, therefore, before the teachings of the Land League, or the terrorism of the Land League, had obtained sway in Ireland. There was no Member in that House who had spoken out more boldly as to that teaching than he (Colonel Colthurst) had done; but he maintained that this teaching and terrorism could have nothing to do with the antecedent arrears. He hoped the Government would not give any pledge as to the reconsideration of this question; but would take their stand on the principles laid down by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster).

said, before they proceeded to a division he should like to point out that this Amendment, like many of the Amendments proposed last night and that day, had been found so very defective that, before being put, it had either to be recast or post- poned. What did the Government say? It said this—that as to the first part of the Amendment, it was so entirely inadmissible as it stood, even in the opinion of those who advised something of the kind, that it could not by any possible means be adopted at that moment; and as to the second part of Amendment, the Government ought to have time to consider how they should deal with it. But Her Majesty's Government, having asked for time to consider the Amendment, the Committee was now asked to arrive at an immediate decision—it was asked to force its opinion in such a way as to put both sides of the question in a very embarrassing position. He thought that the advice which had been given by the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. Newdegate) was good advice; and, therefore, he hoped the Committee would not pass the proposed Amendment, but would allow the Government further time for its consideration.

said, the Committee was assuredly in a very embarrassed position. The Government had asked it to defer until the Report the consideration of this question because the Government themselves had not considered it. The question was whether or not the money of the British taxpayer should be given to those who had been guilty of absolute and intentional fraud; and it had been clearly stated in that House by the responsible Ministers of the Crown and the Guardians of the Public Purse that they had not considered whether they ought to take steps to prevent the money going into the hands of those who had been nothing less than swindlers. The Committee had, no doubt, listened with great attention to what had fallen from the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster), because whatever fell from him always came with peculiar weight. To him (Earl Percy), what had been stated by the right hon. Gentleman appeared to form one of the strongest arguments that could be urged against the measure, for the right hon. Gentleman had said it was almost impossible to prevent the money of the British taxpayer being expended in an improper manner by being given to persons who really did not deserve it. If, then, the Committee were in this position—that the right hon. Gentleman said it was impossible to prevent a gross misapplication of the public funds, and the Government said they required further time to consider whether or not they should even take into view the desirability of such an expenditure as the Committee were asked to defer the further consideration of to the Report, the best plan, as it appeared to him, would be for them to adjourn, so as to give time to the Government to fully consider their position.

said, he hoped the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Gloucestershire (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach) would not press his Amendment, as it was evident that if he did so the Committee would reject it. If the right hon. Gentleman would withdraw his Amendment the Committee would then proceed to a division on the Amendment of the hon. Member for Pembrokeshire (Mr. II. Allen), and the matter could be brought up again on the Report.

said, what appeared to him to be essential was that they should on that occasion have the decision of the Committee on the principle that tenants who were wilful defaulters should not receive benefits under this Bill. He would withdraw his Amendment on condition that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen) would bring up his words as an Amendment to the Bill.

said, he had merely thrown out a suggestion for the consideration of Her Majesty's Government. He had listened with great interest to the debate; but he was not prepared to embody his suggestion in an Amendment at that moment. He thought the right hon. Gentleman was perfectly right in his opinion that the principle of the decision of the Committee should be taken upon the principle that the tenants who were wilful defaulters should not be benefited under the Bill. The other part of the recommendation he considered satisfactory; but, at the present stage, he was of opinion that both Amendments should be withdrawn.

said, that if the proposal contained in the Amendment were accepted, it would double the work of the Land Commission, and materially lengthen the time of their sitting. It was stated last night from the Conservative Benches that hon. Members opposite wished to see the Bill in operation as quickly as possible. If, however, the Amendment were adopted, it would be necessary to have two investigations instead of one. They would have men coming forward to prove that in 1879, owing to the prevalence of rot or foot-and-mouth disease, they had only got one-half of the money for their flock of sheep that they obtained the year before. It was well known that the loss in some instances, in this way, had been enormous.

said, he was quite ready to withdraw the Amendment he had moved, after the undertaking which had been given by the Prime Minister that the matter would be considered before the Report. He had only one word to add. It had been asked what was intended by the words "without fault on his own part," and the interpretation which had been put upon the words was certainly not the one he had had in his own mind. What had always been in his mind was that the fault on the part of the tenant should be an agricultural fault. For instance, if a man chose to refrain from sowing his land, he should not then be able to recover; and he certainly had not suggested anything so absurd as an inquiry into the moral character of a tenant in any other respect. As far as he was personally concerned, he was quite satisfied with the undertaking given by the Prime Minister, and he was ready to withdraw the Amendment.

I must point out to the hon. Member that he cannot withdraw his Amendment until the right hon. Baronet (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach) has withdrawn his proposed Amendment of the Amendment.

desired to say a few words before the Committee divided. He believed he understood the matters at issue as well as most hon. Members, and he was of opinion that it would be more merciful to the tenants of Ireland, and to society in general, that the Bill should be thrown out altogether rather than enter upon a course of refinement like that which had been suggested, and which the Prime Minister had promised to take into consideration. He did not intend to cast the slightest reflection upon the right hon. Gentleman for saying, on the spur of the moment, that he would take the matter into consideration, because he knew how difficult it was for the right hon. Gentleman to realize suddenly what it was he ought not to consider in connection with Amendments of this kind. But the right hon. Gentleman might find himself beset with embarrassments, and he warned Her Majesty's Government that if the Bill was only to become law after it was surrounded by a number of refinements as to the mode of procedure, they would be laying the groundwork for a comprehensive failure which, instead of pacifying, would continue the disturbance of Ireland.

said, he would at once, in order to save time, say that this was an Amendment which the Government could not accept. It related to the same matter as the Amendment which the Committee had already rejected; but so far as the subject-matter of the Bill was concerned, he was bound to say that this Amendment appeared to him far more objectionable than the Amendment of the hon. Member behind him (Mr. H. Allen), and which raised difficulties that were comparatively slight. The object of the right hon. and learned Gentleman would be better done by words directly intended for the purpose. That, however, was not his main objection to the Amendment. The argument of the right hon. and learned Gentleman went entirely to one limited point—namely this, that it was desirable that the Court should know that the tenant was not only unable at the time of the application to meet the rent, but that he was unable at the time each of the two gales of rent accrued due in the year 1880, or became customarily due. That was the argument of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, and a legitimate one from the right hon. and learned Gentleman's point of view. The Bill said that, as a condition of proof, the Court should be satisfied "that antecedent arrears of rent are due to the landlord"—antecedent to the years 1880 and 1881—and the right hon. and learned Gentleman required that it should be shown to the Court, not merely that the tenant was unable to discharge such antecedent arrears, and not at all that he was unable to discharge the rent of the years 1880 and 1881, when it became due, but that in each and every year when the rent accrued due before 1880, the tenant was at each period of each year unable to pay the arrears. Under the Amendment of the right hon. and learned Gentleman all the old famine arrears would start up, and it would be positively necessary under the clause for the tenant to prove that in regard to each gale of rent which accrued due, even if there were 20 of them, the tenant was unable to pay it. If he was unable to prove to the satisfaction of the Court that he was unable to pay arrears which accrued due 20 or 30 years ago he would be excluded from going to the Court. He did not think that that was the meaning of the right hon. and learned Gentleman; but the adoption of his proposal would have that effect. At any rate, it was quite clear, without going into any details at all, that the Government could not accept an Amendment of that kind.

asked what the Amendment was that the right hon. Gentleman himself intended to propose?

said, that his Amendment would be proposed for another purpose altogether; but he could not move it as an Amendment now. It went to a Point which the Government had always admitted to be quite a reasonable point—namely, the question whether a guiding rule was to be recorded for ascertaining the tenant's inability. He should be inclined to leave that to the common sense and experience of the Judges. At the same time, he thought there was a general impression in the House that it would be well to make some provision to this extent, and, undoubtedly, the Government could not object to it on principle. In the first place, on account of any step which would drive the tenant out of his holding, because that would be at variance with the whole purpose of the Bill, which was not to fasten him to his holding any more than to drive him away from it, but to leave him free to stay or leave. Another result which they would object to was any provision which would place the tenant in such a state of restricted means that he could not make a living out of the holding. His right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for War, on a former occasion, on behalf of the Government, used the familiar phrase, which would really be a good phrase to introduce into the Bill if it were possible to do so, that they were going to deal with the farm or the holding as a going farm, and they would not do anything that had a tendency to deprive it of the character of a going farm. His proposal was to insert, in the same place as the Amendment of the right hon. Gentleman, after the word "arrears," certain words which would make the sentence read thus—

"That it would have to be proved before the Commissioners that the tenant was unable to discharge antecedent arrears without the loss of his holding or deprivation of means necessary for the cultivation thereof."

That was the Amendment he intended to propose, and the Government believed that it would distinctly direct the mind of the Court to the assets of the tenant, and at the same time limit the operation of the clause, so that there should be no compulsion of sale or any deprivation of the tenant of the means for the cultivation of his holding. He would not enter into details upon the subject now; but that was the nature of the Amendment he proposed to insert.

said, it would be premature and entirely out of place to discuss the Amendment of which Notice had to be given by the right hon. Gentleman. He wished, however, that it had been put upon the Paper. He saw very clearly that the Amendment was one which would require much consideration, and it introduced words which would not settle controversy. It did not, in the slightest degree, remove his desire to take the opinion of the Committee upon the Amendment which he had moved.

said, that, before a division was taken, he wished to say that he disapproved of the Amendment of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, and of any Amendment of the character suggested by the Prime Minister, because it would render the Bill, which there would already be some difficulty in working, still more unworkable; and it might also tend to raise expectations in regard to the beneficial operation of the measure which might prove irritating and unsatisfactory in particular districts. He had no wish to express any further opinion upon the Amendment which the Prime Minister had just read to the House. It would be out of Order to do 60; but certainly the tendency of the Amendment of the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) would be so very largely to widen the area of the inquiry that he did not think the Committee would accept it for a moment. It would extend the area of the investigation in such a way, and would require the tenant to prove so much, that he did not imagine any of them would live long enough to see the termination of the inquiries which the Court would have to enter into. The Amendment suggested by the Prime Minister was open to a similar objection, but not to the same extent. He should much prefer to leave the question to the rough good sense of the Court, in the hope and belief that substantial justice would be obtained. It would be impossible to obtain more than substantial justice, because the essence and efficacy of a Bill of this character depended upon the speedy application of the measure. If the Bill could not be worked quickly as it stood, all the tenants whom it was desired to benefit would be ejected or their interests sold up. Therefore, he objected to all of these Amendments, whether in favour of the tenant or of the landlord, which would open an additional area of investigation.

said, he thought it was most important to consider how the Bill would work if a series of Amendments of this character were inserted. Hon. Members should take into consideration that one of the necessary ingredients of the passing of any case before the Court was that the landlord must practically obey the decision of the Court, and in some way or other be brought to agree that the tenant was not solvent, and that what was being proposed to be done was the best thing to be done under the circumstances. He wished the Committee to bear in mind what would be given for an agreement between the landlord and the tenant, so that when the case came before the Court it should give rise to no difficulty whatever. The Irish landlords were giving, as it were, a hostage for their opinions, because they were consenting to deprive themselves of something, and they would be liable to severe penalties, as well as the tenant, if they attempted to deceive the Court. Ho, therefore, hoped the Prime Minister would discourage all line-drawn Amendments, and leave the inability of the tenant to pay the arrears, at the time they accrued, to be readily ascertained by the Court on its own responsibility without hampering its action. These repeated Amendments, if adopted, would force the Court to entertain questions which would only involve delay in the working of the measure.

I beg to ask the hon. Gentleman the Secretary to the Admiralty, If he is able now to give us any further information as to the operations off Alexandria?

Yes, Sir; since the meeting of the House we have received two telegrams. The first was sent from Alexandria at 4.30, and was received here at 5 P.M. It is to this effect—

"Meks, as well as all forts on the sea front of the Peninsula, silenced. Action between un-armoured ships and Marabout ceased 11.40. Monarch and Penelope now engaged with batteries inside harbour. Invincible unengaged, lying off Meks."

The second telegram, which was received at 6.10, is as follows:—

"Action ended 5.30 afternoon."

This came from the same source as I have mentioned before—namely, from the secretary to the Commander-in-Chief, who is on board the telegraph ship off Alexandria.

Has the hon. Gentleman any information as to whether any of Her Majesty's ships have been struck, or whether any casualties have occurred?

I have read all the information we have received. I presume we shall probably soon receive telegrams from the Commander-in-Chief himself, which may give the information desired.

Can the hon. Gentleman say whether the Egyptian flag has been lowered?

I have given all the information in my power.

Before the House resumes Business, Sir, I would ask the Government whether they have any further intelligence from Alexandria beyond what was announced before the suspension of the Afternoon Sitting?

Yes, Sir. The following telegram has just been received:—

"Alexandria, 7.50 P.M.—The following casualties in the fleet. Killed—In the Alexandra, 1; in the Superb, 1; in the Saltan, 2; in the Inflexible, 1—total, 5. Wounded—In the Alexandra, 3; in the Sultan, 7; in the Superb, 1; in the Invincible, 6; in the Inflexible, 2; in the Penelope, 8—total, 27. Twelve officers and men landed from the Invincible under cover of the guns of the Condor and the Bittern, and destroyed with dynamite heavy guns in Mexs."

That is the only further information we have received.

Does the hon. Gentleman know whether any officers are among the killed and wounded?

No; I presume not. The telegram says—"The following casualties in the Fleet." So I presume it is an exhaustive list.

Is there any information with regard to the number of Egyptians wounded?

I have read all the information we have received; but, obviously, we should not know the effect on the shore.

said, he rose to a point of Order. He understood that among the Regulations that guided the Business of the House was one that prevented any controversial matter being entertained after 10 minutes to 7 at a Morning Sitting, and another practice was to allow Amendments to be moved in the order in which they appeared on the Paper. His hon. Friend the Member for Mid Lincolnshire (Mr. Stanhope) had a number of Amendments, which had been printed on the Paper for some days past; and the Amendments of his hon. Friend and his own raised questions of great importance, and affected the position of tenancies outside the provisions of the Bill as it stood. His Amendment had been some time on the Notice Paper, when the Prime Minister suddenly proposed an Amendment, the discussion of which would prevent his Amendment being put. This Amendment which the Prime Minister foisted suddenly on the Committee was an elaborate Amendment in manuscript, altogether without Notice, and put from the Chair so close to 10 minutes to 7 that few could know whether it was really in Order or not. When he came down to the House he found that the Amendment of the Prime Minister, put at 10 minutes to 7, was inserted as the first Amendment; and, consequently, if that Amendment was discussed, the whole of the subsequent Amendments to the same part of the clause standing in other names would be excluded from consideration. He would venture to ask whether it was in Order to put this Amendment of the Prime Minister's at a time when nobody [in the House could say whether or not it was really later than 10 minutes to 7?

Whether on the Paper or not, the Amendment would come first, and the position of the noble Lord's Amendment is the same; but the 10 minutes to the hour had not been reached when I put the Amendment, and I thought it would be for the convenience of the Committee to know exactly what the Amendment was. For obvious reasons, and as the noble Lord knows, the Minister in charge of the Bill has precedence in his Amendments; but if he agrees to postpone his Amendment he may do so.

said, but as to putting an Amendment after 10 minutes to 7?

I was careful to see that it was not 10 minutes to 7.

said, he desired to make a few remarks on the subject of the Amendment of his right hon. Friend. The question whether it was necessary to insert any words at this point, after Sub-section (c), had been discussed on a previous stage of the Bill; and it was understood, the point having been raised on both sides of the House with reference to the possibility of difficulty arising as to the inability of the tenant to pay his arrears in consequence of his having property in the nature either of the selling value of his tenancy, or of stock on his farm, that it should be carefully considered by the Government; and they undertook to give it their consideration, and state the result on this stage of the Bill. Only a few words were necessary upon the point, because it was fully discussed on the Motion that the Speaker do leave the Chair; but the question was this. In the absence of any words instructing or directing the Commission as to the meaning of the words "inability to pay," a great injustice might be done to the tenant, because it might be assumed he was the owner of—as he in every case would be—either of the tenant right or the saleable value of the farm; or if he was also the owner of a certain amount of stock on the farm, unless some direction was given in the Bill as to the intention of the Legislature, the whole of that property might be deemed to be property which the tenant ought to convert into money in order to liquidate arrears on his farm, and the position of the tenant would thus be really no better at all, and he would be utterly unable to continue his business of farming. He need not say that any such construction was mischievous, and would defeat the object of the Bill. On the other hand, if a tenant had the full value of the saleable value of his farm, and had also stock on his farm, and would be able to raise a sufficient amount of money, without injury to the carrying on of his business, to discharge a moderate amount of arrears, it would be manifestly unjust that he should be considered, in the words of the clause, a person unable to discharge his arrears. Therefore, it became necessary to say—which the words of the Amendment expressed, and which, he would venture to say, was not only the view of the Government, but which must be, and was shown to be in a previous debate, the general view—the medium between these extreme propositions. To give an instance. Suppose a tenant had a farm valued at £30 in Ulster, and he had a tenant right of the saleable value of £150 or £200, and that the farm was well stocked, and there was no mortgage upon it—clearly it would be quite proper that this farmer should not be able to obtain the benefit of the Bill if he owed a year's rent or so, for he would be perfectly well able to raise £30, £40, or £50 on the value of his farm and stock, without interfering with the means necessary for the cultivation of his land. If, on the other hand, a farmer had only a saleable value on the farm, or a tenant right worth only half that amount, or if he had already mortgaged that value for a considerable sum, and his stock was small, and he was called on to pay £30, it was quite clear he could not, without interfering with the conduct of the farm, pay these arrears, and that he ought to come within the provisions of the Bill if the Act was intended to have any practical working. This was a practical question, to which the Amendment offered a practical solution, meeting the two cases, on the one side, where a man could divest his farm of part of his stock or surrender a part of his tenant right; and, on the other hand, where, if he did so, he would be unable to carry on his farm. The Government therefore proposed the Amendment, the words of which had been carefully considered, and he did not think it would be easy to express the view of the Government in a more clear and simple manner, and he hoped the Committee would adopt the Amendment.

asked whether, in the event of this Amendment being put from the Chair, his Amendment on the Paper would be precluded from being moved; and whether the whole question of a tenant's interest in his holding could be raised on this Amendment? His Amendment had been placed on the Paper for three days, and, though he had been in communication with the Government, they had moved their Amendment at the last moment without any notice to him.

The hon. Member's Amendment is a little way ahead yet, and I would like a little time to consider. I would rather not answer the question now.

said, but what was he to do? If the question wore settled now, then he would be precluded afterwards; and, in that case, he must certainly oppose the Government Amendment, which he had no wish to do.

said, he also had an Amendment similarly relating to tenancies; and he wished to know in what position that would be placed?

The Amendments have only come before me five minutes ago. I just want a little time to consider the bearings of them.

said, he had listened with great attention to the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for War, and he understood him to say it was necessary this provision should be inserted, in order to give the tenant an opportunity of continuing in his occupation; but he failed to see there was any protection against any right of action which an ordinary creditor possessed against the tenant under similar circumstances. This provision would preclude the landlord from taking any step which might result in turning out the tenant from his holding; but it did not preclude any ordinary creditor from pressing the tenant at law, obtaining a judgment against him, and compelling the tenant for a sum, less probably than the sum owing to the landlord—compelling him either to sell his holding, or part with his stock or crops. He wanted to know, before pressing the subject further, what security the Government supposed this was against all creditors, and how the tenant could remain in his holding when pressed by these for his liabilities?

said, if the question was addressed to him, he could only make the reply that this Bill merely dealt with the question of arrears of rent, and not in any way with other debts on a farm; they would remain in exactly the same position in which they were now.

said, that was an extraordinary statement to make. This was a proposal to enable a very large class in Ireland, as it was understood, to continue their undertakings with the hope of maintaining themselves and their families. The Government and the House knew that nearly the whole of the men who were in debt to their landlords were also in debt to a great many other persons. The evidence gathered by the Bessborough Commission showed that where a man was in debt for three years' rent to his landlord he was also in debt to shopkeepers, bankers, and others, to an amount equal at least to the landlord's debt. Now, it was understood this proposal would save the tenant so far as the debt to the landlord was concerned; but it would not save the tenant from the action of his other creditors. They would be at full liberty to take any steps they pleased to recover their debts, even if those steps resulted in turning the tenant out of his holding, and depriving him of the means of livelihood, swallowing up his stock, or whatever means he had of continuing his livelihood; in point of fact, pronouncing that very sentence of eviction which the Bill was intended to avoid. He confessed he failed to see what justice or charity or consideration there was in extending this measure of protection to the tenant only, so far as the landlord was concerned. The landlord would suffer, but the tenant would not be secure.

said, he might also point out that the proposal would encourage what in Bankruptcy proceedings would be called a fraudulent practice. Suppose a tenant owed two years' rent to the landlord, and was unable to pay this as well as his debts to shopkeepers and other persons, inasmuch as the landlord would by the Bill be prevented from recovering his rent; while the shopkeepers would not be prevented from recovering, the tenant would be in this position—that he would have to use all his available resources, including his tenant right, if necessary, in order to pay all the other creditors in full; and, having paid all his other creditors in full, he would be able to come before the Land Commission and make out a case of inability to pay one unfortunate creditor, and, in that way, would obtain a grant from the Consolidated Fund for the purpose of compounding with his landlord. The hon. and learned Member for Stockport (Mr. Hop wood), interrupting with an interjection, said—"What is the harm?" and it seemed to him the harm was that it was contrary to the natural ideas of justice. Here was a man confessedly unable to pay everybody, and why should all the other creditors be paid in full, being able to put a pressure on the tenant to force the payment, and why should the landlord be the only unfortunate creditor, not only not paid in full, but forced to accept a composition paid out of the Consolidated Fund? That would be the natural result of this measure.

said, he desired to recall the attention of the Committee to the fact that the Bill before them was one dealing with arrears of rent. The Bill they were considering was a Bill to make provision respecting certain arrears of rent in Ireland, and the hon. and learned Member said if the object of the Bill were carried out it would put the tenant in the position of a fraudulent debtor.

said, he said nothing of the kind. He said it would induce the tenant to do that which, in Bankruptcy proceedings, would be called a fraudulent practice.

said, that what they were considering was this. The tenant, being deeply indebted to the landlord, this provision was proposed to enable him to earn the money to pay his debts so far as he could, and for that purpose the State would advance a sum as a gift. The very fact of enabling the tenant to remain on the land, not, as the Prime Minister pointed out, by anchoring him there, but to allow him to earn the means of paying his way, not only with the landlord, but his other creditors, was by no means a fraudulent practice in Bankruptcy proceedings; it was to enable the man to pay his way in the world that was the ground for the introduction of the Bill. If the Committee were to travel outside the lines of the Bill they would embark on a sea of speculation whereof no man could see the other shore. They were dealing with a known class of debts and debtors; the Bill came before the House, and was read a second time on these lines, and it was now too late to go back on those lines laid down for the consideration of the Committee and enter upon matters entirely foreign to the Bill. On those lines, it was provided that the Court appointed to investigate the circumstances should decide whether a tenant was one for whom the Bill was designed as being unable to pay his arrears of rent; and it was a general impression in the Committee that it was desirable that some line should be laid down as an instruction to the Court as to how they should proceed; and, as the Prime Minister said, it was perfectly idle to continue a man in his holding with no means of carrying on his farming. There was an old saying in Ireland, "Samson was a strong man, and Solomon a wise one; but neither of them could pay their rent if they had no money." What was intended was to subsidize the tenant by a gift from the State which would enable him to pay his way in future. It was for the advantage of the community that this should be carried out. Suppose a tenant were held able to pay, if he could pay by selling out all his resources by which he carried on work, that would defeat the object of the Bill. The object was that the man should continue to pay, and on those lines the Amendment was proposed, that the tenant should be left with the means of making an honest livelihood, paying all his creditors in future. The Amendment must commend itself to the good sense of the Committee. If they were to travel outside their object into unwise speculation as to what the tenant might owe, then they might as well give up the Bill at once.

asked, had the Chairman now had time to consider the question put to him?

I have examined the Amendments, and I am of opinion that the hon. Member can put his Amendment; but the Amendment of the hon. and learned Member for Monaghan (Mr. Givan) will be precluded.

said, it had been attempted to limit the scope of the discussion in an extraordinary manner. It seemed to be thought by the right hon. Gentleman that the question of the position of the tenant, in regard to other creditors than the landlord, was outside the limits of discussion, and that it was irrelevant to suggest the possibility of the tenant owing money to the usurer or the shopkeeper. What did the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for War tell the Committee was the meaning of the Amendment? He said if a man was in the possession of a farm with a valuable tenant right, and if that tenant right was not mortgaged, then he would be compelled to borrow money on that to pay the landlord; but if the tenant, through misfortunes or any other cause, had mortgaged his tenant right up to the eyes, if he had mortgaged it to its full value, then the State would intervene, and assist the tenant to remain on his mortgaged holding, helping him to pay his landlord out of the Consolidated Fund. No answer had been given to his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Chatham (Mr. Gorst), who pointed out that the operation of the Amendment would be that the State would help the tenant out of the Consolidated Fund, and would enable the tenant to pay his other creditors in full, while only paying the landlord in part—perhaps in small part. A great many Amendments urged from the Conservative side had been met by the Government with the argument—"Your Amendment may be founded on principles of justice; but, in order to carry it out, you must complicate the working of the Bill, and thus practically do more harm than good." But had not the Government now put forward an Amendment which would greatly add to the complexity of the working of the Bill, compelling the Court to decide an exceedingly difficult and complicated problem—namely, the amount of capital required to work a farm? Now, in those parts of England where farming was carried on upon a more elaborate system, no doubt anyone with experience could tell the amount of capital required for a farm, say, of 300 acres; but could anyone say what would be required on one of the small holdings in the West of Ireland? These were not worked on scientific principles, and it was impossible to state definitely the amount of capital required. He imagined that in the West of Ireland no holdings probably were worked with what in England would be considered sufficient capital. According to English and Scotch ideas, better buildings, more stock, more ma- nure was required than it was the practice to use in that country, in order to carry on farming properly. Now, on what principle was the Court to decide these matters? Was it to be on the Scotch principle, and was the Court to say no tenant should be required to sell any part of his stock unless he had left such stock as a Lothian farmer would require? If so, he could only say that oven the best stocked farm in the most prosperous times in the West of Ireland was extremely imperfectly provided with the necessary capital for working it. So much as regards Ireland; but had the Committee gone into the consideration of how this proposition was likely to be received by the taxpayers of England? It was well known, especially to those connected with agricultural constituencies, to what condition the English farmer had been reduced by the last four or five bad years. It was sufficiently grievous that he should be told that he was to assist out of his taxes in paying the just debts of other people; but if this Amendment were carried his grievance would be much greater, for it would be telling him that not only would he assist in the payment of the just debts of other people, but the debts of people who had property of their own amply sufficient to pay those debts. How would the English farmer receive a statement of this kind, he probably having been paying his rent for years past partly out of his capital? It was too well known that there were cases where the farmer had found it difficult to maintain on his farm a sufficient amount of stock for working purposes, and had found it difficult to get advances from the local bankers. To these struggling men came the proposition that they should pay something in taxes to the Irish farmer, and that the Irish farmer was not to have his capital or his stock touched, and was not to dispose of his property in any way; but he was to be kept on his holding, and not required to go to any of the sacrifices which his unfortunate brother on this side of St. George's Channel had to make. He agreed with the right hon. Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen) that unless there was an Amendment in this direction there would be a great deal of complexity. If they were to have a Bill of this kind at all there was a great deal to be said as to introducing an Amendment of this kind; but the fact of having to introduce such an Amendment showed what an exceptional and vicious principle there was in the Bill, and he confessed he could not, as a Representative of the British taxpayer, consent to an arrangement which would not only compel the English taxpayer to assist in paying the Irish tenants' debts to his landlord, but would compel the English taxpayer to pay those debts, even when the debtor had sufficient assets in his possession to meet those claims.

said, he regretted that so much was said in this discussion of an Irish Bill of the pressure that would be likely to fall on the English taxpayer, because he thought it had been demonstrated already that the Church Surplus Fund would almost meet the amount of the advance that the public would be called upon to make. And there was another reason why he regretted this. It was the object of the Bill to give relief to the Irish farmer in his present unfortunate condition; and the effect of this relief, it was anticipated and hoped by Her Majesty's Government, and those who wished well to Ireland, would be to put down crime, disorder, and outrage, and to restore peace to the country. Now, at present a standing Army was maintained in the country at the expense of the British taxpayer; and was it not better to pay out of the Public Exchequer a sum of money towards settling arrears, accompanied by peace and prosperity, than to keep up a standing Army there, which could only produce irritation and discontent all over the country? He regretted that this Amendment of the Prime Minister's did not go far enough, because he considered that in estimating whether or not a tenant was able to pay antecedent arrears, regard should be paid to the tenant right being absolutely protected. It had been said by the Secretary of State for War, in his observations, that a tenant might mortgage his tenant right for the purpose of getting money to pay his pressing creditors. And the result would be to start the tenant anew in the debt of some usurer, who ultimately, by process of law, would sell the tenant right, or keep him paying an exorbitant rate of interest, which, in the working out of the Purchase Clauses of the Act of 1870, had the effect of entirely stopping the whole of the intention of the Government in passing those clauses. Of course, the Amendment now before the Committee would render it impracticable for him to move his Amendment subsequently to protect the tenant in his tenant right, and such stock as was necessary for the working of his farm; but with regard to what had been said by the hon. Member for Hertford (Mr. A. J. Balfour) as to the position of shopkeepers and others to whom the tenant might be indebted, he had only to say, as was said by the Attorney General for Ireland, that such considerations were not within the scope of the Bill; but, so far as they were within the scope of the Bill, surely, when the tenant was relieved of the weight of his arrears to his landlord, he would be in a better position to satisfy his other creditors. He was greatly amused at the man of straw the hon. Member for Hertford had set up for the purpose of knocking down again, in estimating what capital would be required for the working of a farm. They were not going to Scotland to know what capital small Irish farmers required; but they were going to appoint men in Ireland who were intimately acquainted with the amount of capital that was absolutely necessary, and who were thoroughly able, from their knowledge of the condition of small farmers in Ireland, to administer this Act. Surely they would infer that the Government would select for the administration of this Act men of common sense and competence. He considered the Amendment a very moderate one, and regretted it did not go far enough.

could not help thinking that the Attorney General for Ireland had somewhat misstated the Amendment, which, in his opinion, seemed to alter the whole character of the Bill. As the condition stood, it would have been the duty of a Judge to determine whether or not the tenant was unable or not to discharge his antecedent arrears. The effect of the Amendment was to make the duty of the tribunal, not to determine this question, but to determine whether the tenant was unable to discharge his antecedent arrears, keeping in his possession the farm, and retaining his saleable interest in it, and whatever might be necessary to work the farm. The Bill was to enable certain advances to be made on certain conditions, one condition being that the tenant was unable to discharge his arrears; and he (Sir Hardinge Giffard) invited the Attorney General for Ireland to tell him whether the words of the clause, unqualified or unlimited by this Amendment, would not involve the necessity that the tribunal should determine, before an application should come into force, that the tenant was unable to discharge his antecedent arrears, and whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman would contend that if these words were inserted the same duty would be existing on the tribunal? He was sorry to detain hon. Gentlemen opposite, but this was not altogether a new sort of provision. We had something of the sort in England. In 1869, when imprisonment for debt was abolished, there were saved out of this abolition those cases in which, after an order should be made, the Judge should be satisfied that the debtor had the means of payment, and, having the means of payment, would not pay. That was an investigation, which went on in every County Court now upon a judgment summons when an order had been made; and it did appear a somewhat singular thing that a farmer, in asking State aid in order to keep on his farm, should be entitled to receive it, if he did not exceed a certain standard of possession of property, or possession of saleable interest in land; it did seem strange that a farmer in Ireland should be entitled to State aid, although he had property which, according to the Bankruptcy Law, he would be compelled to distribute amongst his creditors. This provision was made solely against one particular creditor—namely, the landlord, and it was not intended to protect the debtor generally. A tenant's interest in land was saleable, his farm stock was saleable, so this Bill, intended as a relief to tenants, was covertly an attack upon landlords.

said, that very much depended upon this clause whether the Bill would tend to good or evil. This Bill was, no doubt, a very exceptional Bill. The principle of it was one which was generally disliked; but the expediency of the Bill he was bound to admit, and having admitted that, he thought the greatest care ought to be taken in order to guard against the evils which everyone had foreseen if this Bill were abused, and to try to make it run in those lines in which it would be difficult to abuse it. With regard to this Amendment, he had tried his hand, as he had no doubt many hon. Members had, to draw up words as would provide for those cases they feared. It seemed to him that they could not possibly ask that the man should sacrifice his tenant right in procuring the means for payment of his rent; and, on the other hand, they could not allow a man who had an actual cash value in his tenant right to say that he had no assets in that tenant right. It was impossible to deprive a man of the means of cultivating his farm, and to take away his tenant right; but if his tenant right was of such value that he could mortgage it, not to the usurer, but on a fair rate of interest, it became necessarily one of the things which were to be taken into consideration by the Court. The hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) had talked of the rough justice of the Court. He (Sir Joseph Pease) thought they would have to leave a great deal to the rough justice of the Court. The hon. Gentleman the Member for Hertford (Mr. A. J. Balfour) had asked on what principle the Court was going to judge? He believed the Court would have to be driven back to common sense. The Prime Minister had pointed out that the whole question before the Court would be, what a man could part with, retaining his farm, and what he must keep on his farm in order to cultivate it, and avail himself of the good which this Bill was intended to do him. They would have to trust a great deal to the Court, in whose common sense they would have to confide. It was an absolute absurdity to suppose that they could place a man on his farm and cut off his arrears, and then take away either his tenant right or those things which he required on his farm for the purpose of working it, on the ground that the tenant right and his implements and stock were assets.

said, he must enter a protest in the strongest terms he could command against the manner in which this Amendment had been sprung upon the Committee. It had been brought forward, without being placed on the Paper, without Notice, and at a time when not one-third of the Members of the Committee were not even aware of what was now being discussed.

said, the hon. Gentleman would remember that this Amendment was introduced in deference to what appeared to be the wish of the House. The Government had not the slightest desire to force the consideration of it, if the Committee did not wish to do so.

asked if he was to understand that the Amendment was not to be pressed at the present time?

said, the matter was in the hands of the Committee.

said, in the absence of any assurance to the contrary, he must assume that the Amendment was going to be pressed. The terms of the Amendment were diametrically op-I posed to those which were announced by the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. John Bright) recently as presumably the opinion of the Government. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster pointed out that the tenant right ought to be, and was fairly, chargeable with such charges as were now proposed to be taken off the tenant. He felt the country and the Committee would appreciate the reason why this Amendment had been introduced, and that it was for the purpose of cutting the ground from under any Amendment of a similar nature which had already appeared on the Paper, and, by now affirming the principle as to whether or not the tenant right was to be charged, prevent every Amendment of a similar nature being brought forward. Hon. Members must have observed, during the pro-gross of this discussion, the persistent manner in which Members of the Government, and those speaking in support of the Government, had entirely ignored the true manner in which those arrears had accrued. The Prime Minister himself had often said that the general cause of arrears in Ireland was the failure of crops.

The arrears affected by this Bill.

said, he took it that the arrears generally to be affected by this Bill were the arrears in Ireland, and those arrears were put down by a Member of the Government last year at a sum not exceeding £700,000. The arrears that were to be affected by the Bill in the present year were put down by the Government at a sum not exceeding £2,000,000. That being so, and the statement of the Government being that the arrears had been principally caused by the failure of crops, he should like to know how the Government accounted for the difference between £700,000, the estimate of last year, and £2,000,000, which it was now proposed should be the amount, when there had been no failure of crops during the interval which had elapsed between the making of those calculations; but when, on the contrary, there had been one of the finest harvests with which Ireland had ever been blessed. The true quarter to which they must now look for the cause of arrears was the quarter in which the Government were now looking for support in the passing of the Bill. He should not go into that question at present, as it would probably arise further on. What were they about to do by this Amendment? They were going to say to the tenant—"If you cannot pay your debts to the landlords without selling your interests in the farm, or your stock, or your implements of trade, we will not compel you to do so; but, at the same time, we will leave every other creditor you may have in possession of his full rights and powers over you. The only one we will prevent from asserting any right whatever is the man whose rights have hitherto always been considered paramount." By the Act of last year the Government created a saleable interest of the tenant's right, which they said was to increase the security of the landlord's just claims. By this Bill it was proposed to leave the bankrupt tenant in possession of that interest which was created for him, and it was proposed to absolve him from any obligation to pay his debts so far as the landlord was concerned; it was proposed to whitewash him with one hand, and to tar-and-feather with the other the man from whom the interest was taken last year, and diverted to the tenant. It was proposed that the creditor from whom the interest of last year was taken was now to be the only one who was not to enforce his right against that interest. Now, in carrying out the principle enunciated last year, he asked, was this right or just? Was it right that a man who committed an act of political and moral bankruptcy should be enabled the following week to sell property which Parliament had created for him, and which was now in his possession, notwithstanding that by this Act he was declared to be unable to pay his lawful debts? By this Act the ordinary creditor—the shopkeeper, the money-lender, and the banker—would be left in possession of all rights and powers of recovering his debts which he now possessed at law, and could seize upon the property which had been taken from the landlord and given to the tenant. Possibly there were many hon. Members who were not aware that in the absence of other property applicable to the payment of debt in Ireland, the interest or goodwill in a farm could be sold to the creditor. That was being done almost every day. They gave the ordinary creditor all these powers, whilst they said to one solitary creditor, whose rights had hitherto been considered to be superior to those of anybody else—"We will take a way from you the right of recovering a shilling of the amount due to you;" and they said this notwithstanding the fact that from that very person they had taken his property and transferred it to the tenant. What sort of justice, he would ask, was this? What justification could there be for such a proposition? With regard to the tribunal which was to decide these questions between the landlord and the tenant, it was a tribunal which the Prime Minister had said, within the last day or two, commanded the confidence of the country. But there were two sides to every question, and although the tribunal might command the confidence of that side in whose interest it was working, it certainly did not command one grain of confidence on the other side—on the side of those in whose interest it was not working. The Bill as it stood at present provided that the tribunal to adjudicate in these matters should be a single member, possibly of one of the Sub-Commissions. Why, they would probably not find a single landowner in Ireland who, if he were asked about it, would say that he would be satisfied to allow the matters at issue between himself and his tenant to be decided by any one of these single individuals. These creations of the Land Act were to be extended for the purposes of the present measure; and, so far from their commanding the general confidence of the country, he (Mr. Tottenham) should say that the general opinion with regard to them upon one side certainly was that they were a mockery of justice and a parody on a judicial tribunal. He hoped the Committee would not agree to the Amendment.

said, he desired to put one or two points before the Committee in regard to this Amendment, which had been moved by the right hon. Gentleman at the head of Her Majesty's Government. Perhaps it was not possible; but if it was, no doubt it would be greatly for the convenience of the Committee that they should ascertain what was the general view of Her Majesty's Government with regard to the part which the tenant right was to play generally in the estimation of the assets, and he (Mr. Goschen) said this quite as much from the point of view of the tenants as from the point of view of the landlord. He had ventured to suggest the other evening that it was bettor that this should be defined in the Bill, than that it should be left entirely to the discretion of the Commissioners; and he was bound to say that it appeared to him that his right hon. Friend the Prime Minister had given effect to that idea in the Amendment he had proposed, in suggesting the introduction of the words "without loss of his holding." Those words differed from the original draft of the Bill in this—that they distinctly laid down in favour of the tenant that his ability to pay was not to be considered if his tenant right was so small that the selling of it would inflict upon him the loss of his holding. He took it that the Amendment was drafted in favour of the tenant. He did not say on that account that it was an Amendment that ought to be opposed; but what he did say was, that they should distinctly understand where they were. The Bill as drafted did not recognize tenant right as an asset in considering ability or inability to pay; but if the words of the Prime Minister were inserted, it would possibly be the duty of the Commissioners to compel the tenant to sell, because as long as he had a tenant right it would constitute ability to pay. If he was not mistaken, therefore, the words of the Prime Minister were necessary, not in order to limit, but in order to guide the Commissioners, not to take into consideration the tenant right as part of the assets, but, on the contrary, to exclude it, and to provide that no tenant was to lose the benefit of the Bill in consequence of the exist- ence of a certain tenant right. He did not know whether his right hon. Friend the Prime Minister disputed the justice of this interpretation; but that was how he (Mr. Goschen) read the Amendment—"without loss of his holding or deprivation of the means necessary for the cultivation thereof." These were the words to be taken into consideration by the Commissioners before they decided whether or not a man was able to pay his arrears. His (Mr. Goschen's) view with regard to these words would be influenced to a very great extent by the attitude which he should expect Her Majesty's Government to take with regard to the other Amendment that stood upon the Paper. He was quite sure the hon. Member who spoke last (Mr. Tottenham) was mistaken when he thought this Amendment had been put down by Her Majesty's Government in order to exclude other Amendments which stood upon the Paper. He (Mr. Goschen) was convinced that nothing of the kind had entered the minds of his right hon. Friends on the Front Ministerial Bench. On the contrary, he believed they would be prepared to give every facility for the bringing on of Amendments, and every attention to Amendments when proposed. He should be prepared to admit himself that the one object of the Bill was to settle the Land Question, and to prevent evictions; and he granted to the fullest extent that if the tenant right in every case were to be taken into consideration as an asset, it might so affect the operation of the Bill as to make it nugatory and inefficient for the purpose for which it was intended. Therefore, he was prepared to admit the argument, if it should be made on the part of the Government, that if they were in all cases to take the tenant right into consideration, they would too much limit the operation of the Bill; but, on the other hand, he thought they were equally entitled to ask Her Majesty's Government, if they assented to words which committed them to a very important principle, that when the value of the tenant right was so large that it constituted an actual asset, it should be taken into consideration, and should be realized, and the taxpayers of the country should be relieved, the surplus being given to the tenant. He thought the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government would admit that he (Mr. Goschen), and those who thought with him, were fairly entitled to put this question to the Government—If they assented to words of this kind, that no tenant was to be forced to lose his holding, through the realization of his tenant right, what safeguards, on the other hand, would Her Majesty's Government be prepared to accept, so as to prevent the burden upon the taxpayers becoming unnecessarily heavy? He did not think he had explained with perfect clearness the last part of his argument; but what he meant was this—that when the tenant right was so small that it would simply mean eviction if it were taken from the tenant, it should not be considered as an asset, as he did not desire that the tenant should lose that tenant right for the purpose of diminishing his chance of availing himself of the benefits of the Bill; but, on the other hand, where the tenant right was large enough to constitute a real asset, it would be wrong on the part of the Committee not to take it into consideration. He, therefore, ventured to suggest to Her Majesty's Government that before considering the further Amendments which stood on the Paper, they should make some statement as to their general attitude on this question. The Committee should know whether, if they accepted this Amendment of the Prime Minister, they might at the same time look forward to the Government accepting Amendments in future which would have the effect of realizing the surplus value, if he might so express himself, of the tenant right as an asset?

said, the speech of the hon. Member for Leitrim (Mr. Tottenham), he was sorry to say, impressed him with the perfect hopelessness of any attempts which Her Majesty's Government might make at conciliation in regard to opinions such as those the hon. Member entertained. According to the view of the hon. Member for Leitrim, everything that the Government proposed to do was to be interpreted in the worst sense. All that the Govern-had done, and all that they proposed to do, was an unmixed evil. His right hon. Friend behind him (Mr. Goschen) approached the question in a totally different spirit. He (Mr. Gladstone) had not the smallest objection to raise to the spirit in which his right hon. Friend re- garded the matter. In fact, he (Mr. Gladstone) wished to approach it in exactly the same spirit. If he did not agree entirely and absolutely with the right hon. Gentleman's construction of the Amendment, that was a matter for fair difference of opinion; but in the right hon. Gentleman's spirit and aim he entirely concurred. He did not, however, agree with him as to the precise construction to be put upon the Amendment proposed, because his right hon. Friend seemed to think the Amendment was proposed in the interest of the tenant. That was not the case so far as the tenant was concerned. He (Mr. Gladstone) owned that, in his opinion, they would do wisely to forego all attempts at definition, and perhaps he was influenced in some measure by the recollection of the unfortunate issue of such attempts last year. The Government had not felt justified in closing the door against them; but he would point out to his right hon. Friend that the hon. Member for Cork County (Mr. Shaw) had not objected to the Amendment because of its being in favour of the tenant, but he had taken exception to it as constituting a deduction from the import and efficiency of the Bill. In the opinion of the Government, if the Amendment could not be properly described as an Amendment in the interest of the tenant, neither could it be properly described as an Amendment in the interest of the landlord—it was neither the one nor the other. As a matter of fact, it was intended to express the meeting-point of the two interests—it was intended to embody in words simply and impartially the spirit and intention of the Bill, and if it failed in that so far, it was a fault and a flaw which they were bound to admit and thoroughly to remedy if they could. It seemed to the Government that the effect of the Amendment was to lay down certain limits to the province of the Commissioners in regard to determining inability, which limits were not to be found in the Bill at the present moment further than were absolutely implied in the word "inability" itself. Those limits were, he thought, well understood by his right hon. Friend (Mr. Goschen), and he did not think the right hon. Gentleman had shown the Committee that if the Amendment before it were adopted there was any great necessity for anything further. He did not mean by that to infer that the mind of the Government was closed against the acceptance of any Amendment. They felt that really between persons who accepted the principle of the Bill there was very little room for difference as to the Amendment with which they were now dealing, in regard to its spirit and aim and its proper limits. If the intention of hon. Members, by moving Amendments in Committee, was to defeat the main principle of the Bill, that, of course, was quite a different matter; but he conceived that they were proceeding in Committee, thoroughly recognizing the fact that the measure had received a second reading. Her Majesty's Government could be no parties to anything that could impair the principle of the measure. The Amendment before the Committee, first of all, pointed to the loss of the holding, and said that the Commissioners were to consider a tenant as unable, or in a condition of "inability," to discharge his arrears to their full amount, by submitting either to the loss of his holding, or deprivation of the means necessary for the cultivation of it. These two, on the one side, were the positive objects which Her Majesty's Government considered essential to the Bill—first, that the tenant should not be driven to part with his holding; and, secondly, that he should not be driven to the scarcely less objectionable alternative of remaining on his holding without the means necessary for its proper cultivation. These wore the two purposes on the one side, and so far as they went, no doubt, his right hon. Friend was right in saying that this Amendment was an Amendment in the interest of the tenant. But his hon. Friend the Member for Cork County (Mr. Shaw), with the astuteness that belonged to him, had perceived with truth and justice that in their reference to the tenant's loss of his holding there was a reference to the tenant right as a possible asset. There could be no doubt about that. The Government said that a tenant might be considered unable to discharge his arrears if he could only do so by losing his holding—that was to say, by selling his tenant right, and the tenant right was at once brought into view as a possible asset. He (Mr. Gladstone) was bound to say, in regard to the Amendment of which the hon. Member had given Notice, proposing that under no circumstance should any liability be in- curred in respect of the tenant right, that the Government were not prepared to accede to the principle. They did not think it reasonable or fair. He (Mr. Gladstone) could do no better than quote the instance given the other night by the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who took the case of a man whose rent was £20, and whose tenant right was estimated at 40 years' purchase—namely, £200, and whose arrears were supposed to be £ 10 or £50. It would not be according to reason and according to justice to the taxpayers of the country, or to any parties interested, if they were to say, in such a case as that, that not one shilling should be raised upon the tenant right in order to pay the arrears. He had taken a strong case, but it was the case which had been selected by his right hon. Friend (Mr. John Bright) for the purpose of illustration, and he (Mr. Gladstone) believed it at once struck the House by its justice and fairness. He adopted it fully as expressing the view of the Government, that there was a point at which the tenant right should, if need be, be made the subject of an advance. It ought not to be an encumbrance of such a nature and extent as to endanger the tenant's continuance in his holding. The Government had contrived to find words—he could assure his right hon. Friend who had just sat down that it had caused Her Majesty's Government a good deal of pains to put them together—but they had contrived to find words which he believed were as fairly balanced as any they could adopt. They indicated no change whatever in the view of Hoi-Majesty's Government in regard to this matter, but simply indicated the unfolding and putting into expressed words that which had been in their minds, and with regard to which they had thoroughly and perfectly understood one another. It would not be open to objection on principle to point to the tenant right as a possible asset, but to point to it as more than a possible asset would be highly objectionable. The tenant right of these tenants in arrear was not based upon the general rent; and excepting in Ulster, and on comparatively few estates where the Ulster Custom or something analogous to it prevailed, the tenant right was but a very indefinite affair. The Government distinctly affirmed the principle that they would not exclude the tenant right from consideration; but they could not affirm the principle that it had invariably to be taken into consideration, because they believed it to be a fugitive asset so uncertain in its value that if it were taken into account in many cases it would cause the defeat of that which the Government regarded as the chief purpose of the Bill. Without unduly wishing to press the Amendment upon the Committee at the present moment, yet it did appear that these were words which, so far as they went, were good words, and should be accepted. But, at the same time, he did not say that in order to give good effect to the wishes of Parliament, it would not be possible to further assist and develop these words by some additions. He did not say that they would be prepared to accept any Amendment on the Paper as thoroughly satisfactory for that purpose; but this Amendment was for the purpose of showing that it was intended by the measure to give a man a reasonable chance of becoming the free tenant of his holding, and that it was not intended that he should be driven either to the loss of his holding or the loss of the stock necessary for its cultivation. He reserved for future consideration the question whether it would be wise to say that the saleable value of a holding might, if the Commissioners should think fit, be taken into account as an asset in determining the extent of the man's ability to pay, or of his inability.

said, that when the Land Bill was under consideration last year, one of the strongest arguments used by the Government to induce the House to consent to the passing of it was that in Ulster they had tenant right. It was said that tenant right possessed many advantages, one of the greatest being the security it gave to the landlord for the payment of the rent due to him; and it was pointed out that if they gave this tenant right in the rest of Ireland they would give the landlords a security which they did not then possess. Well, that security was given last year, but by the Bill this year it was to be taken away. He could imagine a case which would well illustrate the point before the Committee. Let them take what was not very unusual in Ireland, a holding valued at £30 a-year upon which there were five years' rent due. Such cases were not very unusual; in fact, he knew of them upon his own property. This Bill said to the tenant—"You pay one year's rent, that is £30; the Government will give you another, making £60; and the landlord will give you a receipt in full for the whole amount." And that £60 which the landlord had been paid would be less than the tenant would be perfectly certain to get under the usual Ulster Custom by the sale of his tenant right. In the county where he had property the tenant right was frequently worth £30 an acre—£22, £23, £25, and up to £30 an acre. It was not an unusual thing for the tenant, in addition to the £150 he owed his landlord, to owe £150 to other creditors, making in all £300, which amounted to about half the value of his saleable tenant right. They were told that the tenant right was to be considered by the Court as a picture—that was to say, it was to be hung up against the wall, and was to be looked at and admired and valued, but was not to be taken down and used; or, in other words, it was to be used only so far as to enable the tenant to raise money on it, and not so as to deprive him of it altogether. But the tenant had already raised the money on it, and the people who were in the habit of lending money to the tenantry as well as to the landlords were now beginning to draw in their horns; indeed, it would be difficult even to get the gombeen man to lend money on a farm where the rent was five years in arrear. And it must not be forgotten that in addition to five years' rent due in 1881, there would probably be before the case of the farmer was decided in the Court two more years' rent due, which would make seven years. The Government said the landlord was not to have the power of demanding that this estate should be sold for the payment of the debt to him; but in Ulster the tenant right had always been considered a saleable asset for the payment of rent. They said the tenant was not to be deprived of that which he required for the cultivation of his farm. But what was it that he required? They surely could not mean ploughs, harrows, spades, wheelbarrows; they must mean something else, for these articles were of very small value. They must mean cattle and horses. These were things which were valuable assets as well as the tenant right. They might have a man with a farm worth £600, with five cows worth £10 or £12 each, with a horse worth £20, and with a good crop; but before the claim under the Bill was made he would have disposed of the crop. The question might be asked of him, "What have you done with your crop of flax?" and his answer would be, "How could I feed my family? I had to sell it to provide them with food." Then the question might be put, "What did you do with your crop of oats?" and the answer would come, "Oh, I owed my neighbours some money, and what I realized by the sale of my oats I paid to them." The Court would have to consider all these points. Here was a man with the usual means of paying his rent, and who ought, if he neglected to pay his rent, to be sold out without the slightest commiseration, because he had property and was able to discharge the debt to his landlord—lie was a man who should be regarded just as the landed proprietors were in the time of the establishment of the Landed Estates Court. They had property, and their creditors got their estates and away they walked. But since the establishment of the Landed Estates Court ideas seemed to have marched very rapidly. He was not saying that the tenant right was in any way to be considered as an asset if it was not to be sold—what was the use of taking into consideration the property remaining in the possession of a debtor if it was not to be taken as something by which his debts were to be discharged? They did not expect that the Irish farmers had large sums of money in the bank. Where, then, were their creditors to go if not to the property that they had accumulated, whether in the form of tenant right or goods? All other creditors but the landlords would be able to realize in the ordinary way, and they would not hesitate to proceed against tenants who were in their debt. The tenants would be certain to pay these people; and, therefore, the effect of this Bill would be that the tenants would rob the landlords, to a great extent, for the benefit of their other creditors.

said, if the Government pressed this Amendment he should not oppose it; but he confessed that he was rather sorry it had been introduced. He thought it was one of those cases in which, in a very difficult matter, they were forcing on the Committee words to define what was right and just to be done for the tenants throughout Ireland. The circumstances of the case were most difficult; and, in his opinion, it would be impossible to find words which, while appearing to meet the difficulty in some parts of Ireland, would not increase it in others. The question as to whether the tenant right should be considered as an asset varied very much in different parts of Ireland. In Ulster, no doubt, it was an asset, and had been looked upon as such for a long time, both by law and custom, in that Province; and although it did not apply so much to small farms it was, no doubt, a real asset. The Amendment, when looked upon from an Ulster point of view, seemed rather strong. It said that the tenant right was not to be looked upon as an asset if the sale of it would interfere with the continuance of a tenant on his farm, and that was a very strong thing to say. Supposing a man paid £30 a-year rent, and had an estate worth £300—and the tenant right was often worth a great deal more in proportion—it would be a strong thing for the Committee to lay down that in a provision regarding the payment of rent that asset ought not to be interfered with, if such interference would prevent the tenant from cultivating his farm. He was not quite sure that that was the proper thing to say, and he believed there was a great deal in what had been said upon this subject—namely, that if they gave the sanction of the law to that interpretation of tenant right it would diminish the value of that right to the tenant, as it would be by no means easy for him to raise money on mortgage, say, from a bank or other persons. If they went outside Ulster to the South and West where tenant right did not exist, or was a very shadowy one indeed, the case was a very different one, and his impression was that they had much better leave it alone. The Court would have to consider whether a man was able or unable to pay, and would take into account all his property, and whether the property was really valuable. Where the property was valuable it ought fairly to be considered, but where it was shadowy no Commissioners in their senses would attach much value to it. He could not help thinking, both in the interest of the landlord and the tenant, that they had better leave the thing to be decided by the Commissioners according to the circumstances of the country. No doubt the Land Act might make tenant right in some districts, although it had not done so yet. When it had done so, he certainly thought that it would be a property which ought fairly to be considered. The Amendment proposed had been objected to on both sides, both by landlord and tenant; and he (Mr. W. E. Forster) was not at all sure that it was not objected to with some degree of justice.

said, there was one remark made by the right hon. Gentleman who had just sat down that he did not think they who sat on the Conservative side of the House, and who lived in Ireland, could agree with. The right hon. Gentleman proposed to leave a great deal to the discretion of the Court which would have to administer this Bill; but the hon. Members to whom he was referring had rather a painful experience of the use the Court made of its discretion. There was very little doubt as to what the intention of Her Majesty's Government was in passing the Land Act of last year; but certain as was their intention it was equally clear that the Sub-Commissioners had not given full effect to it. With regard to the Amendment, he wished to interpret it in the most friendly spirit, and he might say he believed it to be an attempt on the part of the Government to give practical effect to the expressions contained in the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham (Mr. John Bright) the other night with regard to tenant right. The Prime Minister must find himself a little out of court in discussing this Amendment, when he remembered that during the early part of the evening he had objected to a proposal which had been made because two words in it were in manuscript. Well, the whole of this Amendment was in manuscript.

It is now in print.

said, it might be in print now, but it was not when it was moved. He quite admitted that it was one of the most difficult and complicated matters that any Legislative Assembly could be called upon to discuss. What he ventured to remind the Com- mittee of was the main argument urged during the whole of the discussions of last year, and, he might say, during the discussions of the preceding year, on the question of land tenure and the establishment of tenant right; and it was this—that though there might be economic objections to the division of property between landlord and tenant, yet when the landlord had security in the tenant right for the payment of rent he was enabled to allow exceptional consideration to the tenant. That was the argument used from first to last by the Government; and when, in 1880, they introduced the Compensation for Disturbance Bill a very remarkable proposal was made by that, which threw a little light on the present Amendment. The Compensation for Disturbance Bill was a proposal to prevent evictions; and the Government added a very important clause to that Bill, which would have had the effect of preventing evictions, the proposal being to give to the tenants in the scheduled parts of Ireland a tenant right that previously had not existed. The object in giving the tenant that tenant right was to enable him to realize his interest in his holding for the payment of the rent due to the landlord. ["No, no!"] Well, he had the document before him, and he would rather be guided by that than by the opinion of the Prime Minister. There happened to be in the House at that time an authority on the question of tenant right—namely, the present Lord Chancellor of Ireland (Mr. Law), who, in the discussion of the Bill of last year, said the Court was to consider whether or not a reasonable proposal had been made by the tenant to the landlord, and if the proposal were unreasonable no compensation would be given, but if it was reasonable compensation should be given. He would just read two sentences from, perhaps, one of the most important authorities to be found in Ireland on the subject of tenant right. Mr. Law said he had to remind the House, on the second day of the debate, that no Court would hold that a landlord had acted unreasonably in evicting a tenant for non-payment of rent where he allowed him the option of selling his tenant right. Now, under the Act of last Session a tenant had a greater tenant right than he had in 1880, or than it was then proposed to give him. He had hoped that one of the results of giving tenant right would be that this question of arrears would have settled itself. It was pretty evident to everybody living in the North of Ireland, where tenant right had existed to a greater extent than in any other part of the country, that if the Government, instead of making the present proposal take the shape of a gift, made one to take the shape of a loan, all these difficulties would have been avoided, because the great advantage of tenant right was that it gave good security for the payment of the rent. The question the Government had had to consider was, what were they to do with the tenant right—whether or not they were to consider it as an asset? There were one or two large estates that he (Lord George Hamilton) was acquainted with where the tenant right far exceeded in value the fee-simple of the landlord; and it was obvious that in cases of that kind it would be grossly unjust to exclude the tenant right from consideration as an asset? But then came this difficulty—that, supposing they excluded altogether from consideration this asset, what would the tenants in the North of Ireland say? he undertook to say that the enormous mass of tenants in the North of Ireland had an interest in their holdings that far exceeded the amount of their arrears, and, consequently, none of them would come under the operation of this Bill. Let the Committee consider the case of a tenant who had, by his idleness and neglect, dissipated his tenant right, and the case of an industrious tenant who had cultivated and improved his holding. The former would come to the Court and demand assistance, saying—"My tenant right will not cover the amount I am in arrear;" while the industrious tenant, whose tenant right exceeded the amount of his arrears, would not come under the operation of the Bill at all. It seemed to him (Lord George Hamilton) that the effect of such an arrangement as that upon the tenantry of Ireland would be of the worse kind. It seemed to him that it would be necessary for the Government—and he said it with all respect—to insert fresh clauses in the Bill, by which they would give to tenants in the North of Ireland, who could offer good security, advances of money at a low rate of interest to enable them to pay off their arrears. If such a proposal as that were made, he had no doubt that many landlords, especially in the North of Ireland, would only be too glad to compound with their tenants and effect a settlement. He was afraid that the Amendment before the Committee would not effect the object the Government had in view, as it would simply put a limitation on the Court in estimating the tenant right as an asset. If the Amendment were inserted in the Bill it seemed to him that the Government should also adopt the Amendment of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Heneage), because that Amendment was in the sense of a direction to the Court that they should take into consideration the saleable interest which the tenant had in his holding. That would be a clear direction to the Court, and the Court would take into consideration the tenant right. It seemed to him that unless the Government were prepared to adopt an Amendment equivalent or similar to that of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Heneage) the present proposal had better be left out of the Bill altogether. A proposal had been made and had been ruled out of Order, and he believed the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) had put another on the Paper practically to the same effect—that the tenant right was not to be taken as an asset for the payment of arrears of rent. Well, he believed there was no other proposal that could possibly be made that would be more detrimental to the interest of the tenant than that, because, if any such view were sanctioned by Parliament, what position would the landlord be in? He would be in this position—he would find that the security the tenant had previously been enabled to offer him for the payment of his rent no longer existed. Whenever bad seasons occurred, not having a prior claim upon the tenant right, he would be forced to evict the tenant and make him sell his tenant right.

said, everybody admitted that this was an extremely difficult point; but he thought the difficulty the Government had to grapple with in defending their fortress—to use a simile with which their minds were now pretty familiar, in consequence of the warlike operations in Egypt—was on account of the shots that came from behind themselves. It seemed to him (Mr. Mitchell Henry) that the words proposed were perfectly apt and expressive words, and extremely conclusive and useful. If the Bill were passed without them, it would be perfectly open to the Commission, or to those who administered the Act, to enforce the sale of the tenant's holding, and to apply the produce of the sale of the tenant right to the arrears, which would actually be to defeat the primary object of the Bill. The words before the Committee seemed to him to express precisely that which Parliament wished to accomplish. Parliament wished to prevent the loss of the tenant's holding, and it also wished by this Bill to prevent the tenant from being deprived of the proper means of cultivating his holding. But if these words were left out of the Bill, he (Mr. Mitchell Henry) himself should have great fear of the operation of the Act, and especially in consequence of what had fallen from the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) had heard the right hon. Gentleman's words on the subject of the sale of the tenant's interest with the greatest dismay, because if the doctrine the right hon. Gentleman had laid down were to prevail, and the value of the tenant's interest was to be taken tentatively and without qualification, the result would be that, instead of settling the tenants in their holdings and making their tenancy permanent, there would be a fresh impulse given to eviction. These words of the Prime Minister, therefore, were exceedingly grateful to him, who, in common with his Friends who represented Ireland on both sides of the House, wished to see the people of Ireland settled once more in their own homes and able to maintain themselves in decency and comfort. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) seemed to him, notwithstanding all his experience, to have failed to master the condition of the tenants in Ireland. It was not the fact that there was no tenant right except in Ulster. There was a tenant right in existence both in the South and in the West of Ireland; and there was hardly a tenant who gave up his holding in either of those two portions of the country who did not obtain for his interest in that holding a very considerable sum of money. It was perfectly true that that tenant right had not proceeded in the South and West to the extravagant extent to which it had proceeded in the North; but tenants in the South and West had obtained either from their neighbours or from their landlords on giving up a holding five or six years' value of such holding. He himself had repeatedly given it to his tenants when they had given up their holdings. They had expected this consideration with quite as great confidence as any tenants in the North of Ireland could have done, and, of course, the object in purchasing these holdings from the tenants who wished to leave was to enlarge the boundaries of those who were left, and make them more capable of supporting the tenantry. The hon. Member for Tyrone (Mr. Macartney) had spoken of tenants being five years in arrear, and that in Ulster, of all places in the world, and of there being an additional two years to be placed against the tenants before this Bill became operative. Well, he (Mr. Mitchell Henry) denied entirely that there was any considerable number of tenants in Ireland who owed five years' arrears. If tenants had been allowed to accumulate five years of arrears it had been upon very badly-managed estates. It had been observed that that was what had brought them to the present difficulty—that the people had not managed their estates properly. He (Mr. Mitchell Henry) had too great a respect for his hon. Friend to believe that he could have many tenants who were situated as he had pointed out, and he felt sure that if the hon. Member would look at his rent-book he would find that there were very few who owed him as much as five years' rent. But even if, on the hon. Member's estate, there were some individuals who owed such an amount of arrears, he (Mr. Mitchell Henry) could say with confidence that there were very few in the rest of Ireland. The point to which he wished to direct the attention of the Committee was this, that this Bill only affected tenants of a very low class in Ireland—that was to say, tenants whose rating was not above £30. The majority of these tenants, he was perfectly convinced, were unable to pay their arrears; and were the Government going to assist them effectually or not? If they did not assist them, the result would be that they would be evicted, and there would be a worse state of things existing in Ireland than had existed hitherto. He hoped the Government would adhere to their Amendment, because it would be a direction to the Commissioners who were to administer the Act, and would show that it was not the intention of Parliament that the tenant right of holdings should be taken into account to such an extent as to cause the eviction of tenants. Tenant right was like latent heat—it did not practically exist until they released it—and to say that any number of tenants in Ireland had been in the habit of borrowing money on their tenant right was to state that respecting which the Royal Commission on which he (Mr. Mitchell Henry) had had the honour to sit for the past three years had received no evidence whatever. A tenant did not know the value of his tenant right until he was ready to leave his home and his holding, and then he got what those who had to assess the value chose to give him; but it was an unheard of thing in the North of Ireland, or almost anywhere in Ireland, for the tenant to borrow money on his tenant right; and, therefore, if they were going to place a value on the tenant right on that assumption they would be adopting a different course from that which had been taken in Ireland for years past.

said, he saw no provision in this Bill that would render it obligatory on the part of the tenant to make an effort to obtain a loan such as the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster had suggested he ought to obtain, supposing his tenant right to be a tenant right of considerable value. A man might say, "I cannot get the loan, and I will not attempt to obtain it." It appeared to him that the Amendment would permit a man who owed arrears to remain in undisturbed possession of his tenant right and of his farm, and it seemed to him to be a very undesirable thing that such a principle should be adopted. He (Mr. W. H. Smith) wished to know whether, under this Amendment, that charge could properly be made by the landlord?

said, that question raised one of the difficulties incident to the new light thrown upon this Bill by the statement the Committee had heard. As the Bill was drafted, it would undoubtedly be necessary for the Court to take the tenant right into consideration as an asset. If that were so, certainly it was necessary to insert some definition in the Bill of such a character as to exclude the tenant right from any consideration; and he could not but think that it would be very much better for the Prime Minister to have determined to adopt this course rather than the alternative course of permitting the Court, in some cases not definable, and in which it would be impossible to lay down certain rules, to take this tenant right into account. The right hon. Gentleman (Mr. W. H. Smith) had just asked a very pertinent question. Supposing a landlord told the Court he was willing to advance money for the payment of arrears on the security of the tenant's interest in his holding, that, of course, would put the tenant in a position to pay his rent, and the arrears would be wiped off. The tenant's interest would have been mortgaged to the landlord. Supposing, in six months or 12 months, the landlord called upon the tenant for payment of the loan so advanced, and, failing the payment of the loan, turned the tenant out, of what benefit would the Arrears Act then be to the tenant? If the question put by the right hon. Gentleman was answered in the affirmative, that at once opened the door for the wholesale evasion of the Act. Looking at the nature of these arrears and the nature of the Bill—looking at it as an exceptional measure which could not be strictly defended by the rules of political economy, and brought in to meet very exceptional circumstances in Ireland—he thought it would have been better to have entirely exempted the tenant right, the right conferred by the Act of 1881 no longer being charged in respect to arrears which had accrued during the very bad seasons, and which in most cases were arrears due to rack rents. That would have been a sounder policy, and would have removed the difficulty of defining how far the tenant right should be considered as an asset. It appeared to him that this was a hopeless task for the Committee to enter upon, and it would be impossible to lay down any rule as a guidance to the Court in this matter. The Amendment of the Prime Minister appeared to admit that the Bill, as drafted, permitted the Court to consider the tenant right as an asset, and to say that it should not be considered in such a way as to deprive the tenant of his holding or of the means of cultivating it properly. At the same time, the Amendment implied that the tenant right might be pledged—that was to say, that if the Court saw that a tenant could fairly obtain a loan upon his holding upon not unreasonable conditions, he ought not to be permitted to have the benefits of this Bill, and that would leave open the question of how far the Court might direct the interests of the tenant to be pledged as a security for the loan, while it prevented the loss of his holding and of the means of cultivation. He objected to this exclusion of the tenant's interest as an asset, and thought it would have been better to have left that element out altogether, and to have allowed the tenant to start clear by getting his judicial rent fixed, after he had proved his inability to pay, apart from any ability he might be supposed to have of being able to borrow on his tenant right. Under the present proposal injustice was done to the tenant in regard to borrowing, for, no matter how unjust the arrears of rent might be, he was not to be allowed the advantages arising from the Bill in order to partially wipe out the arrears; neither was he to be permitted to have the advantage of a gift from the State for the payment of one year; but he was to be compelled, not only to forego a gift from the State, but to repay all the arrears, even supposing they amounted, as in the case instanced by the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon), to arrears for 13 years. No matter whether the arrears arose from the famine, the tenant, if he could borrow money on the security of his tenant right, was to be compelled to borrow in that way, although he might practically swop the whole value of his interest, and render worthless that which the Act of 1881 was supposed to confer. He did not think that was the intention of the Government when they brought in this Bill, but that it was their intention, having regard to the circumstances under which the arrears had accrued, to make a gift to the landlord of one year's rent, and then to compel the tenant to pay another year's rent, so that the tenant might start clear without the necessity of borrowing on the security of his interest. There was very great difficulty in laying down a rule as to the line of demarcation between tenants who were to be compelled to borrow on their holding and those who were not. He did not see how this could be done by this Bill, and he should prefer the tenant right being excepted from consideration altogether, and the tenant allowed to start free under the judicial rent to be fixed by the Court. However, as something must be done, he hoped that proper safeguards would be inserted to limit, as far as possible, the number of tenants who might be deprived of the benefits of this Bill. He did not know that it would be of much use to move any Amendment, as the Prime Minister had announced his intention not to accept an Amendment; but as he had an Amendment on the Paper he would propose it.

I am very glad to hear the general tone of the speech of the hon. Member. The hon. Member has put one case in regard to tenant right, and the right hon. Gentleman opposite has put another, and both of them, in my opinion, are perfectly right in their respective cases; but they look at the question not as a whole, but from one extreme. The hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) says you may estimate the tenant's interest in the saleable value of the holding in such a way as to swamp that interest—that is to say, to make the burden of his debt such that he will not be free even if he continues in the holding, because on the slightest disturbance of his position—say, by a bad harvest—he would be placed in a position of necessity, and be unable to meet his liabilities. That is perfectly fair, and no such case ought to be allowed; and, in our opinion, we have excluded such a case by the words which say that he is now not only not to be deprived of his holding, but he is not to be deprived of the means of cultivating his holding. Let me take another case—let me suppose the case of a man with a farm of £ 10 rent and a tenant right of the value of £50, and in whose case his nominal arrears run up to £30 or £40. To charge that amount on the tenant right would swamp his interest in it. It would not nominally turn him out, but it would leave him in almost a hopeless condition, and it would not be in the spirit of a provision such as this to charge that upon a tenant right which might be worth £50. What am I to pay to the right hon. Gentleman opposite, who takes a very different case, not a case where arrears would form an overwhelming portion of the tenant right, but a more common case, where the arrears only form a moderate portion of the tenant right? We take a case in which the tenant right is manifestly or almost certainly £200 and the arrears are £50. I do not say it would be necessary to pledge the tenant right; it might not be necessary to base a positive transaction on the knowledge of the tenant right existing. The tenant might have a tenant right and yet might be evicted: but that is without pledging the tenant right, or without constituting anything in the nature of a mortgage. People will lend money to those who they know can pay without knowing the specific relation between the amount lent and the sources to which they will look for payment, and therefore I should say a little more than the right hon. Gentleman. He asks, suppose a landlord is willing to accept a charge on the tenant right, is he to be excluded from taking that away? I would deal with it a little more broadly. If the Commissioners, on examining the value of the tenant right, find the proportion of arrears is moderate in proportion to the tenant right, it is their business, without any inquiry into any question between the landlord and tenant, to say they cannot entertain the case, and he is not one of those who are unable to pay. That is such an instance as the right hon. Gentleman suggested.

said, he thought the speech just made showed the inconvenience of this Amendment being sprung on the Committee when the Committee were about to take into consideration the whole question of a tenant's interest. He did not object to a single word in the Amendment, provided it came as a Proviso to the Amendment he had proposed. The Prime Minister had only quoted the first few lines of an opinion given by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster upon this point. The right hon. Gentleman had said, suppose a man had a farm of 20 acres worth £20 a-year, the tenant right would be worth £10 or £5 an acre. Would it not be unreasonable to say that the Government should advance money and the tenant right should be untouched? He (Mr. Heneage) thought it would have been wise for the Government to have waited until there had been a thorough discussion on the question of tenant right. There was very little he should quarrel with in the speech of the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell), for he did not wish the tenant to be deprived of any right under this clause, but thought a tenant's interest in his holding should be available as a mortgageable asset. The Bill was not brought in on economical principles, and altogether it might be described as an immoral Bill. He did not say it was wrong on that account; it was only a corollary to the Bill of last year, which was brought in to meet exceptional circumstances. He voted for it in that light, and he wished the question of arrears had been taken up in the Bill of last year and dealt with at the same time. But it was not fair that the money of the taxpayers of England, or the property of Ireland, should be given to tenants who had money of their own, and that that money should remain untouched. It was hardly possible to avoid discussing the question of tenants' interest upon this Amendment. His proposal, which he had yet to propose, was, that where the tenant had not sufficient interest to pay the rent due, and also to provide the means of cultivating his holding and to remain upon it, then it should not be taken into account. But if the man had sufficient interest in his holding to pay, that interest should be made available, and the Government should lend money to the tenant at reasonable interest. Such a tenant ought to be able to pay interest; and otherwise it might as well be said that a tradesman in England might decline to pay his rent because all his capital was locked up in stock.

There are a number of Amendments upon that which have not yet been discussed.

said, that what he complained of was that the Committee were asked to vote for an Amendment which was not objectionable in itself, but would be very objectionable if placed in the Bill without any other Amendment stating that the tenant's interest was to be considered an asset. He would, therefore, ask the Prime Minister to withdraw the Amendment for the present and allow the whole question of tenants' interest to be discussed, and then he would vote for the Amendment.

said, he would not discuss the morality or the immorality of the Bill. He was surprised that the hon. Member should vote for the Motion that the Speaker should leave the Chair. Neither did he approach the question as opposing the principle of the Bill. That principle had teen accepted by the House, and the Committee were endeavouring to carry out the views of the Government in this particular matter of the consideration of the tenant right as an asset. It seemed to him that the Government, as had been already stated by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ripon (Mr. Goschen), had only carried out part of the views they had stated to the Committee. The present Amendment would carry out what was said by the Secretary of State for War on more than one occasion; but it would not at all carry out what had been stated by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was quite willing to admit that, looking at this matter from the point of view of those who were in favour of the principle of the Bill, the Government were right in proposing that an Amendment should be inserted in the Bill by which a tenant should be safe from loss of his holding or deprivation of the means necessary for cultivating it; but he would ask the Prime Minister to carry into effect what he had said in his last speech. He had said that the tenant right had been brought into view as an asset; but he went beyond that point in his last speech, and almost suggested words by which it might be made clear that the views of the hon. Member for Cork City (Mr. Parnell) were not to be carried out in this respect. He himself was ready to accept the words which the Government proposed to insert in the Bill; but he would wish also to see them accompanied, as they ought in fairness to be accompanied, by other words such as the Prime Minister had suggested to carry out what the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster had said on the debate on the Motion that the Speaker should leave the Chair. Then the Com- mittee would have what, he thought, they were bound to have—namely, the insertion of a guidance to the Court in this Bill. He differed entirely upon this matter from the opinion expressed by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster), quite irrespective of the fairness or unfairness of the Land Act of 1881. He thought nothing was more reprehensible than that, when complicated questions were debated and utterly opposing views were expressed, the Committee should shrink from settling such questions and leave them to the interpretation of the Courts. It seemed to him that legislation carried out upon that principle could not but be mischievous.

I cannot quite agree with the hon. Member behind me as to the inconvenience of our not taking the course of proposing words of our own which will advance us a considerable way. We have been spending the evening on the discussion of this Amendment, and I do not believe it to be the general wish of the Committee that the words of the Amendment should be withdrawn. The clear wish is that there should be words added, not at this particular place, but it should be understood that when we come to the proper part of the Bill, which we think will be more convenient, words shall be introduced in a separate section. Her Majesty's Government, wishing to unite as far as they can with the feelings of the Committee, are perfectly free to make a proposition to introduce the words—

"For the purposes of this Act the saleable value of the tenant's interest may, if the Commissioners think it reasonable, he taken into account as an asset."

That would distinctly throw on the Commissioners the duty of distinguishing, as they must distinguish, between the cases in which it would be perfectly reasonable, as has been pointed out by the hon. Member for the City of Cork and others. I am not going to move those words now, because I think they would be more conveniently introduced in a subsequent clause; but I think they will satisfy the desire, which appears to exist, for something specific with regard to tenant right to be expressed in the Bill.

said, he considered the suggestion of the Prime Minister most important, as bearing on the ques- tion before the Committee. He should have had some objection to vote for the words of the Prime Minister unless it was certain that other words would be inserted in the Bill. He sympathized with the object of the Government in this measure. He was sure that many Members took the view that the tenant right ought to be considered an asset, and at the same time they did not wish to defeat the object of the Bill. It appeared to him at the first sight that the Prime Minister had met the Committee very fairly upon this point by suggesting words providing that the interest of the tenant should be taken into account as an asset. That was a point to which he thought many hon. Members would have objected; but if it was understood that the Commissioners might consider the tenant right as a saleable asset, then he thought they might vote for the Amendment proposed by the Prime Minister—namely, that it was not to be pushed to the point of depriving a tenant of his interest.

said, he thought the words proposed by the Prime Minister should have rather more consideration than they could have now, because he thought they would go far to defeat the object of the Bill. Hon. Members had talked very freely about making loans and lending money on tenant right—an hon. Friend behind him had talked of making loans of this kind at a reasonable rate of interest. Well, he would venture to say that there would be hardly a case which would come under the Bill in which it would be found that the owner of the tenant right was able to pay a charge in respect of his tenant right in the shape of interest. He would put a case in a general way in this fashion. The maximum rental to which this Bill would apply would be £30, and they might take it as a rule that the amount of profit the tenant derived from his holding was about equivalent to his rent. A payment of £30 to the landlord they might take it would represent a profit of £30 or £35 to the landlord. That would be about 12s. a-week. The tenant right might be worth £200, and English Members would naturally say that was a valuable asset; but how could it include any profit to the tenant?—it was only a sum invested by him in the right to earn his living. He paid it for the purpose of getting employment. The root and bottom of all this tenant right in Ireland was the want of general employment in that country. In England this sort of thing did not prevail, for if a man had £200 or £300 in land he would realize it and invest it in more remunerative operations. In Ireland it was not possible for a man to do that; and his (Mr. Magniac's) contention was that if they forced these tenants to borrow a year's rent, in order to pay a year's rent due up to 1881, they would so load him with a charge upon a minimum of sufficiency for existence as to render him a pauper. If a man only had 12s. a-week and had to pay out of that 1s., or 2s., or 3s., it would have a ruinous effect, and, to his (Mr. Magniac's) mind, it would result in defeating the objects of the Bill by bringing the poorer tenants to a state of pauperism. As he understood it, the object of this measure was to enable the Irish tenantry to avoid being thrown into a condition of pauperism and distress, and thereby to prevent discontent and outrages. [A laugh.] If hon. Gentlemen opposite thought the question of preventing outrages a laughable matter, he (Mr. Magniac) must say he did not agree with them, and would contend that this was a subject upon which every Member, however imperfectly informed, might be able to bring to bear some little information, or some new suggestion which had not been mentioned before. He ventured to say that every shilling a week they charged these poor tenants the nearer they would bring them to pauperism; and as they wanted to put those men in the position of being able to earn their living, and to avoid the necessity of having to sell their tenant right—being in that way driven to emigration to some more congenial place—he trusted that every effort would be made to keep them from having unnecessary charges imposed upon them. If they were going to fritter away the tenant right by charging the tenant with the interest of a loan upon it, there was no doubt they would be defeating the object of the Bill, and the measure might as well be abandoned. What would happen if they abandoned the Bill; would not hon. Members on the Opposition side of the House interfere in favour of the landlords? The House had heard a great deal last year about the landlords not getting their rents, and could anyone desire to abandon the landlords in the position in which they were at present? He ventured to say that to do so would be a frightful catastrophe to the landlords and their families. They had heard a great deal about political economy and about the British taxpayer being violated; but the British taxpayer was used to being violated—he had been violated on the subject of public loans; he had been violated on the subject of loans to landlords. What did hon. Members do every time they passed the Estimates? Why, they made the British taxpayer pay a large sum for the purpose of tenant right in the Army; they did that every year, and he had no doubt they would continue to do it for a great number of years to come. He would urge the Committee not to so frame the Bill as to prevent its being able to bring about peace and tranquillity in Ireland, which he sincerely hoped would be its effect. They should deal with the question in a liberal spirit, and not parsimoniously, and he trusted that the Committee would refrain from frittering away the boon which it was proposed to give to the tenantry.