asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, If a prosecution was instituted against two officials of the Belfast Bank, named Smyth and Rodgers, who were accused of abstracting £184,000, but were only charged with petty larceny by the Law Officers of the Crown, with consent of the Belfast Bank; if this large sum, or any part, was accounted for in the balance sheet published by the Belfast Bank; and, in what respect, if any, did the last audit differ from that of the late Glasgow Bank, which was supposed to have a large reserve against deposits and note circulation?

This Question relates to a prosecution which took place about 15 years ago. The two bank officials named were tried on the charge, not of the charge of petty larceny as alleged in the Question, but of conspiring to defraud and of defrauding the bank. The loss is overstated in the Question by about £50,000. It was entirely provided for in the then current year, ending July 31, 1874, by being paid out of the reserve fund of the bank; and not only has the amount so withdrawn been since restored to the reserve fund, but also that fund now stands 20 per cent higher than it did before the withdrawal of the amount to meet the frauds. The audit of the Belfast Bank is the same as that of every limited bank in the United Kingdom; and is regulated by the Act of 1879, which was passed after and, in a chief degree, in consequence of the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878.

asked the Postmaster General, Whether he is aware that the contract for the carriage of mails by steamer from Oban to Fort William stipulates that the arrival shall be at 3·30 p.m. in summer and 4·30 p.m. in winter, but that the steamer is generally half-an-hour, and often an hour, behind time; whether the contractors who forward the mails from Fort William to the inland portions of the parishes of Kilmallie and Ardnamurchan are obliged to be, and stand, in readiness at the post office at the above hours of 3·30 and 4·30 respectively; whether there is any penalty in the steamer contract for breach of agreement; and, whether he will take steps either to enforce punctuality or payment of the penalty?

, in reply, said: The hon. Member is right in his facts as regards the carriage of mails by the steamer from Oban to Fort William. The loss of time which has occurred is due to the exigencies of traffic and the state of the weather, which has been recently exceptionally severe. There are no penalties. To provide for such in the contract would largely enhance the subsidy. The service, as a whole, is, I consider, satisfactorily performed. The contractors and the postmen who carry forward the mails from Fort William are, of course, required to be in attendance at the stated hours of arrival of the packet. The Ardnamurchan Post, I may mention, does not start from Fort William at all, but from Ardgowan, a point at which the steamer calls before reaching Fort William.

asked the President of the Local Government Board, Whether the new county rate in London will be in all respects levied as poor's rate, so that existing exemptions from the rate of the Metropolitan Board will cease?

The Question raised by the hon. Member depends upon the construction of the provisions of the Local Government Act, and is, therefore, a point of law. I am constantly receiving inquiries as to the legal construction of the Statute on matters, many of them of considerable difficulty, which I have neither the power nor the desire to determine; and, therefore, I think it is better that I should not express an opinion upon thorn.

asked the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education, Whether the late Hylton School Board was dismissed on the strength of the Inspector's Report; that the Board ought to be considered a Board in default; and why the Board was not supplied with a copy of the said Inspector's Report; and, why a public inquiry into the facts of the case was refused when urgently asked for by the said Board?

The Hylton School Board were declared in default because they declined to comply with the Statute. The Department had no power to grant the public inquiry asked for; but if my hon. Friend will read the letter, a copy of which I have in my hand, and will be glad to give him, I think he will be satisfied that there were sufficient grounds for the action which was ultimately taken.

asked the Under Secretary of State for India, Whether the Madras Government and the Government of India have received Memorials from Mirasdars of Thattathimoolai, Nannilam, Talug, Tan-jore, alleging that certain remissions of revenue have been improperly cancelled, such, remission having been made to the village, pursuant to the Revenue Regulations, by the Head Assistant Collector, after due inspection, in consequence of the great damage and suffering caused by the repeated heavy floods destroying the crops; and, whether the Government will take any action in the matter?

The Secretary of State for India has not received any information or Reports concerning the Memorials referred to, nor has any representation on the matter reached him. As at present advised, the Secretary of State does not propose to take any action in the matter; but he will draw the attention of the Madras Government to the hon. Member's Question.

asked the hon. Member for Waterford (Mr. R. Power) to postpone until Monday his Question with regard to the contract for post-cards, so as to allow him to communicate with the writer of a confidential letter which had been sent to him bearing on this subject. With regard to an answer given by him to the hon. Member for Preston (Mr. Hanbury) some days ago, to the effect that the present contract was for 10 years, he desired to explain that this included two years which had already elapsed.

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, When it is probable that some of the public works in the West of Ireland, which have been recommended by the Royal Commission, will be commenced; and, whether the railway from Galway to Clifden, viâ Oughterard, with a branch to the Killeries, will be shortly undertaken, in order to afford work for the people during the winter?

I must refer my hon. Friend to a reply given by my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland to a somewhat similar Question in regard to another district. That statement was to the effect that the Government are anxious to deal with those parts of the Report of the Royal Commission which refer to railways and harbours; but that these undertakings must necessarily wait until the proposals which the Government have already made, based upon the Royal Commission's earlier Report with regard to drainage, are dealt with by the House.

asked the Postmaster General, Whether he has received a Memorial from the inhabitants of Drumswoods and its vicinity, a thickly-populated district in the County of Monaghan, four miles distant from a post office, praying for the establishment of a post office at Drumswoods; and, whether he intends complying with the prayer of the Memorialists; and, if not, can he say for what reason?

A Memorial has been received. The post already established in the vicinity of Drumswoods is conducted at a loss, and the Drumswoods letters are too few to cover the additional expense which compliance with the Memorial would involve. I have, however, offered to establish a post office under guarantee, and I await the reply of the Memorialists.

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, having regard to the latest Returns of the Commissioners of National Education, which show that there are only 59 agricultural schools now in connection with the National Board, Whether the teachers of the schools examined last August have yet been paid their result fees; and, if not, whether he can offer any explanation as to the cause of the delay?

said, the National Education Commissioners state that the number of agricultural schools shown in the latest Returns is 55. The teachers in some of the schools were paid result fees some time ago; the rest are now paid. They add that there has been no avoidable delay in the matter.

asked the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education, having regard to the fact that 11 years ago a Royal Commission reported that—

"For a thorough reform in the management and discipline of Christ's Hospital, we think that its removal from London is indispensable,"

and that the Charity Commissioners have, after exhaustive inquiries, reported that more boarders and 1,000 additional day scholars might receive the benefits of the school if the recommendations of the Royal Commission were adopted, Whether it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government to take action in the matter?

The scheme of the Charity Commissioners providing for the objects set forth in the Question received the sanction of the Education Department on the 15th of June. Subsequently a Petition was presented to Her Majesty in Council, and the scheme will have to be considered by the Judicial Committee. If the Petition is dismissed, the scheme will be laid before Parliament in the usual way.

asked when the question was likely to go before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council?

could not answer the Question.

expressed a hope that there would be no undue delay in the matter.

said, he would take care that there should not.

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Whether his attention has been drawn to observations made at Belfast on October 13 last by Mr. E. T. M'Carthy, R.M., on the hearing of the case of a destitute child named Mary M'Donnell, to the effect that from day to day proper cases for orders for admission of children to industrial schools come before the magistrates at Belfast, and the magistrates are obliged to send the children to the workhouse, or postpone the cases for want of room; also that the magistrates would do what they could to have increased accommodation provided; whether, after the child Mary M'Donnell had been committed to St. Patrick's Female Industrial School, the order was found to be inoperative, as no vacancy existed in the school; and, what decision has been come to upon the application of the Committee of the school (submitted to the Irish Government last August), requesting an increase in the number of children sanctioned by the certificate?

The attention of the Irish Government has been called to a report of the case alluded to, which appeared in a local newspaper. An application has been received from the industrial school in question, and also from several other industrial schools, for an extension in the number of inmates chargeable against Imperial funds. These applications are receiving careful consideration.

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Whether a pupil teacher, who has been successful at the end of his first year, and who is 18 years of age, can then be appointed an assistant in a National School, with an average attendance of 70 children, where there is already a paid assistant in this school; whether, under similar circumstances, it is competent to appoint and to pay such a pupil teacher as an assistant teacher in a model school of same average attendance, and where there is already a paid assistant there; and, what limit there is to the number of teachers in a model school, and how the number is regulated?

The National Education Commissioners reply to the inquiries in the first two paragraphs in the negative. As regards paragraph 3, they state that the same general principles apply to the appointments of assistants in ordinary National schools and to the staffs of assistants in model schools.

asked the Secretary of State for War, Whether it is intended to put in force Army Order 293 of July, 1888, which enacts that after the 1st of January next all soldiers will have to take a first-class certificate of education before promotion to the rank of warrant officers; and, whether he is aware that this Order will debar many able and deserving old soldiers, colour sergeants of 18 or 20 years' service and others, from obtaining the position to which they have looked forward for many years?

The Army Order referred to will be so far modified that the first-class certificate will be not regarded as indispensable in regard to promotion of non-commissioned officers to the rank next above that held by them when the Order was issued. It is considered that this sufficiently protects the interests of men already serving; while the Order itself acts as a direct encouragement to men of superior education to enter the ranks of the Army. I may also remark that warrant rank is a comparatively new creation; and that the non-commissioned officers in question could not have looked forward to it at the time they entered the Army.

asked the Secretary to the Treasury, When it is proposed to apply the seven hours' system to the Statistical Department of the Customs; whether it is a fact that the new classification is agreed upon, and is now awaiting the assent of the Treasury authorities; and, what is the reason (if any) for the continued postponement of the proposed re-organization of that Department?

It is proposed to apply the seven hours' system to the Statistical Office of the Customs upon the basis of its present establishment. The question of a new classification is being considered by the Treasury in connection with the general questions of rearrangements of staff involved in the adoption of the seven hours' system, recommended by the Royal Commission.

asked the First Lord of the Admiralty, When the complete Returns "Dockyard Expense Accounts, Parts I. and II., for 1887–8," will be presented to the House, only one Part having hitherto been published?

The final Dockyard Expense Accounts are necessarily delayed for the receipt of the accounts from foreign stations, and for the completion of the Navy Appropriation Accounts. They will probably be completed in February next.

asked Mr. Solicitor General for Ireland, Whether he is aware of the practice now adopted by some landlords in Ireland of appealing against the fair rents fixed by the Sub-Commissioners, and of then serving on these tenants notices of eviction whereby the tenants are made caretakers; and, whether this action on the part of the landlords entitles the landlord to obtain a dismiss from the Land Commission on appeal, owing to the fact that the tenant is then a caretaker under "The Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1887"?

I am not aware of the existence of any such practice as that referred to by the hon. and learned Member in the first paragraph of his Question. It is the fact that a tenant served with an eviction notice ceases to be a tenant (subject to his right to redeem his holding within six months), and is, therefore, not in a position to continue proceedings for the purpose of having a judicial rent fixed, unless he avails himself of his right to redeem. The service of this eviction notice is the termination of the proceedings in ejectment, and at any time during the pendency of such proceedings the tenant could have obtained a stay for the purpose of proceeding with his application to have a judicial rent fixed; and, further, under the 30th section of the Act of last year, a tenant to whom that section applied could have obtained a stay of proceedings and an order for payment of arrears of rent by instalments.

said, that if his attention were formally called to specific cases he would inquire into them.

asked the Postmaster General, Whether the Regulation prohibiting Civil servants from taking active part in contested Parliamentary Elections applies also to the election of County Councillors?

Although I do not think it is desirable for Post Office servants to undertake duties which are likely to involve them in Party contests of any description, it has not hitherto appeared necessary to debar Postmasters, who do not give their whole time to the Public Service, from membership of Town Councils. As regards the election of County Councillors, I have come to the conclusion, after consultation with my Colleagues, that the Rule prohibiting officers of the Post Office from taking an active part in contested Parliamentary Elections must be held to apply to the election of County Councillors. I am further of opinion that no Post Office servants should themselves be members of a County Council. Such membership is likely to involve frequent, and perhaps prolonged, absence from their posts of duty.

asked the Secretary to the Treasury, If he will state why no provision was made in the Estimates for 1886–17, 1887–8, or 1889, for the pension awarded to Mr. Clifford Lloyd in 1885; and, whether it has hitherto been the invariable practice to make provision for each pension awarded in the Estimate next succeeding the date of each award?

I am glad that the hon. Member has asked this Question, because it enables me to remove a wrong impression conveyed by me yesterday, when I said that the pension was awarded in 1885. It would be more correct to say that it was awarded in respect to services which terminated in 1885; as a fact, the pension was not granted until March, 1888, and therefore the hon. Member will see that no provision could be made in the Estimate to which he refers.

Was Mr. Clifford Lloyd in receipt of any salary during the years 1886, 1887, and 1888?

Yes, Sir; he was in receipt of a salary from his Colonial appointment from the end of 1885 until 1887. It is not the practice of the Treasury to grant pensions in respect of services to an officer so long as he is in receipt of a salary in another appointment exceeding that of the appointment he has left. The hon. Member will, therefore, see that up to 1887, during which time he continued to draw a salary in respect of his Colonial appointment, the pension for his previous services really could not come into operation.

Then I understand the correct answer to be that Mr. Clifford Lloyd's employment ceased in 1885 on a certificate that he was permanently unfit for any service, and he then took service in the Colonies, for which he received a salary?

No, Sir. The hon. Gentleman must not understand that to be the reply. Mr. Clifford Lloyd was granted a pension in respect of services which terminated in 1885 on a medical certificate that he was incapacitated for the discharge of the duties of the post he then held. The House will understand that if, at a subsequent date, an officer so retired on such a certificate should recover his health, it would be quite open to the Government to call upon him to take up his duty in Ireland.

Then I understand that after being certified to be permanently unfit, he recovered, was employed, and now has a pension for the unfitness on which he retired?

Is it a fact that those medical certificates of permanent incapacity distinctly state that that incapacity only applies to the work that the officer was engaged upon at the time?

When was the medical certificate granted?

Can the hon. Gentleman kindly inform us what is the precise state of Mr. Clifford Lloyd's health at the present moment?

I am sorry that I am unable to answer that Question, because I do not know. The certificate was given in 1885, when Mr. Clifford Lloyd retired. As to the Question of my hon. Friend (Mr. Hanbury), the words of the certificate are to the effect that the officer in whose behalf it is given is incapacitated—[An hon. MEMBER: Permanently?]—permanently incapacitated if you like, for the discharge of his duty; and in this case it was distinctly stated by his medical attendant that he could not, without serious risk to his life, in consequence of the condition of his health, continue in the discharge of his duty.

Was the attention of the Government called to the Report of the Royal Commission on Civil Service Establishments with reference to these medical certificates, and especially to the dissatisfaction the Commissioners expressed with the manner in which certificates were granted, and to their recommendation that the Treasury should have an independent medical opinion in all cases?

Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to answer that Question. Our attention has certainly been called to the extremely important recommendations made by the Commission; it has been my duty to look through them; and I hope it will be possible for the Government to submit either a change in the Regulations, or a Bill to the House, carrying out a portion of the recommendations of the Commission.

inquired what was the length of service in respect of which this gentleman got his pension; whether when he was certified permanently unfit for service in Ireland he was also certified permanently unfit for service abroad; and how long it took him to recover his health?

When the hon. Gentleman answers that Question perhaps he will also say who was the medical man who gave that certificate. Will he produce the name, and tell us whether it was Dr. Barr?

No, Sir; it was not Dr. Barr. The hon. Member for Cam-borne asked what period elapsed before Mr. Clifford Lloyd recovered his health? I have not heard that he has recovered his health, and so cannot answer the hon. Member. His length of service was, I believe, 11½ years.

Will the hon. Gentleman say whether Mr. Clifford Lloyd lost his health endeavouring to restore law and order in Ireland? And during the time he was doing so did not the Land League offer a reward for his assassination?

The hon. Member will see that these are Questions I am unable to answer.

asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Why the prosecution of Cavanagh, one of the witnesses for The Times before the Special Commission, on the charge of shooting with intent to murder, was not conducted by the Treasury, as is usual in such grave charges; and, whether it is a fact that the defending counsel in the case is the senior counsel to the Treasury at the Central Criminal Court?

The Regulations do not make it incumbent on the Director of Public Prosecutions to take up cases of this nature on his own initiative. In this particular case no notice was given to his Department, and no application for legal aid was made, either by the police or by the magistrate by whom the prisoner was committed for trial. Judging from the report of the trial, it does not seem to be a case which presents any feature of exceptional difficulty or importance. The answer to the second paragraph is in the affirmative.

I beg to ask the Attorney General, whether Mr. Justice Hawkins, in his summing up, declared that the prosecutor, a witness for The Times, had concocted a tale which, if true, would have caused half of the Irish Members to be hanged?

I must ask for Notice of that Question.

Why did not the police report the matter to the Director of Public Prosecutions; and why was the case considered to be of such small importance?

said, he was un-unable to tell, unless it was that it was a matter a private prosecutor could deal with.

asked Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, How, if £5,000,000 is granted for the purposes of Lord Ashbourne's Act, he proposes to raise the money, whether by Treasury Bills, Exchequer Bills, the issue of Stock, or otherwise?

If the hon. Member will refer to the National Debt and Local Loans Act of last year, he will find that all money required for State loans will hereafter be raised by the issue of Local Loans Stock, so far as it may be needed—that is to say, so far as the sums repaid in respect of old loans are insufficient to meet the amount required for new ones.

asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Whether he is prepared, in the case of the Whitechapel murders, other than that of the woman Kelly, to offer a free pardon to any person not being the actual perpetrator of the crimes?

I should be quite prepared to offer a pardon in the earlier Whitechapel murders if the information before me had suggested that such an offer would assist in the detection of the murderer. In the case of Kelly there were certain circumstances which were wanting in the earlier cases, and which made it more probable that there were other persons who, at any rate after the crime, had assisted the murderer.

asked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Whether his attention has been called to reports in The Daily News and other newspapers of recent disturbances on the River Niger; whether he is in a position to give any information on the subject, especially whether those disturbances have occurred in the territory of the Royal Niger Company; and, if so, what was their origin; whether the Secretary of State has come to any decision on the increased imposts levied by the above Company; and, if so, whether it can now be stated to the House; and, whether any answer has yet been sent to the Memorial transmitted through the Governer of Lagos against the extension of the Royal Niger Company's Charter; and, if so, what was its purport.

The only Report which Her Majesty's Government have received of such disturbances relates to hostilities between the tribes in the neighbourhood of the Oil River, and of subsequent acts of cannibalism by the victorious tribe. These events were not within the Niger Company's territories. The Consul visited the spot, accompanied by the commander of one of Her Majesty's ships, rescued some surviving prisoners, and inflicted a fine on the offending tribe. He speaks in high terms of the assistance rendered to him by the coast tribes. I cannot at present make any further statement to the House on the subject of the last two paragraphs of the hon. Member's Question.

asked the Secretary to the Treasury, What steps have been taken in regard to the new contract for the publishing and printing of the debates of the two Houses of Parliament; and, whether, when the contract has been settled, he would object to give a Return of the different tenders?

, in reply, said, he had already informed the House that tenders had been invited for the publishing and printing of the debates, and several tenders had been received. When the formal contract had been completed, he would lay it upon the Table of the House.

asked the Lord Advocate, Whether he can state the number of cases determined by the Crofters' Commission during the first year of its existence; the number during the second year; the number of cases partially hoard but not decided; and the number of applications still to be considered?

As regards the first 18 months of the operation of the Crofters' Commission, the results are given in the Report to December 10, 1887. As regards the second half of the second year, the materials for information are not with the Scottish Office, but with the Crofters' Commission. Owing to stormy weather and consequent delay in postal communication, we have not yet heard from the Commissioners whether they can supply the particulars desired without interrupting their urgent duties, although from a telegram from the Commissioners I fear that the complication of the details required might be somewhat troublesome. The Commissioners have, however, written, and until receipt of their letter I cannot say more.

Might I ask the right hon. and learned Gentleman if he will get the information from the secretary and clerks to the Commissioners? It is in their books, and is not to be got from the Commissioners themselves?

Of course the information would be derived from the officials of the Commission. At the same time, our application is necessarily made to the Commissioners. I understand the information received by telegram was from one of the officials of the Commission, and shows that the matter might somewhat embarrass the procedure in regard to what is at present being done in Lewis if it were entered into now.

asked the Secretary of State for War, Whether the Departmental Committee on Soldiers' Rations has yet been appointed; when it will begin its deliberations; and, whether he can state its composition to the House?

Yes, Sir. The Committee which is considering the dietary of soldiers has commenced its labours under the presidency of my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Sir Stafford Northcote); with whom are associated my hon. and gallant Friends the Members for Hammersmith (General Goldsworthy) and the Ince Division of Lancashire (Colonel Blundell), Sir Redvers Buller, Sir Arthur Haliburton, and Surgeon General Massey.

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, In what number of cases advances have been made by the Land Commissioners under the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act of 1885, for the purchase by tenants of their holdings, of sums between £2,000 and £4,000; and in what number of cases advances have exceeded £4,000?

The Land Commissioners report that there have been 249 cases in which sums of between £2,000 and £4,000 have been advanced under the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act, 1885, for the purchase by tenants of their holdings, and 28 cases in which the sums exceeded £4,000.

asked the Lord Advocate, If Mr. Stipendiary Gemmel, at the Glasgow Central Police Court on Wednesday, the 21st instant, sentenced Mrs. M'Kenzie to 30 days' imprisonment, and ordered her daughter, aged eight years, to be kept in an industrial school for five years for the alleged theft of some articles of clothing from the Clothes Market in Greendyke Street; if it is the case that there was no evidence whatever against Mrs. M'Kenzie, or any evidence that her daughter had stolen the articles, or that both were not respectable persons against whom the police knew nothing; and, if he will take steps to enable Mrs. M'Kenzie to obtain an interim release pending an appeal, and will inquire into the case of her daughter, with the view of liberating her from the industrial school to which she has been sent, if found innocent?

The Secretary for Scotland has asked the stipendiary for information as to this case, of which his Lordship has knowledge only from the newspaper report sent by the hon. Gentleman. The right to grant interim release pending an appeal lies with the High Court of Justiciary, to whom the appeal would lie by way of suspension. The High Court has also jurisdiction to deal in like manner with the order of the magistrate relating to the little girl. But I would remind the hon. Gentleman that, so far as the Executive Government are concerned, industrial schools remain within the Department of the Home Secretary, and are not within the charge of the Secretary for Scotland.

Might I ask whether it is not the fact that the stipendiary did not convict the girl, though he sent her to a reformatory, and that the mother was sent to prison for having been art and part in a theft of which the girl was not convicted?

The position is this. The High Court of Justiciary would certainly have the right to quash the order sending the girl to an industrial school, just as much as the sending of the mother to prison. Therefore, so far as the High Court was concerned, the two courses were one. But the Secretary for Scotland has not within his charge industrial schools, and accordingly any order referring to the matter must come from a Court of Law or from the Home Office.

Would the right hon. and learned Gentleman communicate with the Home Office on the subject?

I gather from the Question of the hon. Member for the Blackfriars Division that there is to be an appeal to a Court of Law. If the sentence should be quashed, there is an end to the matter. Failing that, recourse might be had to the Home Office as regards the child.

asked Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Whether the report is true that he has added, or intends to add, Scotland to the already long list of exemptions from the proposed Van and Wheel Tax; and, whether, in redemption of his often-repeated promise to give ample Notice as to when the second reading of the Excise Duties (Local Purposes) Bill will be taken, he will now state how many days' notice of his definite intention will be given?

The suggestion of the hon. Member that to omit Scotland from the Excise Duties (Local Purposes) Bill would be an exemption rests on a fallacy. If the proposed taxes were intended for the Imperial Exchequer, to omit any part of Great Britain would be an exemption; but the non-application to Scotland of a measure for raising local revenue cannot be called an exemption. It might be more properly described as a denial to Scotch ratepayers of a boon offered to England. The position with regard to this Bill in Scotland is different from that existing in England. In Scotland there has never been that pressure for the relief of rates which there has been in England, and which Government after Government have promised to satisfy. No similar demand has come from Scotland; therefore we have no similar demand to satisfy. While the Representatives of large sections of ratepayers in England hold me to my promise to proceed with the Bill, no similar representations have been made to me from Scotland. Neither in England nor in Scotland would I proceed with it from mere obstinacy or amour propre. But, with regard to England, I am under a promise which, with regard to Scotland, I am not under. Notice has been given over and over again that we will proceed with the Bill directly after the Land Purchase (Ireland) Bill. It is impossible to fix the time more exactly.

Does not the Estimate of receipts made and quoted to the House by the right hon. Gentleman include Scotland?

I have made a separate Estimate for England and for Scotland. One Estimate is for both England and Scotland together, and the other for England and Scotland separately.

I refer to the Estimate which has been circulated by the right hon. Gentleman himself.

I have not the Estimate by me at this moment, and I cannot say from memory.

Are we to understand that the right hon. Gentleman has determined to exclude Scotland from the Bill?

Yes, Sir. I shall be prepared to accept an Amendment excluding Scotland from the Bill.

Cannot the right hon. Gentleman give us some more definite statement as to when this Bill will be taken?

It will be taken at the conclusion of the consideration of the Bill which is now engaging the attention of the House.

That is rather indefinite, for the closure may be applied, and this Bill may be brought on quite suddenly.

There is no danger whatever of this measure, in which so much interest is, I know, taken on both sides of the House, being sprung upon the House. Hon. Members can form a very accurate estimate for themselves of when the Bill will come on after the intimation that we have given.

I would suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that we are at least entitled to 24 hours' Notice.

I promised the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Derby (Sir William Harcourt) that I should have something to say on this subject and the course of Business to-day, and I will shortly do so.

asked Mr. Attorney General, Whether, at the Guildhall, Canterbury, on November 10, on the hearing of a charge of embezzlement against one—Hopper, the magistrates, acting on the advice of their clerk, refused to allow J. Nye, who stated that he was without religious belief, to give evidence on affirmation; and, whether this is in accordance with "The Evidence Amendment Act, 1870?"

In reply to the hon. Member, I am informed by the clerk to the magistrates that Nye's evidence was not taken because it was not required, there being ample evidence without his testimony. I have already answered so many Questions of the hon. Member upon the point of law raised in the hon. Member's Question that I must refer him to my previous answers.

said, he desired to ask the Solicitor General for Ireland a Question arising out of the Report of the Irish Land Commission. Did the words "tenement valuation," at the head of one of the columns in the report, mean the value of the entire holding, including the value of the tenant's interest in the holding?

said, it was difficult for him to answer this Question with regard to a Report which was not before him without Notice. But if the right hon. Gentleman gave Notice of a Question he would give a definite answer.

said, it was rather difficult to give Notice in regard to these matters, owing to the rate at which the Government were proceeding with the Land Purchase (Ireland) Bill.

said, that the tenement valuation referred to was Griffith's valuation, which was no test of the letting value of the property. It was a valuation fixed exclusively for rating purposes, upon certain principles laid down by the Commissioner. It had been fixed at different times in different parts of Ireland.

asked whether it were not the fact that where the tenant had made improvements after Griffith's valuation the supervisor came round and rated the improvements?

There has been no general re-valuation.

Of course not. But does not the supervisor add a tenant's improvements to the value of his holding?

There has been a re-valuation in certain individual cases; but tenants' improvements are not all included.

Is it not—

Order, order! A series of Questions like this amounts to a debate.

asked Mr. Solicitor General for Ireland, Whether, seeing that he had given the number of purchases from £2,000 to £4,000, he could not give the House the number of purchases under £2,000?

I gave an answer to that Question some time ago.

Will the hon. and learned Gentleman lay on the Table on Monday a Return giving the required information?

Certainly.

I should like to ask the First Lord of the Treasury, Whether he has anything in his mind in regard to a Sitting of the House for to-morrow; and, if so, whether he will be kind enough to say what is in his mind?

I am aware what an earnest desire the hon. Member always shows to be informed of his public duties. But I am not sure that he speaks the views of Members on both sides of the House in suggesting to me—[Mr. LABOUCHERE: I did not suggest.]—that we should meet tomorrow. If I could gather that it was the wish of hon. Members, in order to facilitate the progress of Public Business, to sit on Saturday, it would be my duty to propose it. But I am aware that hon. Members want some rest under the present pressure of Business; and therefore I am not, as at present advised, disposed to ask the House to sit tomorrow.

asked the First Lord of the Treasury, with regard to the Motion for the appointment of a Committee to inquire into schemes of emigration which he had moved last night, and which stood seventh on the Orders for this evening, Whether he would consent to enlarge the reference so far as to authorize the Committee, in considering the question of colonization, not to confine themselves solely to British Colonies?

I must remind the hon. Gentleman and hon. Members that I explained last night, as well as I could, the immediate objects which the Government had in view. The House will be asked to vote a Supplementary Estimate with reference to a certain tentative colonization experiment which has been made from the Western Islands of Scotland. We desire to get as much information as we can with reference to this experiment before the House is called upon to proceed any further with it; and we thought that it was only carrying out the pledges into which we had entered with the House that this Court should sit during the Autumn Session, make their inquiry, and report their opinion to the House with reference to this particular question, in order to guide the House in the present necessity. I am fully aware of the desire of hon. Gentlemen that the inquiry should be a large one into the whole question of colonization, and that it should not be restricted either to Scottish crofters or to any part of the United Kingdom. That large question must be entered into next Session; but if the House is of opinion that this Committee, which we desire should sit to advise the House, and to collect information with regard to this particular question, should not be appointed during the Autumn Session, we should have no alternative but to forego the Motion on the Paper. I should greatly regret that; because I think that, without reference to opinions and prejudices which hon. Gentlemen may entertain on the question, valuable information may be placed at the disposal of the House, which might guide them in coming to a decision as to the Vote, and as to the question whether or not colonization should be entered upon.

gave Notice that when the Motion came on for consideration he would move that the scope of the inquiry be enlarged, so as to consider the question of colonization, not confined solely to British Colonies.

asked whether the First Lord of the Treasury would not exempt the Order for the appointment of this Committee from the operation of the 12 o'clock Rule?

I think it would be a mistake to enter upon a prolonged discussion of such a matter, probably at a late hour this evening. It is one on which I hope to arrive at practical agreement with hon. Gentlemen on that side of the House, as well as my hon. Friends behind me. If I cannot arrive at such an agreement, I am afraid I will not be able to press for the Committee. It is obvious that the appointment of a Committee, even on a question of this important character, is not a matter on which the Government, at this period of the Session, can enter into a prolonged dispute with any Member of this House.

I wish to ask the Solicitor General for Ireland, If he can inform the House whether it is true that criminal proceedings have been instituted in Ireland against seven Members of this House; and, if so, whether he will see that such prosecutions are postponed until these Members have discharged their duties to their constituents by taking part in the consideration of the Irish Estimates for the year?

The hon. Member must please to give Notice of his Question.

said, that the First Lord of the Treasury had probably been informed that criminal proceedings under the Crimes Act had been instituted simultaneously against seven Members of the House. He wished to ask whether the institution of those criminal proceedings and the delay of the Irish Estimates had any relation to each other; and, if not, he would ask the right hon. Gentleman to give the House an assurance, which might tend to facilitate the progress of Public Business, that the prosecutions in question would be so conducted that those seven Gentlemen should not be withdrawn from their public duties until the Irish Estimates had been considered?

In answer to the Question of the hon. Member, I have to assure him and the House that I am personally unaware of the fact to which he refers. I only just this moment found a note from the hon. Member on my table informing me of the fact; and therefore it could not have been in my mind when I made the statement with regard to the Irish Estimates. I will inquire into the circumstances of the case; and I can only say that, so far as I am concerned, unless there is any good ground—any material ground—for haste in the business, I should certainly desire that hon. Members should be in their places in this House to take part in the discussion of the Estimates.

asked the First Lord of the Treasury, Whether he could give the House any information as to the tenure of office of the two gentlemen who had administered the £5,000,000 under the Ashbourne Act, and who had taken three years in doing it. Were the gentlemen in question removables?

As I understand it, the two Gentlemen to whom the hon. Member refers are not removables; but are within the terms of the Expiring Laws Continuance Act, and will continue till the end of next Session. It is the intention of the Government to deal with the question of the renewal of the Land Commission next Session; and, therefore, no change can be effected in the status of these gentlemen.

said, the Government had withdrawn their Land Commission Bill, in which they had proposed to make Mr. Wrench a permanent officer and leave the terms of the other Commissioners at the discretion of the Treasury. He was not in a position to say what proposal would be submitted next Session.

moved for the following Return:—

"The names of the Landowners the purchase of whose properties under the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act, 1885, has been sanctioned by the Irish Land Commission, with the following particulars against each name:—(a) Area of the property; (b) County in which situate; (c) Total rental; (d) Valuation; (e) Amount of purchase money; (f) Total number of holdings on the estate."

asked whether the Solicitor General for Ireland would add a column in which would appear the arrears, if any, which bad been dealt with in the present Session, as there had been a good deal of talk on that matter lately?

said, he was not sure whether that information would be available in the Papers which were in the possession of the Land Commission; but if it were available there would be no objection to adding it to the Return.

said, he understood that, in his absence, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was asked a Question regarding the Wheel and Van Tax, and that the right hon. Gentleman expressed his willingness to except Scotland from the operation of the tax. Would the right hon. Gentleman make the like concession to the country with which he was connected—namely, Wales?

No; I am not prepared to make that exception.

I wish to ask the First Lord of the Treasury a Question of which I have given him private Notice—namely, Whether his attention has been called to the evidence given on Wednesday before the Special Commission by Sergeant Meehan, of the Royal Irish Constabulary, who stated on cross-examination that he had come to London without a subpoena, in consequence of a telegram received from Mr. Rogers, his District Inspector; and whether this proceeding on the part of an officer of police, who is under the direct control of the Government, is consistent with the declaration of the First Lord that the Government maintain a position of impartiality and neutrality as between the parties now before the Commission?

I found a note from the hon. Member on this Bench when I came here a little more than half-an-hour ago. I had no previous knowledge of the circumstances to which the hon. Member refers. I am, therefore, quite unable to give any answer to his Question, and I must ask him to put it down for another day.

I shall put it down again for Monday.

asked the First Lord of the Treasury, Whether, in the arrangement of the Business for the remainder of the Session, he was able now to give a definite date when he would take the second reading of this Bill.

I am sure the hon. Baronet will see that I have entered into as many arrangements as I possibly can. I wish to meet the wishes and feelings of hon. Members as far as I possibly can; but I cannot go further than I have already done.

asked the hon, and gallant Member for North Galway, Whether, considering the strong objection that existed in certain quarters in Ireland to this Bill, and the late period of the Session, he would not consider the propriety of withdrawing the Measure?

said, he had still some hopes of passing the Bill, which ought only to occupy 10 minutes.

said, he was told he was not in Order in discussing the Bill now; but the hon. and gallant Member should be aware that it was a breach of the Irish Church Act.

I propose, Sir, to move the following Instruction to the Committee which stands in my name:—

"That it be an Instruction to the Committee that they have power to provide that the Irish Land Commission may take an account of the amount of arrears of rent due from tenants who have made, or shall make, application to have judicial rents fixed for their holdings, and may decide whether the whole, or any, or what part of such arrears ought to be paid, and whether in one payment or by instalments, and at what dates the same shall be paid."

I took the earliest opportunity of intimating to the hon. Gentleman the irregularity in point of form of this Instruction which he proposes to move. The Motion of the hon. Member says—

"That it be an Instruction to the Committee that they have power to provide that the Irish Land Commission may take an account of the amount of arrears of rent due from tenants who have made, or shall make, application to have judicial rents fixed for their holdings."

That opens up the whole question of the Land Act of 1881, without any special reference to either Lord Ashbourne's Act, as it is called, or to the Land Purchase Bill now before the House. I do not think it would be in Order to open up the whole question of judicial rents, because it is conceivable that persons might make application to have judicial rents fixed without ever intending to apply for the purchase of their holdings under the provisions of this Bill or of Lord Ashbourne's Act. Therefore it seems to me that the Motion would open up a wider and independent question which ought not to be done in the discussion of a Land Purchase Bill, which merely authorizes a further advance of money for the purposes of Lord Ashbourne's Act.

Of course, Mr. Speaker, I accept your ruling. I had always understood that an Instruction was necessary where the matter was not relevant to the Bill under discussion. Therefore I put the Instruction on the Paper because I conceived that it was not relevant to the discussion and required an Instruction to the Committee. I should like to ask whether I may be permitted to amend the Instruction by the introduction, after the word "tenants," in line four, of the words "desirous of purchasing their holdings?" That Amendment would, I think, bring it within the Rule.

That is an Amendment in the direction I have indicated as bringing the Instruction in Order. The hon. and gallant Member for North Galway (Colonel Nolan) has a Motion on the Paper in which he proposes that the Land Commission should permit tenants, "when purchasing their holdings," to do certain things. That is quite in Order, and if the hon. Member for Cork City (Mr. Parnell) confines the Instruction to those tenants who wish to purchase under the Land Purchase Bill, and who wish that the amount of the arrears should be taken into consideration in settling the amount of the purchase-money, that, I think, would bring it within the terms of the formal Order, with which I alone have to deal, and would, being a limitation of the Notice on the Paper, not be such an alteration as would require a fresh Notice. I therefore think the hon. Gentleman, if he is prepared to take that course, would be in Order.

Then I gather from your ruling that the addition of the words suggested would bring the Instruction within the Orders of the House. The amended Instruction will read as follows:—

"That it be an Instruction to the Committee that they have power to provide that the Irish Land Commission may take an account of the amount of arrears of rent due from tenants desirous of purchasing their holdings, who have made, or shall make, application to have judicial rents fixed for their holdings, and may decide whether the whole, or any, or what part of such arrears ought to be paid, and whether in one payment or by instalments, and at what dates the same should be paid."

It was not necessary for him to go at any great length into that question of arrears, although it was a very important and most pressing one. He had had an opportunity on the previous day of touching on that subject, and he would only say that, whereas the discussion on the first reading raised the whole question of the settlement of arrears as an alternative to the Bill, that Instruction introduced the question of the desirability of settling arrears in certain specified cases only, and as an addition to the Bill. It was argued on all sides of the House, and admitted by the Government, that there was an arrears question in Ireland which required to be dealt with. If this were the case, it was necessary to settle it from many points of view. It was necessary, from the point of view of security to the Exchequer, that they should put the tenant on an equal footing on the basis of freedom of contract in dealing with his landlord when he came to make terms for purchase. It was necessary also to guard against inflation of the price given to the landlord where the tenant had no power to get out of his arrears except by entering into that contract. It had come to this, that in many cases of purchase in Ireland the arrears accrued due to the landlord had been added on to the purchase price, and had become a debt due by the tenant to the landlord which would have to be wiped out by these annual payments, extending over 49 years. Now, I was precluded by the Speaker's ruling from going into the wider question of arrears, but I could not see upon what ground the Government objected to the Instruction in its present limited form and scope. Did they wish, were they desirous, that the tenant purchasing should stand, so far as this House could place him, in a position of equality with the landlord in making his bargains? Did they admit—they did admit—that arrears exist in Ireland, and constitute a pressing question? If they were desirous that the tenant should be in the position of a free agent, if they considered, as they announced, that the arrears question did exist, then he said he could not understand upon what grounds of equity or justice, or desire to protect the Exchequer, they could persist in refusing the Instruction which he proposed. The matter of arrears had always been a pressing one. The limited field which he desired the Government to enter upon was not one of great magnitude or moment, but it was of importance as regarded the security of the Treasury from loss. It was of importance as regarded the power of the tenant to make his bargain upon free and equal terms with his landlord, and it was of importance as regarded the future smoothness with which the Act would work. The hon. Member concluded by moving the Instruction as modified in accordance with the ruling of the Speaker.

, in seconding the Motion, said it was a fundamental principle of common law and of common sense that if two parties were to make a contract both of them should come together with their hands untied. But at present, beyond all doubt, in a great number of cases—he believed in the majority of cases—one of the parties—namely, the Irish tenant—came to make a contract with his hands very much tied indeed. He had gone during the vacation to the Vandeleur estate which had been mentioned during these debates. It had been stated that that estate was one on which proceedings were taken with great kindness and "sweet reasonableness" by the landlord and the agent; but yet in every case there was something left in the shape of arrears round the tenant's neck. He maintained that if the negotiation for purchase began while the tenants had arrears round their necks they did not give them a fair chance; and that the only just thing Parliament could do was to give power to the Land Commissioners to deal with arrears exactly as was done in the case of the Scotch Crofters. They must begin their negotiation by dealing with arrears just as if there was not to be a purchase, although they meant that there was to be one. They must get rid of the arrears entirely; and, until they did so, they were putting a screw on one of the parties to the supposed negotiation and bringing to bear on him a pressure that was in every way unfair. He wished to point out what was the bearing of those arrears, and the manner in which they grow, or did not grow, on estates that were reasonably managed; and he wished in illustration to take the Vandeleur estate, as to which he had an account of every man who had been evicted, and who might have purchased if he had a reasonable chance.

asked, whether the hon. and learned Member was speaking to the question of arrears or of purchase?

said, that if he was not in Order he would, no doubt, be called to Order by the proper authority.

was understood to point out to the hon. and learned Member that to go into the general question of arrears and their bearing on the ultimate position of tenants who might hereafter desire to purchase, was opening a wider field of discussion than it was competent for him now to enter upon.

said, he was anxious to point out that in every case of purchase, unless they had already previously made preparation for the arrears, they were rendering it impossible for an honest and fair arrangement to be made. It was not sufficient in all cases where there had been arrears to call upon the tenant to make them part consideration of the price. But that was exactly the vice which was at the bottom of this Bill. Suppose the case of a tenant bound down with arrears on his holding. He could do nothing with the holding while those arrears were pressing upon him. He would like to purchase, however, if he could do so at anything like a fair price; but if they were going to add to the price of the holding the amount of arrears which the tenant could not pay, then they were simply doubling the price. Take a holding, the fee-simple of which was worth £100, the tenant having fallen into arrears to the extent of £30. The purchase-money would be £100 plus £30 for arrears. In such a case the tenant was perfectly helpless and in the power of the landlord. He cordially seconded the Instruction of the hon. Member for Cork.

said, the Government objected to the Instruction of the hon. Member for Cork, because, in their judgment, it would place the tenant in a distinctly worse position than he occupied at the present time. It would decidedly injure his position, and recognize the arrears as a charge which might continue hanging round his neck after the contract had been sanctioned by the Commissioners, and after they had sanctioned the advance to him of the money necessary to effect the purchase. The Instruction distinctly recognized the arrears as an asset due to the landlord, independent altogether of the question of purchase and the value of his estate. This was not the condition of affairs at the present time. In present circumstances the rule of the Land Commission required that before making any advance the Commissioners must be satisfied that all rent had been paid, satisfied, or released; and the form of agreement provided that all rent due up to the last gale day should be included. If the Government accepted the Instruction there would be two distinct arrangements in force. There would be a contract of purchase recognizing a distinct liability on the part of the tenant to pay an annuity to the State, and there would also be a subsidiary contract recognizing on the part of the tenant a liability to his landlord, which would continue for some time after the contract had been made. As a matter of fact, however, no arrears of rent survived the purchase. After the purchase contract was once entered into, the arrears were ipso facto wiped off. What security had the tenant that those arrears were not added to the contract price so as to make it excessive? They had the security of the action of the Commission. The Commissioners were bound to see that the total sum paid was not excessive as regarded the tenant, and was not excessive as regarded the State. The Commissioners had to view both the ability of the tenant to pay the annuity to come, and they had also to see that the money advanced by the State was not more than the holding itself would afford capital security for. The Government believed that the returns furnished to the House showed that the Commissioners had done their duty in this respect. The average rate of purchase was 17·4 years, and as the arrears were wiped off, this left the tenant in a better position than before. The Commissioners were protecting the tenant and the State. No transaction was permitted to take place which was harsh or injurious to the tenant or which was dangerous to the State. In these circumstances, he trusted that the hon. gentleman would see that in the interest of the tenant alone the Government was bound to resist the recommendation.

said a serious misapprehension existed in the minds of the Government on this point, and it was one also which had run through the course of the preceding debate. The right hon. Gentlemen said the Commissioners were empowered to see that the tenant did not pay more than a fail-price. But the Commissioners themselves had repeatedly and emphatically denied this statement. They had placed it on record that they had no legal power whatever to do anything of the kind. Then it was said that the Commissioners had power to see that the holding as it stood with everything upon it was ample security for the advance; but had not the House heard it stated by the Irish Solicitor General that the holding as it stood was and ought to be regarded in many instances as more than half the property of the tenant? It might therefore easily occur—and he contended that it frequently did—that the Commissioners had no power whatever to interfere or stop the bargain, although it was manifest to them that the tenant was paying not only for the interest of the landlord, but for his own interest as well. The Commissioners were not empowered by law to protect the tenant against an excessive price for the landlord's interest; they were empowered to protect the State, and when they sent down a valuer to ascertain the security, that valuer had no instructions and no right to inquire what part ought to belong to the landlord and what to the tenant; but he valued the holding as it stood, and although lawfully and morally three-fourths ought to be the property of the tenant, it was practically competent for the landlord to compel that tenant, in spite of the Commissioners, to purchase and pay with the money of the State, not only the interest of the landlord, but a large proportion of the tenant's own interest as well. That was a consideration which ought to be present to the mind of every hon. Member. The First Lord of the Treasury seemed to think that he had disposed of the case when he pointed out that arrears disappeared when the purchase was made; but the mischief caused by the arrears took place before the agreement of purchase was signed. The Commissioners very properly insisted on the discharge of all liabilities before they advanced the money, but they did not insist that there should be a discharge of the unjust and oppressive arrears before the tenants signed the agreement. The powers of the Commissioners did not extend to a protection of the just rights of the tenants. They had no power under the law to protect a tenant after an agreement had been made from paying more than his holding was worth. Consequently the whole of the argument of the First Lord of the Treasury collapsed like a pack of cards. Hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite were altogether unacquainted with the subject, and merely got their arguments from the columns of The Times. An extraordinary misconception had taken hold of the minds of the Members of the Government as to their object in moving this Instruction. He did not know if the Chief Secretary had been present whether he would have made an attempt to defend this proposal, but he had never seen a measure defended in so lame, faltering, and ignorant a fashion as was this Bill by those responsible for it. There was unquestionably no landlord's agent in Ireland who would dream for a single second of denying that the arrears of rent were looked to by the landlords as a most valuable means of driving up the price of the holdidgs. The cases on which alone the House could be asked to advance this money was in the case of those estates in which some trouble and differences existed. Why should the taxpayers of England be asked to advance millions to increase the value if there were peace and quiet on these estates, and if there were no trouble upon them? On these estates the rents were more or less in arrear. What happened? The landlord proceeded to compel the tenant by process of law to pay the arrears, and when he was face to face with eviction, with no resource but combination and perhaps prison behind, the landlord went to him insidiously and said, "Sign this agreement for purchase at my price, and I will withdraw all the processes and the ejectments, and I will forgive the arrears." He could not understand a bargain in which there was more duress or less freedom. This was not a position in which a man who was making a bargain should be placed. The agent of Lord Kenmare, in the witness box at the Commission Court on the previous day, admitted that he kept alive the arrears on the Kenmare estate, and that it was a good thing to do. He swore in court that lots of tenants owed him rent for the spring of 1883. He kept the arrears alive for the same reason as every other agent who acted for a harsh landlord, although it might be said there were many worse landlords than Lord Kenmare—he kept those arrears alive because they were a valuable instrument with which to exercise pressure against the tenant. He was perfectly convinced that in four-fifths of the sales under the Act in Ireland the tenants had been more or less coerced by the existing arrears. Proceedings were recently taken in the Court-house at Kildare in reference to an estate where a battering-ram and 200 or 300 police were employed to batter down the houses of the tenants who refused to sign agreements at 22 years' purchase. These poor people offered 18 years' purchase of the judicial rents, all the arrears being left to arbitration. The reply was that they must pay 22 years of the judicial rent and all the arrears. As they objected to pay more than 18 years' purchase they were served with ejectment notices. In the Court the tenants said they were prepared to repeat their offer of 18 years' purchase, when Mr. White, on behalf of the landlord, said—"Then you will get it now. We will withdraw all offers of purchase whatever." Whenever a body of tenants approached the Commissioners and said they desired to purchase but were prevented by a threat of eviction for arrears, the Commissioners ought to have power to untie their hands and set them free. If the tenants had some other alternative than that which lay before them of signing the agreement or being turned out on the roadside; if they could go before the Land Court or buy on reasonable rents, the case would be different. Then it had been carefully pointed out by the Government that the effect of purchasing was to reduce by 30 per cent the sum annually payable by the tenants. Now, in pursuing this course the Government were impaled on the horns of a dilemma—either they were guilty of the most iniquitous conduct to the landlords, or the rents formerly payable by the tenants had been grossly excessive. In the City of London it would not be necessary to bribe a man to buy his house by reducing his rent 30 per cent. In these circumstances, was not an unanswerable argument to be found—was it not a fair deduction that the former rents were unjust and inflated rents? There was really no escape from that position. If, then, the rents were excessive the arrears must be unjust; and it was a monstrous thing to leave the tenants under the screw of these unjust arrears in order to compel them to buy their farms on the basis of their unjust rents.

said, he would not follow the hon. Member in the somewhat heated expressions which he had let fall. The principle, as he understood, of the Bill had now been generally adopted. That being so, he desired to speak in a conciliatory spirit upon what he believed to be the basis of the measure. He believed that the Ashbourne Act had been fully adopted by both landlords and tenants in Ireland; but the argument with which the hon. Member concluded his speech struck at the whole policy, not only of this Bill, but of every other Act aiming at the same result which had been passed since 1870, and also at the policy and the principles which time after time had received the cordial approbation of Irish Members. The hon. Member had quoted a case of which he had not caught the name—[Mr. DILLON: The O'Kelly estate, County Clare.]—and with the circumstances of which he was unacquainted. It was, therefore, impossible for him cither to assent to or contradict the statement which the hon. Member had made. But, whether the statement was true or false, exaggerated or accurate, it had no bearing upon the question before the House. In the first place, that case never came before the Commissioners at all. There had been, it seemed, negotiations between the landlord and tenants. The proposal of 22½ years' purchase never came before the Commissioners, and would probably not have been approved by them. But suppose a tenant, with the bonô fide intention of purchasing, came to the Commissioners and stated his desire to purchase, but as a preliminary asked the Commissioners to consider whether the arrears were just or unjust, would not the result inevitably be that the Commissioners would be converted into an Arrears Court? And it was obvious that the applications made to them to consider arrears would not be confined to bonô fide purchasers. It might or might not be a good thing to deal with the question of arrears; but it was clearly altogether foreign to the Act, which could not be worked if the parties applying under it approached each other in a spirit of hostility. The proposal had no value at all if it did not mean the establishment of a general Arrears Court. Applicants, having got the matter of arrears settled, might change their minds and not go on with the purchase, so that the Commissioners would become nothing else than a Court of Appeal to decide on the justice or injustice of arrears all over Ireland. If, however, after the application as to the arrears, it was made compulsory on the parties to proceed to a sale and purchase, a totally different state of things would be brought about, and one which, whether good or bad, was contrary to, and inconsistent and irreconcilable with, the principle of this Bill and every similar Bill which had preceded it. If the Instruction were agreed to, the effect would be to alter and revolutionize the whole policy upon which the Act proceeded; and he doubted whether it would be possible for the mover of the Instruction himself to draft such clauses as would carry out his view. He submitted, therefore, that, while a good deal might have been said in favour of the hon. Member for Cork's Instruction as it first stood upon the paper, in its altered form it was one which could not be worked concurrently with an extension of Lord Ashbourne's Act. He appealed to hon. Members, not in the least in a hostile or controversial spirit, not to insist upon the Motion of the hon. Member for Cork. The House had agreed to the second reading of the Bill, and re-affirmed the principle on which the Ashbourne Act had been originally passed; and he would entreat hon. Members to proceed with the Bill in a spirit of friendly agreement on the principle which had been thus affirmed.

said, the right hon. and learned Gentleman commenced and concluded his speech in a spirit with which they must all sympathize, but at the same time he must point out that the right hon. and learned Gentleman had entirely passed over the main and the powerful contention that had been urged in favour of this Instruction. The right hon. and learned Gentleman contended that there was nothing to be urged in favour of this Amendment considered as an Amendment upon the extension of the Ashbourne Act. There was one thing to be urged, and it was a very considerable thing indeed—namely, that as the Act stood, when a purchase was about to take place the arrears constituted a lever in the hands of the landlord to compel the tenant to give an unjust price. Was that denied? The landlord and tenant were in these relative positions. The tenant was under arrears which, by hypothesis, he was unable to pay. The land lord wished to bring the tenant to bay, and the landlord was in a condition to say to the tenant—"I offer you this at such a price. Either take that price or pay me your arrears," which we know he could not pay, "or go out upon the road." But the right hon. and learned Gentleman said that under this Act there might or might not be arrears. If there were no arrears and there were no evictions, then it would not come into the present debate. The right hon. and learned Gentleman spoke as if the purchase under the Ashbourne Act was to provide a convenient arrangement between landlords and tenants in the cases of estates where no trouble or difficulty had arisen. Well, but that was not what they had been taught was the principle of the Act. They had been told the purpose of the Act was to pacify the country; but they did not pacify a country by enabling landlords and tenants, who never had had any trouble in their relations, or who had entirely got over their trouble, to come to an arrangement for the purchase of the estate. The object of the Instruction was to press upon the House that the existence of arrears—showed where trouble existed—it was indicated by the existence of arrears—and that in these cases the landlord had a most unjust power placed in his hands to ex-tract from the tenant an improper price. Did the First Lord of the Treasury adhere to the speech he made half-an-hour ago? [Mr. W. H. SMITH nodded assent]. Did he assert that the Commissioners had power to inquire into the equity of the agreement made between the landlord and tenant? There was a plain question to which he hoped they would have a plain answer. He understood that assertion was traversed as being absolutely at variance with the facts. The assertion on his side was clear that the Commissioners possessed no shade or shadow of such a power, and that they had nothing to do with the equity or inequity of the agreement between the landlord and tenant. What they had to do with was the security given to the State. That was a totally different matter. The question of tenant-right, referred to yesterday by the Chancellor of the Ex-chequer, was a very proper thing for the Commissioners to take into consideration for the purposes they had in view, but the consideration was one which had nothing to do with the protection of the tenant. The First Lord of the Treasury made a case which was no doubt highly agreeable to his own benevolent mind and disposition, because he was the last man who would like to see a tenant placed in a position of difficulty or a landlord invested with a power which would enable him to exercise undue pressure. Having that view of what ought to be, the right hon. Gentleman philanthropically assured the House that was the state of the law as it stood. They had a right to ask, was the state of the law correctly described by the Leader of the House? Would he show them in what words, in what enactment, the Commissioners under the Act were placed in a condition to protect the interests of the tenants? The matter depended to a great extent on that, although the action of the Commissioners had been in many cases a very effective intervention. But if it were true, as he contended, that they had no right or power to protect the tenant, then what was the answer to be made to the contention that the landlord had the power to put before the tenant two alternatives only—purchase subject to the arrears or pay the arrears, or go out—and either alternative might involve the most grievous oppression? It was no answer to them to say that the principle of the Bill was in the judgment of the Government necessary to maintain the union between the two countries. It was for that sacred principle that the Irish tenant must suffer as the landlord required him to suffer—go out on the roadside or purchase on the terms placed before him. But then it was said the tenant, after getting his arrears settled, might say, "I don't mean to purchase; I have got rid of my arrears; that was all I wanted." That could be met by inserting a clause, and the right hon. Gentleman knew that there was nothing easier than to provide that the arrangement as to the arrears should be dependent upon the conclusion of an agreement between the landlord and the tenant. He therefore contended that nothing had been or could be said to shake the contention so powerfully urged by the Member for East Mayo, that there was a strong case of a practical grievance, and that it would be the duty, and, as he hoped, it would be the disposition of the House to adopt frankly the remedy.

said, he trusted that, with the permission of the hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), who thought that everyone on that Bench was necessarily ignorant of Irish affairs, because he had not been in Ireland, he would be allowed to reply to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Mid Lothian, who suffered from the same disadvantage.

What is that?

The disadvantage of not having been in Ireland.

Oh, but I have been there.

said, that, at all events, he could claim the privilege of a later acquaintance with Ireland than the right hon. Gentleman. It had been his pleasure and advantage to have been in Ireland comparatively lately. [An hon. MEMBER: Dublin.] He only mentioned this to show that they were on a level with the right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite, the fallacies in whose arguments they wished to point out. The House must have observed the extremely limited number of individual cases which hon. Members from Ireland, with all their knowledge, had been able to produce in these debates, and the very few cases in which they had been able to convict the Government of being wrong in their statistics. Even in the present debate the hon. Member for East Mayo had himself committed a gross error, and he would convict the hon. Member out of his own mouth. The hon. Member stated that he believed that in four fifths of the cases of purchase the purchases had been made under the stress of arrears; but the hon. Member at another time asserted that the great majority—more than half of the purchases—had been made in Ulster; and had been made in cases where there were no arrears at all, and he complained that purchases had taken place where there were no arrears and no distress. Those statements of the hon. Member, who lectured the Government on their ignorance of Ireland, were diametrically opposed to each other. Then the hon. Member for East Mayo supported the new theory, which had already been replied to, that the Government were on the horns of a fearful dilemma because, if the tenants were to pay a lower price in future than they paid before, this was tantamount either to a censure or the previous rents as being unjust or to an admission that they wore now robbing the landlords. It was, however, the invocation of the credit of the State which made the difference between the two, and that was one of the very first principles of the whole of the arrangement, as, by being able to borrow money cheaper than it could be done by an ordinary borrower, the State was in a position to let the tenant buy at a cheaper rate, and therefore he was enabled to pay an instalment smaller than his rent, while yet the landlord was satisfied. He noticed that argument again, because the Government had been abused because they had not repeated arguments over and over again that they had used in former debates. Now, the speech of his right hon. Friend opposite had shown that the proposed Instruction, as drawn and presented to the House, was absolutely impossible of acceptance; but he said they could amend it in Committee.

You can draw it out in the clauses.

But it was by drawing it out in the clauses that would show the impossibility of dealing with it. [An hon. MEMBER: Let us see.] The hon. and learned Member for Lincolnshire (Mr. Waddy) argued that they ought to deal with arrears and close them up before they began to negotiate. Now, was that the view of the Leader of the Opposition? If they dealt with arrears before they began to negotiate, they opened up that vista to which allusion had already been made—that every tenant in arrears would come and say, "I wish to buy; wipe out my arrears," and when the Land Commission had cleared him, he might turn round and say, "I am prepared to give only five or ten years' purchase; otherwise I won't buy." Was it not clear that a proposal of that bind would simply wipe out all the arrears without promoting the purchase? On the other hand, suppose they made the arrears and the purchase independent negotiations, then it was said that the screw was applied to the tenants to force them into a hard bargain. If they once made the remission of arrears conditional on the agreement, they had not advanced the question at all from the point of view of hon. Members opposite. Hon. Members from Ireland did not want it conditional on, but independent of, the agreement, and then it was impossible to accept the proposal of his right hon. Friend. Therefore it would be perfectly futile to accept a proposition of the kind, because it would be impossible to work it out in clauses, which would either be absolutely unacceptable or would be nugatory and even injurious to the tenant. Then, again, there were no cases in which it had been necessary to pay more than 20 years' purchase, and yet the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. W. E. Gladstone) had spoken of cases of gross iniquity, and appeared to think that the Land Commission would give the landlords the facility of wringing unjust rents out of the tenants. £5,000,000 had been spent, £1,000,000 more had been applied for, yet no single case of individual injustice had been shown. ["Hear, hear!" and "No, no!"] He held, therefore, that it could not be said that the tenants who had purchased their holdings had paid too much. ["Yes, yes!"]

They are being sold out in Kerry now by the Purchase Commissioners for the instalments.

Because they have not paid their instalments. What has that got to do with it? There might have been one or two cases, but the fact that in two or three cases in Kerry the tenants had not paid their instalments did not prove that these instalments were too high. It was impossible to judge from single individual cases. The hon. Member by his interruption did not show that the tenants had paid too much.

said, that he had mentioned the case of the Marquess of Waterford's tenants, who had, under pressure, contracted to pay too high a sum by way of purchase money.

repeated that if tenants had really been subjected to undue pressure, they would have been overwhelmed with cases in proof thereof. At all events, he would put it fairly to the House. Out of 8,000 or 10,000 cases, was there any which had been brought forward showing that there had been that strain put on the tenants which has been alleged? And, again, he must point to the protection which was given to the tenant by the Land Commission. And in answer to the right hon. Gentleman opposite, he must repeat what had been stated over and over again in former debates, that the protection to the State was at the same time a protection to the tenant. That was the protection afforded by machinery of an organization against which no complaints were brought; and besides that, the Government were able to bring forward the satisfactory proof, in the sales which had actually taken place, of the remarkably small number of years' purchase which had been given. The average price in Kerry was not 17 years' purchase, but 16·8, which included arrears. Supposing there were in Kerry cases where there were arrears extending over four or five years, it would appear that the number of years' purchase was only 11 or 12. That looked much more as if the amount of arrears in Kerry had induced the landlords to accept a very low price than as if the existence of arrears had enabled the landlords to place any strong pressure on the tenants. He had endeavoured to meet frankly the arguments of the right hon. Gentleman opposite. It was not that the Commissioners asked themselves directly what was due to the landlord and what was due to the tenant in a particular case; but the tenants had the security which he had described—namely, that the Commissioners would not, for the sake of the State, sanction a purchase that was unduly high for the value of the property. He ventured to think that through the action of the Commission there had been none of those cases to which the right hon. Gentleman has alluded. He had endeavoured to prove that while the right hon. Gentleman had spoken theoretically, and had said that there might be gross cases of injustice, it had been impossible to prove that any palpable amount of injustice had been done throughout these large transactions, and the figures of the sales showed that the rate had not been exorbitant, and that there was real protection in the Commission which watched over the interests of the State and at the same time indirectly over the interests of the tenant.

said, that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Mid Lothian had put a plain question to the Government and had asked for a plain answer. He asked whether the Government adhered to the statement of the First Lord of the Treasury, that the Commissioners, before sanctioning any purchase, took means and were empowered to make inquiries as to the basis of that purchase. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had evaded that point, because, by a solemn judicial decision, Mr. Lynch, one of the Commissioners, stated that they had no such power. The decision was given in the case of one of the Waterford tenants. It was reported in The Irish Law Times, and the decision had ruled hundreds of cases since it was delivered. The Chancellor of the Exchequer admitted that there was duress in that case; but the Land Commissioners decided that there was no duress. Lord Waterford was by no means a bad landlord; but in the bad times arrears accumulated on his estate, and a test case was taken from his estate into the Commissioners' Court. Lord Waterford was charged, through his agent, Captain Gandy, with forcing the tenants right and left, by means of writs of ejectment, to take advantage of the Ashbourne Act. The case which he himself took into Court from the Waterford estate was one in which the tenant was two or three years in arrear. Captain Gandy went to the tenant and asked him whether he would purchase, and the tenant said that he would. Before this, however, the agent had issued against the tenant writs of ejectment, and he wished particularly to point out that these documents were dated weeks anterior to the agreement to purchase. They asked the Purchase Commission, under these circumstances, for a decision, and the tenants came up and swore that they never would have purchased but for the writs issued against them. The Commissioners decided that this was not duress; but, as he had pointed out, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had stated that it was. Which of these views was to prevail? The Irish Members were told that they were not precise in their facts. The facts of this case were reported, and could be read. What use, therefore, would it have been if they had taken subsequent cases before the Commissioners when they were solemnly told that the Commissioners had no power to go into the question? They were told by Mr. Lynch that if two men came before him, one to buy and one to sell, and he sent down his valuer, who informed him that upon the tenant's right and the landlord's interest there was security for the advance by the State, he had nothing whatever to do with the antecedent relations between the parties. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, said, "What harm is there if a little pressure be used, so long as the State has good security?" That was all very well for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but what was it to the Irish Members? It was proved, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said, that these men had not paid too much, because in no case had 20 years' purchase been given. Twenty years' purchase of what? The man whose case he had referred to, could he have got a judicial rent fixed? If he had attempted it he would have been put out of his holding. The fact was, the 20 years' purchase was upon the old rent which had been paid, and this was equivalent to 40 years' purchase on the judicial rent. He should like to inform the House that there had not been a judicial rent fixed in 50 per cent of the farms in Ireland; a judicial rent had been fixed in the cases of about 200,000 farms out of 500,000. Men were prevented from going into Court because of the existence of arrears—because, if they went into Court, the landlord would at once issue an ejectment against them. The Fox tenantry came to him and asked him whether they should buy or not? He advised them to buy because they owed a year or a year and a half's rent, and it was being added to the purchase-money. They hoped that times would improve, and as they would not be called upon for an instalment until late in the present year, they thought that they would be able to meet it. In The Irish Times of Tuesday last it would be seen that these tenants had sent in a petition to the Land Commissioners, in which they said that Lord Ashbourne was the greatest benefactor and pacificator that Ireland had ever had; but they were unable to pay their instalments. These men were fairly prosperous, and lived in a county where there had never been an agitation against the payment of rent, and there was no duress used against them. They were, however, tempted to purchase because, by doing so, they would get rid of existing arrears. This was the case on the Fox estate, and the temptation must be greater in the adjoining town-lands. If the Government were unable to accept the Instruction, could they not at least accept an Amendment to this effect—that every payment of money, every order made by the Land Commissioners, should be an order made in open Court, that it should be made upon proceedings which the Land Commissioners were empowered to inquire into, and that the Commissioners should take care that the security should be a security with reference to the landlord's interest in the holding? It must be remembered that the tenants' interest was made extinguishable by the non-payment of a year's rent. It was a novelty to hear the Irish Attorney General telling the tenants that they owned half the soil in Ireland; yet his chief could toll audiences there was an exact analogy between Irish tenants and those living in the slums of London. If the Government wished to give relief to the tenants and security to the State, they would make this a judicial proceeding, and only allow a transaction to be carried through when it was found by the Land Commission that there had been no duress. Look at the case of "Londonderry v. Fergusson," in which the landlord sought to get an order for the recovery of rent which would be the subject of judicial abatement. How were tenants to stand independently before such landlords? In the Waterford case the Land Commissioners said they had no power to go behind what the valuer said, and they declined to allow the previous relations of landlord and tenant to be opened up. He recently met the Duke of Abercorn in the Land Court looking for his quarter of a million. As he jostled up against the Duke he experienced a profound emotion, and he said to himself, here was the brother of a Cabinet Minister who was endeavouring to force through Parliament a Bill which would put a quarter of a million of this swag into his pocket. When such men threw out hints of what might happen if tenants did not purchase, the tenants could not be acting freely. The landlords might be animated by profoundly disinterested motives, but it was difficult to believe it. When the ducal brother of a Cabinet Minister would benefit so much, the Cabinet hardly came into Court with clean hands. It was said that the details of cases were not furnished by the Irish Members. It could hardly be expected that they would supply them in debate under the liability to be closured; but they could be supplied by thousands if the Bill were referred to a Select Committee. He repeated the challenge to the Government to show that the Land Commission had power to enter into antecedent relations; and, if the Government found they were wrong, let them give the Commission statutory power.

said, that the hon. and learned Member could not have described the transaction in question more inappropriately than by suggesting that the landlord went off with the swag. The tenant paid instalments that were lower than his rent, and the income of the landlord was invariably reduced. In the Waterford case the landlord entered into the usual agreement to purchase, and on the 11th of July the agreement came before two Commissioners upon the report of the inspector as to the sufficiency of the security. Afterwards application was made to one Commissioner, Mr. Lynch, to have the agreement cancelled on the ground of duress; and he held that the Commission had not jurisdiction to set aside deeds or contracts for sale, and that they could only decree specific performance on the application of either party. On the other hand, he was prepared at any stage, before the actual payment of money, to order stay of proceedings in any case in which there was evidence showing reasonable ground for application for relief; and, further, the Commissioner said there were circumstances in which he would not hesitate to throw upon the vendor the onus of applying to the Court for a decree for specific performance.

asked the hon. and learned Gentleman to state all the facts of the case to the House.

said, he thought it unnecessary to do this. It was quite sufficient to mention the conclusion at which the Commissioner arrived. This House was not a Court of Appeal from the Commissioner. There was a Court of Appeal in Ireland to which the tenant could have gone, but did not. The Commissioner in giving judgment said that there was no evidence of any duress by the landlord to compel the tenant to enter into the agreement to purchase. Either the Commissioner was right or wrong. If he was right, there was an end of the matter, and there was no duress. If he was wrong, why did not the tenant appeal? He did not appeal, and they must take it that the Commissioner was right. The Commissioner pointed out that the mere existence of arrears on an estate could not be pleaded as a bar to a purchase. Did the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Mid Lothian think that there ought to be no sales on estates where there were arrears, and that all tenants in arrear should be debarred from purchasing and thus prevented from obtaining this opportunity of wiping off their arrears? The Commissioner pointed out the "happy results" which flowed from these purchases in terminating strained relations between landlord and tenant. The House had been told that there were numerous cases in which pressure had been brought to bear upon tenants to purchase, but, notwithstanding all the hon. and learned Member for Longford's professional experience in matters of this kind, he could only relate this one case, which, upon being looked into, did not in any degree support his contention. The hon. and learned Member had also referred to the petition of certain tenants. The temptation to allude to that very amusing document was too much for the hon. and learned Gentleman. Certainly it was tempting; but what was this document? It was a petition presented by a tenant on the Lane-Fox estate, and the substance of it was, "We bless Lord Ashbourne as the greatest benefactor to the country, and we are paying our instalments." This was not a case of men who were led into a bargain which they could not fulfil. They said, "We are not men who are likely to live for 49 years," but the document rather led to the conclusion that they expected to live for 65 years, and so the sense of humour of the hon. and learned gentleman could not resist the reading of this document. What was the inference from this document? Here were men who were paying up, and what they said was this—"We want during the period of 10 or 15 years for which we expect we have to live to pay a lighter rate." He could not see how that document strengthened the hon. and learned Member's case. These men had paid their instalments and were apparently quite willing to fulfil their engagements, though they made certain suggestions as to a change in the conditions of repayment. There was another observation of the hon. and learned Gentleman on which he wished to say a word. He said—"Take the rate of purchase upon judicial rents." If they were not judicial rents the tenants could go into the Courts and get judicial rents. With regard to Kerry, to which reference had been made, he was in a position to inform the House that there had been 275 sales in that County and only in 10 cases were the instalments in arrear. In one case the holding certainly was advertized for sale, but upon that being done the instalments in arrear were paid up, so that these figures could not be said to corroborate in any way the contention of the hon. and learned Member. Some remarks had been made with regard to the function of the Commissioners in this matter. It was true that their duty was to protect the State by seeing that the tenant did not purchase at a price for which his holding would not be adequate security. But this was practically an indirect and substantial protection to the purchasing tenant. And just in those cases where the tenant most required protection, where the value of his interest in his holding was least, would this indirect protection of the Commissioners be found to be most effective.

said, he thought it would very much facilitate discussion if members of the Government did not contradict one another. The hon. and learned Gentleman's argument was inconsistent with that of the hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Plunket). He wished to call attention to a very singular difference between statements of the Solicitor General for Ireland and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had plainly stated to the House that the Commission in protecting the State also protected the tenant; but the Solicitor General had risen later, and at once this direct and identical protection had become an indirect protection. He would show that it was neither one nor the other. What the Solicitor General had said confirmed the view of the noble Lord the Member for South Paddington (Lord Randolph Churchill) that the tenant right was an additional security for the payment of the money, an assertion which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had most emphatically repudiated. The Solicitor General now admitted that when the Commissioners were discussing the terms of the agreement, what they asked was not whether the landlord's interest was alone sufficient security for the repayment of the money, but whether the landlord's interest plus the interest of the tenant was enough security. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was in entire disagreement with the Solicitor General with regard to this point. ["No, no!"] He had understood the Chancellor of the Exchequer to say, on the previous night, that there were two securities—there was the security of the ownership of the landlord and there was the security of the ownership of the tenant—and so there was a double security for the purchase of a single security, because the single thing that was bought was the landlord's interest, and for that there was the security of the landlord's interest and the tenant's interest. Now, there was the declaration from the Solicitor General that the Commissioners did not judge of the amount paid to the landlord by simply the landlord's interest, but by the tenant's interest combined with the landlord's. That declaration got rid of the double security, and showed how fallacious was the whole position of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Solicitor General on this matter. Their whole position was that the security for the State was identical with security for the tenant; but how could that be. The only thing the Commissioners asked was whether the whole value of the farm was equal to the 17 years' purchase which the tenant had paid—the whole value of the farm including the ownership of the tenant and the landlord combined. Therefore the tenant might have given too much, and at the same time the State might be secured. It was a complicated question; but he repeated that the tenant might make a bad bargain while the State obtained perfect security.

I do not admit the argument of the hon. Member; but I cannot reply now, though I will do so when I rise.

said, he would read to the House some very remarkable figures given to him by an hon. Member. The judicial rents on which purchases were made amounted to £97,000 odd. Griffith's valuation on the holdings amounted to £86,000 odd. So the valuation of the tenant and the amount of judicial rents purchased upon were practically identical. Griffith's valuation included the improvements of the tennnt, and, therefore, the Commissioners included the value of the tenant's improvements in the security for the money which the tenant agreed to pay. Accordingly the bargain might be a good one for the State and a bad one for the tenant, and this being the case, some protection for the latter ought to be provided.

said, that it was not until the speech of the Solicitor General for Ireland had been delivered that the most important objection which had been urged had been understood; and the Solicitor General had understood it more than grappled with it. The objection was that between the tenant and the State there was not that identity of interest which was necessary if the action of the Commissioners was to be looked to for the protection of the tenant. He was one of those who had not seen their way to oppose the Government's proposition. The reason which made him vote in favour of the principle of the Bill made him anxious that some Instruction such as that now under consideration should be adopted. But the very fact that a satisfactory and considerable security had been obtained for the State was just the reason that might make the Commissioners indifferent as regarded the tenant unless they had the duty cast upon them to see that an undue proportion of the money advanced did not go in payment for the landlord's interest. They would have no reason to inquire whether the tenant had made a fair bargain with the landlord. What was wanted, and what he pressed the Government to do, was to take care that the very purpose for which this public money was being offered should be fulfilled, and that this public money should not be taken merely for the sake of enabling landlords in Ireland to get better bargains than they would otherwise obtain. What they on that (the Opposition) side wanted was that a fair bargain should be made between landlord and tenant, and that only so much of the public money as the landlord was properly entitled to should go into the landlord's pocket. What they asked the Government to do, if they wished the Act to be really useful, was to accept the principle of the Instruction, and to develop it. Unless the Government took this step, they would render useless what might otherwise be a most useful and beneficial measure. He rejoiced once more to find himself in accordance with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Mid Lothian.

said, he absolutely denied that in this matter the protection to the State was any protection whatsoever to the tenant. The Solicitor General for Ireland, in introducing the Bill, made the very valuable admission that in the majority of cases the interest of the tenant in his holding was greater than that of the landlord.

What I said was that in many cases in Ireland the value of the tenant's interest under the existing law sold for a larger price than the fee-simple.

said, that the hon. and learned Gentleman admitted that in many cases the tenant's interest sold in the open market for more than the landlord's interest, and pointed out that that was a great security for the State. But when the hon. and learned Gentleman spoke a while ago he took quite a different view. There were 519 cases, involving a sum of £243,000 purchase-money, in which the Land Commissioners refused to assent to the terms of purchase, but subsequently sanctioned an agreement, when the purchase-money was reduced by £41,000. That showed that the tenants had been induced by some means or other to agree to pay £41,000 more than the holdings were worth. These holdings were security for only four-fifths of the money. But the holding meant the tenant's interest and the landlord's interest combined. In the 519 cases he had mentioned, the inspectors went down and looked at the whole value of the holdings or the interests of landlord and tenant combined, and therefore we had it beyond contradiction that those unfortunate tenants had agreed to pay £41,000 for the landlords' interest alone more than the landlords' and tenants' interests combined were worth. He would like the Chancellor of the Exchequer to point out a single word in the Act which enabled the Commissioners to withhold their sanction if there was sufficient security, and one-fifth of the money was kept in their hands as an extra security.

said, he had received a letter with reference to a tenant named Reidy, in the County Kerry. The landlord asked him to purchase at about 17 years' purchase. This would mean £120 a-year as the purchase instalments. Reidy considered the terms too high, and refused to purchase. Ultimately he agreed to the terms on the landlord promising to pay for him the first two instalments of the purchase money. The landlord also gave Reidy a present of nine cows and gave him 10 more in time. The first two instalments of the purchase money were paid by the landlord. When the third fell due Reidy was only able to pay £40. When the fourth instalment became due, in May last, Reidy was only able to raise £50 by selling the stock of his farm, and he has been served with a writ for the arrears. What was that but robbing of the public purse? He would undertake, if the debate were adjourned, to bring from County Kerry several instances of tenants being put out of possession, and in particular would prove that in the case of one man the sheriff had come to him with a signed purchase agreement in one hand and a writ in the other.

said, he wished to draw attention to the proposition of the First Lord of the Treasury, which went to the root of the discussion. The First Lord had pointed to the Land Commissioners as being possessed of an authority and as using that authority to consider the equity of the terms between the vendors and the purchasers. His right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Lothian challenged the First Lord to say whether or not the Commissioners possessed and did exercise that authority, and the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer evaded that question. He said that if the Commissioners considered the interest of the State they would at the same time consider the interest and equity of the tenant. He would venture to answer the question of his right hon. Friend out of the mouth of Commissioner Lynch himself. In the judgment which was first brought to the attention of the House by the hon. and learned Member for Longford (Mr. Healy), and upon which the Solicitor General for Ireland afterwards endeavoured to pu a new and different complexion, Commissioner Lynch used the following language:—

"The basis of our jurisdiction is the agreement of the parties. Our duty, then, if we are otherwise satisfied with the security, and if a guarantee deposit is provided as required by the Act, is to make the advance; if we are not so satisfied we reject the application."

He wished particularly to call the attention of the House to the following sentence:—

"We have no power to fix prices or revise contracts for sale, and therefore it behoves both landlords and tenants to consider well the terms of sale before entering into agreements."

He submitted that that was a complete answer to the challenge of his right hon. Friend, and overthrew completely and entirely the position taken up by the First Lord of the Treasury.

said, what he maintained was that it was the duty of the Commissioners to see that the advance which they sanctioned was one which the conditions of the case would permit; and those conditions, indirectly, as his right hon. Friend had said, were the most sure and complete protection of the tenant. What the Commissioners took into account when their surveyor went to inspect the holding was the rent or annuity which a solvent tenant might be expected to pay for the holding as a tenant. [Several hon. MEMBERS: As it stands.] That was to say, it was the landlord's interest that was sold. [Cries of "No!"] That he asserted to be the case, and those who questioned it must obtain information which would overthrow that statement. The tenant's interest was not purchased by the advance which was made by the Commissioners. All the interest that was purchased was the landlord's interest. The rent to be paid to the landlord was one which the Commissioners, by the report which they received, had reason to believe was an annuity in the place of rent, which the tenant might with case continue to pay. That that was so was shown by the fact that the judicial rent was reduced by from 20, 25, and even 30 per cent. and that judicial rent had been fixed as a rent which the tenant might reasonably, rightly, morally, and lawfully pay to the landlord for his holding.

seconded the Motion, pointing out that in the congested districts they might go for miles without seeing a house or a human being, but it was only when they penetrated into the most inaccessible districts that they realized the situation. What was the genesis of this vast expanse of grass land in the west of Ireland? In the time of the famine great stretches of land were turned into grass farms, but most of those great speculations came to grief, and the days of large cattle ranches in Ireland were doomed and gone. Those grass lands, extending over hundreds of thousands of acres, were incapable at present of rearing the stock they were originally intended for, but if they were split up into small parcels and handed over to the farmers, it would inevitably have the effect of increasing the comfort and well-being of the farmers and make them a self-respecting class of the community.

thought that a more unfortunate question in reference to Ireland could not be brought forward than was embodied in the present Instruction. It was one that had come down from a very long time past. The result of the policy that came into vogue after the famine of amalgamating farms and laying them down in grass was that the poorer tenants had been driven to the bad lands, to the fringe of a bog, to sandhills, and the barren coast line of the west, so that the parts of the country which were least able to support a large population were precisely those where the population was congested. The population of Ireland had decreased by 20,000 during the past year, and he was sure the Government, Radical or Tory, which would stay this depletion by giving employment to labourers and small farmers to enable them to stay at home would deserve the thanks of the people of Ireland and of all good people. He had often wondered that it had never struck some Members of the Government that great relief would be given if these large grass farms were cut up and offered in the market. If they were to cut up those grass farms, and give a preference to those which were connected with adjoining farms of a different character, they would soon effect a considerable improvement in the condition of those parts of the country in which grass farming prevailed. In connection with that question, they ought to bear in mind the immense impulse that would be given to employment if a better system of farming could be made to supersede grass farming. Grass lands always had a tendency to degenerate into moss, or waste, and such farming ought to be discouraged. The Government ought to take this matter up, and they might do so with a reasonable prospect of raising Ireland out of the miserable condition she was in.

said, he did not complain of the spirit in which the Amendment had been brought before the House. He did not propose to argue the question of the purchase of grass land, although he believed there were cases in which it would be an undoubted advantage to the tenant if he had the opportunity of adding some grass land to his farm. But where the landlord and tenant were willing to carry out such a transaction as was suggested in the Instruction, they could do it outside the Act. The question was whether money was to be advanced under the present Act for that purpose. If they adopted any such proposal as this it was obvious that very stringent provisions would have to be taken in order to prevent its being used in a way contrary to the spirit of the Act. He might say that there were on the Paper two Amendments which were opposed to the proposed Instruction, and those Amendments stood in the names of the hon. and learned Member for North Longford and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. Shaw Lefevre). He opposed the Instruction on the ground that it would be necessary, to a great extent, to recast the Act in order to make such an Amendment practicable.

said, he thought it an unfair method of argument for the right hon. Gentleman to bring forward Amendments on the Paper which had not yet been reached in opposition to the Instruction now before the House. If this Instruction had been proposed from the other side of the House, the Government would, he believed, have accepted it, for it was plainly a just and beneficial proposal. The only argument urged against it was that there was another and different Instruction on the Paper standing in the name of another hon. Member. Unless the Bill was extended, as this Instruction suggested, its benefits would be confined entirely to the class of large tenants, and it would be of no service whatever to the small cottier tenants in the poor districts of the country. What the Instruction proposed was merely that when an estate was being sold the landlord should be empowered to split up the adjoining grass lands and allocate portions of such grass lands to the purchasing tenants. This would enable the tenants who purchased to improve their position, and would thereby not only benefit them, but provide additional security to the State. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had said that the Irish Representatives could go and advise their constituents on this matter. The right hon. Gentleman would be taken at his word and his bona fides would be tested. But if the Bill were enlarged, as suggested, it might be of service to the poor cottier tenants and save them from their present unhappy position.

said, he regretted that the hon. Member who had just sat down had thrown unnecessary bitterness into this question. He wished that hon. Members from Ireland who sat on the Benches opposite should accept from him the assurance that those on his side of the House who came from the North of Ireland desired as heartily and earnestly as did hon. Members opposite the welfare of the peasantry of the South and West of Ireland. There should be no sectional difference on this subject; and, therefore, when so reasonable a proposition as that of the hon. and gallant Member for North Galway was submitted to the House he desired briefly to express his hearty concurrence and his hope that Her Majesty's Government would find themselves able to accept, at any rate, the spirit of the proposal.

said, he desired to express his concurrence with the sentiments of the last speaker. He held there would be no difficulty in inserting a clause giving effect to the proposal. He attributed the distress in the congested districts mainly to the tenants having been deprived, at the time of the famine, of their grass lands, which were let at low rents, as grazing farms, to Scotch contractors.

said, an amount of irrelevant matter had been introduced into the discussion of the simple proposition of the hon. and gallant Member for Galway, which would be perfectly incredible to anyone who had not had experience of this House. He could not urge the Government to accept the Instruction in the present Bill, because it would encumber it in a way which the period of the year and the circumstances of the case would not admit of, but he thought something of the kind might usefully be considered in connection with any larger measure. He thought it would be equally in the interest of all parties concerned. It certainly would facilitate the sale of some estates where the landlord might be willing to dispose of his property, provided he could do so as a whole, but would not do it if he were obliged to leave his estate in a chess-board state, with the grass farms unsold and the tillage farms parted with. He was the occupier of a grass farm himself, and he admitted that he should be willing to buy the lady up who owned it. Therefore, he supported the proposal of the hon. and gallant Member, while he could not recommend its adoption in the present Bill.

said, he would appeal to the House not to prolong the discussion. The question had been discussed in a very friendly and amicable spirit on both sides, and had certainly not been met in a hostile spirit by the Government supporters. There were very serious difficulties in the way of engrafting the proposal on to this Bill, but it was a matter which might very fairly be raised by a separate and distinct proposition, and in a distinct Bill. If the Instruction were not to be withdrawn, he hoped they might be permitted to divide upon it at once.

said, that he would withdraw it if the Government would undertake to legislate upon it next Session.

said, the interest of the subject to Irish Members was shown by the fact that, although the Instruction was moved from below the Gangway on the Opposition side, its principle had received the support of two Irish Members on the Ministerial side. Still, they had before them a good many matters of importance that were more germane to the Bill. Therefore, if they were to have a Division, it might be taken at once; but perhaps the hon. and gallant Member would be content with the assurances of support he had received.

declared that he must regard the speeches of the Solicitor General for Ireland and the First Commissioner of Works as nothing short of a positive insult to the Irish Members, who were not to be put off with flimsy and paltry excuses two years old. He regarded the present question as a test of the good faith of the Government in their proclaimed endeavours to do something for the working poor of Ireland.

, in rising to move, in page 1, line 7, to leave out the word "ten" and insert the words "six and a-half," said, the object of the Amendment was to limit the sum to be used for the continuance of the Ashbourne Act. He did not propose this particular sum because he believed the principle of the Bill to be a good one, or because it was likely to do much good for the pacification of Ireland. He had already discharged his duty by voting, as he should do on all other occasions, against the grant of any further sum for carrying out the provisions of the Land Purchase Act. Having done that, and having been beaten in the Divisions, he thought the opportunity should not be lost of endeavouring to reduce the amount, and his proposal was to vote £1,500,000 instead of £5,000,000. From the figures given by the hon. and learned Gentleman the Solicitor General for Ireland (Mr. Madden), it appeared that 14,338 applications had been made under Lord Ashbourne's Act, of which 8,632 had been closed, leaving 5,706 to be dealt with. If the total appliations—14,338—were complied with, the £5,000,000 already voted would be exceeded, according to the hon. and learned Gentleman, by something like £1,000,000. He thought it was time that they should close the account, and as £1,000,000 was stated by the hon. and learned Solicitor General to be the amount necessary to complete the present applications, he proposed £1,500,000, believing that that sum would cover everything. He wished to fix a limit to the advances of money under the Act. £5,000,000 were granted by the first Act; it was now proposed to vote another £5,000,000, and there was no guarantee that they would not be asked to grant £5,000,000 more from time to time for the purpose of carrying out what many considered to be a wrong principle. He desired to have the account closed for this reason: that the sooner it was closed the sooner would the Irish land scheme, which they were told was in the minds of the Government, be produced. If it existed, the sooner it was produced the better, and if it was a good scheme, then the sooner it was passed the better. At all events, all encouragement to delay its production should be avoided. But he objected to the present Bill on account of its principle, and therefore he wanted to limit the amount of money granted under it. It created a new class of landowners, and the more new landlords there were created in Ireland the more difficult it would be to deal with the Land Question in the future. One of the difficulties of dealing with the Land Question in Ireland arose from the many different titles which had from time to time been created under various Land Acts. By creating these new occupying owners they would be creating a class which would form an additional barrier to the carrying out of radical changes in the land system of Ireland. Therefore, although he was quite willing that small occupying owners should be created, he did not think that public money should be given under that plea partly for the relief of the landlords, and partly for the benefit of a small class of tenants. He thought that whenever public money was voted it should be used for the benefit of the community at large, and not for one or two particular classes, or for the encouragement of a system that would interpose an obstacle to the settlement of the land difficulty in Ireland. He had also another reason. He had no wish to see the Government placed in more direct relations with a larger number of the Irish tenants. It was said that the security was good. He did not think the security was better than that proposed in the Bill introduced by the late Government. Indeed, it did not seem to him to be as good a security as that which was then condemned. At that time many vigorous speeches were delivered, not only in Birmingham, but in other parts of the Kingdom, in which that security was called flimsy and unstable. If it was flimsy and unstable then, it was flimsy and unstable now, and he did not envy the consistency of those men who went blithely into the Lobby to support this grant on flimsy and unstable security, while they indignantly repudiated in 1886 any scheme for taking money from the British taxpayers for the benefit of Irish landowners. Another objection was that the money, as it was proposed to be applied, would not touch those classes which most needed help. Only 2 per cent of the 400,000 tenants in Ireland with holdings under 30 acres, whom they professed their anxiety to relieve from the poverty and hardship of their present life, had been touched by the £5,000,000 already voted. £5,000,000 more would affect but little those portions of the country where the social condition of the people was worst. From the last Report it would appear that 7,711 tenants had been relieved in the Province of Ulster, and only 6,627 in the other three Provinces. It was remarkable that the money to relieve the landlords should have been distributed mostly in that portion of Ireland which supported the Government. It had never been contended that the money was intended to benefit the community at large. It had been used for the benefit of a class which scarcely deserved the largest amount of the sympathy of the Legislature. The Bill had been spoken of as a measure for the pacification of Ireland, but that task must be a very easy one if dealing with some 8,000 farms could effect the pacification of the country. Only 2 per cent of the poorest class of the Irish tenants had been relieved, so that the result had, as regarded the relief of poverty, been exceedingly minute. If the Act of Lord Ashbourne had been really useful in effecting the pacification of Ireland, then the sum of £5,000,000 was much too small, and it ought to be at least £50,000,000. He apprehended that the Government desired to have this £5,000,000 in order to put off the day when they would have to produce a complete land scheme. Those who believed that the scheme of the Government should be produced at the earliest possible day were perfectly justified in limiting the amount of money to be granted. It must have been noticed that as the discussion upon the Bill proceeded the smaller the majorities of the Government became. That ought to teach them a lesson, like the Bill brought on earlier in the year for the payment of a salary to the Under Secretary for Ireland. Another good thing had been brought home by these debates, not only to Members of the House, but to the public outside—namely, that Lord Ashbourne's Act was a scheme which benefited only a small class of persons in Ireland, and that it could not benefit the poorest tenants to any large extent. What he held was that public money ought not to be expended for the advantage of one section of the people of Ireland alone. The labouring classes in England asked for allotments, and were most anxious to have them, but the Allotments Act of last year had proved a sham, and they had been unable to get them. He, for one, objected to a sum of £5,000,000 being voted by Parliament in order to do a piece of work in Ireland that would confer little or no benefit upon the poorest class of the community, while agricultural labourers in England were unable to obtain land, because public money could not be used to help them.

said, the hon. Member had not only raised the question of the amount to be granted, but had again attacked the general principle of the Bill. He thought hon. Members opposite would scarcely expect that the Government should again enter upon the general question, and the speeches of hon. Members on both sides of the House ought to be confined to the actual sum to be voted. The hon. Member had once more raised the somewhat odious point that the friends of the Government were being favoured with regard to the application of the money. Hon. Members must know that the Government had absolutely no control or influence with regard to the orders or dealings of the Land Commission. And here he would make a confident appeal to hon. Members opposite. They had admitted that they had confidence in the Land Commissioners, with the exception of one hon. Member, who always attacked everybody, and who would not admit the honesty of anybody except himself. [Cries of "Name!" An hon. MEMBER: Do not be afraid!] He did not wish to mention any name; but hon. Members opposite who had been in their places throughout the evening would know who had attacked the independence of the Commissioners. During the debate hon. Members admitted that they trusted the Land Purchase Commissioners, because they were willing to put the question of arrears into their hands. When they were challenged as to whether they trusted the Commissioners, by their silence they practically admitted that they did trust them. It was an absolutely false suggestion that influence had in any way been brought to bear on the Land Commissioners to favour the tenants or landlords in any particular part of Ireland, or to favour any particular class of applicants. The Commissioners were bound to listen to and to deal with the applications as they came in, and he felt called upon on behalf of the Land Commission to repudiate the suggestion that they had in any way favoured any class of persons whatever. The hon. Member argued that the sum should be limited, partly because he did not believe that the right persons would receive the money. But if the hon. Member had studied from year to year the applications to purchase, he would see that the applications were, in an increasing degree, coming from the precise districts in which he would desire to see the money distributed; and it was from Kerry and other congested districts that applications had lately been increasing. It was not true that no applications for a fair share of the grant had been made by the poorer districts of Ireland. He wished to impress upon the Committee the fact that Kerry stood third in all Ireland in the order of counties which had made applications for purchase.

In number, or in amount?

In number; 860 loans had been applied for in that county. He thought that was satisfactory, and he did not see why the hon. Member should desire to diminish the significance of the fact. Then, again, in the county of Donegal there had been 706 applications. That also was a poor county. Prom the whole of the Province of Ulster the applications numbered 7,700, but in this number both Monaghan and Donegal were included, and the hon. Member knew very well that both in Monaghan and in Donegal there were a large number of poor tenant purchasers. Therefore it was not true that all the money had hitherto gone to the richer and more thriving districts, but the facts were quite the contrary, and there was an increasing number of applications from the less thriving districts, where it was especially desired by hon. Members to see the number of owners multiplied. He would ask the Committee whether it was desirable to check the new movement in the direction of a peasant proprietary by limiting the number of applicants? The hon. Member knew that there were already a large number of applications, and he wished to limit the number. By that means the Commission would be brought practically to a deadlock, and it was precisely that state of things the Government were anxious to avoid. The hon. Member wished to see a comprehensive Land Bill introduced. He hoped the hon. Member also wished to see it passed, as well as introduced. But did the hon. Member realize that if his suggestion were complied with they would have to propose that Land Bill in the early part of next Session? But the Government had to consider the demands and requirements of England and Scotland, as well as Ireland; and the hon. Member was aware that many important Scotch and English questions demanded the attention of Parliament. The Government, therefore, were not prepared, in the very first month of next Session, again to engage in the discussion of an Irish Land Purchase Bill. They asked the House to give them a sum which would be sufficient to carry them over till the time came—which, he hoped, would be no remote time—when they would be able to submit their plans to the House. It would be entirely breaking down the object they had proposed for themselves to vote a smaller sum to carry them over the interval which must necessarily elapse before a larger measure could be proposed and carried. He asked the Committee to confine themselves to the question as to whether or not they should vote a sum sufficient to bridge over the interval, and not to go through again those principles which had already been discussed at considerable length. The money would be distributed fairly in all parts of Ireland, without favour and without advantage to any applicant. The applications would be taken, as hitherto, in the order of their being presented to the Commission. He trusted that, in the course of time, a large number of applications would be made by those portions of Ireland where they especially desired to see a peasant proprietary established.

said, the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer contended that, as the Amendment merely applied to the amount of money to be raised by the Bill, there was no reason why the Committee should enter into a discussion of the general principles of the measure. He did not propose to detain the Committee with more than a very ow sentences. In considering the Amendment of his hon. Friend (Sir Walter Foster), he thought they ought to look to the time at which that Bill was introduced, and what had happened since. The Bill was laid upon the Table of the House a week or so ago, but since that time there had been a series of debates which had damaged the Bill to a greater extent than any Bill he ever remembered. He would give an illustration of his meaning. One of the most important speeches that had been made was made by an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, an ex-Minister belonging to the Conservative Party—the noble Lord the Member for South Paddington (Lord Randolph Churchill). The noble Lord described the Bill as being altogether financially unsound; and he (Sir George Trevelyan) ventured to say that, in the arguments used by the noble Lord in support of that contention, he was supported by the general feeling of the House. [Cries of "No!"] Certainly the noble Lord was supported by the general feeling of the House, and was supported, also, to a considerable extent, by the feeling of the Treasury Bench; for, if ever he had seen a Ministry glad to catch at a straw, it was when the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer to whom he was referring said he would support the Bill, although he believed it to be financially unsound, as it only asked for £5,000,000 more. He had read carefully the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which followed that of the noble Lord. He could not put his finger upon any sentence in which the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer admitted the Bill to be financially unsound; but the general tone of his speech was a complete acknowledgment of the strength of the arguments of the noble Lord the Member for South Paddington. The noble Lord supported the Bill notwithstanding that he regarded it as financially unsound, but because a sum of £5,000,000 was all that was asked for. Here, then, they had a Bill, the financial soundness of which was attacked by the Opposition side of the House with arguments that were unanswerable and unanswered, the defence of the Government being that they were only going to ask for another £5,000,000. He would ask the Committee to consider what that meant. They had been told in many speeches, and in the eloquent peroration of the eloquent speech of the noble Lord the Member for Rossendale (the Marquess of Hartington), that this was a Bill for pacifying and settling Ireland, and doing away with those difficulties between landlord and tenant in Ireland, which was the real problem they had to solve. That, at any rate, was a fine description of the Bill, and hon. Members who voted for it might think they were doing a great public service. There was no fine description of that kind put forward now; it was altogether withdrawn. There was no pretence of pacifying Ireland or of settling the Irish question by this Bill, and the issue had been narrowed to this—that they were simply asked to vote another £5,000,000 in order that those fortunate great families in Ireland, which happened to be first in the field, should be allowed to go off with the taxpayers' money in their pockets, leaving their obligations and their positions as landlords behind them. He admitted the truth and justice of what the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer had said as to the Government. He should take shame to himself if he were to suggest that the Government were favouring or playing into the hands of these families, but these families were in the market anxious to sell their estates for £200,000 or £300,000; and £5,000,000 of the public money were asked for by which their wish would be gratified. [Cries of "No, no!" Then for what other motive was the money asked? They were now told by the Government itself that the Bill was such that it was a calumny and an injustice to say that it would lead to any more Bills like it in the future. He maintained that the measure was not financially for the advantage of the taxpayer, and that it simply enabled a system of land purchase to be carried out in Ireland for the benefit of the Irish landlords at the expense of the British taxpayer. They were told by the Government, in their defence, that it was not meant to be a great scheme, nor a perfect scheme, nor even a sound scheme, but was only meant to provide £5,000,000 more to keep things going.

said, he presumed that the right hon. Gentleman did not wish to misrepresent. In his first speech he (Mr. Goschen) had said that this proposal was to be limited to £5,000,000. There was no departure from the attitude he had taken up on the matter from the first. He had, in his speech, distinctly stated that the Bill was not intended as a redemption of their pledge that they would bring in a larger measure, but intended only to bridge over the interval until their larger measure could be introduced.

said, he was not speaking of the personal attitude of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but of the way in which the scheme was regarded by the House on the first night, and of the speeches by which it was then defended. The Government were very glad on the first night to have the scheme defended and spoken of as a grand scheme to pacify Ireland. They were now glad to have it defended on the statement that it was not a perfect scheme, but simply a measure to divide £5,000,000 more among the Irish landlords. Now, he absolutely objected, as a Representative of the British taxpayers, to vote £5,000,000 for a scheme which the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer said he did not consider to be a perfect scheme, and which he himself considered very imperfect and exceedingly dangerous. It was not a scheme for the advantage of trustworthy tenants in Ireland who had shown their bona fides by paying a portion of the purchase money, but it was a scheme for clearing the estates of certain landlords who wanted to have them cleared. It had been stated in debate that certain great families were going to receive large sums at the expense of the British taxpayers. He was told that it was a libel to say so. Well, he did not know that it was a libel; he had no means of knowing the facts. He knew nothing about the matter. All he knew was that in June the Government said they would ask the House to vote £5,000,000 sterling with, for aught he knew, a good deal more to follow. Would not a Government which respected the House of Commons have given directions to the Land Commissioners to draw up statistics and facts on that subject to be laid before the Representatives of the taxpayers? He was told that a Blue Book—a Report of the Land Commission —had been made up, not to September, October, or November, but to August last. He had seen it in the hands of hon. Gentlemen opposite. It was a small, compact document, which might have been got up and printed in a week, and considering that it was not only in type, but absolutely bound in blue on Monday morning, it might surely have been placed in the hands of hon. Members, at any rate, on that Friday evening. He was obliged to form his ideas on the question from the answers that were given to Questions and the tags of the rhetoric of hon. Gentlemen opposite. He was not certain that it was a libel to say that a great nobleman connected with the Government was to get a large portion of the money—£200,000 he believed. [An hon. MEMBER: More than that.] He might be uttering a great libel if he repeated an observation which had been made from the Opposition Benches and not been contradicted by the Ministry—namely, that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland himself, the Head Executive Officer of that country, intended or hoped to profit under the Bill. He could only say that he trusted the allegation was a calumny. He could not conceive anything more indelicate or more improper than that the Head Executive Officer in Ireland should occupy such a position, because, although it might be said that he did it entirely in the interests of his tenants, still there were ill-natured people who would say that he did it for himself. He (Sir George Trevelyan) had been opposed to the Conservative Party all his life, but he was prepared to pay it this tribute, that he had always found it a good-natured Party. The Conservative Party evidently believed that if the Lord Lieutenant intended to sell his estates, he did it entirely for the benefit of his tenants. But whatever his object might be, it was something very like a scandal if a great officer connected with the Executive in Ireland got any benefit whatever from a Bill of such an equivocal nature as this one had been described, in the early part of the evening, to be. It must be remembered that in the House itself there was a large body of Members opposed to the Bill who had only been defeated by a majority of 34; and, looking at the great pressure that could be brought to bear upon the tenants under the Bill, he maintained that no high officer in the position of the Lord Lieutenant ought to engage in any operation under the measure. Perhaps he himself might be wrong, and perhaps there were no great and powerful families which had carried away large sums of money under the Act; but still, for all that, they found themselves face to face with the position that the Bill was now defended on the other side of the House by the suggestion that this sum of £5,000,000 was the last £5,000,000 that would be asked for. It was a scheme which he defied any man, standing on the platform of a public meeting of his countrymen, to defend; and, under the circumstances, seeing that the Amendment of his hon. Friend exactly met the merits of the case, he should support the Amendment to substitute £1,500,000 for £5,000,000. That sum would just satisfy those tenants and those landlords who had carried through their arrangements up to the point of being something like a contract, and would also enable Parliament to discharge its obligations to the Treasury and to the taxpayer.

said, he would net detain the Committee long by replying to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman (Sir George Trevelyan), which he had heard with as much disappointment and regret as any he had ever listened to in that House. Of course he should not have much to do in replying to it, because not one word of the declaration of the right hon. Gentleman had any bearing upon the Amendment now before the Committee. [Cries of "Oh!"] Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would tell him what part of it he ought to reply to. He (Mr. Plunket) would repeat that he had listened to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman with very great regret, because the right hon. Gentleman had adopted a style of appeal which was seldom heard in that House, or in any other Assembly, no matter how commonplace might be the character of the demagogic appeals made to it. The style of argument used by the right hon. Gentleman was such as that they were familiar with in the pages of a book called The Financial Almanac. Every one of the insinuations and suggestions which the right hon. Gentleman had thrown out was not a direct charge, but was calculated to create suspicion, to inflame passion, and to array class against class. And who was the right hon. Gentleman who had attempted to set class against class? He, who now sought to draw a distinction between £5,000,000 and £1,500,000, was himself the Minister who had introduced a Bill to expend £20,000,000 for the same purpose.

On Irish credit.

On Irish credit! That was the only defence or excuse. Whether it was upon Irish credit or English credit, the money was to be advanced; and what difference did it make if the great shame was to be committed of these great families putting the money or the plunder into their own pockets? Supposing such a charge were true; what provision was there in the Bill of the right hon. Gentleman to prevent this from occurring? None whatever. He (Mr Plunket) said then that it was a total misrepresentation of the facts. It might be that the right hon. Gentleman had some other object than to inflame the minds of the public by representing that the great families were marching off with the public money. Was there anything which forbade the landlords, great or small, from coming in and benefiting by this Bill as well as their tenants? Where was the shame, and what was the scandal? The main policy of the Bill was the policy of the Bill introduced by the right hon. Gentleman. What did it matter who got the money—whether it was one landlord or another—so long as the benefit was produced and the occupying tenant converted into the owner? The right hon. Gentleman said that he did not directly charge the Government with playing into the hands of their friends. Did he not know that the Government could not play into their hands? Did he not know that the Government had nothing whatever to do with the distribution of these monies? He asked Englishmen, to whatever class they belonged, whether that was a fair method of attack? He asked the right hon. Gentleman not to say, "I will not give names," but, instead of throwing out insinuations, to make his charges in an open and straightforward manner. Passing away from the subject, which was distasteful and odious to him, he would ask the Committee seriously to consider what was the real question before them. The Government asked for £5,000,000, and it was proposed by the Amendment to grant only £1,500,000. Why did they ask for £5,000,000 and not for £1,500,000? The right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer said the Government desired the Bill because they did not want the machinery of the Ashbourne Act, which had effected so much good and operated with such satisfaction, to fall to the ground. They were of opinion that the machinery should continue to be carried on; and in order to make sure that there should be no failure he said that £5,000,000 was a fair sum to ask for. How did the case stand? He believed that for the last two years the money voted by Parliament had been spent at the rate of £2,250,000 a-year. It had been spent at an increasingly larger rate; and was it not natural that as the benefits of the Act became appreciated, all classes of tenants—the poorest as well as the larger and more thriving—should desire to come in? As time went on the smaller had, in proportionally larger numbers, been coming in, and as far as any distinction was to be drawn between the last £5,000,000 and the present £5,000,000, the benefit would be more and more in the direction of the smaller tenants. Could they get anyone from Ireland to deny that, up to the present moment, the effect of these transactions had been not only beneficial to the landlords, but to the tenants? He could not deny that it might be possible to put their finger upon one case as an instance in which the working of the Act had not been wholly satisfactory, but in the mass of cases there could be no doubt that it had had a beneficial effect. Hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway, with all their industry, ability, and zeal, had not—if they would forgive him for saying so—their heart in opposition to the Bill. They knew that there was a strong feeling in Ireland in favour of giving the experiment, successful as far as it had gone, a further fair trial. It was only an experiment on comparatively a small scale. It was the beginning of a policy which, with whatever qualification they might make in it in the future, all parties, from whatever part of Ireland they might come, regarded as sound. It was acknowledged that the scheme was popular in all parts of Ireland, and the Government asked the Committee to give them this additional £5,000,000—which was not in itself a large sum—with every prospect of developing the resources of the country at but slight risk to the State. The system had been successful, and they asked that it might not be interrupted, popular as it was with every class in Ireland. So far as not only the immediate but ultimate effects were concerned, speaking with some knowledge of the country, he declared that nothing but unmixed good would result.

said, the right hon. Gentleman the First Commissioner of Works, who commenced his speech by an attack upon his right hon. Friend the Member for the Bridge-ton Division (Sir George Trevelyan), had stated that he believed his right hon. Friend was the author of a Bill which practically would have treated £20,000,000 in the same way as the present Bill treated £5,000,000.

I said for the purpose of his argument.

said, he could not blame the right hon. Gentleman for not remembering all the proposals of that Bill, but there was one proposal which he appeared entirely to have forgotten—that not a single sixpence, under the Bill of his right hon. Friend, could be advanced until after the Representative of the county, elected by popular election, had decided that it should be advanced. The Bill enabled advances for the full amount of the purchase-money to be made to the tenants after the plan of advancing three-fourths under the Act of 1881 had failed. But the repayment had to be guaranteed by the county; and not only so, but that previous assent was necessary before any advance was made. Thus, if an advance were proposed to be made to purchase an estate in Tipperary, it was necessary, under the Bill of his right hon. Friend, that a Body popularly elected by the occupiers and owners of Tipperary should approve that particular advance; and without that approval it could not be made. That was a totally different manner from the proposal of the present Bill, where there was no popular representation whatever, where the county was not responsible for the advance, and had no voice in its sanction. He believed the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who appeared to doubt his accuracy, would find that he was right in both those respects. He had not, however, risen merely for the purpose of putting that matter right, but to call attention to another point. The Government were aware in June or July that this proposal was to be brought forward. He wanted to know why they did not then instruct the Land Commissioners to cause to be prepared, before the House met in November, a complete Paper, to be laid before the House, showing the operation of Lord Ashbourne's Act, with detailed accounts of the purchases and advances, giving the names of the sellers and the acreage of the farms? There was nothing to prevent them from making such a Return. The Act had now been in operation for three or three-and-a-quarter years; and he understood from the right hon. Gentleman who had just spoken (Mr. Plunket) that this year £2,000,000 had been advanced, or arranged to be advanced. That being so, there could have been no difficulty in getting the Commissioners to prepare a Return of the operations from August, 1885, to the month of August in the present year, showing the way in which the money had been expended. There had been no Return of the kind. The Government now sought to extend the operations under Lord Ashbourne's Act by granting another £5,000,000 without producing a page of any Return to show the manner in which the first sum of £5,000,000 had been expended. He recollected when there was a proposal in 1860 to expend a sum of £8,000,000 upon fortifications, before a Bill was introduced into Parliament, the utmost details were given to the House, and those details were followed by the Bill. Parliament had a full opportunity to discuss the Return before the money was voted. Full information was similarly given as to the advance for localization purposes, which amounted to several millions. He should like to know why that precedent had not been followed now? It was the duty of the Government to give the whole body of information officially to the House, not to distribute one or two copies of a Return to this or that Member—a Return which, he might say, as he had seen it, was most imperfect and delusive. If it had been so given to them they would have been in a position to discuss the Vote. As it was, certain statistics had been given, but they did not possess anything like a complete body of information on any point connected with the advances that could be said to be within the grasp of any hon. Member. They were told that many thousands of tenants had applied for advances, and that so many thousands of persons had been agreed with in respect of their applications, and certain sums of money advanced. He had not the smallest wish to obstruct the Bill; but he did say, by all the analogy of Parliamentary practice, that that information ought to be given to the Committee before they were asked to do what, in the opinion of the hon. Member for the Southport Division of Lancashire (Mr. Curzon), was carrying out an operation to do justice to persons who had not yet applied for advances, and who, the hon. Member said, would be defrauded if the same facilities were not given to them which had been given to other landlords and tenants in regard to the first £5,000,000.