To ask the; Secretary of State for War whether he is aware that the maps now issued for manoeuvre purposes by the War Office of War Department land on Salisbury Plain do not show the railways from Stert to Westbury opened two years ago, or from Amesbury to the South Western main line; and whether he will have these maps brought up to date. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick..) The hon. Member is evidently labouring under a misapprehension. The half-inch to a mile manoeuvre map of the Salisbury Plain district shows both the railways mentioned.

To ask the Secretary of State for War whether the cadets at Sandhurst are in future to be sent into a training camp, similar to that recently adopted for the Woolwich cadets. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) I am not prepared to give any decision on this matter at present until we have the experience of the encampment of the Woolwich cadets.

To ask the Secretary of State for India whether he is aware that several of the leading shipowners in Liverpool, and others who are engaged in the shipping trade with Calcutta, state that owing to the mudbanks in the river they will be unable to maintain the trade with Calcutta unless the river is dredged; and will he consider the expediency of representing to the Calcutta Port Commissioners the necessity for dredging operations between Calcutta and Saugor. (Answered by Secretary Lord George Hamilton.) I am not aware of the statements quoted in the Question; but I am aware that last year, when the Committee inquired into the working of the Calcutta Port Trust, it was stated in evidence before them that the removal of the bars by dredging the river would cost a crore of rupees, and that no case existed for such an outlay, which, if incurred, would greatly increase the already heavy charges of the port.

To ask the Secretary of State for India whether he is aware that the carriages of the Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway are still unprovided with artificial light, with the result that passengers have to travel through the jungle in darkness for hours; and, will he, in the circumstances, consider the expediency of making representations on the subject to the controlling authority in India. (Answered by Secretary Lard George Hamilton.) The hon. Member has already been informed, in reply to his Question of the 27th May, that the matter is one as to which any complaints should be -addressed to the local authorities.

To ask the Secretary of State for India whether he has yet received from the Government of India a report in regard to the statement that the Khairpur State's rupee coinage is no longer to be accepted by the Treasury in payment of either land rent, fines, taxes, stamps, or otherwise; and, seeing that this refusal has caused a depreciation of six annas per rupee, will he state whether the Government of India have taken, or propose to take, any action with a view to relieve the people of Khairpur of this loss. (Answered by Secretary Lord George Hamilton.) I understand that a scheme for the conversion of the local currency of Khairpur is being matured, and that, pending its introduction, the Mir has, on the advice of the Government of India, cancelled his previous orders, and is now willing to receive Chalan rupees for State dues. Until the details of the scheme are before me, I cannot say what loss or depreciation has occurred.

To ask the Secretary of State for India whether any arrangements have yet been made for the punctual attendance of the medical officer for the examination of passengers leaving Calcutta by morning sailings of outward bound steamers; and can he state whether the shed in which passengers are examined has yet been put in a state of repair, and the practice of medical examination in a public thoroughfare discontinued. (Answered by Secretary Lord George Hamilton.) I have no information about these matters. They are such as are dealt with by the local authorities with-out being reported to the Secretary of State. Any complaints on the subject should be addressed to these authorities.

To ask the Secretary of State for Ind a whether, having regard to the services rendered in Mekran and on the Perso-Baluch frontier by the mixed force of troops under Major Tighe, who acted as escort to Major Showers, the political agent, from January to April, 1902, and did some fighting, particularly at the capture of Nodiz Fort, regard will: be had in the rewards to be distributed to the claim of the native troops in the expedition to have the frontier medal awarded them, as has been done for the men engaged in the Mahsud blockade; and whether the Indian Government will at the same time reconsider their decision as to the grant of the medal to the troops engaged in Mekran in 1898. (Answered by Secretary Lord George Hamilton.) The question of the grant of a medal for the operations in Mekran in 1898 has been very carefully considered on two separate occasions, and decided in the negative. I do not see any grounds for re-opening the question. No recommendation has yet been forwarded for my consideration by the Government of India regarding the grant of a medal for the operations in Mekran and on the, Perso-Baluch frontier from January to April, 1902.

To ask the Lord Advocate whether the Congested Districts Board have yet decided on a site for another light on the coast of the Island of Lewis, in place of the light sanctioned for Tong; and. if not, will he state the cause of the delay. (Answered by Mr. Graham Murray.) No decision has yet been reached, no application having so far been made to the Board from any other locality.

To ask the Lord Advocate if he will state what progress has been made in the construction of the roads between Cromore and Gravir, Island of Lewis, for which the Congested Districts Board made a grant of £2,700 in June of last year. (Answered by Mr. Graham Murray.) I understand that no progress in the construction of these roads has yet been made by the County Road Board.

To ask the Lord Advocate whether he is aware that the application made under The Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act, 1899, in April last for an Order, under the title of the Highland and Invergarry and Fort Augustus Railway Companies Provisional Order, is, under The Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act, 1899, proposed to be proceeded with as a private Bill, and that, owing to want of time, it is not possible to proceed with the Bill this session; and whether, in these circumstances, he will arrange that such amendments shall be made in the Standing Orders-as will provide that the proceedings taken hitherto under The Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act, 1899, and the Standing Orders this session shall be available for the prosecution of such Bill if introduced into-Parliament next session. (Answered by Mr. Graham Murray.) I understand that the necessary amendments in Standing Orders will be moved in due course.

To ask the President of the Board of Agriculture if he still hopes to introduce the Bill dealing with sheep-worrying, before the end of the session. (Answered by Mr. Hanbury.)Yes.

To ask the Secretary to the Treasury, if, in consideration of the amount of overtime duty performed in connection with the increase of work occasioned by the imposition of new revenue duties and the preparation of the Annual Statement of Trade, and in view of the fact that the assistant clerks in the majority of Government offices receive more than fourteen days annual leave, he will consider the possibility of granting an increase of annual leave given to the assistant clerks in the Customs Statistical Office. (Answered by Mr. Austen Chamberlain) I think that this Question is based on some misapprehension of the facts. The new revenue duties imposed this year have not involved any additional overtime attendance, though extra attendance has been given by the staff, as usual, for the preparation of the periodical Trade Returns, and is paid for at the customary rates. As regards the general question of the annual leave of assistant clerks, this has been fixed at a maximum of fourteen working days, exclusive of Bank Holidays and the King's Birthday, for the Treasury and subordinate Departments. There is no general Order in Council regulating their leave, but, in the opinion of the Treasury, it would be highly desirable that other Departments, of Government should adopt this scale.

To ask the Secretary to the Treasury whether his attention has been called to the case of William Heylin, a Senior Assistant Clerk in the Board of Education (Whitehall), who committed suicide; and whether he can state what was his salary after twenty-five years service. (Answered by Mr. Austen, Chamberlain.) The Treasury have no information regarding this case. Any inquiries relating to it should be addressed to the Board of Education.

To ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if his attention has been called to the arrest and imprisonment, of two English ladies in Switzerland; if he has caused inquiry to be made into the circumstances; and if he will seek from the Swiss Government compensation to the ladies for the treatment they have suffered. (Answered by Viscount Cranborne.) The attention of His Majesty's Government has already been drawn to this case, and the Consul at Lausanne has been desired to furnish a full report. Only a brief statement of the facts has as yet been received, from which it would appear that the two English ladies met with very arbitrary treatment. It is desirable to await the fuller report called for before bringing the matter officially to the notice of the Swiss Government.

To ask the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education whether he will state the number of boys and the number of girls educated in public elementary schools, and will he state why these figures, which appeared in Table 8 of the Statistics of Public Elementary Schools published in previous years, have been omitted from the new volume of statistics [Cd. 1139] recently published. (Answered by Sir John Gorst.) The number of boys in actual average attendance amounted, according to the last Returns, to 2,430,570, and that of girls to 2,305,013. The Table to which the hon. Member refers gave the number of boys and girls in the different standards. It could not be continued in the volume recently published, as the classification by standards had ceased during the year to which these statistics relate.

To ask the Secretary to the Admiralty if he can inform the House whether the French Government have a Naval station called Mers - el - Kebir, situated near Gibraltar; if so, will he state its exact locality and the distance from Gibraltar, whether it is fortified, a torpedo base, or only a signal station. (Answered by Mr. Arnold-Forster.) Mers-el-Kebir is an auxiliary to the French Naval Station of Oran, and there is at present a small torpedo boat station there. It lies about 6,000 yards N.W. by W. of Oran, and 228 miles from Gibraltar. It is fortified.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether, in the event of the. Licensing Bill becoming law before the adjournment of Parliament, it is intended that brewester sessions should beheld during the autumn as usual, or whether they are to be held in February, as provided for in the Bill. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Ritchie.) It is provided in Clause 13 of the Bill, which postpones brewster sessions till next February, that that enactment shall come into operation on the passing of the Act. I do not doubt that the Bill will become law in time to save the necessity of holding the sessions this autumn.

To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he will state the number of persons prosecuted in Ireland under the provisions of the Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act during the twelve months ending 1st July. (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) The number of persons proceeded against under the Act in the period mentioned was 134.

To ask the Secretary of State for War whether he is aware that John Naughton, of Athlone, was accepted for enlistment in the 8th Hussars early this year; and whether, seeing that the Colonel of the regiment has been supplied with a certificate showing that Naughton is still under eighteen years of age, he will order this man's discharge. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Bordrick.) This matter rests with the general officer commanding, to whom the hon. Member should address any communications he may like to make.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether he has any information to the effect that Dr. Leyds is returning to South Africa in the ss. "Bavarian"; and whether steps will be taken to prevent persons, other than Afrikanders by birth, who have taken an active part, by military service or in any other way, against Great Britain during the recent war from entering British possessions in South Africa. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Chamberlain.) (1) Dr. Leyds has not returned to South Africa on the "Bavarian." (2) Such persons are not being allowed to return.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether his attention has been called to the position of the Civil Servants of the late South African Republics, some of whom held office for years prior to the outbreak of the war, and were eligible for pensions under the laws of the Republics; and whether the cases of such Civil Servants will be considered by the Government at Home, or by the Governments of the new Colonies, with a view of continuing to these persons under the new régime. their rights to service or pension as under the laws of the late Republics. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Chamberlain.) The rights to service or pension of servants of the late Governments cannot be recognised. A certain number have, however, been re-employed and some pensions have been granted. Each case will be dealt with on its merits.

To ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether it is proposed to declare 9th August a Bank Holiday.

To ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether he can say if Saturday, 9th August, will be declared a Bank Holiday. (Answered by Mr. A. J. Balfour.) The result of such inquiries as the Government have been able to make into this matter tends to show that the balance of public opinion is in the direction of turning the customary half-holiday of Saturday into a Bank Holiday on the occasion of the Coronation.

I desire, Sir, to move the reduction of the salary of the Chief Secretary, which stands in my name on the Notice Paper, and to found upon this Motion a condemnation of the entire system of Irish administration carried on by the right hon. Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman has now been about two years in Dublin Castle, and I think no Englishman ever came over to govern Ireland on behalf of this Parliament under more favourable circumstances and with larger opportunities. First of all, he found Ireland in a state of profound peace. By his statements made in this House, agrarian crime was lower than at any period in the past history of Ireland of which we have a record, and so far as ordinary crime is concerned— also on his own admission—it had almost disappeared from the country. By comparison with any part of the so-called United Kingdom, or any other country in Europe, Ireland was in a state of absolute crimelessness; the seasons had been fairly good, and he himself had certain affiliations which disposed certain people to look on his administration with some degree of sympathy, and to expect from him some measure of sympathy with Irish aspirations. He represented a Government of enormous and unparalleled power—as many of us wore aware he was possessed of considerable knowledge of Ireland, and, as everybody knew, he was a man of great ability. Now, he has had a fair trial; he has had two years experience in his effort to govern Ireland; therefore ample time has elapsed to enable any man to form a fair estimate of his success. Adequate time has been allowed for any man to answer this question impartially: What has the right hon. Gentleman done? What has he tried to do for the benefit of the Irish people, to govern whom he was sent to our country? What has he done? What has he tried to do to conciliate Ireland to the Empire, in whose interest he was sent to govern the Irish people? If such a man, under conditions such as these, has absolutely failed in his efforts to govern Ireland, has done absolutely nothing for Ireland, absolutely nothing for the Empire, and if the Irish problem today is more pressing and more perplexing to English statesmanship, and more dangerous to the Empire, than it has been in the immediate past, surely thoughtful men must be inclined to admit our plea when we say that the government of Ireland by England, even when carried on through the medium of the ablest Englishman, and under the most favourable conditions, is an absolute impossibility. Now, Sir, I say that of all Irish administrations of which I, at any rate, have had any knowledge for the last quarter of a century in Ireland, that of the right hon. Gentleman has been the most colossal failure. So far from benefiting Ireland, it has injured Ireland; so far from conciliating Ireland to the Empire, it has exasperated and embittered the relations between the two countries. When the right hon. Gentleman went to Dublin Castle he found Ireland in a state of profound peace. Although—thank God!—he has not succeeded in bringing about a recrudescence of crime in the country, still he has to face a country profoundly stirred and seething with disappointment, discontent, and the spirit of revolt. Sir, when he went to Dublin. Castle he found the ordinary law in operation. That ordinary law had been in operation in Ireland for eight years, and under its operation peace had spread through the country and crime had disappeared. After two years of the rule of the right hon. Gentleman, the ordinary law, which exists in every part of the United Kingdom, is suspended in Ireland; over a large area of the country the constitution is abrogated, trial by jury is abolished, and tribunals—corrupt, servile, and degraded — consisting of the paid I servants of the right hon. Gentleman himself, and removable from office at the right hon. Gentleman's pleasure, are sent up and down through the country to convict all the local leaders of the people on vague and meaningless charges of conspiracy and unlawful assembly. And, at the time when this kind of thing is going on on the one hand, the right hon. Gentleman's paid and trusted police officials, who have been detected in the horrible crime of sending innocent men to penal servitude for brutal offences committed by themselves, have been some of them allowed to escape from justice altogether, and others of them have been actually rewarded by what the right hon. Gentleman the other day in this place called compassionate allowances, and others of them still at this moment are retained in the police force and in the pay of the Crown. When the right hon. Gentleman came to Ireland two years ago, the people were full of a vague hope of some remedial legislation especially dealing with the land question. The right hon. Gentleman himself is directly responsible for that feeling, because he has over and over again declared in this House, and outside of this House, that land legislation for Ireland was an immediate necessity. Today he tells the Irish people that such legislation is impossible unless, forsooth, tin Irish members of this House abrogate their functions and are willing to accept as uncontroversial, and allowed to pass practically without discussion, the halting and inconclusive Land Bill which he, has placed on the Table of the House. One word as to this last point before I go to the others. What has been the record of the right hon. Gentleman with reference to this land question? No Nationalist, no land reformer in Ireland, ever made a stronger case for immediate and sweeping legislation on this land question than the right hon. Gentleman did in his speech recently in this House. He repeatedly stated that a Land Bill, which would effectually remedy the evils of the present defective system, was an immediate necessity, and in introducing the Land Bill before Parliament he made an overwhelming case, a case which he did not present to us but to some of his impatient followers, who apparently were reluctant that even an hour should be given to this question for the complete and immediate remedy of the evils of the land system. He spoke of the complete breakdown of the rent-fixing portion of the present system; he pointed out how, in order to keep the country in a perpetual lawsuit, that they were paying £140,000 a year to the Land Commission, and £1,350,000 a year for a police force which, he admitted, was necessitated by the existence of the present land system, and he said—

"In spite of these precautions, and notwithstanding the passage of forty Land Acts, no one can reasonably be expected to be satisfied with the present state and the future prospects of agriculture in Ireland. We cannot leave it alone."

He spoke of the delay of justice in this case as being a denial of justice, and he said further—

"If we look to the rent fixing, we find the number of appeals becomimg yearly greater than the number disposed of in any one year and if we look to the state-aided purchases we see them shrinking before our eyes."

Therefore, he made out a complete case for a radical remedy being applied to the present system of land tenure. But what steps of a genuine nature has he taken at all to endeavour to obtain adequate time, even for the consideration of this question? None whatever. He has dangled before the eyes of the Irish people a phantom Land Bill, which he knew perfectly well he could not obtain adequate time for the discussion of. The introduction of that Land Bill was a sham. I stated repeatedly before he introduced it that he knew it would be impossible to obtain time in this overburdened Imperial Parliament, which insists not only on governing the portions of the United Kingdom, but on governing the Empire, that he would find it impossible to obtain adequate time for its discussion, and he then came forward and made the extraordinary and unparalleled suggestion that this Bill— having dropped out a couple of Clauses when he found feeling in Ulster was very strong against him, a couple of Clauses which, I may remind the House, he declared when he introduced the Bill were a vital portion of the Bill, and which we-would have to swallow or get none—he then said that, forsooth, this Bill, should be sent upstairs to a Committee as a non-controversial measure. Now, I stated outside the House, and I repeat it here, that in my opinion a more impudent and cynical suggestion was never made. Non-controversial! Everybody who has looked at this Land Bill knows that it is in the main a landlord's Bill, that at the best it will be a miserable makeshift, and what I have to say to the right hon. Gentleman in reference to his Bill is this—he may keep his Bill. In the contest which is going on, and is rapidly coming to a head between the tenants and the landlords in Ireland, the tenants can afford to wait better than the landlord, and we have evidence of that in the frantic appeals which are being made by the landlords for the passage of this Bill. It is quite clear the right hon. Gentleman has yet to learn a lesson from the tenantry of Ireland. Up to the present, during his two years tenure of office, he has treated the Irish National movement with ill-disguised contempt, and he has treated the scheme of compulsory practice with derision. I venture respectfully to make a prophecy here, that before this day next year his contempt for the National movement, for its strength and overwhelming power, will not be quite so great, and that his respect for the principle of compulsory purchase will be very much more than it is today. Meanwhile, we can afford to allow the proceedings of the Government and the right hon. Gentleman on this Land Bill to stand as the latest and the strongest argument for Home Rule—an example of a vital grievance affecting the lives and fortunes of a whole nation— and of a Government with a majority of 150 yet unable to deal with it. Let me for a moment turn to the administration of the Coercion Act by the right hon. Gentleman. I will not here repeat the arguments which I used the last time we discussed this matter, and when, I think, I was certainly able to make a strong case against the right hon. Gentleman, that without any provocation he had revived the provisions of this odious Act. I will not go into the question of whether he was justified in proclaiming these counties or not. I ask the House to consider how he has administered the Act. How many has he prosecuted? Mr. Lowther, I am quite sure that the House is in absolute ignorance of the fact that since January —I have not the full figures before me— the right hon. Gentleman has imprisoned, has succeeded in convicting and imprisoning, between fifty and sixty men. If anybody who knows Ireland will take the list of these men, he will see that they are the local and trusted leaders of the people in every part of the country. Sir, these men have been imprisoned on charges of conspiracy and charges of unlawful assembly, charges which, of course, could not be proved against any man in this country, unless the prosecution was prepared to abide by the arbitrament of a freely chosen jury. These men have been convicted by magistrates whom I rightly described a moment ago as paid servants of the prosecutor, the paid servants of the right hon. Gentleman, and removable at a moment's notice, without any reason given, from their office. If nothing else has come out of the proceedings of the Committee over which the Prime Minister presides, which is dealing with the case of my hon. friend the Member for North Leitrim, at any rate, this good has come from it, that it has shown in the most glaring colours how this system has worked. Sir, the system of the tribunals is ludicrous. What happens? The right hon. Gentleman makes up his mind to prosecute some man for a speech which does not fit in with his views of how public controversy should be carried on, and he tells his Under Secretary, Sir David Harrell, to institute a prosecution, and Sir David Harrell sends a note to his son who is one of these removable magistrates, and he tells his son to go down and give an impartial trial to the prisoner. With that amazing stupidity which characterises so many acts at Dublin Castle, there was produced before the Committee—why in Heaven, no one knows—a paper containing the letter written by Sir David Harrell to his son, telling him to go. Could anything be more ridiculous My hon. friend the Member for North Leitrim did the proper thing when he appeared before that tribunal. I speak not of the precise words he used, but he was perfectly right in pouring contempt and ridicule on it; and I say that no man with any self-respect ought to plead before these tribunals. These tribunals are not Courts of Justice. Here we have a Government official on a Treasury Bench ordering a prosecution; his Under Secretary sends his own son down to try the prisoner, and that son is removable at the pleasure of the Chief Secretary without any reason given. These are not Courts of Justice, and I hope the Irish people will pour upon them absolute contempt with regard to any sentences that may be inflicted upon such prisoners, and regard them as an honour and not as a stigma; and if they do the right hon. Gentleman will find this last weapon in the Unionist armoury break in his hands. These are the proceedings of the right hon. Gentleman towards the tenants' combination. But the tenants' is not the only combination in Ireland. Within the last two or three days there have been published some very remarkable documents in the Irish papers. The Unionist landlords cannot even trust their own officials, because the more private and confidential a document, and the more it is marked private and confidential, the more certainly it finds its way into our hands. Two private and confidential documents were published the other day from the landlords, and I do not intend to dwell at any length upon these documents, but I want to make one or two points. The first document is dated 7th April this year. I ask the House to note the date for a moment. It is a document to form a combination of landlords to be called the Land Trust, 1902, which calls for subscriptions of £100,000, in order to crush United Irish League and to provide a fund for such actions as those instituted by Lord De Freyne against myself and others. This document bears the signatures of Mr. Smith Barry and Lord Clonbrock. Mr. Smith Barry, according to the document, has subscribed £1,000, and Lord Clonbrock a largo sum also. These gentlemen, on the 7th April, issued a declaration of war against the tenants, combination, and on the 14th of April, one week afterwards, the same two men— Mr. Smith Barry and Lord Clonbrock—as Privy Councillors, signed the proclamation from Dublin Castle proclaiming Ireland under the Coercion Act. That is to say, the tenants have got a combination to endeavour to get their rights; they meet with persecution at the hands of these degraded and servile tribunals of the right hon. Gentleman in Ireland; they are harried and persecuted; their meetings are broken up; their leaders put in prison. The landlords form a combination, and within a week the two leaders of this landlords' combination are allowed in the name of the Government to issue a proclamation for suspending the ordinary law in Ireland and putting the Coercion Act into force. A greater scandal was never known. What is to be said for the unfortunate and well-disposed Unionist in this House, or out of it, who desires to conciliate the Irish people to government by this country? What can he do except hang his head for shame and close his mouth? How can any man justify such a system of Government? For my part, I am not afraid of the landlords' combination; one of these precious documents published the other day asked the shareholders of the Land Corporation, the latest of these combinations, to allow their interests to be merged in the new concern, and went on to point out that their interest in the shares in the old company amounted to a few pence. These combinations are not paying or successful concerns. We have nothing to fear from them. I don't make any appeal or claim, because I know it will be useless, but I do make a protest that where there is a great trade contest going on between the tillers of the soil and the owners of the soil that it is a monstrous thing that the Government should throw in its weight on the landlords' side, and allow the leaders of the landlords' combination to wag the Government as they like, and allow Mr. Smith Barry and Lord Clonbrock to go into the Irish Office and force the Government to issue a proclamation suspending the ordinary law. While these methods are being pursued against the people's combinations, against the people in their legal and lawful and constitutional rights of public meeting and of open combination, what, I ask, is the conduct of the right hon. Gentleman with reference to his own trusted police officials when these men are detected in brutal, inhuman, and disgusting crime? The exposure in the Sheridan case is like a ray of light thrown upon a dark mass of corruption and villainy. If the right hon. Gentleman, when he made that brief and jaunty reply to the hon. Member for East Mayo, imagined that that was the end of the Sheridan case, he was greatly mistaken. This Sheridan case has got to be represented in and outside this House until some inkling of the facts penetrates into the minds of the people of this country. This man Sheridan was a policeman in Ireland, and for services rendered he was again and again rewarded, until finally he was promoted to be sergeant. He was transferred from time to time from one part of Ireland to another, and everywhere he went he was noted for his clever detection of brutal offences:, especially the offence of the most brutal character, consisting of the mutilation of dumb animals. Wherever he went he was able to exercise his extraordinary talent. In districts where there were no such offences known before, shortly after he appeared on the scene they began to spring up, and he was always able to put his hand on the criminal. For this he was rewarded again and again, until he came to be regarded as a pillar of law and order and of the Unionist Government. He came also to be regarded so highly in the force that the younger members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were, as the Chief Secretary has told the House, "dazzled" by his abilities. Suddenly, a trumped-up charge of a more or less trivial character—that of having posted up a threatening notice — which was brought against a poor tramp of the name of Ryan, was so unskilfully done —apparently a long course of impunity had induced him to act with less than his usual caution—that the prosecution had to dismiss the charge against Ryan, and were obliged to institute some sort of inquiry against Sheridan: and as the result of that inquiry Sheridan was dismissed. Now, the last time this subject was under discussion, the Attorney General, who muddled up the whole case in his reply, seemed to imagine that our case against the Government was that they did not prosecute Sheridan for the trumped-up charge against Ryan. Nothing of the kind. I think myself that they ought to have done that; but that was a comparatively trivial matter, and possibly the right hon. Gentleman exercised the best discretion he could. But that is not our real charge against the Government. I ask the Committee, to understand that I am basing every statement I now make on the declarations of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary in this House, and standing at that box. After Sheridan had been dismissed, and after, I believe, in fact, I know, Sheridan was still in the country, a gentleman called Irwin, who, I think, was a district or county inspector—at any rate, an official of the poice—sent to the Chief Secretary a report which the right hon. Gentleman told us was to the effect that suspicion was thrown upon the conviction of certain men for certain brutal offences in Ireland, in the trial of which the chief evidence was that of Sergeant Sheridan. These offences were arson and the mutilation of cattle. I want to know more precisely than has yet been given to us what was in that report of Irwin. It may be said that such reports are confidential, but in a case like Sheridan's, where infamous criminals were protected and rewarded, no such plea as official secrecy should prevail, and I call, therefore, for the production of Irwin's report,. I want to see the date of that report and what is in it. I contend that the-moment that that report was received, by the Chief Secretary, Sheridan ought to have been arrested. What happened in this country only the day before yesterday? There was the case of a police sergeant who made a charge against a man of loitering with intent to commit a felony. The case was dismissed and the policeman was at once arrested and put on his trial. As a matter of fact, the evidence against the policeman broke down. I say that if this had been a. case of an ordinary policeman in England in which the authorities received such a report as had been sent to the Chief Secretary about Sheridan, that policeman would have been instantly arrested and the Government would have done their best to get a conviction. Sheridan was not arrested, but a private-inquiry was instituted about his conduct. At that inquiry three accomplices— three accessories before or after the fact—three other policemen, accomplices in some degree of Sheridan, were examined. The Chief Secretary told us that the-Government were unable to get the truth from these three accomplices except on the condition of giving them an indemnity, of giving them a promise that they would be protected. And the Chief Secretary exclaimed, "Am I to break my word that no injury would be done to them?" At the private inquiry, and by the help of these three accomplices, it was established that Sheridan, in his capacity as a police officer, had been concerned in crimes of mutilation of cattle and setting fire to property, in order to win prestige and reward, by-hounding innocent men to gaol on perjured evidence. No one knows, or can know, how many cases of that kind have occurred. For years this man was engaged in detecting the perpetrators of these crimes, and no man living can tell how many innocent men may have been sent to the grave, to madness, and to ruin by the action; of this policeman. But we do know that the inquiry established the fact that that was what happened in the case of four men. Beyond that we know nothing. What occurred in the case of these four men? One of them died immediately after he left prison; and it is out of the power of any human being to give any compensation to him, or to give any real compensation to any of his poor family. He died with the stigma of crime still upon him. Another of these wretched, poor men actually pleaded guilty to the charge laid against him. The Chief Secretary told us the other night that the man who pleaded guilty was innocent. Can Englishmen realise the state of the administration of the law in a country where such a thing can happen? Here is a poor innocent peasant boy, suddenly accused of the most heinous crime any human being can conceive of. He protests his innocence to his legal advisers, who say to him, "Whether innocent or not, in God's name, plead guilty." And why? Because the tribunal that was to try him had been packed by the Attorney General, and because he knew, and his legal advisers— his solicitor and counsel—knew that he had no chance: that the policeman Sheridan's word would outweigh any evidence of innocence. And, in order to get a lighter sentence, he took the not very heroic course of telling a, he and saying he was guilty. The other two men refused to tell a lie. They said that no consideration of a lighter sentence would induce them to plead guilty of an offence of which they were innocent. Observe, ninety per cent, of the whole population of the district in which the trial took place are Catholics, and yet sixty Catholic jurors were challenged for entering the jury box. This peasant boy was tried by a jury entirely composed, not merely of Protestants, but of men notoriously known to belong to the political party bitterly opposed to Catholics, and the people of Sligo. Of course he was convicted, and equally of course the learned judge commended the verdict and said there was no doubt whatever in the case. That peasant boy served out his sentence, and when; he came out of prison his first act was; to go before a magistrate and swear an affidavit that he had been wrongly I convicted. The right hon. Gentleman admitted, so far as manner was concerned, most handsomely that Dan Mc Goohan was innocent, and he gave him,.£100 as compensation. I ask the Committee to bear that,£100 in mind. Sheridan was never tried. He was allowed to escape from the country. I want a clear and specific answer to this question. "Why was he allowed to escape? "; and I will go on repeating it inside this House, and outside it, until I get an answer. After the result of the private inquiry was known, and after it had been proved by the evidence of his accomplices that he had got poor innocent men sent to prison for offences they had never committed, but which Sheridan and his accomplices had committed, is it true that Sheridan was walking about free in Ireland and England for two months? During that period Sheridan had the impudence to come to the House and send up his card to me; and when I went out to see him he told me a story so plausible and so cleverly put together that it made me very suspicious, and I gave him a wide berth. After that the Chief Secretary knew that Sheridan was going about laughing at your law and daring you to prosecute him. if the Government had prosecuted him he knew that such a flood of light would have been thrown upon the whole system of administration of the law in Ireland as would have destroyed the blood-stained and disgraceful methods of governing Ireland. Sheridan has left the country; he was in America a few months ago, and I believe he is there yet. You can still try him if you like. The question was asked the other day of the Attorney General whether men accused of perjury and arson could not be extradited, and he said, "Yes, they could." Why is not Sheridan prosecuted? Now I come to the answer which seemed to slip from the Attorney General somewhat inadvertently, and which, if true, raises a still more serious matter. I have not the exact words, but what he said was to the effect that the indemnity given to the three accomplices was of such a character that their evidence could not be used against Sheridan in a court of law. I should be delighted if the Chief Secretary was in a position to contradict that statement. Who has the right to give any such indemnity to accomplices? Informers and accomplices constantly appear in the witness-box in criminal trials, and they necessarily, and in most cases very properly, get an indemnity— what for? In order to punish and convict the worst criminal of the lot. What practice can be quoted in the whole experience of this country in which the accomplices are given an indemnity to the effect that if they give evidence nothing will be done to them, nor will the evidence be used against that criminal. It is monstrous and absurd, and I want to know if any such indemnity was given— if so, who gave it; also its exact character, whether it will he produced, and what right any man, especially the man charged with the duty of maintaining law and order and of administering criminal justice in Ireland, has to condone felonies, and to protect and screen the ' perpetrators of inhuman and brutal offences of this kind. Then what happened to the three accomplices? Two have left the force, but they were given compassionate allowances of £200, It is a crying shame! Here is this brave young peasant, Dan; McGoohan, suffering all the torture and misery of a conviction for an offence of which he was innocent, and to compensate him and his family, and to give him if possible a new lease of life after his years of imprisonment, he is given £100. Yet the accomplice in the actual crime gets double the amount.

Reid got £50, not £200.

Then if the particular accomplice in McGoohan's case did not get £200, apparently the other did.

Not in the McGoohan case.

There were three accomplices, and I myself heard the right hon. Gentleman state the other day that one of them got a compassionate allowance of £200. Is that true or false? It is true. What are we to think of such an interruption as that of the right hon. Gentleman, the effect of which, if it had any effect at all, must be in the direction of inducing the Committee to believe I had made a false statement. The right hon. Gentleman says it was not an accomplice in the McGoohan case; then it was in the case of the other poor wretches, perhaps that of the man who died. But the third accomplice is still wearing His Majesty's uniform, is still in the police force, is still engaged, no doubt, on all appropriate occasions in harrying disorderly and rebellious Nationalists, and presiding at celebrations of loyalty and good-will in Ireland. This is a serious matter, and I will not mince words in dealing with it. In my opinion—No, I will not say in my opinion at all—I charge the Government with having hushed up the affair, with being responsible for letting Sheridan escape from justice, with paying hush money to two accomplices, and with keeping the third man in the pay of the Crown, because they dare not face an inquiry into the system of corruption, perjury, and infamy which is carried on in the interests of Dublin Castle by paid officials of the right hon. Gentleman. A more shameful and infamous transaction; was never heard of in the whole political history of this country. I go a step further. Apparently the Chief Secretary himself is directly responsible for all this. The Attorney General the other night, when pressed, as to why he did not order a prosecution of Sheridan with reference to the McGoohan and other cases, said the case had never come before him. What is the meaning of that? The Attorney General is the public prosecutor in Ireland, and is at the head of the administration of the law. Does he say that the Chief Secretary, when he received the report of the private inquiry, establishing beyond yea or nay the guilt of Sheridan, withheld that information from him? I accept the righthon. and I learned Gentlemen's statement and am i convinced the case was not put before him. But why was it withheld? Knowing what he did about the Ryan case, is it possible or credible that he never even asked an innocent question further about Sheridan, that without his knowledge this secret inquiry was held, and that he never heard of Sheridan's guilt until the-matter was dragged into publicity by the hon. Member for East Mayo last session? At any rate, as far as we can judge from his statement, and that of the Attorney General, the Chief Secretary is directiy responsible for this. If so, how does he stand before the world? He prosecutes a poor, wretched peasant who may be guilty of some act of violence in defence of his little home; he imprisons his political opponent if he makes a speech displeasing to him; he suspends, trial by jury in order to convict men as respectable and as honourable as himself; but he does not prosecute—on the contrary he allows to escape and gives compassionate allowances to men, police officers, his own officials, when they have been convicted of these crimes; that is to say, he screens and protects the police cattle-mutilators, the perjured police officers, the Dublin Castle incendiaries, the unmitigated scoundrels who do these almost unheard-of offences in order to get pay and promotion for themselves by the conviction for those offences of innocent men before packed juries. I say deliberately that if the right hon. Gentleman cannot clear himself, and he certainly has not done so yet, of direct responsibility for the screening and protecting of these criminals, he ought, for that one act alone, to be driven out of public life. I am sure of this, that no English statesman convicted of similar transactions in England, could continue sitting on that Bench. But this is only in Ireland, and as it is in Ireland, the only surprising thing is that we had managed to obtain any light on this transaction at all. Redress, I am sure, there will be none; full and open inquiry there will be none; punishment of the criminals there will be none. The one result, so far as we are concerned, will be to convince the Irish people more and more that "Sergeant Sheridans" are plentiful in Ireland, and that in moral guilt, at any rate, they are very little removed from their Dublin Castle paymasters. Sir, one defence which Unionist Members, and, I suppose, the Chief Secretary will make, is that this is admittedly a very bad case, but that it is an isolated case, and that a similar case might happen in the best-governed country. Before I sit down let me deal with that plea. It is the only plea which can be put forward in mitigation of this offence. I assert that it does not hold good for one moment. I assert that it has been the constant practice of various English Governments in Ireland to avail themselves of the services of men, in the police and out of the police, who were paid to promote crime, and to convict innocent men. I might, if I were so unreasonable as to detain the House much longer, give a number of instances of this kind in the last twenty years. Probably some of my hon. friends will do so. Let me give one shortly to the House, a most dramatic case, which is engraven upon my memory by the fact that it was the first case in which I addressed a jury in Ireland after I was called to the bar. In September 1887 a gang of Moonlighters in the county of Clare made a raid on the house of a farmer called Sexton. Up to that time the neighbourhood had been singularly free from crime, and certainly free from crimes of this character. The police mysteriously got word that this raid was going to take place, at this lonely house at a particular time, and Head-constable Whelehan and a large force of police went early in the evening and ambushed themselves round the house. The Moonlighters arrived with masks on their faces, carrying guns, and broke in the door of the cabin. The moment they got into Sexton's cabin the police closed round and sought to arrest them. Unfortunately they did not succeed in arresting them all. Some of them got through the door, and in the scuffle the Head-constable Whelelan received a blow from which he died. The men caught in the house were put on their trial for murder, and I was counsel, defending two of the men. The first witness produced by the Crown was a man named Cullinane who was the captain of the Moonlight gang on that occasion. He was arrested in the house with his gun in his hand, and his mask on his face. They knew practically nothing about that man. and it was the direct result of the cross-examination of that man in the witness box that the truth came out. And what came out? This man, under pressure and terror—because he was a coward—swore that he had been for six years in the pay of the police. He swore that he had concocted this Moonlight not with the unfortunate Head-constable who was killed. He swore that a meeting had been held just before at which the hon. Member for East Mayo spoke, and that Whelelan gave him money for this particular job, and told him it was necessary to get up some outrage in the neighbourhood to show the evil result of the speech of his hon. friend. In pursuance of these orders Cullinan got a few wild boys in the neighbourhood together, and told them it was necessary to do something of this kind to carry out the object of the Land League. The result of it all was that Cullinane, disguised as a Moonlighter, on that occasion regarded by his unfortunate youths as a pattern of men, was in reality a policeman, or, at any rate, in the pay of the police having his own transaction with the Head-constable. It turned out in cross-examination that he was a man of most infamous character. He admitted that he had been convicted eleven times of all sorts of offences—robbery, assault, drunkenness, desertion from the army, etc., culminating in one horrible charge of having committed a criminal assault on a little girl five years old. I shall never to my dying day forget the dramatic incident which occurred in Court. He was asked whether he was convicted of an assault of this character, and he said "No." He was pressed, and wavered. A record of his convictions was produced, and with a dramatic force and effect which could not be described Judge William O'Brien, who was trying the case said, "You had better admit it, because, as it happens, I was the judge who tried you and sentenced you to three years imprisonment." This was the man who for six years was the paid agent of the police and concocted these outrages. Of course nothing could be done. I may say in passing that the men were all acquitted of murder, but wore convicted of a Whiteboy offence and got terms of imprisonment. No human agency could inflict any punishment upon Head-constable Whelehan, who met his death upon that occasion— but where is Cullinane? Cullinane has escaped. I suppose he has got a £200 compassionate allowance. I assert that this Sheridan case is not an isolated case. I could mention a score of cases in my own experience similar to the one I have referred to. But if it is an isolated case, why need the Government be afraid of a full disclosure of the facts? It is because it is not an isolated case that you are afraid to probe this matter to the bottom. It has ever been the same, not only in Ireland, but in every country and every clime and time where a despotic rule has been maintained in a country, in opposition to the will of the people who are governed, and where the Government has always been forced in the long-run to rely upon the spy, the informer, the agent provocateur, and the perjurer. So it has been in the past history of the world, and so it is in Ireland today, and that is one of the reasons why the Irish people hate, and detest, and loathe your rule. That is why they will never be satisfied until they have razed Dublin, Castle to the ground, and driven the horde of spies, informers, perjurers and agent-provocateurs, who are sheltered within its walls, away from the shores of their country. For these reasons I arraign the administration of the Chief Secretary, and I tell him that that administration rests under a stigma of dishonour and crime. I say that his administration, from every point of view, has been a failure, and I beg to move the reduction of his salary, which stands in my name.

in seconding the Motion, said that after the powerful indictment of the Chief Secretary's administration delivered by the hon. and learned Member for Waterford, his function in addressing the Committee was a mere formality. During his hon. and learned friend's speech it struck him that it might be possible for him to give the Chief Secretary some information as to Sheridan's whereabouts. He had himself recently been in America, and he could tell the hon. Gentleman that if he wanted Sergeant Sheridan back in Ireland, he would find him in Lowell, Massachusetts. Two or three years ago the great heart of England was profoundly moved by the famous Dreyfus case. They all heard how England, in a spirit of justice, was roused in holy indignation at the manner in which Captain Dreyfus was treated. Here was a case where the argument and the evidence was so powerful against Sheridan that they would make this a Dreyfus case throughout England, Scotland, Australia and Canada, unless the Chief Secretary met the indictment which his hon. and learned friend the Member for Waterford had presented to the House. One thing which the supporters of the Chief Secretary prided themselves upon was the impartiality of his administration. Where was the impartiality displayed in the recent suppression of public meetings at Rostrevor and Dublin. The Chief Secretary himself gave orders for the breaking up of a public meeting in the capital of Ireland. He sent policemen to bludgeon the citizens of Dublin and an Irish Member of Parliament, and before doing that he never consulted a single civil authority in Dublin as to whether his action would Vie wise or not. What did the Chief Secretary do in the case of Rostrevor? Why, he consulted the Grand Master of the Orangemen as to whether this meeting should take place or not. This was the impartial spirit which inspired the administration of the Chief Secretary. He seconded the Motion, because the whole policy of the Chief Secretary was to harass the peasantry, to suspend constitutional law, to break up meetings properly called, to imprison Members of Parliament, to pack juries, and to spread outrage in peaceful communities. It was known to every man in Ireland that the whole Government of Ireland was an organised machine, not for the suppression, but the creation, of crime, that there were Sheridans in every county and village in the land, for the purpose of destroying the fair fame of the country. He was one of the youngest Members of the Party, and an indictment such as that delivered by his hon. and learned friend, the Member for Waterford, only made him hate more bitterly and tight more determinedly the system under which such things were rendered possible in Ireland. There were two great combinations in Ireland—that of the harassed peasantry and that of the landlords. why was Smith Barry sitting in the Privy Council instead of an Irish dock? Here they had a tangible instance of the system under which English rule was carried on in Ireland, and it would be their duty, whether this House liked it or not, to carry on an agitation which would compel the Government, by a sense of the overmastering power of their I movement, to give way to the repeated I claims for justice which had been so often desired. The coercion policy of the present Chief Secretary would no more succeed than had the policies of his predecessors. In 1882 the Liberal party attempted to support the Land League, just as the Gentlemen on the Government Benches were endeavouring to suppress the United Irish League today. The Liberal party, then, had behind them the whole strength and power of the democratic forces in England. They had the great genius, and the matchless eloquence, of Mr. Gladstone to inspire them and to lead them on. They tried the policy of coercion from 1882 to 1886, but with all that power at their back they were unable to suppress the Land League, or to destroy the spirit that gave it inspiration. The men now on the Government Benches, who had degraded and lowered the name of England before all civilised humanity, and who had disgraced the military prestige of the Empire, with only a tithe of English support at their back, would not succeed where Mr. Gladstone and the powerful forces of the Liberal party failed. The power that conquered then would conquer now— that was the union of the Irish race, which was more powerful today than ever it was before. Let the landlords come on with their combination. There were twelve millions of the lrish race living in America who were burning with hate of the bad laws and rapacious landlordism which compelled their ancestors to leave their own land. These men were the descendants of those who were sent away in the famine ships of 1847, and they were a co-operative force which the Irish tenant farmers could rely upon, in every emergency, to act against the whole combination of Dublin Castle and the Irish landlords. He earnestly trusted that even yet the Chief Secretary for Ireland would cut himself adrift from the cursed influences of Irish landlordism—influences which had ruined the reputation of too many Chief Secretaries. If he did the people of Ireland were generous, and they would forget the past, but if he refused to listen to their appeal, then the Irish race would go on with this battle, satisfied that in the end God would some day bestow upon them the priceless blessing of liberty.

said four-fifths of the long speech of the hon. and learned Member for Water-ford were occupied in discussing a thrice-told tale. He should have expected, after the sweeping denunciation the hon. Member had given of the Chief Secretary's policy, that he would have had some fresh facts to put before the Committee. The hon. and learned Member charged the right hon. Gentleman in a direct manner with having shielded the scoundrel Sheridan. Whatever might be the opinion of Members of the Committee as to the action the Chief Secretary took about Sheridan, no one who heard his speech last year in the debate on the Appropriation Bill, and the speech he delivered a short time ago in regard to this case, could say that there was the slightest desire on his part to screen that constable. He desired to take this opportunity of asking his right hon. friend to explain the action of the Irish Government in relation to some recent occurrences in the north of Ireland. A very large demonstration had been arranged to take place on the occasion of an anniversary in County Down. [A NATIONALIST MEMBER: What was the anniversary?] The battle of the Boyne. The demonstration was arranged to take place in a village, where he was told the majority of the inhabitants were of the same religion as the great majority of the demonstrators. It had been announced for a considerable period, and until attention was drawn to it by a violent speech or letter, he thought by a Roman Catholic curate, there was no reason to suppose that it would lead to any breach of the peace, or that it would not have gone off with complete tranquillity. When public attention was aroused by that speech or letter, a counter - demonstration was threatened, and what in his judgment would have been a very orderly meeting, was suddenly transferred by those who were desirous of stopping the demonstration, into one threatening the public peace. The resolutions proposed were neither seditious nor disloyal. They were principally resolutions congratulating His Majesty on restoration to health, and pledging those who were there to support him and his successors. It seemed to him that it was desirable the action which the Government took should be stated in this House, for there was a feeling in Ulster that there was a disparity in the treatment dealt out by the Irish Administration, which, while favourable to those who had on several occasions in the immediate past held meetings at which sedition and disloyalty had been preached, came down with a heavy hand on those meetings where loyal resolutions were to be proposed. He, therefore, should like to hear from the Chief Secretary what were the special circumstances which on this occasion induced him to proclaim a meeting whose objects were legal and at which in ordinary circumstances there need not have been apprehended any breach of the peace. The local magistrate had decided that a comparatively small body of police would be required to preserve the peace, and that all that was necessary was to take the ordinary precaution which on many previous occasions had been taken by the Irish Government, namely, that a counter-demonstration would not be allowed. He was informed that not long ago in Armagh a meeting was held which was of a character most provocative to the vast majority of the people of that county, and at which most seditious and violent language was used. That meeting was held with the permission of the Government and under the protection of the police. It seemed to him that the action which the Government had now taken was a direct invitation to those who object to loyal demonstration to organise on every occasion a counter-demonstration, and then to appeal to the Castle on the ground that a breach of the peace might occur and get the loyal meeting proclaimed and stopped. Of course he was quite prepared to admit that there might have been circumstances which justified the Government in taking the action they did. He was perfectly willing to admit that the object for which the meeting was called was innocuous, and that for other reasons the Government might be inclined to take steps to prevent the meeting being held. He thought it right, not only on behalf of those whom he represented, but in consequence of the feeling which existed in the province of Ulster, and which had been aggravated during the last few weeks, that the hon. Gentleman should have an opportunity of stating publicly what were the reasons which led the Government to take the step which he regretted they did. He should be glad if the decision and promptitude which characterised the Government on that occasion were signalised in the administration of the Irish Government not only in Ulster but in the rest of Ireland. He had on several previous occasions felt it his duty to complain that in the West of Ireland—in Connaught and some sections of Minister— the action of the Executive Government had not been of that character which inspired the law-abiding inhabitants with confidence, and they had allowed organisations to spring up which were calculated to intimidate the population, and which had for their object the procuring of the breaking of contracts. The hon and learned Member who opened the debate had spoken of a great trade contest which was going on in Ireland. To some extent he had given it a proper name. It was a great contest in which the agitator, made money by trading on the credulity of his dupes, and by means of organisations, public meetings, and speeches, induced them to go behind their legal contracts. The great case at issue now was that of the Associated Estates, and in reference to these the United Irish League had exerted all its power, and all its influence, to induce the tenants who were on good terms with their landlords, and behind whom there was pressure of inability to pay their rents, to join a movement which could only be profitable to those engaged in the agitation. The case of the Associated Estates had been represented to Parliament and to the people of the country as one in which the tenants on the De Freyne property had been so struck by the enormous disparity between their position and the position on the Dillon estate that they had been obliged to band themselves into an organisation and to claim a reduction of their rents. The right hon. Gentleman and the Government of Ireland had been blamed for not having continued the policy of purchase, begun on the Dillon estate, in the case of the De Freyne estate. It had been said that it was on account of the sale of the Dillon estate, and the remarkable advantages which the Dillon tenants possessed, and which for the first time the De Freyne tenants were made aware of, that induced the De Freyne tenants to join the agitation. That view was absolutely absurd. It was not the case that it was the first time the tenants had become aware of the benefits of purchase, because that had been going on in the county of Roscommon for many years. No less than forty-seven estates had been dealt with by the Land Commission, by way of purchase, in the county of Roscommon, and in that particular portion where the De Freyne estate was situated, the congested portion of Roscommon, eleven estates had been dealt with be the Purchase Commissioners. So that the De Freyne tenants, like other tenants in the county of Roscommon, had for many years had before them the advantages of purchase. Yet all this time they had been free from agitation and ready to pay their rent. Right in the heart of the De Freyne estate on which it was said that an economic rent could not be paid, a town land was sold fourteen years ago and on it a reduced rate was paid by the occupiers. The De Freyne estate had been characterised by some hon. Members as one which entirely differed from any other estate in Ireland. It had been described as the poorest and the most miserable land. Well, he had never known any land in Ireland subject to agitation which was not so described. But this estate was by no means of that description. It was by no means poor. The hon. Member for South Tyrone had said there was no such thing as economic rent. There were some portions of the West where there was a constant struggle between the industry of man and the elements but that condition did not exist on the De Freyne estate.

said if he was to be quoted he would like to be accurately quoted. He had admitted that on the better class laud there was economic rent; but on the small patches of bog land, for which a rent of 12s. and 15s. an acre was demanded, there was no economic rent.

said he was not alluding to the Roscommon portion of the property. The estate was divided into four parts. There were Roscommon grass farms, and three other portions on which the rent was small. He absolutely challenged the hon. Gentleman's statement as to the rent on those three divisions. He had had an opportunity of going through the rental of the estate and he would give the particulars to the Committee.

said that hon. friends who accompanied him were refused all information by the agents.

said that might be so but it did not warrant the hon. Member coming to that House and telling them, as he did, that the average rent was 17s. per acre, when he could show the House that it was not one-third of that.

Where do the right hon. Gentleman's figures come from?

From the rental book. Lord de Freyne had nothing to conceal in connection with his property at all. He might refer to another statement which was as inaccurate as any statement could be, viz. that the tenants on this property were weighed down by hundreds and thousands of pounds of arrears which made it impossible for them to meet their engagements. That was not the case. On the Frenchpark No. 1 there were 506 tenants. The rental was £2,587 and there were only twenty-eight cases of heavy arrears. The average rental per tenant was £5 2s. and per acre 6s. 5d. On the French part No. 2 there were 439 tenants. The rental was over £3,000 a year, and there were thirty-three cases of heavy arrears only. The average rental was £7 6s., and per acre 9s. 11d. Then there was the Loughglynn portion —the poorest. There were 524 tenants, twenty-nine of whom were in heavy arrears. The rental was £2,450. The average rental per tenant was: £4 13s. 6d. and per acre 5s. 6d. In the Roscommon division, with only forty-nine tenants, there were no heavy arrears; The rent was £1,700, the average rent per tenant £34, and the rate per acre 17s., making the average rate for the whole of the property 7s. 1d. It was said that no economic rent was possible on the Loughglynn division. He would test that statement by taking the two standard crops of Ireland—potatoes and oats. The potato crop last year was one of the finest for the last fifty years. The average produce all over Ireland was 5·3 tons per acre, which was 30 per cent, over the average of the last ten years. The first four counties for yield last year were Down, Louth, Dublin, and Armagh. Then came Roscommon, with an average yield of 5¾tons per acre, well over the average for the whole of Ireland, while the yield in the Castlereagh Union was actually larger than that of the county. As to the oat crop, the average yield was 16 cwt. per acre over the whole of Ireland; the average for Roscommon was 15 cwt., and for the Castlereagh Union 14 cwt.; whereas in the Clogher Union, which was considered to be such good land, the yield was only 15½ cwt. Then it was said the people could not pay the rent. In ninety cases Civil Bill Decrees had been executed on this property in consequence of the combination. These extended over thirty-five different town-lands, and in eighty-six cases, when the County Court bailiff demanded the rent and costs the money was paid with the greatest ease, and in the remaining cases in which effective seizures were made the full amount I was paid at once. The assertion that the costs had been piled upon these people was true, but by whom was it done? Who was if that was making it impossible for some of the De Freyne tenants ever to hope to remain in their homes? The solicitor of the United Irish League, Mr. Kilbride. When Lord De Freyne commenced his case, Mr. Kilbride forced him to serve statements of claim and to go through every legal formula; he heaped costs upon Lord De Freyne, but also upon the tenants, I without any authority from or consultation with them; he then deserted the tenants and made no appearance in Court. He charged Mr. Kilbride with having deliberately piled up legal costs on the wretched dupes when there was no possible defence to the action of Lord De Freyne, and in forcing Lord De Freyne to take these steps he was only making it impossible for the wretched dupes of the League, and the victims of this organisation, to pay the rent and the costs as well. Many of the men were perfectly able and willing to pay the rent, but they were absolutely unable to pay costs four times the amount they need have been. It would be an entire mistake for the Committee to suppose that because land was termed ''bog land" nothing could be grown upon it. In the Frenchpark and Loughglynn districts he had seen as good crops of oats and potatoes this year as any in the Union of Clogher, or any part of his division. This bog land was extremely productive. He mentioned the case of a tenant who paid 4s. as the rent of his holding, and who had on the property crops of potatoes and oats, with two cows, a calf, a donkey, and two pigs, with turf free. That was not an exceptional case, and in every instance in which there was any evidence of labour or trouble having been taken on the holding, the difference could be seen between that and the neighbouring holding. What had made the mischief?. It was the fact that for months in the year the men did nothing. They put in the crop and went to England in May; they returned in November, and from November to May they did nothing but wander about the country after the agitators, wasting their money and making the fortune of the whisky-shop keepers in certain districts, he would not ask the Committee to accept his judgment as to the value of the land. One could not properly value land by just walking over it, but by looking at the condition of the stock a very fair conclusion as to the inherent qualities of the soil could be arrived at. The whole of the stock on this De Freyne property was well bred and large, and in good condition. Nobody who was a judge in agricultural matters could go over the property, look at the class of stock, and notice the condition it was in, without being convinced as to the productive properties of the soil. He contended that in some parts of this property the people were in much easier circumstances, and better able to bear the stress and conflict of life, than many of the tenants in the higher and colder mountain farms of Ulster, Fermanagh, and Tyrone. After all, the opinion of the De Freyne tenants themselves was worth something in considering the value of the land, and a large number of them were now farming holdings in regard to which they had paid considerable sums for the tenant-right. He instanced a case of a holding of fifty acres, with a rent of £27, in which £297 was paid to the out-going tenant; and another of twelve acres, with a rent of £ 5s., in which £65 was paid for tenant right. Nine-tenths of the tenants were perfectly able to pay the rent. The hon. Member for North-West Lanark was one of the hon. Members who went over to make investigations for themselves. He did not know whether the hon. Gentleman was an expert in agriculture or not, but he should be very sorry to take his opinion on the condition of the De Freyne estate, he not knowing the people or the country. The hon. Member had been to Ballaghadereen, and said although there were in that place seventy-three public houses, it would be difficult to believe they were actually public houses.

What I said was that a large number of the so-called public houses were not by any means what English Members of this House would understand by public houses, and that the persons who kept them were largely concerned in selling other things, such as groceries and provisions, and the like.

admitted that the Ballaghadereen public houses were not such as hon. Members themselves would patronise, nevertheless he was confident that if the hon. Member was in the place on fair days he would see that they were very well patronised by the people. The people of Balaghadereen had been represented as the poorest of the poor. But in 1894 there were 465 savings bank depositors With a total sum to their credit of £19,115, whereas in Antrim the savings bank depositors, through 505 in number, had only,£l3,112 to their credit. The conclusion he had come to was that the hon. Members from England who recently paid a visit to this part of Ireland were not likely to carry away very accurate impressions. They did not know the conditions in which the Irish farmer and labourer chose to live—conditions which were not accepted in England or Scotland; and the actual position of a man could not be guessed from his appearance. The tenants on the De Freyne estate, who were able to pay their rents, had been forced into this combination by intimidation, by public meetings, and midnight bands. They had been intimidated all through last winter with such effect that a responsible person had told him that his parishioners would have been guilty of any folly. The condition of terror and fear in which the tenants of the De Freyne estate lived last year was greater than that in 1887 when intimidation was at its height. But these men were not only the dupes of the agitators, but also the victims of the Government; for, if the Government had taken steps earlier, the agitating organisation would have got no hold. It was thought that Lord De Freyne, as a poor man, would easily be brought to his knees; but fortunately that had not been the case. More than a dozen of Lord De Freyrie's tenants were now on the roadside, and the Government bore a great weight of responsibility in respect of those tenants. He hoped that in the stronger position which the right hon. Gentleman was to occupy, he would grip the organisation with a firmer hand, or its victims would multiply. He must make law and order respected, and establish the conviction that peaceful and law-abiding persons would be protected and not handed over to the agitators.

said that the right hon. Gentleman who had just addressed the Committee indulged it with figures which he had obtained from the De Freyne Estate Office, it was a great pity that that information was denied to English hon. Members who had recently visited the estate.

said that Lord De Freyne's complaint was that those hon. Gentlemen never went near him, though he would have been glad to give them every information.

said that it was only fair to say that they were invited to see Lord De Freyne by Mr. Flanagan, who was anxious to give them particulars but forbidden by Lord De Freyne to do so.

said the estate books were, as a matter of fact, kept not by Lord De Freyne, but by the agent, and Lord De Freyne, as another matter of fact, was abroad at the time. The right hon. Member had dealt with the figures in so involved a manner that it had been impossible to understand them. The right hon. Gentleman had stated that the tenants of the De Freyne estate, after their return from England, spent a large part of their time in running after the agitators, but they ran after the agitators in quite a different way to certain gentleman who ran after hon. Members opposite on the 12th of July. He was surprised at the mildness of the right hon. Gentleman's protest in reference to the proclamation of the demonstration at Rostrevor, and there would be disappointment among the Orangemen in the morning. From what he had read in the Ulster papers he had feared that the Chief Secretary and the right hon. Gentleman might have almost come to fisticuffs, but the right hon. Gentleman's protest had been almost as mild as mother's milk. It was very different to what appeared in the newspapers of Armagh. He had in his hands some extracts from the Armagh Standard and he was very glad to see the representatives of North Armagh and Mid Armagh were in their places, because, having been elected with the aid of that paper, they would not dare to repudiate these sentiments—

"This is a time for plain speaking. The Balfour brothers and the present Chief Secretary have again and again betrayed Unionist interests, and Ulster Unionists have suffered in silence. But there comes a time when submission to wrong becomes a crime, and when every man imbued with the spirit of personal liberty will resist even to force the deprivation of the legitimate right."

and again it said—

"Treason is to be encouraged with the sunshine of official favour; loyally is to be ground down. It is a matter of notoriety that already there exists amongst the respectable part of Irish society the most intense dissatisfaction with Mr. Wyndham and his management of Irish affairs."

Then came a passage which he apologised for reading, and which, for downright vulgarity surpassed anything he had ever seen—

"Mr. Wyndham is a dilettante, who owes his political position to the influence of Ins wife, the Countess of Grosvenor, and to the fact that he was Mr. Arthur Balfour's devil. He has been a lamentable failure at the Irish Office, and has shown himself to be utterly out of tone with Irish sentiment, and incompetent to deal with the existing state of Irish affairs."

No better argument in favour of the reduction of the right hon. Gentleman's salary could be advanced than these quotations of the views of the Armagh Standard, which would not be repudiated by either Member for Armagh, and which thus showed that Irish opinion was unanimous upon that point. This loyalist organ went on to say—

"Arthur Balfour tried the same policy, and his natural ability prevented him from carrying it too far, though it was, perhaps, a fortunate thing for his reputation that his change from the Irish Office took place when it did. Gerald Halfour carried on the policy of killing with kindness, and lost the little reputation that he ever had. He was taken from the Irish Office as a hopeless failure. And 'hopeless failure is the legend writ broad over the administration of Mr. Wyndham. Many will be inclined to add treachery and sheer cowardice as distinguishing characteristics of Mr. Wyndham's conduct. It has been left, for a Unionist government, or, rather, for the contemptible coward who represents it at the Irish Office, to muzzle the loyalists. We call upon our Parliamentary representatives to take immediate and rigorous action in this matter. Mr. Wyndham must be withdrawn from the Irish Office. He has had his chance—a chance which he ought never to have had—and has proved himself a failure. The opinion of loyal Ireland has long been hostile to him, as every tyro in politics knows. We are much mistaken if this last action will not go far to bring to a head the feelings of hostility and distrust with which he has long been regarded."

Those wore the views of an Orange newspaper, and he commended them to the right hon. and gallant Member and to the hon. Member opposite, the representatives of Armagh. The right hon. and gallant Member for North Armagh was reported to have said at Lurgan the other day that the Nationalist Members were, "to use a gentle phrase, unbridled ruffians."

said he never said anything of the kind, whatever he might have thought. He was alluding to the Nationalist party at Rostrevor, who opposed the meeting of the Orangemen.

said it was not the first time the right hon. and gallant Gentleman had had to complain of being misreported. He now appeared, however, to have said that it was his (Mr. Mac-veagh's) constituents who were unbridled ruffians.

So they are.

said that unbridled ruffians were not confined to his constituency. Mr. Arthur Trew, one of the leaders of Belfast Protestantism, and who might be here in a short time as Member for Belfast, said—

"The Chief Secretary was a recreant coward, a villainous knave, la shandy-gaff politician. He was neither a loyalist nor a rebel."

With regard to the Rostrevor demonstration, English hon. Members might like to know what anniversary was being celebrated. It was the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, fought centuries ago, and in which a Dutch usurper succeeded in defeating the lawful King of this realm, and the so-called loyalists of Ireland had gone on celebrating that event ever since. Nationalists had no objection to these men making fools of themselves in the localities in which they were the pre-dominant partners, but no Government had ever allowed them to indulge in their drunken orgies in districts in which they were an insignificant minority. The population of the Rostrevor district was about 700, of whom 600 were Catholics. In the town itself the enrolled members of the Orange body scarcely numbered more than a baker's dozen, and no respectable Protestant had anything to do with them. The demonstration, therefore, was not local but imported, and the decision to demonstrate in Rostrevor was arrived at by the Orangemen of Armagh, some thirty miles distant. If it were local, Nationalists would not think of seeking to prevent it, for no one held more strongly than they did that minorities had their rights as well as majorities; and that however unpalatable their views may be, the minority were entitled to express them. But it was a different matter when it was proposed to import some thousands of strangers, many of them armed, and more of them drunk, for the purpose of overawing and terrifying the residents of a district. Rostrevor was a resort for invalids—the best health resort in the kingdom. It contained numerous sanatoriums and almost innumerable invalids, and just imagine the feelings of these invalids at experiencing the drum whacking, revolver firing, and drunken jamboree of this imported rabble. Before proclaiming the Rostrevor meeting the Chief Secretary consulted the Earl of Erne, Lord High Chief Imperial Grand Master or something, and Lord Arthur Hill, Master of the Orange Light Horse. He had never heard of Nationalists being consulted about suppressing their meetings, but these potentates urged him to suppress the Orange meeting.

said they never sanctioned the proclamation, all they said was that it was injudicious to hold a meeting.

said that before proclaiming the Rostrevor meeting the Chief Secretary consulted two Orange magnates, the Earl of Erne and Lord Arthur Hill, He never yet heard of the Chief Secretary consulting any Nationalist Members about the proclamation of a Nationalist meeting, but this impartial Chief Secretary, before he suppressed a meeting which was bound to lead to disorder and not, considered it proper to consult the leaders of the Orange Party before proclaiming the meeting. The prime mover in all this was a peripatetic tub thumper who called himself ''reverend," but he was no more "rev." than the Chief-Secretary. This Gentleman made a speech in which he said that he and the Orangemen had endeavoured to hold a meeting, but that a "crowd of savages" gathered to prevent them, and he declared that on the 12th July he would march, if not at the head of 12,000 Orangemen, at least he would be second in command. He wished to call the attention of the Committee to the provocative character of the circular which convened this meeting at Dromore. It concluded by calling upon the brethren to assemble in their thousands to uphold the principles of the Orange institutions. The local press freely spoke of the probability of a pitched battle taking place between the two parties at this meeting. The Committee had no idea as to bow those Orange gatherings were got up- They gathered in the tag-rag and bob-tail of the countryside and very often paid them. He did not often get hold of the private circulars of the Orange organisations, but he had one in his possession from which the following was an extract:—

"It has been proposed by the rebels to hold a meeting in Dromore on Tuesday, 1st January, 1884, to promote, as we believe, sedition and disloyalty in our county, and we have been directed to apply to you for a subscription to defray the expenses and transport of loyal Protestants. Orangemen, and others, who will attend to demonstrate our antagonism. It is proposed that any subscriptions sent by various contributors be applied in proportion to the amounts offered as the then exigencies of the case may require, and as the matter is most pressing, may we request an answer by return of post."

If they attempted anything of that kind in the South or West of Ireland every man who took part would be locked up, and probably sent to penal servitude. After these men met they set out, most of them armed with revolvers, and many of them drunk. Every one knew that this was a common thing in the North of Ireland. When he put a Question to the right hon. Gentleman on the subject of armed Orangemen, the answer was that he was considering it. They had been "considering" it for a quarter of a century, and no doubt they would go on considering it for another quarter of a century. Not long ago the Dublin Daily Express described one of these gatherings in the following terms:—

"Some pistol shots were fired into the air in the outskirts of the crowd, and immediately the fire was taken up by several hundred persons throughout the vast assemblage. Pistols and revolvers were produced on all sides, and a continuous fusillade was maintained for nearly fifteen minutes. The leaders endeavoured to stay the deafening discharge, but for some time without effect, and one found it hard to imagine that he was not a spectator at a sham fight in the Phoenix Park. The police and military alike appeared amazed at this extraordinary display, which the Orangemen appeared to regard as a splendid joke."

But the most glaring case which had recently occurred was at Newry, when the Orange party were on the way to Warrenpoint. They began firing, as usual, out of the train, and two persons were injured. It happened that an English lawyer was looking on and was nearly hit. He immediately took train, vowing he should never visit Newry again. This was not in South Africa, but in Ireland. Three policemen and two civilians had very narrow escapes. One arrest was made and what happened? This man was brought up before a packed bench of magistrates, and their decision was, that as no evidence had been given that the accused fired with the intent to maim, they would discharge him. When he called attention to the case of this man, with his revolver in his hand and his pocket stuffed with cartridges, the Chief Secretary upheld the decision of the magistrates and said it was perfectly correct, but he wished to know if the case was going to be allowed to rest where it was? Were men passing through a crowd to be allowed to fire revolvers? If so the sooner it was proclaimed for the next gathering of Irish landlords the better. The Chief Secretary was probably not aware that there was on record on the journals of the House a Motion moved by Lord John Russell praying that the King should take such measures as he thought necessary for the effectual discouragement of Orange lodges in Ireland, and this Resolution was unanimously agreed to, and the King promised to take such measures. He recommended these facts to the attention of the Committee.

said he was glad, as an Ulster Member, to have the opportunity of referring to the policy of the Government in Ireland. He had recently been in County Antrim, in Belfast, and at the funeral of one whom both sides of the House revered, his late friend William Johnston. There was the greatest dissatisfaction in Ulster at the present policy of the Government. From the Chief Secretary's point of view there were three parties in Ireland—first the party who considered that the concessions which from time to time he had made to the Nationalist Party in Ireland disqualified him for office; second, the wider class that offered sympathy to the Chief Secretary in the many and onerous difficulties and responsibilities of his position, and who were anxious to help him in the interest of the country, and not of party merely, in carrying them to a, successful conclusion; and third, the class represented by hon. Members opposite who, no matter what might be done in the way of agricultural grants, grants for piers and harbours, the extension of Local Government, ignoring breaches of the law here and winking at it there, would accept no benefit from the hand of what they called a foreign Minister, and nothing that he could do could be reasonably expected to satisfy them. This policy of concession had been tried again and again in Ireland. He did not think the Chief Secretary should be controlled from the party point of view, but from the party point of view they saw at the last election how it led to the loss of two seats in Dublin. In the interest of the good government of the country itself it was a misfortune that those who formed the larger second class to whom he had alluded—those who sympathised with the difficulties of the Chief Secretary should be driven into the first class. He did not say this lightly. There was an idea abroad in the North of Ireland, and there was no use burking it, that the Government would go to any extreme in making concessions to the Nationalists at the expense of their own supporters. There was the question of the claim of the moderator of the Presbyterian Church. That might seem a small matter, but it was one which was deeply felt by the ministers of that church. It was believed that if the moderator had been a bishop of the church to which hon. Members opposite belonged his claim would have been settled at once. He would give another instance—these straws showed how the wind blew. A small disturbance took place in County Down. It was not a political matter at all but unfortunately the newly elected Member for South Down discovered that two or three of the persons charged belonged to i an Orange institution, and he began to | ask Questions in the House as to when i proceedings would be taken, in which he was assisted by the hon. Member for South Tyrone. The result was that, instead of these men being prosecuted at petty sessions for disorderly conduct, they were tried for riotous conduct at the Assizes, where the case was laughed out of court.

How many jurors were ordered by the Crown to stand aside in the Orange trial?

said the question of jurors being ordered to stand aside did not arise here. That prosecution was largely due to the political interest taken in it by the hon. Member for South Down, and the feeling was general in the North of Ireland that if these prisoners had been Nationalists instead of Orangemen proceedings at petty sessions would have been resorted to. With regard to the Rostrevor case the hon. Member said the Orange celebration at that place had been jeered at, but there was nothing peculiar in choosing that place for a holiday. Rostrevor was on the coast, and it was the place to which Sunday Schools, Foresters, Gardeners, and religious and philanthropic societies took their outing. He had received an account of the disturbance which took place from an educated man, a civil servant, who stated that he was in Rostrevor on a bicycle tour. He found in the market place a band of men armed with pitchforks, staves, and clubs, and there was a kind of expectancy on their faces. On inquiring what this meant he was informed that they were waiting for the Orangemen who were coming through Rostrevor. There were only about half a dozen policemen in the town, and being unable to prevent a disturbance a free fight took place. It had been stated that the men who were brought into the town broke the chapel windows, but on inquiry it was discovered that there was no foundation for the allegation. With regard to the occurrence at Rostrevor, he said that there was a breach of the peace last year, and it was the duty of the Government, when this year they found that the Orangemen had made arrangements for their meeting weeks in advance, to see that there should be no breach of the peace. A branch of the United Irish League in the locality declared they would not permit an Orange procession at Rostrevor. The peace might have been preserved by preventing the crowds from meeting. It was not the case that they had not a force to prevent a breach of the peace. They brought down not only a large number of police, but a regiment of soldier: but the result was that because a bogus Nationalist opposition meeting was announced, the Government, to get out of the difficulty, proclaimed both meetings. That had given rise to much dissatisfaction in the North of Ireland, and he hoped his right hon. friend would give some explanation of the action he took, if explanation there could be. He maintained that the police and the soldiers ought to have been moved to the approaches to the town so as to prevent a breach of the peace. No doubt they would be told that the Government were impartial because they had proclaimed both meetings. But suppose a sentry found two men approaching his post, a friend and a foe, and he shot each of them, that might be called impartiality, but it would be neither patriotic or politic. Here was a loyal body about to meet to proclaim its devotion and fealty to the Crown, and it was put on the same level as a disloyal United Irish League Meeting, and proclaimed! He contended that impartiality, when it was relied upon, must have some regard to precedent. Now what were the precedents? He supposed there was no city in which party feeling ran so high as in Belfast; yet in 1898 a procession of Nationalists was held and it passed through the city of Belfast, the hon. Member for East Mayo, who-was in that procession, being protected by a great force of police.

said that, as the hon. Gentleman had stated, he had been present at that meeting, but, as in alt other like cases, the Government had laid down the route to be taken, and they were prohibited from going into any other part of the city.

said he did not discuss the question of route; what he-said was that the police were there to give the hon. Member protection. In Donegal there was a question of an Orange celebration on the 12th July, and the route was laid down by the police authorities exactly in the same way as in Belfast. In the case of Rostrevor the aggressors ought to have been limited to their own district. He wished to ask what the policy of the Government was going to be in the future about these meetings? If there was a threat of a counter demonstration by the Nationalists, were the Unionist and Loyalist meetings going to be proclaimed? That was the impression in the North of Ireland, and it was giving rise to great discontent at the present moment. He would take another case which had occurred since the Rostrevor event. He referred to a Nationalist meeting in Cork which the Government objected to and directed the High Sheriff of the county, who had charge of the safe-guarding of the peace in the county, to disperse it; but that decision of the Government was flouted and ignored by the Nationalist party. On Friday last there was a pretended meeting of the County Council of Cork in the Cork County Court. [Nationalist cries of "No."] He said pretended for this reason, that nine members of the County Council could not constitute a quorum, and there were only nine members of the County Council at that meeting on Friday morning. It was, however, sufficient to give this rump of nine members the opportunity to take possession of the court house; and then they proceeded to take the control of the room in which they sat for a so-called convention of the United Irish League. Now, the control of the court house, as the judges of the High Court have decided, was vested in the High Sheriff. But, as he understood it, when the High Sheriff went into the court house his presence was at once challenged by the hon. Member for Cork as an interrupter and an interloper. It was the duty of the High Sheriff to carry out the ordinary law and to exclude this gathering from the court house under express directions from the Castle. From the answer which his right hon. friend had given to a Question of his that day, he understood that the High Sheriff called upon the local police to assist him in clearing the court house, and it appeared from the reports in the newspapers that the police refused to assist the High Sheriff in the discharge of his duty. Now, he had heard it said over and over again in Belfast, and in Ulster generally, during the last three or tour days, that it would be interesting to see how, in the case of this open defiance and flouting of the law by the Nationalists in Cork, the Government would proceed to enforce respect for their order. [Laughter.] He did not know why hon. Members opposite should laugh. Would it be left to the Orangemen, who had dutifully obeyed the orders given to them, to discard these orders in the future because there never was any intention to enforce them? In the North of Ireland they were determined to have a test case to see how far the Government would proceed with them on the same lines. The Committee had heard that at the meeting at Rostrevor the usual loyal resolutions were to be carried, but what was done at Cork? At that meeting in Cork the hon. and learned Member for Waterford made a speech in which he said that the people of Ireland were determined to come to close quarters with the Government, and to make the Government of Ireland by England, according to present methods, difficult and dangerous, and in the end impossible. The hon. and learned Member went as near as possible to incitement to insurrection. Ireland, said the hon. and learned Member, would today be amply justified in rebelling by force of arms if she had the means. But by oppression and the ruin of the country she had not the means, and it was not in the power of Irishmen to rebel against the present system. It was, however, in their power, if they had the courage to do it, to make the present system, which was a mixture of coercion and oppression, absolutely impossible. These sentiments were spoken in the court house of Cork in defiance of the High Sheriff with Dublin Castle at his back. What action was the Government going to take in that matter? He acknowledged the courtesy with which hon. Members opposite had heard him, but he was only expressing what the feeling was of those with whom he was coming in daily contact in his own home, and he trusted that the opportunity would be given to his right hon. friend to clear up the apprehensions which were so prevalent in the North of Ireland.

said that although he was not an Irish Member the conditions of Irish administration had a profound interest for him, as indeed it ought to have for all of them. In every other part of the British Empire they saw progress, or at least hope. In South Africa, after the prolonged and bitter war had come to an cud, there were elements of hope for the future. But in Ireland there seemed to be no grounds for such hope. Chief Secretary after Chief Secretary had appeared on the scene with the ambition to do his best for Ireland, with the hope—the vain hope—that things would improve in the course of his administration, only to find that at the end of his period things remained as they were when he entered into office. The debate to which they had listened was an illustration of the extreme difficulty in which every Chief Secretary was placed. The present Chief Secretary was blamed from both sides. They had heard the right hon. Gentleman blamed severely on one side for what was called the weakness and vacillation of his policy, and then there was a most powerful attack made upon him for his severity by the other side. The fault could not be in the individual. He had listened that night to the severe attack upon the motives which had inspired the right hon. Gentleman's actions in the case of Sheridan. He acquitted the right hon. Gentleman of any such motives. He knew he was a man of the highest character, of the greatest idealism, inspired by the keenest desire to do his best for the country with which he was so closely associated by ties of blood; and yet the right hon. Gentleman was in a position in which he could give no satisfaction to either side of the House. There must be some deep-rooted cause for that failure—a cause that was not in the individual Chief Secretary but in the extraordinary difficult situation in Ireland, where there were two people separated from each other by religion, almost by race, and divided in a fashion to which there was no parallel in any other part of the United Kingdom. In that state of things it was the duty of the Government to enforce the law, and see that it was obeyed; but it was no less their duty to bring the administration of the law into harmony with the aspirations of the majority of the people. They never would succeed in the task, such as they had got before them, if they made themselves the allies of one section of the people, and that section the minority. He did not wish it to be understood that he was without sympathy with the minority. He thought the unfortunate landlords had often been made scapegoats. He felt deep sympathy with men like Lord DeFreyne, and he believed that it would be the best investment the British Exchequer ever made to get rid of such landlords, not on mere terms of a commercial bargain, but to give them; a bonus to clear out. The spectacle of one estate where the landlord was able to afford improvements and reduce rents, contrasted with another estate where the landlord was too poor to part with what stood between him and poverty, was a state of things that must involve discontent. The cheapest thing for the people in this country would be, if necessary, to put their hands in their pockets, so as to relieve the situation which had created such acute tension in some parts of Ireland. The first case mentioned in this debate was that of Sheridan. The hon. and learned Member for Waterford made a speech of great eloquence, in which he told a story, which, unfortunately, had been told a hundred times before in this House, of the breakdown of the machinery of government—of a man of ruffianly character getting into a position in which he ought not to have been, and abusing that position in the most cruel and abominable fashion. The hon. and learned Member made an attack on the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary which he thought was not wholly deserved; because the right hon. Gentleman manfully rose at the earliest moment to repudiate altogether the conduct of Sheridan, and any desire to shield him. But he did think that there was some foundation for the criticisms, not of the motive of the right hon. Gentleman, but of the course which the right hon. Gentleman had felt himself forced to pursue. The case of Sheridan was a very great scandal, but Sheridan was dismissed only on the undertaking that the witnesses would not be called upon to testify against him in a court of justice. But though he thought there was no ground for criticism of the right hon. Gentleman's motives, he did feel that he ought to have made an attempt by a criminal trial to bring Sheridan to justice, and. to show to all the world that he dissociated himself wholly and utterly from the man's crimes. He did not blame the Irish administration as a whole. They had a difficult task to perform: the Constabulary had shown on the whole a desire to do its work with energy and ability. But when a black sheep appeared, the obligation was all the greater to sift the matter to the bottom and bring the criminal to justice. He was keenly aware of the extraordinary difficulty in which the Chief Secretary was placed. No Irish legislation could please both parties in Ireland. It was impossible to govern Ireland in these days with a wide franchise according to the view of the minority. But, on the other hand, the Chief Secretary would not let himself go in the only direction in which it was possible to get the Government of Ireland on to a proper footing, which was to enlist more and more the sympathies of the people to his side. He did not believe in the policy of coercing British opinion. Hon. Members from Ireland put themselves in antagonism to their own interests by alienating, as they constantly did, British opinion. They did not imagine that the people of this country listened to stories like that of Sheridan without a feeling of shame, and yet the reason such stories were received with indifference was not far to seek. There was a rooted fear on the part of the people of England that, if large powers were given to those who represented the majority in Ireland, they would use them to the prejudice of the minority. He, for his part, believed there was a policy which, if it were pursued with continuity and was not made the shuttlecock of partisanship, could be carried out with a large measure of success—the policy which would result in the people of Ireland getting the largest measure of control over their own affairs, and in drawing to them the confidence of the people of this country, who, when they saw things going step by step, and successfully, would be more and more ready to assent to a large extension of the power of control being given to the Irish people. The policy of the right hon. Gentleman was a policy of making large attempts, which were doomed to hopeless failure. He regarded the question as a particularly burning one, and considered that the time had come to put in a better position the only part of the British Empire which was in this black condition. That was only to be done by winning the confidence of the people It might be said that that was a difficult matter for the right hon. Gentleman to do, but it was the policy to follow out, and he was not without hope that the right hon. Gentleman might before long be able to mould his policy with regard to Ireland with greater authority than at present. It was a constructive policy that Ireland needed. The Irish people were reasonably disappointed with its slowness. They wanted something larger, and he wanted them to have something larger. He believed that if the right hon. Gentleman would pursue the policy of extending the sphere of administration by the people themselves, and would not be afraid of bringing forward such measures in a bolder fashion than anything that had yet been seen, there would be a great mitigation of the bitterness that now existed. It was a hard burden to put upon the right hon. Gentleman. But he was a man of originality and imagination; a great career was before him; he had a great opportunity; and it was to be wished that he would take the opportunity of making a clean sweep of some of these miserable things of which they had heard that day, and in relation to which he was made, not to do what was wrong, but to soften the position of those who found themselves dismissed from the police force for a great crime, and to take up an attitude towards them which could not but alienate the great mass of impartial onlookers. He wished the right hon. Gentleman could indicate a bolder course of administration, a course marked by some clear outlook. He had recognised in his policy and that of his predecessors a tendency towards something better. He hoped this tendency would be magnified and increased, and the elements of Irish policy complained of on the other side greatly diminished. They would all, in that hope, listen with interest to what the right hon. Gentleman had got to say in this debate.

I am afraid that I shall have to disappoint the right hon. and learned Member who has just addressed you. This is not, in my opinion, an occasion for laying down a constructive policy for Ireland, and certainly it is not an occasion on which I could, without being charged almost with insanity, state that I have found a solution of the Irish question which is to operate in the course of the next three months. Far he it from me—it would be impossible for any one—to reply in a controversial spirit to the speech which the right hon. and learned Member has just made. It was a balanced, an impartial, a kind-hearted, and a philosophic speech. But I must tell him that philosophic impartiality is the quality which he will find least appreciated in Ireland; and he must himself have noticed that those good counsels which he gave with philosophic impartiality, now to myself and now to hon. Members opposite, were received with chilling silence. When he was giving advice to them I agreed with every word; when he was giving advice to me, I believe they were honestly with him; but I believe we all felt that this attitude of balanced calm was so foreign to anything to which we are accustomed in Ireland, that even if we did agree we should be betraying our ignorance of the whole subject if we allowed our enthusiasm to carry us away into cheers. The right hon. Gentleman's speech was a summary, not so much of the debate, as of the impressions which the debate had made upon him. They were the familiar impressions, he told us, that we all remembered in debates of this kind. But how did this debate begin? The hon. and learned Member for Waterford, who moved the reduction of the Vote, said he found in that Motion an occasion for condemning the entire system of Government for which I, as Chief Secretary for the time being, happen to be responsible to this House. He followed that up with a series of short but sweeping charges against the police, the magistrates, and the Government upon this matter, and upon other matters. I shall pray for the indulgence of the Committee if I trespass on their time to make an explanation of the position of the Government, which is the position of the Government which preceded it, and a comprehensive reply to this weighty attack. But before I do that, it will be felt that I ought to deal with some extraneous and separate matters which have been imported into the general trend of this debate. I will get them out of the way, and return to the main charge of the hon. and learned Member for Waterford. I have been asked categorically to state the reason on which the Government founded its action at Rostrevor. On August 12th last year an Orange excursion party passed through Rostrevor on the way to Warrenpoint. The party numbered about 300; they were on brakes and cars. On arriving at Rostrevor they sent their vehicles along the shore road, which was the usual road followed by such parties, and they themselves marched in procession through Rostrevor, playing party tunes and shouting party cries. A collision, of course, resulted. The police did their best to preserve order, but in consequence of this unprecedented action on the part of the Orange procession—for no procession had before marched through their town—reprisals were on their return undoubtedly made by some of the Catholics, who were there in a large majority, and had gathered together—incensed, it may be, by some exaggerated accounts, as that the windows of the chapel had been broken, or incensed, in any case, because an Orange party demonstration, using party cries and playing party tunes, had gone through a Catholic district which had never been traversed by such a party before. There were a number of assaults, and a number of cross-summonses at the next petty sessions at Warrenpoint. The Bench, as I hold very wisely, counselled the mutual withdrawal of these summonses and advised the parties to use their best endeavours to live at peace in the future. Now, that is the reason for the action which the Government has taken. You have an Orange procession proceeding by a route which has never before been followed. You have that procession indulging in party tunes and cries. You have a Catholic party or Nationalist party making reprisals. You have a Court of petty sessions making the peace and advising them to keep it. There had been an unprecedented provocation, an illegal reprisal, and then a counsel of reconciliation. That being what took place last year, it came to the knowledge of the Government that a circular was being sent round urging that a new Orange demonstration should be made at this very place, obviously for the purpose of retaliation—of not leaving the whole matter where it stood. I, as an individual, might not altogether condemn that, recognising it as being a kind of temptation to which we all may be liable; but as a Minister responsible for the government of that country, I held, in common with Lord Cadogan, that we ought not to allow the setting up of new places where each party thought it was bound in honour to hold demonstration and counter-demonstration year by year. A certain number of such places now exist. These places it might be imprudent and a counsel of perfection to decrease; but we hold as a general rule that new incursions into the enemy's country either way should not be allowed when their introduction was for the purpose of provocation or for the purpose of retaliation. And I would point out that that rule is not a new departure. It is a reasonable and logical extension of the rule which has hitherto been followed. In Belfast, where both parties reside, the Executive has never allowed the Orange party to march through Catholic quarters, or the Catholic party to march through Orange quarters. But, surely, if that be a sound rule, it is a sound extension of it to say that an Orange excursion is not to go forty miles through intensely Catholic districts, or, vice versa, that a Catholic excursion is not to go through Orange districts. I do not know whether that will be accepted by everybody as satisfactory action on the part of the Government, but it will be taken as not being assistance to one side or the other, but as intended to be a sound rule of administration which, in the opinion of the Irish Government, it is wise on such occasions to follow. Then I think the hon. Member for North Antrim also raised the question of the Cork County Court-house. I am prepared to explain what happened there, as there seems to be a good deal of doubt upon the subject. There is no doubt that the Court-house is in the custody of the high sheriff. Baron Hughes laid it down in 1867 that the custody of the Court-house was entirely vested in the high sheriff of the county; and Chief Baron Palles, in January, 1900, said—

"It is an established maxim in our administration of justice that the Court-house is vested, by virtue of his office, in the high sheriff."

It is clear from the provisions of the Local Government Act of 1898 that it is not the duty of the sheriff to allow the Court-house to be employed for a political gathering. There is no shadow of doubt that the Court-house cannot be employed as a place to hold demonstrations of a kind that are a great scandal to all people who wish to see the law duly obeyed and reverenced in the country. Nobody knows that better than the hon. Members who ask what right had the sheriff to intervene. [A Voice: ''Who built the Court?" "Who paid for it?"] Nobody knows it better than the hon. Members who this session have introduced a Bill, which I think is not likely to pass, two clauses of which are for the purpose of making that lawful which is now unlawful. That Bill would not have been introduced if they had not been well aware that a Courthouse under the existing law cannot be used for a political meeting. For reasons I find it hard to follow, the High Sheriff seems to have been in doubt as to his responsibilities and his duties, clear as they are; and it was only late on the evening before the meeting that he telegraphed to the Government for instructions. The High Sheriff had no need of instructions. He has many duties, of which this is one, but there was no more occasion for him to ask for instructions in this matter than in the execution of a writ. The duty of the Government is to give to the sheriff all the force needed for his protection, but the office upon which he is engaged is matter for himself, and not for instruction or direction from the Government. But I am prepared to allow that in this case there was some difficulty and perplexity, for the County Council were allowed to hold their meeting, and it was the duty of the sheriff to allow it. The County Council having held a meeting at noon, at half past one that meeting was resolved into a meeting of the United Irish League. It was not until two o'clock that the local police received any communication from the high sheriff. It was not until three o'clock that they were able to collect first some twenty and then sixty men. The district inspector then came to the conclusion that he ought not, with so small a force, to endeavour to disperse a meeting of 800 persons inside a room with locked doors. [Cries of "Not locked."] The inspector general, after considering the use he had made of his discretion, agreed that the district inspector was right under the circumstances. But a grave scandal has occurred. If hon. Members listened to some of the extracts given by the Member for North Antrim from the speech made at this meeting by the hon. and learned Member for Waterford, they can come to only one conclusion—that the whole of the manaeuvre and the speeches made were calculated to affront, were designed to affront, and did affront the sentiment of a number of sober, law-abiding, peaceful citizens. [Interruption.] What a commentary are these jeers on the eirenicon of the hon. and learned Member for Haddington! If it is held permissible for a public body elected on a liberal and popular franchise, entrusted with grave matters of local concern, dispensing large sums of money collected in the district, and administering large sums from the common exchequer—if it be permissible, is it tolerable that such a body should take part in this tricky form of sky-larking, and then make it an occasion for delivering speeches which are intended to affront the sentiments of the great majority of the inhabitants of these two islands? That is a matter which deserves, and will receive, the attention of the Government. I pass hastily to some incidental attacks which were made in the course of the debate upon Mr. Harrel, the resident magistrate who had charge of a Crimes Act case at Sligo. I do not intend to delay the Committee long over this matter, but I feel bound to resent and reject the attacks which have been made upon a magistrate who has been faithfully discharging his duty, and upon the Under Secretary for Ireland—that is to say, a permanent Civil servant. We generally spare Civil servants in our debates in this House, and are content to attack the political Minister responsible for their actions. I think it is deplorable that in the course of this debate one allusion after another should have been made to the fact that Sir D. Harrel is the father of this resident magistrate, Mr. Harrel; because those who made the allusion, and those who now greet my reply with derision, know perfectly well that Sir David Harrel acted as any Civil servant in that position must act, as the I instrument merely of the Executive Government to carry out the orders and discharge all that is needed to effect the policy of the Government of the day. [Cries of "And so did his son."] It is suggested that a peculiar selection was made of Mr. Harrel instead of employing a magistrate resident in the district. I will not elaborate that. I should say that Mr. Harrel and Mr. Brown were the two obvious selections; but I should like to give the Committee the reasons which actuated the Government in not appointing Mr. Henn to adjudicate in this case. It will then be seen by the Committee that the Government, far from seeking a bench likely to be hostile to the hon. Member for North Leitrim, avoided purposely including on that Bench a man who had been outrageously attacked in the hon. Member's newspaper. The reason why Mr. Henn was not appointed was because the newspaper with which the hon. Member for North Leitrim is closely associated attacked him again and again in language I scarcely like to repeat in this House. The Committee will, I hope, feel the propriety of the course followed by the Government in not setting up as judge an honourable man and an able lawyer who had been subjected to vilification by the man who was to be tried. [Cries of "Why select Harrel?"] I think, although I have twice made a speech about Sheridan, I ought, perhaps, to add a few words this afternoon. But they shall be very brief, because I have fully stated the action taken and the reasons for it, and two divisions have been taken in the House on the subject. I know I have not convinced hon. Members opposite that the course I followed was the right one, but I have had the support of the majority of Members in the House, and I do not believe that I should have had a majority if the House believed that I was fairly accused, as I was this afternoon by the hon. and learned Member for Waterford, of being guilty of conduct which would justify my being driven out of public life.

I stated that if the right hon. Gentleman did not vindicate himself from responsibility for what occurred, then he ought to be driven from public life. He has not yet done so.

I have twice vindicated myself. The hon. Member does not accept my vindication, but if I had not succeeded in the sense in which he now uses the word, I should not have had a majority of hon. Members in the House. "They did not know the facts."] Let me pick up the gravamen of his attack. It was in his concluding words: "I charge the Government with having hushed up this affair." He began his sentence by saying, "I am of opinion," and then he changed and said, "No, it is not a matter of opinion. I charge the Government." Well, my reply, which is sufficient to meet that charge, is that, but for the Government, no one in this House would ever have heard of Sergeant Sheridan ["Oh, oh!"] I will run briefly over this much-travelled ground. A tramp called Ryan was arrested on January 4th for posting a threatening notice, a somewhat trivial offence. The depositions were unsatisfactory, and bore upon them marks of having been "cooked" by Sheridan and another officer named Mahony. The prosecution was abandoned on January 25th, and Ryan was released on the 26th. I recommended the discharge from the force, without claim to pension, of Sheridan and Mahony on February 4th, and on the 9th they were discharged. Many appeals came to the Government from Sheridan, many Questions were asked in the House during the month of March, but not one Question was asked referring, even in the remotest degree, to the earlier cases which have now been discussed.; The only reference, as far as I recollect, was in a Question from the hon. Member for South Leitrim in the early summer as to the case to McGoohan. I, acting for the Government, on looking into these earlier cases, advised that there should be a secret inquiry in order to make reparation, if that were possible, to these men in the event of its being shown that they had been improperly convicted. Two officers were charged with that secret investigation on May 18th, and the report of those officers was sent to the Irish Government on July 15th. I cannot name the day, or even the week, in which I investigated the report myself, but it was towards the end of the session, when there was a good deal of business in the House. I do not know whether it was at the end of July or the beginning of August that I investigated the report; but my case is, not that I investigated the report with a view to the prosecution of Sheridan for forgery—I have never advanced, and do not now advance, the statement that I took the report and considered it with a view to the prosecution of Sheridan, who had been discharged more than five months previously—I took it to see if I should be justified administratively in making reparation to the persons convicted on the evidence of Sheridan, to get at the truth, and to measure the extent of what seemed to me to be a most monstrous evil. If now, therefore, I give reasons that might have actuated me in not prosecuting Sheridan, it is, I admit, something in the nature of an ex post facto statement. The report contained no evidence: it was not based on evidence; it enforced the moral conviction by its cumulative effect. As I stated when this matter was discussed in August last, in each case the officers showed that the arrest was made prior to the verification of the offender charged. I said then, as I say now, that this, happening once, would be a wonderful coincidence; that if it occurred twice it would be matter for incredulity; and that, happening thrice, it became an insult to one's intelligence. I therefore felt justified in concluding that the men condemned were entitled to reparation.

The right hon. Gentleman says the report contained no evidence. Does he mean to tell us that no evidence was taken during the secret inquiry?

The hon. Member knows perfectly well that statements made not on oath are not evidence. I now come back to the point raised. What is urged is that, having a report written by the two officers stating their conclusions, I ought at the end of July or beginning of August to have set about taking depositions from the persons whom they had interviewed. I did investigate closely the possibilities of such a course. Having discharged Sheridan in February, having in May appointed two officers to hold an inquiry, with full power to arrive at the truth, and they having assured the policemen conneeted with Sheridan that if they told the truth they would not suffer, I felt that it was out of the question to put the police officers in the witness box. ["Why not?"] I know hon. Members do not agree with me; but they have stated their case three times, and I may be allowed to state what passed and what was present to my mind. I cannot give the terms or the words used to these men. They were verbal, and they were given to these men by those who conducted the inquiry. But they were of this character—that, when I had the result of the investigation, and the account of the means employed, before me, I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I was bound to keep these men in the constabulary if they wished to remain. A fortiori, I could not, in my opinion, put them into the witness box, and even if I had, I could not have compelled them to give any evidence which they were not prepared to give of their own free will.

But they had been parties to a crime.

One of them, in my opinion, was a party to a crime. The other two, in my opinion, knew that Sheridan was not speaking the truth, and if they had had sufficient moral courage they might have exposed him, but they did not do so.

But the right hon. Gentleman still thought it desirable that they should remain in the constabulary force.

I did not think it was desirable. I thought it was a grave calamity, and I have so stated. But I had to choose between two calamities—keeping people in the police force who ought not to be kept there, and breaking an undertaking which had been given by the Government. It was explained to these men that if they were kept in the force they could never be used in any position of trust. An hon. Member said that one of these in en was still free to interfere with the people of Ireland. I stated most explicitly the other day that it was explained to them that they could never leave the depôt; that they could, if they liked, go on serving for such pay as they were entitled to, but that, if they left the force and sought to find a place again as honest men, they would be allowed to do so, and would be given the means for starting afresh. That has been derided as giving a compassionate allowance.

You used the phrase yourself.

Would the undertaking given to these men, in order to arrive at the truth, have been carried out if they had been turned out of the force in which they were earning high wages, cut off from the pension to which they were entitled, and turned into the streets in the clothes in which they stood? No; it was necessary that they should be given a certain sum of money. But I supposing another course had been adopted—the course which, I gathered the other night, the hon. and learned Member for Dumfries would himself have recommended. I had it present to my mind that, in Ryan's case, but a few months before, it had been impracticable to take proceedings against Sheridan for perjury. It did not occur to me I that that which was impracticable in respect of an offence of five months standing would prove more feasible in cases all of which were three years old, and in which the principal witness could not be compelled to go into the box and incriminate himself. This impression—I ought not to call it a conclusion—was heightened by the fact that in the first case—in Bray's case—the poor man, unfortunately, had died long before I ever heard the name of Sergeant Sheridan. In the second case—the case of Murphy—he had pleaded guilty, and any one acquainted with the difficulties of proving a charge of perjury will conceive what slight grounds there were for expecting a conviction when you endeavour to prove perjury in a case that I had been determined previously by due process of law. In the third case—McGoohan's case—there was no evidence, and no chance of obtaining evidence, outside the admissions of Sheridan's accomplices. McGoohan himself had made an affidavit, saying, "I was alone that night, and it was impossible for me to make a defence or to explain my action." What evidence could a man in those circumstances give in the box?

Could he not swear that he did not do it?

The cumulative effect of these three cases was convincing to me. But, in a prosecution for perjury, each one of these cases would have been tried singly on its own merits; and I am of opinion—I may be wrong—that if each one had been tried singly on its own merits, Sheridan would have been acquitted—the jury would almost certainly have been divided. Had that been so, the results achieved—namely, the making; of reparation to innocent men, and the ridding the force of those who had in any degree connived at Sheridan's malpractices—would most certainly have been imperilled. Now, it must seem all I plain sailing when every hon. Member I who speaks in this House accepts from me that I was the first person who had proof that Sheridan was a scoundrel, and that he did commit these villainies. But, at the time of which we are speaking, that was not the view. The hon. Member for East Mayo himself, speaking on August 17 last year, made a balanced speech, saying that Sheridan was either guilty or the victim of some vile conspiracy on the part of his brother officers. That went on. The Press—what I may call the Nationalist, Press—either suggested that Sheridan was himself an innocent victim, or balanced between the two alternatives, and more than that, Canon Scully, the priest of the parish in Limerick where Sheridan had served, wrote a letter, to the Daily Independent, I think it was, in which he professed his entire belief in the innocence of Sheridan, and regarded him as being the victim of a conspiracy. So that, if Sheridan had been put on his trial, you would not have had the general view that he was a villain who might be condemned with or without legal evidence. You would have had the view that he was an innocent man, who himself had been the victim of oppression. As far as I can recollect, it was not until a letter appeared, written by the hon. Member for South Leitrim, who all along seems to have held that Sheridan was a villain, in the Daily Independent, that Sheridan left the country, and that everybody seemed to come round to the view, which I have held since July, that Sheridan was a villain.

Why did you not arrest him?

Then this melancholy, deplorable case has been used as the starting-point for accusations for which there is no foundation at all. We have had great indignation of these false charges of Sheridan. That indignation comes from hon. Members who, without a shred of evidence, think they are entitled to say that Sheridan is but a type and a sample; and, again, it is represented that if these men were convicted, as they were although innocent, it was due to the machinations of the Government. Take the case of McGoohan. When he was first brought up he was remanded by a Justice of the Peace, Dr. Mulcahy. He is not a supporter of the Government. I understand he is himself a leading Nationalist, a member of the United Irish League and of the Directory. That person, who you cannot say was a prejudiced party, accepted Sheridan's story, pressed somewhat hardly, as I now think, against McGoohan, and sent him by his own action to be tried at Sligo. [An IRISH MEMBER: What else was he to do as a Magistrate?]. I hope hon. Members will allow me to proceed. I do not think my point is an imperceptible one. It is that that person, who cannot be considered to have been an agent of the Government, was himself at the time of opinion that McGoohan was a person who ought to be returned for trial, and was himself the person who returned him for trial at Sligo. We are told that Sligo juries are packed, and it has been suggested that the Government sent McGoohan to be tried at Sligo on that account. But on the first jury there was a majority of Catholics, and on the second jury, which unanimously came to the conclusion that McGoohan was guilty, there was again a Catholic and a Nationalist, Mr. J. T. O'Brien, of Ballymole. He must have been convinced that McGoohan was not an innocent man. The fact is, Sheridan deceived the magistrate—he deceived the jury at Sligo—he deceived the papers which appeared to champion his cause—he deceived many hon. Members opposite; and it is only when in the long run he failed to deceive the Government that all these hon. Members band themselves together and make out that the Government is alone to blame for not having detected this infamy before. But the charge that Sheridan is but a fair type and sample of the police is one which must be repudiated with some warmth. Who are the Royal Irish Constabularly? The pick and flower of the small farmers of the Irish race, related by marriage and friendship to all those who are most prominent supporters of hon. Members opposite. And it is this attack that is made on some 11,000 odd of the very flower of the nation. It is repudiated by some of the most advanced organs of opinion in the Press. I have a copy of the United Irishman in my hand, and I think it goes rather further than hon. Members are prepared to go at the present moment. It is somewhat of a Fenian organ, and not at all friendly to the Government. The United Irishman regrets the fact that these denunciations had been made, and it declares—

"The Royal Irish Constabulary is a body of Irishmen recruited from the Irish people; bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. The typical young constabulary man is Irish of the Irish; Catholic, and (as the word goes) Nationalist; the son of decent parents; his father a Home Rule farmer; his mother a Home Rule farmer's daughter; his uncle a patriotic priest; his cousin a nun; his sweetheart the daughter of a local Nationalist District Councillor and patriotic publican; her uncle again being Chairman of the local "League" branch, and the friend of the eloquent and patriotic member for the Division, who asks questions "on the floor" about the young constabularyman's prospects and grievances. The young con-stabularyman subscribes liberally to the Church; he is smiled on by the Irish clergy; be is smiled on by Irish girls; he is respected by the young fellows of the street corner and the country cross-roads."

But when a debate conies on in this House, the whole Irish National party gets up man after man, and would have us believe—of course, we do not believe it, and, of course, they do not believe it—that a considerable number of the Irish constabulary are villains of the deepest dye. All through this sad business I have never — as it is said, two blacks do not make a white—besmirched other police forces by bringing, as I could easily have brought, solitary instances of this character as painful and, shocking. They are known to exist in all large bodies of men; but I say this in defence of the Royal Irish Constabulary, against these unmerited and unsubstantiated slanders, that they are a body of men of whom every Irishman may be legitimately proud. There was some derision on the other side of the House because the United Irishman is a physical force paper. [A NATIONALIST MEMBER: Yes, subsidised by the Government.] In this House hon. Members for Ireland have few good words to say for the physical force party. [An IRISH MEMBER: That is not so.] But the hon. Member for North Kilkenny who seconded the Motion—who only took his seat yeaterday, and made a very eloquent speech—when in America was at great pains to explain to his American audiences that really there I was that close harmony with the physical force party. Let me quote his words—

"I myself am of opinion that it is always a good thing in Ireland to have not only what is known as the constitutional movement, but to have also in existence a physical force party, even if that spirit is never concreted into action."

He went on to utter sentiments which would fill the right hon. Member for Haddington with despair.

"When we have freedom, then will be the time for those who think we should destroy the last link which binds us to England to operate, by whatever means they think best, to achieve that great and desirable end. I am quite sure I speak for the United Irish League in Ireland."

This attack on the police reminds me, and must remind many in this House, of many former debates. No fact in former debates ever made a deeper impression on my mind than the fact that in 1893 Mr. Sexton, who was then a Member of this House, moved an Amendment to the Home Rule Bill of Mr. Gladstone, in order that an Executive responsible to a Dublin Parliament might remain in possession of a central police force. The Bill, as drafted, provided for disbanding the Royal Irish Constabulary and for trusting to local forces alone. Mr. Sexton said—

"Pending the final settlement of the land question, there may be disorder in Ireland, there may be agrarian trouble in one county or another, and it may not be expedient for some years to place on the local authorities the responsibility of preserving order."

The present leader of the Nationalist Party supported that Amendment, and used these words—

"The government of Ireland under an Irish Parliament and an Irish Executive will necessitate for a considerable time the existence of some central police force, which will be quite apart from the local forces that will be created in the different localities. I take the strongest possible view ou this question, and when it comes up in another form, on an Amendment by the Prime Minister, I will express my opinion on the other branch of this subject as to whether this force should not be armed and drilled within certain limits."

The present Prime Minister took notice of that, and of the interesting claim of the hon. Member that it was impossible to govern Ireland, even under Home Rule, unless you had an armed and drilled police, force to assist the Executive in protecting liberty and property pending the settlement of the land question. That is part and parcel of all the other incidents which are brought forward, such incidents as prosecutions under what is called the Statute of Edward III. I make no reproach against the right hon. Member for Montrose when I say that in his time he instituted 279 cases of agrarian origin, that in his time he had to proclaim some thirty-nine public meetings, and suppress them by this armed and drilled police force, and that his conduct elicited the most ruthless condemnation from a number of Nationalist newspapers. I do not refer to that as a barren tu quoque argument; I do not defend myself against a general impeachment levelled by the hon. and learned Member against the Government by saying that the same kind of thing was said even of the right hon. Member for Montrose Burghs. I do it to show that under any Administration in Ireland, even under an Administration in close alliance with the Nationalist Party and seeking to satisfy it with Home Rule, there is a necessity for a special police force, and there is a necessity, if not for the use of a special law, at any rate for the special use of the law which the right hon. Gentleman employed. These things lead, and must lead, to collisions between the people and the police, lead, and must lead to such discreditable episodes as that in the Court house of Cork; they are designed to lead to collision between the people and the police; and then each of these instances is taken up and isolated, and magnified not as a symptom of Ireland's unrest, but as the source of it. We are told that if you have no police, no magistrates, the troubles in the country would cease. [Nationalist cries of "No!" and "Whoever said that?"] It has been said over and over again ["Never"!] that it is a great mistake to have a large force of armed and drilled police, that they ought to be, if not disbanded, reduced to narrow limits. It is said that their intervention is uncalled-for and unprovoked, and that if there are collisions it is the fault of the police, and the way in which they are handled under the Government. Let me take one of those incidents, in order to explain, and therefore to defend, the conduct of the Government by tracing it back to its source. Say that a crowd assembles to intimidate some individual with a band and opprobrious cries; it is not a chance crowd—it is one crowd of many, the symptom of an organized evil which was widespread, and, in old days, was significant of far more terrible consequences than now happily ensue, an evil which would have become general unless it had been stopped by the Government by the use of special police and also the use of a special law. That single instance is isolated, and then a contrast is drawn between the government of Ireland and the government of England. I wish to put this quite dispassionately, and I make this-admission. In England, when you have a solitary instance of turbulent and intimidatory action being taken in connection with some local right of ownership or occupation, or with some civil right of employment and personal liberty, on the first occasion there would not be a great number of police on the spot. I read only the other day in the newspapers of a crowd of 2,000 people, who levelled fences and sacked a house because they thought they had a right of way over the ground on which it was built. Again, if any persons were made amenable to the law in England because they had been guilty of rioting, when first so made amenable they would be lenient treated. But if an organised attempt was made all over England to decide such issues, not by pleadings in Law Courts, not by discussions in this House, but by deliberate turbulence and calculated intimidation, then in England, as in Ireland, the police would have to be multiplied and organised, in England, as in Ireland, the Courts would inflict a heavy penalty, and in England, as in Ireland, the Government as a last resource would have to pass and to employ special legislation. You cannot easily find a complete parallel for the trouble which now exists in Ireland. You find something of the kind on a very small scale if you go back to the Featherstone riots; you find something of the same kind, on a larger scale, if you go back to the Sheffield rattening cases: but to get anything like a parallel in the happier annals of this country yon must go back to the Luddites. Most people thought then—everybody thinks now, I suppose—that the Luddites were wrong in thinking they could assist labour by destroying machinery. Most of us on this side of the House think that the Irish agitator is wrong in thinking that he can assist Irish agriculture by expatriating the landlord and condemning the tenants to the roadside. But, in either ease, measures for protection and measures for punishment are not dictated by a view of the moral or economical merits or demerits of these controversies which give rise to such excesses; they are dictated by the sole duty of protecting the persons and liberty of citizens of this country, and that plain duty becomes enforced and magnified when the problem attains a large size. We are charged with being responsible for the trouble in Ireland, because we have not passed a peculiar land law which would solve all difficulties; and therefore it is said that upon us lies the blame. In this country, if legislation of a special character were introduced, in the interests of the community at large, it would be discussed in this House, although it might have to wait a session or two for an opportunity of being discussed; existing rights would be safeguarded, and any attempt to rush this House while that legislation was being discussed, or after it was passed, but while it was on its trial, in the direction of going further and faster in disturbing existing rights or hypothecating public credit than the House was prepared to go, would be resisted by almost every single member in this Assembly. That is the cause of all the trouble now, a factitious attempt to rush this House by manufacturing collisions between the people and the police. When these collisions occur, the Government has to call up the reserves which are always there for the protection of society. Each incident is magnified into an act of wanton aggression, and the Government is impeached upon the Chief Secretary's salary. But the blame does not rest on the police, on the magistrates, or on the Government; the blame rests upon those who find it easier to inflame the peasant of Ireland with rhetoric than to persuade this House by argument. It is after all far easier to organise agitation than to master a case for remedial legislation, and to present it in a convincing manner to this House. May I attempt to make that good? The charge against the Government is that it will not proceed in the right direction, or fast enough, with remedial legislation in Ireland. What is going on? Two entirely inconsistent policies of dealing with the Irish land question are thrown at our heads at the same time. Compulsory, immediate, universal purchase is one panacea; I believe that is impossible in itself, but it is certain that it is demonstrably impossible unless you merely content yourself with soiling to each occupier the holding he happens to occupy at the moment. The other policy flung at our heads at the same time, however, is that of dividing all the large farms and distributing them among those who are only in the possession of small impoverished holdings. Those two policies cannot be carried out at one and the same moment, and no attempt is being made by hon. Members opposite who feel justified in raising another agrarian agitation in Ireland to give one hour's work to either of these schemes. What are their own views? I may say that one of their newspapers says as much—the Western News— the editor of which has been prosecuted and imprisoned in the course of the present year.

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the editor of that paper is a Conservative?

He called me by many harsh Dames, but what he said in his paper with regard to the policy of dividing the large farms and distributing them was this—

"It is all very well to say 'divide the gross lands,' but amongst whom are they to be divided? Where are the people? And how are the few we have to be spread out upon the land? What is the United Irish League doing? Has it any lists of men who could be relied on definitely to take up and cultivate small farms successfully? There is a great day's work before the League, if we only knew how to go about it."

Is it not the case that he was sentenced to six months imprisonment for writing articles in that paper?

In any case I think the Committee will feel that there is some sense in these remarks, and that there is no justification for attacking the Government on the score that it-represses agitation. If you start that agitation and carry out a wild-cat scheme without having been at least at the pains to discover whether it is practicable and peaceable, there is no justification for hon. Members to throw these two policies together when in the past they have not shown so much zeal in the cause of land purchase as justifies them in taking up that attitude. We have the hon. and learned Member for Waterford leading a large party in the House and the hon. Member for South Tyrone leading a smaller contingent. I say that neither of these leaders has urged his views on land purchase with a persistency and cogency over so long a period of years as to justify either of them in recommending or palliating disorder started on the ground that the Government is remiss in these matters, and that it is blind to the remedies which are as obvious as they are urgent. Take, first, the leader of the smaller of the two Irish parties who are opposed to the Government.

Every Ulster member, with the exception of the Member for North Armagh, is pledged to compulsory sale.

That is an admirable example of the spirit in which the hon. Member conducts this con- troversy. Supposing that every Member for Ulster is pledged in favour of compulsory sale, does that prove that the denial of this House of a Compulsory Sale Bill is a sufficient reason for palliating an agrarian combination which has destroyed all liberty? Can such attempts at palliation be put forward with any plausibility by an hon. Member who has himself denounced compulsory purchase?

I never made such attempts.

I am bound to quote the language used on this question of compulsory sale by the hon. Member. Speaking at Fivemilestone in 1890. he said—

"Mr. Chamberlain—and, at least, I know his views—is not in favour of universal compulsion. Neither is Mr. Balfour. Rant of this kind is more worthy of the platform of a Kerry moonlighter than of a sober Ulsterman. But, if I liked I could imitate these reckless orators. I could pledge myself to compulsion. I could extol it as a heaven-born principle. I could tell you that, with it passed, the golden age would return. I could promise it next year, as O'Connell was wont to promise Repeal, and as the Parnellites now promise Home Hide. I absolutely decline to adopt this course. Whether it makes for or against my political future, I will not stoop to tell you lies, to tell you that a thing is possible when I know it to be impossible—to tell you that, a thing is rising on the horizon of politics when I know that it is outside the scope of all reasonable or practical politic. This, I hope, is plain speaking."

I now beg to ask the right hon. Gentleman, is that a proof that I palliate disorder in Ireland?

It is not my proof—

I should say not: it is the opposite.

But it is my statement that an hon. Member who denounced the plan as impracticable and unreasonable, palliated disorder in Ireland when he stated that voluntary purchase was a sufficient reason for having an agrarian combination leading to agitation, when he charged the Governmen with the whole responsibility for this disorder; and because the Government have not found the time to do voluntarily that which he not many years ago stated to be impossible, on the ground that he would not imitate hon. Members opposite by telling his constituents lies. I must take the leader of the smaller party to a later date. In 1898 the hon. Member made use of words which showed that he was satisfied in all except minor details with the Irish land system of that country. What he said showed that his mind was turning almost exclusively on rent-fixing and the laws affecting tenure, and that progress had been made in the matter of purchase. Every man has a right to change his mind, but he has not a right to attack the rest of mankind, including the Government of which he was recently a member, because it displayed less agility of conscience and belief. I turn now to the leader of the larger Irish party opposed to the Government, and in order to be quite dispassionate, I will not give my own account of their past attitude on the question of land purchase. I will give the picture drawn by the leader of the smaller party. Referring to the attitude of the Nationalist party on the Land Purchase Bill, the hon. Member for South Tyrone, speaking in the House of Commons on 29th March, 1892, used these words—

"On the 22nd November, 1888, when the House was asked to pass the second five millions, sixty-seven Members of the Irish party voted against the Second Reading of the Bill, and if they had had their way, half the freeholders created under those Acts would now be yearly or judicial tenants. The second Ash-bourne Act was passed in spite of hon. Members below the gangway. On the 1st May, 1890, the first Land Purchase Bill came to issue in this House. It was a better Bill in every respect than the Bill of last year, but though it proposed to place at the disposal of the Irish tenant farmers a sum of thirty millions of British credit for the purchase of their holdings, seventy-eight Irish Members—practically a unanimous party — walked into the Lobby against the Second Reading, and sought to deprive the tenants of this great boon. Six months later, on the 3rd December, the Bill which is now the Land Purchase Act was brought before the House, and it proposed to place thirty-three millions of British credit at the disposal of the Irish tenants. Where were the hon. Members then? All of them were in London, but they were occupied in Committee Room No. 15, and only twenty-five of them, headed by the late Mr. Parnell, came down to vote for the Second Reading. The rest abstained from voting."

That was their attitude on the Land Purchase Bill of 1891, and I would remind the Committee that the regular Opposition of that day, led by the right hon. Member for West Monmouthshire, fought that Land Purchase Bill tooth and nail. Yet those who carried it out, and have since extended its operation, are accused of being so remiss, of being blind to patent and obvious remedies, that for this disorder in Ireland they are responsible, and if they put it down they are criminals at large. I can afford to carry that matter down to a later date. The Daily Independent of 29th December, 1898, re-published the following report of an interview with Mr. Redmond by a representative of the Pall Mall Gazette.

"'By the way, a new land war is spoken of. Will you give me your views on its prospect?' "

" 'Land war! There will be no land war. No league or organisation could bring it about.'"

On 20th January, 1900, there was a meeting of the Connaught Directory of the United Irish League in Claremorris.

Are these the same quotations which the right hon. Gentleman has given three times this session?

This one will have the charm of novelty. At that meeting Mr. Davitt was chairman. The meeting passed a number of resolutions, one of which said—

"The promoters of this Parliamentary unity have declared that 'there is no longer any land question in Ireland.' "

I never said that.

These were the words of the resolution proposed by Mr. Davitt, and seconded by the hon. Member for Cork City. If up to 1898 and 1900 you have the leaders of the two Irish parties being soundly taken to task for the urgency of the land question and the feasibility of certain solutions, why are we to be attacked and the Government blamed for trouble in Ireland because our attitude now is what their attitude was then? The whole charge is not only that we are slow or remiss or parsimonious in this matter, but of being blind to remedies which are so simple as to justify agrarian agitation throughout Ireland, which stops all liberty in that country and checks all progress; and when we attempt to deal with the agitation, the whole British rule is held up to odium as being comparable to the worst phases of despotic administration. This monstrous pretension—the failure on the part of Parliament to deal with the Land question now as a justification for this excess—is brought forward by a party which has day after day been voting with the Government in attempting to give education to Irish children in our large towns. That is an inconsistency of which the hon. Member for South Tyrone has not been guilty. If I turn to the Government's attitude, I can say that, year after year and session after session, we have extended the credit available for land purchase, and we have given more money for administrative work, which is the corollary of any extensive operations. I shall invite the House—I have invited the House—to proceed with purchase at a pace which is consistent with the security of the taxpayer and with efficiency and economy. It is in these circumstances that a land war is to be declared, although its inevitable consequences are known to be destitution for the poorest soldiers that are enlisted, the scaring out of the country of capital and industrial enterprise, and constant friction and collision between the people and the police. An appeal is addressed to the courage of the Irish people, whose bravery has been proved on many a stricken field, and never more conspicuously than during the recent war. But what a sordid enterprise is this chivalrous race invited to undertake: to blow horns at night to frighten people, to bring pressure to bear on the most defenceless of their neighbours!— and all these evils are to go on pending the settlement of the Land question; and of this very idea of settling the Land question I suppose the operations on the De Freyne estate are the best example. That may be taken as the touchstone of the chances of settlement. Pending the settlement of the Land question nothing is to be done; and it is to be settled, so it seems, by a policy of proscription, which, if—Heaven forbid—it is permitted to proceed, must lead by the mere process of exhaustion to the Irish nation's consisting of the solitary figure of the hon. Member for Cork City presiding, like a new Alexander Selkirk, over a wilderness. Mr. Davitt said, at Sligo on July 7. that there were three vital national necessities—first, a great economical impetus to industrial development; secondly, the cessation of agrarian crime; and, thirdly, a counter-influence to that of emigration. These are fair objects, but they can never be attained by chasing the rainbow and baying the moon. Irishmen of all ranks, and notably the landlords as well as the peasants, desire alike to live in their own country and not to send their children across the sea. The peasants are told, and therefore in part believe, that this can only be compassed by Home Rule. They are told, and some, strange to say, seem to believe, that Home Rule can be won by boycotting their more defenceless neighbours. They are told to go to gaol for that sinister offence, which works as much moral harm on the perpetrator as it inflicts material loss on the victim. They are ordered to ruin their neighbours and to degrade themselves. Others, including many of the commercial and professional classes, whilst yielding to none in national aspiration, and believing that a larger measure of self-government should be accorded, are loyal to the Empire, and view with alarm and disgust the prospect of being placed under the heel of a party which encourages class feuds and social tyranny. Yet others, more justly as we think, hold that the chance of extirpating that evil and averting the calamity of a decreasing population lies, not only in loyalty to the Empire, but also in union with this country and representation in this House. These constitutional questions have been argued, and they may be argued again. On this side of the House we are Unionist. On the other some are Home Rulers, either under existing conditions, or under new conditions which no one has been able to define, still less to create. Each may adhere to his conviction and seek to persuade lay argument. But this is certain. There can be no cessation to agrarian strife, there can be no stanching of emigration, there can be no revival of industry, the Union must become intolerable, and any development of self-government must remain impossible unless and until the desolating process of social proscription—with its attendant I miasma of apprehension, which penetrates to and paralyses every nerve centre of national life—be repudiated by the good sense of the people and suppressed by the power of the Government.

said the right hon. Gentleman had gone somewhat out of his way to make a direct personal attack upon him. He did not complain in the least, because before he finished his speech he should deal with the actual facts. The right hon. Gentleman had charged him with inconsistency on the question of land purchase. Upon that question he had nothing to conceal. He could have been content with a system of rent fixing if that system had been fairly administered, but he had said all along that what had driven the Ulster tenants into the demand for compulsory sale and purchase had been the maladministration of the Land Acts in the Land Courts. As purchase had proceeded year by year the position had become more intolerable, and any man who ten years ago might have been willing to go on with rent fixing, seeing that 70,000 occupiers had become owners, might without inconsistency say that what bad been done for them should be done for all. That was exactly his position. What had been the history of the right hon. Gentleman's own position in connection with the land question? In the session of 1901 the Speech from the Throne promised a Land Bill, but it came to nothing. The Ulster farmers, Unionists almost to a man, asked the right hon. Gentleman to receive a deputation, and he point blank declined. They made a second application, which the right hon. Gentleman again refused. Then the right hon. Gentleman introduced a Bill which he tried to send to a Committee upstairs as non-controversial. Then he stood at that Table and asked the representatives of these tenants to confer with him. Would it not have been better to consult the tenants before he introduced that Bill? The right hon. Gentleman had made an extraordinary statement about his speeches on the De Freyne estate. He said that the right hon. Gentleman had absolutely and intentionally misrepresented what he said. He was as loyal and law-abiding as the right hon. Gentleman himself, and he had no right to use his great position to make a statement of the kind.

in resuming his speech, said that when interrupted by the Adjournment he had commenced to draw attention to the administration of affairs by the Government in the West of Ireland. His own view was that the situation in the West of Ireland was the main problem which the Government had to face. He thought it was full of danger; he was certain it was full of injustice, and he was quite clear in his own mind that the Government were largely responsible for it. Now, for the last nine years the Government had been pursuing a policy, through the Congested Districts Board, of which everybody in this House who followed it must approve. That Board was formed in 1891 and. it had done much to ameliorate the condition of the peasantry in the West of Ireland. Of late years it had devoted the principal part of its attention to the purchase of land, to the creation of a peasant proprietary, and what he might call the dressing of farms and their enlargement. He had not a word but that of praise and admiration for the action of the Board and of the Chief Secretary as its Chairman, but they quite recently had pursued a policy which had resulted in three things— First of all, the suspension of the Constitution over a great area in Ireland; second, the eviction of tenants, who, notwithstanding what the right hon. Member for South Antrim had said, he maintained, were utterly unable to pay the rents and the costs which had been heaped upon them; and, third, the formation of a Land Trust, which apparently was going to begin a war in Ireland of which no one could see the end. That was a very serious state of affairs. He would put the case historically. The Dillon estate which had been purchased consisted of 90,000 acres, it was to a large extent poor land, reclaimed bog. There were, both on the Dillon and the De Freyne estates, grass lauds which must be differentiated from those held by the people. In times past there never was an occasion of want or famine but the pinch was first felt on the Dillon estate, because the people were poor, lived from hand to mouth, and the first pressure brought them to the verge of starvation. Well, that estate was purchased, and he maintained that under all the circumstances that particular purchase was a grievous mistake in policy on the part of the Government. In the first place, it exhausted the whole of the money at the disposal of the Congested Districts Board, for they expended on it something like £300,000. In the second place, in doing so the Board set up an object lesson which had disturbed the whole province of Connaught ever since. It was no answer to him that there was a town land, as the Member for South Antrim had said, in the middle of that country which had been bought many years ago. In his opinion the purchase of a small town land by the Government, and its re-sale to the tenants, was one thing and the purchase of a whole country-side of 90,000 acres, with 4,200 tenants, was quite a different thing, because it set up an object lesson which could not be mistaken. They had reduced the rents on that estate by 6s. 8d. in the £, and the Government surely could not have expected that a thing like that would produce no excitement. Another thing they had done was to wipe out thousands of arrears—he had heard it stated in the district that it amounted to £20,000— in order to give the people a fair start, and they were now spending large sums in drainage works, and in the repair of houses. Just imagine 4,200 tenants getting their rents reduced by 33 per cent., getting their arrears wiped out, getting their houses repaired and their land drained by this beneficent Government, and then imagine the feelings of the tenants on the neighbouring estates who had got nothing of the kind. He had been accused by the Chief Secretary that night of palliating the disorder that had occurred in that district; he charged the right hon. Gentleman with having created it. He would put the matter clearly. It was impossible for any body of men sitting in a room in Rutland Square, Dublin, to come to the conclusion that action of that kind would not produce difficulties on the estates round the Dillon Estate. As a matter of course, the whole district was at once roused. What followed? A combination was formed. What for? To pay no rent? Nothing of the kind. The combination was formed to ask from Lord De Freyne the same terms which the Dillon tenants had received from the Government. That was the first request, and it was refused: Lord De Freyne, like the Chief Secretary with the Ulster tenants, even refused to see them when they wished to interview him. Things went from bad to worse, and led to what he thought was a breach of the law, because he had written over and over again that it was an offence for a man to stand on any platform and advise a tenant not to pay his rent. Let him here point out a curious omission in the brilliant defence of the Chief Secretary. The Constitution was suspended, but who signed the Proclamation suspending it? The Chief Secretary had not a word to say about that. It was signed by Mr. Smith-Barry and Lord Clonbrock, the two men who only a week before had become the leading members of the landlords' conspiracy against the people. They were Members of the Privy Council, and attended the meeting of the Privy Council, but Privy Councillors only attended the meeting of the Privy Council when they were invited. They therefore must have been invited by the Government to attend the Privy Council in order to sign the Proclamation. The Chief Secretary had whirlwinds of abuse for hon. Members opposite, and for himself, but the right hon. Gentleman had not one word to say in defence of an atrocity like that. The Constitution was suspended, men were sent to gaol, and everything went topsy-turvy. He saw the right hon. the Member for Montrose in his place. That right hon. Gentleman would remember that when he was Chief Secretary for Ireland he had to supply the forces of the Crown for evictions in this district. Who assailed him at that time, who described the condition of the tenants, who begged him to stay his hand? His right hon. friend would admit that he was foremost, ten years ago, in pointing out the condition of these poor people, and although he had written columns in the London Times, at the request of other people, the right hon. Gentleman had never accused him then, and would not do it now, of palliating disorder. It was only men who had no defence for themselves, it was only men who had sold themselves body and soul to the Irish landlords, it was only men who had gone over bag and baggage to the evictors, who dared to bring such charges against those who were as loyal and as law-abiding as themselves. Now, as to the position of the tenants. The right hon. Member for South Antrim charged the tenants' solicitor with creating the trouble, and being responsible for the whole thing. Fortunately, his hon. friends the Members for North-West Lanark, for Oldham, for Dewsbury, and for Orkney, had just come back from a visit to the De Freyne estate, and he hoped they would have an opportunity of stating what they thought of the speech of the right hon. Gentleman. The hon. Member for South Antrim dealt with the question of heaping up the costs on the poor tenants, and said that it was the lawyers that were responsible for that. But might he ask, in all humility, why Lord De Freyne had gone to the Superior Courts at all? In 1887 he remembered that he was humbugged into assenting to what was called the "eviction made easy Clause," by which it was only necessary for the landlord, instead of going to the Superior Courts, to serve a registered letter on the tenant who was a defaulter in his rent, in order to determine his tenancy. Six months after the service of the registered letter, if the arrears of rent had not been redeemed, Lord De Freyne could have got an order from the nearest petty sessions court to put the tenant out of his farm. That was the law. Lord De Freyne could have taken that course at a trifling cost, but instead he went to the Superior Courts., and heaped up costs to the amount of £40 on each tenant—an amount which it was impossible for the tenants to pay. So much for the costs; he would now come to the right hon. Gentleman's statement in regard to rent. He confessed candidly that, along with his hon. friends who accompanied him, he had some difficulty in getting at the facts of the rent. He was quite aware of the possibility of being misled by Irish peasants in regard to the acreage of their holdings, and the rent they were asked to pay. They might be talking about statute acres while the peasants might be talking about Irish acres. His hon. friends opposite would remember that he advised them to go to the agent on the De Freyne estates and get him to tell his side of the story as to the amount of the rents. He himself did not propose to go with them to the agent, for the very good reason that he would have acted upon him like a red rag to a bull, and they would have got no information whatever. But these two stalwart Imperialists. followers of Lord Rosobery, and therefore having none of the character of the hon. Member for South Tyrone, as described by the Chief Secretary — whose opinion the hon. Member for South Tyrone did not care a rap for—surely ought to have been afforded the information. Lord De Freyne's agent told the hon. Gentlemen that he was prohibited from giving any information about the estate, and referred them to Lord De Freyne. The right hon. Member for South Antrim got his information from the rent office.

No, I did not.

said he stood corrected. But the right hon. Gentleman in his figures had included not only the arable land of the holdings, but the acres of heather-land adjoining.

said that he reckoned the arable land only.

said that it was all very well to give the average rent per acre of farms, but in these holdings hundreds of acres were such that a spade could not be put into the ground.

denied that he included commonage in his average. He gave the average rent, and added that the occupier had the free right of grazing over a commonage of six acres. He saw the common, and there was no heather on it at all.

said he had seen the land himself, and he had asked man after man there how the rent was paid. He found out that they depended for assistance upon their children in America, and upon English labour. One told him that his daughter had already sent him £20 that year. That was where the money came from. The Chief Secretary had suspended the Constitution in Roscommon in order that Lord de Freyne should be able to seize American money orders for his rent. The Irish Government ought not, in the circumstances, to have made this tremendous experiment on the Dillon estate. It would have been much safer for them to have gone on with the purchase of small areas and to have left this huge piece of land until something like a final settlement of the Irish land question had been arrived at. By making this experiment they had set up an object lesson which would stand in spite of anything the Chief Secretary might do. The Attorney General had said that the action of the tenants was perfectly natural.

I said it was a perfectly natural outcome of the teaching they had received.

suggested that that was a new and revised edition of the right hon. Gentleman's speech. The tenants took up their present attitude long before hon. Gentlemen opposite appeared on the scene. They were on the very brink of starvation; the failure of the potato crop meant ruin, and they were dependent on help from America; and, instead of being helped by the Government, battalions of constabulary were sent down. He wanted to make his position clear. He was against all reform by law breaking, and never had a fouler and more untrue charge been made against any man than that preferred against him by the Chief Secretary. He had always maintained that the Irish Members in that House were strong enough to compel justice. The right hon. Gentleman had been two years in Dublin Castle, and he never remembered two years in which less work was done for the country. Never since the days of the Chief Secretaryship of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Thanet Division had there been a man at Dublin Castle more defiant of Irish opinion, more careless of official work, than the present Chief Secretary, and no man had ever messed or bungled things as the right hon. Gentleman had done. In the case of Poor Law appointments, the right hon. Gentleman had been pressed to appoint a lady as inspector of boarded-out children in Ireland, the majority of whom were Roman Catholics; but, instead of appointing a properly-qualified Roman Catholic lady, he had appointed a Protestant lady, who was a distinguished graduate of the Royal University. What had the Boards of Guardians done? They had shut the door against this lady and refused to give her any information. The Chief Secretary should have looked out for a motherly woman who had children of her own, or he should have appointed a Protestant and a Catholic Inspector. The post was not one for which a graduate-of a University was required. There was, next, the case of the Marlborough Street Training College, the pupils of which were lodged in what were practically tenement houses close by a street occupied by disorderly women, where the young men were exposed to danger. It was a locality of the worst description. But it was, no doubt, thought good enough for Presbyterian and Methodist students. Even the Ulster Unionist Members made representations to the right hon. Gentleman, but what did he care for them? They would come to heel as usual tonight, or any other night. But nothing would be done. The right hon. Gentleman had been two years in Dublin. What had he done? Nothing. The late Chief Secretary had blundered through a Land Bill, passed a revolutionary Local Government Bill, and established the Industrial Board, over which Mr. Horace Plunkett presided, but he was recalled to fill an easier post, and the present Chief Secretary was appointed—what to do? To mark time. He could deliver beautiful speeches; but if beautiful speeches could avail, Ireland would be a Heaven upon earth, and the salvation of Ireland would have been achieved centuries ago. It was like bringing coals to Newcastle for the right hon. Gentleman to take his beautiful speeches to Ireland, where they were all born orators. And yet the Chief Secretary, in order to have a shot at hon. Gentlemen opposite, actually quoted from a newspaper which his own Government had suppressed. But they had seen a remarkable sight at the Table when the right hon. Gentleman quoted from the United Irishman, a paper, which, if he was not mistaken had been suppressed by the Government; and, going from bad to worse, he quoted from a paper edited by Mr. Hastings. He had known that gentleman for thirty years, and he said it was simply absurd to bring quotations from a man of his stamp, even to condemn an opponent. These were the straits to which the Irish Government were reduced. Who else could they quote? Even "the faithful few" from Ulster had been protesting, and declaring that unless the right hon. Gentleman did something for them they could not support his policy. The right hon. Gentleman had now gone over bag and baggage to the landlords, and it was worth while examining what that really meant for Ireland. At one time Lord Londonderry could control three or four seats on the land question in the county of Down, but he could not control one seat now. He remembered the time when the Hamiltons were supreme in Tyrone, but they could not control a single seat there now. The right hon. Gentleman had sold himself and his Government to a beaten party. He charged the Ulster tenants with sordid motives. What title had he to speak of sordid motives? [A Nationalist Member: "He is a paid patriot."] It was said that this was the result of agitation. There were the agitators on the Benches opposite. Not one of them could be bought; if they could have been, they would have been bought wholesale long ago. Who were those who talked about agitators? Some of the men who had raised that cry in the House had agitated themselves to the bench in the Four Courts, and those who were not there were moving heaven and earth to get there. An agitator got very little in Ireland but broken bones, and the man who denounced the agitator generally agitated himself into a fat situation as soon as he could. The right hon. Gentleman had talked about him as the leader of a small party in that House. He was nothing of the kind. He found trouble enough in leading himself. He had the fate of Irish leaders in all ages before his eyes, and he was not going to undertake the job. He did not object to the right hon. Gentleman's sneers, and he might sneer away. This House might cheer him, but he could assure the right hon. Gentleman that the tenant farmers would take notice of them. He had not stood out on this Land question because he could gain anything by doing so. Had his action brought him any reward? Had it saved him trouble? It had brought him oceans of trouble. In taking up his position of isolation, in ploughing his lonely furrow, he had no object except to do what one man could to wreck the system that had cursed Ireland for centuries. They talked about sordid motives. What about the class who forcibly captured the holdings of these tenants, evicted them by thousands, and drove them to take refuge in the slums of New York? The representatives of that class had the hardihood to stand up in the House and accuse them of sordid motives. The right hon. Gentleman, in attacking him, had publicly directed the attention of his Catholic constituents to his votes on the Education Bill. Was that fair fighting? As a matter of fact, he himself told his constituents at Whitsuntide that the Government had apparently committed themselves to a protectionist policy, that they had apparently committed themselves to the endowment of religion by means of education in England, and that they had undoubtedly committed themselves to the abolition of Mr. Gladstone's Land Act of 1881; and that he was resolved to oppose all three. His constituents passed a resolution approving his determination, and he had carried out that resolution. As to the views of Orangemen on the Education Bill, he reminded the Committee that the hon. Member for North Down had regularly voted against it. And yet the right hon. Gentleman thought to intimidate him by appealing to his Catholic constituents on the education question! He had acted openly and above board, and he would go through with it and take his chance at the general election, when some of the right hon. Gentleman's friends would have to take theirs. He believed the right hon. Gentleman had that night finally thrown away the scabbard, and had drawn the sword on the Irish people. The right hon. Gentleman spoke of impossible theories. But Ulster was practically unanimous on this question of land purchase; and did the right hon. Gentleman think he was going to get rid of that force by calling the thing impossible? What did they care about his impossibles? Was it not a fact that these impossibles rung down the centuries—

That is a matter for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

asked if that was the right hon. Gentleman's only objection. They spent 200 millions upon the Ultlanders of South Africa. Could they not give a loan to the Irish tenant to end this long chapter of misery and woe, and to bring peace to this Parliament and to this country; or was this thing to go on for ever and a day? Ever since 1886, when he entered into active political life, he had felt keenly this Irish difficulty. He never had any objection to Home Rule in the abstract, and he had stated over and over again that his objection to Home Rule was the Home Rulers. That being so, what was his objection now? He thanked the Committee for the courtesy they had shown him. Why did he stand today isolated and alone in the Irish representation? He saw a chance in Ulster, and in other parts of Ireland, of bringing together the Irish people, of trying to create a homogeneous people for once, and of trying to get them to agree upon things on which they could agree, and to differ only where they must differ. A man in Irish polities who chose to stand out from his party and to forego nearly all the friends that he had—he did not speak of the pecuniary loss—with the object of trying to unite the Irish people, to teach them that they had a common country worth living for, and interests worth fighting for—the Chief Secretary was not entitled to hold up such a man as an apologist for disorder. Nothing entitled the right hon. Gentleman to speak in that way of him, and he would like him to know that his words would be remembered in Ulster for many along day to come. He had emptied his whole soul on this question, and he said emphatically that from the day that the Member for Thanet burlesqued in Dublin Castle as Chief Secretary, since the day that Lord Beaconsfield performed that melancholy joke on the Irish nation, there never had been a man inside the Castle more defiant of Irish opinion, more careless of official work, or who had messed and bungled things as the present Chief Secretary had done.

said he would not speak on the important question before the Committee were it not that he himself had been a cultivator of the soil, and had an intimate knowledge of all that concerned land. Further, as it had fallen to his lot to represent a constituency the circumstances of which were similar to those on the De Freyne estate, he had thought it his duty to visit that estate, and to see the condition of affairs there for himself. An Eastern potentate the other day was credited with stating that- London was a very nice place, but that he would be glad to get back to civilisation again. Having visited the De Freyne estate, he appreciated the force of that remark. They had heard a good deal about Imperial unity, and how the British Empire was welded into one great harmonious whole. But the De Freyne estate was the black spot in the Empire, and the Empire should be measured by it. Everyone seemed to talk about the landlords and the tenants, but not a word was said about the State. There were, however, to be considered not only the interests of the landlords, and the interests of the tenant labourers, but also the interests of the State. On the De Freyne estate, it was not too much to say that the tenant labourer had done everything, and had created something out of absolutely nothing. He had reclaimed his patch of land, grown his few potatoes and his oats, and now he saw himself about to be despoiled, and that by the worst process of all—the law of the land. Many hon. Members, and certainly a number of people outside the House, when they thought of the tenant labourer in Ireland, compared him with that much more important personage, the English farmer, who drove to market in a smart equipage, and whose wife, and children lived in comfort, if not in luxury. The English farmer went into a farm where everything was built for him, and all he had to do was to devote himself to the cultivation of the soil. When he left, he had nothing to complain of, because he could take away his capital. Compare him with the poor tenant labourer on the De Freyne estate, and on many other estates in Ireland. He had to build his own cabin, reclaim his land, and he did that in the blackest and dreariest months of the year, because in summer he was away in England or Scotland, leaving his wife and children to struggle on as best they could at home. He inquired how these poor people managed to make any money at all; and they told him it was by selling a few eggs at 6d. a dozen, occasionally selling a chicken, fattening a pig, or rearing a calf at the cost of the children's health. He could not understand how it was that a calf was worth half as much again on that estate than it would be worth in Scotland; but it was explained to him that the very best milk was given to the calf, and that only skim milk was given to the children. At the present season of the year, there was scarcely a man left on the estate. They were away working in the fields in England and Scotland; and when they returned they would probably find themselves turned out into the world without a shilling. What wonder was it that the iron of despair had entered into their souls? That was the position of the poor chaps on the De Freyne estate. He had always discounted, to a very great extent, expressions of Irish disloyalty. He had seen too much of the loyal Irishmen abroad not to take those expressions for what they were worth, and as natural ebullitions of temper on the part of men representing these poor tenant labourers. The question of compulsory purchase had been raised, he thought, in a very extravagant manner, by the hon. Member for South Tyrone, but in an absolutely ridiculous manner by the Chief Secretary. No one with his senses about him would ever propose for a moment that the whole interest of the landlords in Ireland should be turned over to the tenants, and that millions should be expended on that transformation in two or three years. But hon. Members were entitled to demand that a system of compulsory purchase should be established, and that the right hon. Gentleman should take power, through the Congested Districts Board, or through the County Councils, to acquire land whenever he thought it right to acquire it. That, and that alone, would solve the great question of the land. It was no new doctrine. Compulsory purchase was in active operation in New Zealand, and, he believed, in other parts of Australasia. There the Government said to the large landowners: "We do not want to confiscate your land; we will pay you the market value; but you must make way for others who want to cultivate the land." We were a nation of shopkeepers, and we would not be making a bad deal for ourselves if we succeeded in turning the poor peasants in Ireland into loyal British subjects. If we did that, it would be a greater conquest than that achieved by the war which had now happily terminated in South Africa. This was not a local question; it was not an English, or even an Irish, question; it was an Imperial question. Wherever one travelled abroad, from the Yukon River down to the plains of Australia, the same complaint was to be found as to treatment of the Irish tenants by the Irish landlords and the British Government. He had a small album of photographs taken on the De Freyne estate, and hon. Members would be surprised at many of the pictures. They would see the hon. Member for South Tipperary, for instance, followed by two policemen, one on each side. Why, his hon. friend, the Member for the Northern Burghs went to his constituents only a month or two ago, and directed the people to break the law and defy the Government.

The hon. Member must confine his remarks to Ireland.

said, as a personal explanation, he must not be taken as having done more than suggest that a test case should be made for the Woods and Forests Department.

said he would not pursue that point further. It was perfectly impossible for him to understand the policy of the Government with regard to land purchase. Where there were disorder and disaffection, they refused to purchase, but where there was no disorder they purchased. That was an incomprehensible attitude to him. But the worst charge was that legal costs had been piled up against the tenants on the De Freyne estate. If that were true, it was simply monstrous. In Scotland the Crofters Commission settled all questions arising between landlords and tenants, and why-should not a similar system be adopted on such estates as the De Freyne estate? It was perfectly true, as the hon. Member for South Tyrone said, that the Government themselves were very instrumental in bringing about the present state of affairs on the De Freyne estate by the purchase of the Dillon estate. He thought the Government did a noble work in purchasing the Dillon estate; and if any hon. Member could only see the difference between the people on these two adjoining estates, he would be surprised. The people on the Dillon estate saw a busy, bustling agent looking after them, not to see how much rent he could get out of them, but to see how he could possibly improve their position. Beautiful farm houses of stone were being built, while the De Freyne tenants had still to live in their damp thatched cabins; stables were being built on the Dillon estate, while the cows on the De Freyne estate were still being kept with the children. It was only human nature that the De Freyne tenants should want the same advantages. It was alleged that the United Irish League had other objects besides benefiting the tenants; and that its ultimate object was separation and a National Parliament in Ireland. If that were the ulterior object of the League, then the men who shut their eyes to the state of affairs which he had described, and who wilfully blinded themselves to the facts, were the best friends of the United Irish League.

said that the question what was the Irish Question had been asked in this House, and out of it, for more than 100 years without ever receiving, he believed, agenerally accepted reply. Nearly sixty years ago, an hon. Member said he wanted someone to tell him what the Irish Question was. Some said it was a political question, others a religious question; and the hon. Member then went on to describe the state of Ireland as it then was, with the shadow of the great famine looming in the near future. He said that Ireland had a starving population, an alien Church, an absentee aristocracy, and the weakest executive in the world. He asked what was the remedy for such a state of things, and they would say that the remedy was revolution, but Ireland was prevented from attempting that by being tied to a stronger country. If, continued the hon. Member, revolution was the remedy, England was responsible, and the duty of English statesmen was to accomplish by constitutional means, what otherwise would be left to revolution. The hon. Member who uttered these sentiments was Mr. Disraeli. He was challenged years afterwards as to whether he adhered to that statement, and he replied that, although he spoke with a freedom from responsibility, yet, nevertheless, the sentiments he expressed were true. Since then the alien State Church had been disestablished, and. speaking generally, the population could not be said to be overcrowded, inasmuch as it had been reduced by the most awful devastation by one-half. There was, however, along the fringe of the Atlantic seaboard districts where the inhabitants maintained a precarious existence, eked out by money earned in the English harvest fields and by domestic service in New York. The richest of the landlords resided in another country; the best of the Irish produce was exported to pay rent; and the Irish executive was still the weakest in the world, because it proceeded from force and not from the good will of the people. What was the Irish Question? was still being asked; and it was being answered according to the experience, the prejudice, or the ignorance of the person making the reply. He recently met two authorities on the Irish Question. One, with that assurance of certainty which appeared to be the appanage of all Englishmen said, "If you knew Ireland as well as I do, you would know she would be perfectly content were it not for these confounded agitators." That included every Irish Member on that side of the House, and the hon. Member for South Tyrone on the other. The other authority, with equal certainty, said that the Irish did not care a jot for Home Rule or self-government. When he pointed out that five sixths of her representatives demanded that reform in the Constitution, he replied that that was due to priestly dictation; and when he was reminded that the leader of every great Irish movement, with a single exception of O'Connell, was a Protestant, he appeared to be struck, but was not altogether convinced of his error. He then proceeded to advance the astounding theory that Ireland was still overcrowded, and that her population should be still further reduced. If the average Englishman were asked today what was the Irish question he would reply something after this fashion: "The Irish are a discontented, turbulent people. It is impossible to govern them according to ordinary methods; they have to be governed by force; and I would put the leaders and the agitators under lock and key." That was a very easy and convenient method of solving an awkward problem, and shifting responsibility from the shoulders of the Government on to the shoulders of its victims. It was what John Stuart Mill called the "vulgar" method. No one had written more forcibly or more convincingly on that subject than the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin. He would refer to only one other authority, who would commend himself very largely to hon. Gentlemen opposite. One of the most distinguished men who ever sat on the Conservative side of the House, in discussing the Irish Question forty years ago, asked why it was that a country with such a fertile soil, so favourable a climate, and other advantages, lagged so much behind England in the race for wealth. It could not be attributed to Celtic blood; the experience of certain parts of France proved that. It was not because of the peculiarity of the Catholic religion; because in Belgium there was a people singularly industrious and prosperous, who yet were distinguished for their adherence to the Catholic faith. It could not be because the Irish people listened to agitators; because in America the same thing happened, but it could not be said that the American people were unsuccessful. There was only one thing, said this authority, peculiar to Ireland, and that was the Government of England. That authority was Lord Robert Cecil, now Marquess of Salisbury, four times Prime Minister of England. The Chief Secretary had every quality of eloquence, genius, and sympathy; it was only because the situation was an impossible one that he failed in bringing it to a successful issue. The present was not the time to discuss the question of Homo Rule, but it was a most extraordinary thing that the one policy which had never failed to allay discontent, avert separation, and elicit loyalty and goodwill, was the one and only policy that we persistently refused to apply to Ireland. One of the great difficulties had been the Land question, but he was convinced that we had now gone so far along the one road that there was no possible halting-place, and that there must be an entire transfer from the landowners to occupying owners; but whenever that transfer took place there ought to be the fullest and most generous measure of justice dealt out to the Irish landlords. All would agree that the debate had been a most painful one. It was terrible to think that such a state of things as that disclosed by the Sheridan case could possibly exist. It would be unjust to bring an indictment against the police on that one case, but it was impossible to believe that that could be the only case, and that there might not have been others which, although less in degree, were nevertheless of a serious nature.

said the saying that times changed and we changed with them might apply to other countries, but it certainly was not true of Ireland. This debate was repeated year after year, and a useful debate it was, as it gave to Irishmen on both sides of the House the opportunity annually of attacking the policy of the Government. The object of hon. Members opposite in such a debate ought, he maintained, to be to show that the government of Ireland in the past had been unsuccessful. In his opinion it would have been better for the Nationalist Members, from their point of view, to have concentrated the attention of the House and the country upon the misery and poverty and the want of progress in Ireland which they alleged. But, instead of that, they had fixed the gaze of the country upon a man named Sheridan. Sheridan unquestionably was a scoundrel, who deserved to be hanged, and he was only sorry he had not been; but the fact that Sheridan existed was not a sufficient ground for impugning the government of Ireland by England. No attempt had been made to show that the condition of Ireland was a proof of want of success on the part of the House in governing that country. Instead of taking the whole of Ireland, one particular part—tho De Freyne estate—had been taken, and it bad been urged that the condition of the tenants on that estate was intolerable. The hon. Member for South Tyrone had suddenly fallen in love with the Members for Cork and Mayo. That, of course, was a matter of taste. But he was surprised to read a speech of the hon. Member in which he declared that the opinion he had formerly entertained of the Nationalist Members was entirely wrong, and that the years he had spent in attacking them would have been better employed in slanging the landlords. So sudden and grave a change of view rather shook his faith in the solidity of the political opinions of the hon. Member for South Tyrone. Hon. Members had sought to fasten the eyes of the Committee and the country upon the De Freyne estate. The question which the Committee had to ask itself was whether the present condition of that estate would have existed if the tenants had been left alone. It was hard for English, Scottish, or Welsh Members to realise the condition of affairs on that estate. From some observations which had been made, it might be imagined that tenants were ground down, tyrannised over, and robbed by their landlords. But no Irish landlord, however drastic or avaricious, had the power of raising rent 1s. a year; the rent was fixed by a tribunal appointed by the State. The original rents all over the country had been reduced by that tribunal to the extent probably of 35 per cent., so that it was absurd to call it the "landlords' friend." The tenants on the De Freyne estate might be very poor, but their condition was probably a more desirable one than that of the inhabitants of crowded lodgings in the East-end of London. There was clear proof that the De Freyne tenants had been chosen by a political party for political purposes. In order to carry out their objects this party were obliged to enlist the sympathy of the British people. In order to enlist the, sympathy of the British people there must be martyrs — someone suffering for the cause of Ireland's freedom and prosperity. In former times the Nationalist Members supplied the martyrs, and at one time they were nearly all in gaol. But since then they had apparently become tired of making martyrs of themselves, and so martyrs were made by choosing an estate whose landlord was too weak and impecunious to fight his battle with success, and the tenants were induced by the leaders of the Nationalist party to relinquish their farms, to go on the roadside, and become evicted tenants. That this was a spontaneous action on the part of the De Freyne tenants he absolutely denied. He quoted the instance of a tenant, who was the rural postmaster, asking a conference to allow him to pay his rent, because, if evicted, he would lose £1,500. This conference was presided over by the Vice-Chairman of the Roscommon County Council, and it decided that this tenant's case was common with the others, and that he should accept the consequences of paying rent. Everyone knew what that meant, for there was no crime at all comparable in Ireland to that of paying rent. The consequences would have been that this man would be boycotted and probably ruined. Of course this unfortunate man gave in. Then there was the case of a Dr. M'Dermott, who paid his rent, the conference being asked to declare that his dispensary appointments were vacant.

Is the right hon. and gallant Member aware that there is not a word of truth in that statement?

said he did not know that that was the case, but at any rate he thought it was as true as any contradiction which the hon. Member might offer. At any rate he gave the extract from the newspaper, where it was stated that advertisements would be issued for another medical officer in Dr. M'Dermott's place. Therefore the United Irish League claimed the right to discharge and appoint officers under the County Council on political grounds. There were many other cases of a similar kind, where the United Irish League not only claimed the right to decide payment of rent, but also the appointment of men to various offices under the County Council. Take the case of this man he had mentioned, who was practically fined £1,500. What would happen to him? He would probably drift down in the social scale, and at last he might find refuse in this House as a Member of Parliament. He should like to hear from English and Scottish Members who ran over on tour to Ireland some definite statement on the question, whether Ireland, as a whole, was progressing, standing still, or going back. Taking the test of the deposits in the joint-stock banks, he found that in 1881 the deposits amounted to £31,161,000, and in 1901 to £41,568,000, while the deposits in the savings banks had increased during the the same period from £3,765,000 to £10,500,000. The position of the Irish tenantry was unquestionably far in advance of what it ever was in former times. What was the opinion of this agitation on the De Freyne estate held by one of the Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church? The Bishop of Elphin, in a published letter, lamented that "strangers and paid organisers should be sent into that district, involving the unfortunate tenant farmers in so much difficulty and costs," and "protested against those strolling organisers who were only thinking of the salaries they could extract from their dupes, and not in the interests of the people." The Bishop added that he had learned from one of his priests, who had seen the hotel bill of one of these paid organisers for a month, and it amounted to £50. That was the calm deliberate opinion of a Roman Catholic Bishop in Ireland as to this agitation. Not only had an attack been made upon the Government during this debate, but strong expressions had been used with regard to religious differences which existed in Ireland, and which it was alleged made the government of that country so difficult. Naturally the Orange organisation felt itself very hardly used by the Chief Secretary for Ireland when such a meeting as that which it was proposed to hold at Rostrevor was prohibited. It was impossible to ignore in these matters the condition of public opinion in Ireland, which was not divided by political lines of demarcation, because the lines which divided the Irish people was something far wider and deeper than any of those political liberties which existed in this country. On the one hand, they had a minority in Ireland and it was represented practically by the great Orange organisation. This was not understood on this side of the water, and here people asked what was the use of having an Orange organisation simply to perpetuate the memory of things which occurred 250 years ago. That was not the object of this organisation. He had been an Orangeman for many years and had attended many meetings, but he had never heard on Orange platforms anything said of an insulting character to a religion of their opponents. The great majority of Orangemen were well disposed towards their fellow countrymen, and they had no desire to insult their religion. The Orange organisation had two objects. He wished to state first of all that it was not a secret society. One of its objects was to uphold the Protestant faith, and the other to maintain the supremacy of the British Crown. In Ireland they never heard the word "Imperial" mentioned and did not know what it meant until an attempt was made to break the bonds which connected Ireland with this country. Then they realised that the word meant something for Orangemen who had one great object in view, and it was not simply a selfish object for they had a far higher aim, namely to maintain the unity of the British Empire. Therefore when the Government prohibited a meeting such as that which was proposed to be held at Rostrevor, Orangemen looked upon it as very harsh treatment. Meetings were held in all parts of Ireland by hon. Gentlemen opposite at which sentiments were uttered which, he believed, were hateful to the great majority of the British people. The hon. Gentlemen opposite professed openly to be not the political opponents of the Government but the undying enemies of the British Empire. If the Nationalist Party had consulted him as to the line of policy which would be ruinous to their cause, he could not have advised them to follow a better course for that purpose than that which they had pursued themselves. Let them think what a strain they must have put on the political digestion and conscience of their Radical friends above the gangway. They had had two opportunities. When the Local Government Act was passed they had an opportunity of showing that they meant what they said when they promised, on the introduction of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, that they would treat the minority with justice and fairness. But instead of that they turned out and refused to elect a single Unionist in all Ireland where they could prevent it. That was the sort of treatment the opponents of these gentlemen would receive in a Home Rule Parliament. They had another opportunity in the war. From the moment war was declared, they took the side of our opponents, rejoiced in their victories, gloried in their triumphs, and their branches in Ireland used all their influence to prevent a single Irishman enlisting in the British Army. One thing they could not do; they could not prevent Irish soldiers in South Africa writing on the roll of fame a name which would never be forgotten. In dealing with the Orangemen the Government should remember these two qualities. They were loyal to the Crown. They desired to preserve the Union with Great Britain and at their meetings no disloyal sentiment was ever uttered; and when a meeting was proposed in the great county of Down, a loyal organisation had a right, as any one in this country would have the right, to go to any seaside place, to go to Rostrevor and proclaim even in the ears of a National majority, loyalty to the Crown and to the laws on which the prosperity of Ireland depended. He deeply regretted that his right hon. friend had felt it necessary to proclaim that meeting; and he thought the result of the debate would be that the House, in dispassionately considering, and the country in considering the case made against the Government, and by which hon. Members opposite hoped to prove the incapacity of Parliament to bring about the peace and prosperity of Ireland, would feel that that case had fallen to the ground. The verdict of the House and the country would be that under the authority and power of the British Parliament the prosperity of Ireland would be finally assured.

said the speech the Committee had just heard contained painful reminders of the tone and temper of the speeches of fifty years ago. The right hon. and gallant Member had raised an Orange wail as to the suppression of an Orange meeting, but had no regard for the suppression of National meetings all over Ireland. The right hon. and gallant Member had appeared as a great devotee of a distinguished Catholic Bishop in Ireland at one end of his argument, and at the other end he seemed to regard the Catholic clergy of Ireland as being turbulent and disloyal to the core. He did not think that was a consistent position for an honest Orangeman to take up in this House or outside. The right hon. and gallant Member ought to take his stand one way or the other. With regard to the right hon. and gallant Member's complaint in regard to the manner in which County Council elections were conducted in Ireland by the Nationalists, it was ghastly hypocrisy for anybody on the Conservative Benches to make a point against Nationalists on that ground, when it was remembered that in nine cases out of ten in England, County Council and municipal elections were fought on the strictest party lines. They did not want to be preached to on the subject of tolerance by Unionist gentlemen who in this country made the local elections a matter of political test, or by Orangemen like the hon. and gallant Gentlemen who, in their own districts, where they were supreme, would not give so much as the post of scavenger to any Catholic or Nationalist if they could possibly avoid it. He must say that he approached a debate of this kind with something like a feeling of sheer hopelessness: If anybody were to tell him of a Home Secretary condoning and compounding a felony and assisting to escape from this country a police sergeant of Glasgow, London, or Cardiff, who had provoked outrage and committed crime, he would say that the thing was impossible. An English Home Secretary who attempted any double dealing and paltering with the law in that way would not be able to hold his office for a month. But the moment they came to deal with an Irish grievance a sort of moral colour blindness seemed to descend on the great majority of Members of this House. What was wrong in England was right in Ireland. What was black in England was white in Ireland. When the Irish Members raised the question there was a most ostentatious demonstration of indifference on the opposite side of the House. The Chief Secretary was supposed to stand for law and order in Ireland. He would ask the right hon. Gentleman what was the favourite pretence—he maintained a false pretence—for enforcing the Coercion Acts and abolishing trial by jury? It was that there was difficulty in getting the people of the countryside to supply the necessary evidence and to tell the truth. The Chief Secretary's main line in his defence was that the police force in this particular instance was so demoralised that his only chance of getting honest evidence from policemen was to give an indemnity, and to let the chief criminal go scot free. He maintained that if such a state of affairs existed in the Irish police force it should have been the duty of the right hon. Gentleman, on his honour and responsibility, to break it down, and on no account whatever to offer the stimulus of an indemnity or the stimulus of immunity to any policeman, as the price of that policeman telling the truth to his superiors. He (Mr. Haviland - Burke) was one of the defendants in the De Freyne case, and he would not go into the agrarian question which had been raised tonight. He was one of the wicked agitators of whom they had heard so much in the course of this debate. The right hon. Member for South Antrim gave away Lord de Freyne very conspicuously when he said that the people on the estate were well off. In an interview with a representative of the Morning Leader Lord de Freyne said—

"It was a mistake to call them Irish peasants. They are only English labourers living in Ireland because it is cheap."

That was Lord de Freyne's definition of his tenantry, given to the representative of an English paper. He did not condescend to recognise them as Irish people at all. They were poor beggars of English labourers coming over to England to earn the rent which they could not make for themselves at home. What could be more absurd in the face of a statement of that kind than the contention of the right hon. Member for South Antrim as to the economic conditions on the Do Freyne state? He respectfully warned the right hon. Gentleman of the gravity of the task which he had taken up. In Ireland, as in any other place in the world, punishment lost all its sting if it brought no disgrace with it. In Ireland, to be sent to jail for addressing a meeting meant absolutely no disgrace whatever. If at the conclusion of the session he received marching orders to go and address a proclaimed meeting he would go to that meeting, and if necessary he would do his three or six months if the right hon. Gentleman liked, and he would come out feeling that he was as good a man as any hon. Member opposite, and better, he might say, than some of them. He warned the Chief Secretary that no punishment would deter him or his friends from doing their duty.

said he desired to associate himself entirely with the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Armagh and his right hon. friend the Member for South Antrim in regard to the policy pursued by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary in proclaiming the meeting of Orangemen at Rostrevor. He did not wonder at the storm of indignation which had been aroused by this action throughout the whole of the province of Ulster. What the people wanted to know was why was that meeting at Rostrevor proclaimed whilst only a few weeks ago the Government permitted, without interference of any kind, a mass meeting of Nationalists and members of the United Irish League, held in the city of Armagh for the purpose of unveiling a memorial to a man who died fighting for the Boers. Mr. Davitt and other well-known agitators attended that meeting, and delivered inflammatory speeches brimming over with disloyalty. The whole place was turned into a pandemonium, and the police made no attempt to interfere with the meeting. Was it any wonder that the loyal men of the North were indignant at this inequality of treatment? The Chief Secretary had stated that he could not, in the face of the opposition which was threatened by the Nationalist Party, proceed with the Land Bill which was introduced early in the session. He would respectfully point out that there were other Members from Ireland besides the Nationalist Party. He would like to inform the right hon. Gentleman that there were twenty Unionist Members from Ireland who were not sent here to waste the time of Parliament pressing for legislation of an impracticable or impossible character, but to support common-sense measures that would be of genuine and practical benefit to the country Seeing that the right hon. Gentleman had practically consented to drop the controversial Clause 36, he was convinced every one of the Unionist Members was ready to give the Bill hearty support. He was unable to understand the Chief Secretary being deterred from proceeding with a bill which would do so much to facilitate occupying ownership of land simply because the Nationalist Party was opposed to it. That Party opposed legislation of every kind that did not issue from its own ranks. It was time the Unionists of Ireland, who were loyal to the Throne and the Constitution received some consideration at the hands of the Government. Speaking for the farmers of his constituency, he would say that now the Government had dropped Clause 36 they would welcome the Bill as an evidence of the intention of the Government to make some effort to settle this interminable Irish Land Question. While too much could not be expected at a time when the financial resources of the country were so severely strained, he believed that the more voluntary sale was assisted by a measure such as the Bill recently introduced, the nearer at hand would be the time when the happy despatch would be given to dual ownership by the passing of a compulsory enactment. He trusted therefore that the Chief Secretary would proceed with the Bill despite every opposition. If the Government, with its large majority, permitted all legislation to depend upon the will of the hon. Member for Waterford and his followers and refrained from pressing this measure which was just as important to Ireland as the Education Bill was to England, because it was opposed by the Nationalists, they could not expect to receive from the Unionists of Ireland that amount of support which they had consistently rendered in the past.