I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether a trained volunteer is efficient for the year who does not attend camp but performs sixteen drills and musketry; whether a volunteer recruit can become efficient who enlists before camp, but cannot attend one, and performs forty-six recruit drills and musketry; and whether a volunteer recruit can become efficient who enlists after camp and performs forty recruit drills and musketry.

A trained volunteer who does ten drills, but does not attend camp, can be returned as efficient for this year, and draw the full grant of thirty-five shillings: if his whole corps is exempted from camp, he must attend sixteen drills. As regards the rest of the Question, a recruit can become efficient any year by doing forty drills and musketry: if, however, his whole corps is exempted from camp, he must do forty-six drills.

Will the right hon. Gentleman take into consideration that there is no provision in the new regulation for recruits who cannot attend camp.

I am afraid I cannot make any further concession. The arrangements for this year are, I think, complete.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether his attention has been directed to the fact that Dr. Smartt has, in his speeches in various places in Cape Colony, in favour of the suspension of the Cape Constitution, read a letter written to him by Lord Milner in the middle of June, advocating the suspension of the Cape Constitution and authorising Dr. Smartt to make the views of the High Commissioner on this subject known to the public. And, what action, if any, does he propose to take with reference to this intervention of Lord Milner in politics in Cape Colony.

(1) I have seen a report of Dr. Smartt's speech; (2) I do not consider any action is necessary.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies how much of the Transvaal territory has to be handed over to the Colony of Natal; and whether, in view of the dissatisfaction caused by this transfer amongst the Dutch in South Africa, the Transvaal can be maintained for administration intact.

(1) I have to refer the honourable Member to memorandum A. in Parliamentary Paper Cd. 941, page 2: (2) The answer is in the negative.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether any application has recently been made to him for the discharge of John Deacons, of Granard, County Longford, who recently enlisted when he was but sixteen years and nine months of ago; and whether, as this boy was the sole support of his aged parents, he will direct his discharge from the Army.

No such application has reached the War Office. The matter is entirely one for the discretion of the General Officer commanding.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for India whether the entire cost of entertaining the native Indian princes, invited to England by the Imperial Government as guests of His Majesty for the Coronation, is to be charged on the revenues of India; if not, what proportion of the cost is to be charged, and what is the total sum that the taxpayers of India will have to pay for the travelling expenses and entertainment of the native princes and Indian military contingent who have come to England for the Coronation, in response to the invitation of the Imperial Government.

I am in communication with the Treasury on the subject, and am therefore at present unable to give the particulars for which the hon. Member asks. The original estimated cost of the conveyance, lodging, entertainment, etc., of the chiefs, representatives, and military contingent will be found on pages 38 and 53 of the Indian Financial Statement for 1902–3, paragraphs 192 and 218.

My Question was, is the cost to be charged to the Indian Budget.

A certain proportion of the cost will, unquestionably, be charged to the Indian Budget, and has been included in it. The question I am unable to answer is what proportion will be borne by the Imperial Revenue.

May I ask whether, in view of the fact that these Indian gentlemen have come to England by invitation to take part in the Coronation, the Government will reconsider the charging of the expenses to the Indian Revenue.

I have told the hon. Gentleman that I am in communication with the Treasury, and I am, at present, unable to say more.

When may I repeat the Question?

You had better wait until the Autumn session.

May I ask, will there be an opportunity of discussing this matter, and of deciding whether, as these people are our guests, we should not pay the bill?

I have said that these estimates are included in the Indian Budget.

May I ask whether it was intimated to these Indian gentlemen when the invitation was sent to them that they were expected to come here as "paying guests"?

They are not "paying guests."

If this Question is to be repeated in the Autumn session, will not that be after the Appropriation Bill?

And will not the present Chancellor of the Exchequer have retired by then?

That has nothing to do with the Appropriation Bill.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies when the new Governor General of Australia is to be appointed.

My right hon. friend is unable to make any statement at present on this subject.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether any, and, if so, what reply has been sent to Mr. E. Semini, one of the elected members of the Council of Malta, in reply to his communication, dated 12th May, the receipt of which was acknowledged on 8th July, with reference to the language question in Malta.

No further answer than that referred to by the hon. Member has been returned to Mr. Semini, whose letter raised questions as to the policy of His Majesty's Government, which have been fully dealt with by. Statements already made public.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that tenders to build a new lecture theatre at Marlborough Street, Dublin, were invited by the Board of National Education on 2nd May, and that four tenders were submitted; and that when revised tenders, omitting part of the work, were invited, the two contractors whose tenders in the first instance were the lowest were not invited to submit revised estimates; whether he is aware that the two contractors thus passed over are Roman Catholics; and can he state why the usual practice was not followed in this case.

I am informed by the National Board of Education that eight tenders were submitted to the Board. The Commissioners, having scrutinised the tenders, decided to alter the original plans, and having selected, after careful consideration, and in the exercise of their discretion, the firms that they thought would most satisfactorily carry out the altered requirements, the Commissioners invited these firms to submit amended tenders. The religious denominations of those who tendered were not inquired into by the Commissioners, nor known to them.

asked on what principle the selection of the firms to tender was made.

The Board has power to exercise discretion in the matter, and I have no right to press for further information than they choose to give.

Were the altered tenders advertised?

No; apparently two firms were invited to tender on the altered specifications.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he can state the amount of the subsidies paid to Scotch curers by the Congested Districts Board in respect of the development of the summer fishing on the Donegal coast; whether it is proposed to continue these subsidies next year; and whether the same terms will be offered to native as to other curers.

The total amount of the subsidies paid to Scotch merchants was £96. One merchant received £64 for four boats, and another £32 for two boats. The same terms were offered to a Cork firm, but, failing to find boats, it declined the offer. It is not proposed to renew this system next season.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Congested Districts Board are prepared to give any, and, if so, what support to the fishermen of Dingle, in reply to the petition recently presented to the Board by the fishermen and merchants of that town.

The petition was received on Tuesday last only. It will be considered by the Board at its next meeting on the 8th August.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can state the difference in the numbers of hours warders are on duty in local prisons in Ireland and England; what are the differences in the rates of pay in the two countries; and whether it is proposed to assimilate the rate of pay and the number of working hours.

The number of hours performed by warders on duty in English prisons averages, I am informed, sixty-one hours forty minutes per week. In Irish prisons the average, calculated on the five prisons at Sligo, Castlebar, Londonderry, Kilmainham, and Mountjoy, works out at sixty-six hours thirty-eight minutes. In England prisoners are exercised for one hour daily, in Ireland for two hours. If the English practice in this respect prevailed in Ireland the hours of duty for warders would be correspondingly lightened. The rates of pay to warders in both countries are set out in the Estimates. It is not possible to draw a comparison between the two, as the classification is different in each country. No further changes are proposed, such as suggested.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he has inquired into the sworn statements of James McGoohan, of Aughoo, Ballinamore, and his son as to the conduct on their property by ex-Sergeant Sheridan and ex-Constable Reid; and whether it is proposed to award compensation to McGoohan for the loss he sustained.

James McGoohan declined to swear an information or seek compensation when his hay and turf were thrown down on the night of 6th November, 1899. The petty sessions clerk has no knowledge of his having done so at any time. I am not in possession of any evidence pointing to Sheridan, Reid, or any one else as the persons who threw down these, stacks, although McGoohan, I understand, states that he suspects the ex-constable named in the Question.

If I send an affidavit, will the right hon. Gentleman cause inquiry to be made?

I will certainly see if there is any evidence to support the claims.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he can state the cause of the delay in the issuing of the loan for the building of the labourers' cottages in Granard Union under their last Labourers Act scheme; and, seeing that all the formulas of the law have been complied with, will he represent to the Board of Works the necessity of issuing this loan forthwith.

The loan was sanctioned by the Treasury in May. Any subsequent delay has arisen in connection with the preparation of the requisite mortgage deed, which was only received yesterday from the District Council. If this is found to be in order, the first instalment of the loan will at once issue.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether Major C. W. Studdert, one of the defendants in the Remount case recently tried in Dublin, is a receiver under the Land Judges Court.

No, Sir. On the 22nd inst, the Land Judge ordered the name of Major Studdert to be removed from the list of receivers.

Does this Gentleman hold the Commission of the Peace in Ireland?

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will give me notice. I think the reply is in the negative, however.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he has received a copy of a petition addressed to the Chairman of the Board of Works, Dublin, by the Dunfanagby District Council, praying for a remission of a tax of 4d. in the £ paid by the rural district in respect of the Letterkenny Railway; and for an investigation of the earnings of the said railway by independent audit; and whether he will take any steps to meet the wishes of the Council.

My right hon. friend has asked me to answer this Question. I have not yet received any report on this subject, but I am making inquiry, and will inform the hon. Member of the result in due course.

I beg to ask the Secretary of the Treasury, as representing the Postmaster General, whether his attention has been drawn to the fact that a rural messenger attached to the Raphoe Post Office, County Donegal, took part as a member of a band in an Orange procession at Raphoe on the 12th July last, and if steps will be taken to prevent public officials in future taking part in such displays.

The Postmaster General will have inquiry made upon the subject, and will communicate with the hon. Member.

I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether the fines imposed upon persons in the Carna district of Connemara for the cutting of sea-weed will be remitted, and whether compensation will be made to those who have been imprisoned for the like offence; whether the Board of Trade will take the necessary steps to prevent landlords in future from prosecuting their tenants for the cutting of seaweed, which is the property of the Crown.

The Board of Trade were not in any way parties to the proceedings referred to, and I have no information as to the circumstances in which the defendants were fined or imprisoned. Any Question on the subject should be addressed to the Irish Government. The Board of Trade cannot undertake to prevent prosecutions, but whenever their attention is called to an assertion of rights of property over Crown foreshore, they I take steps to safeguard the interests of the Crown.

I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether his attention has been drawn to the breakdown of the cable connecting the Island of Tory with the coast of County Donegal; and whether, in view of the importance of telegraphic communication to the shipping trade and otherwise, he proposes to take any action regarding it.

The reply to the first part of the Question is in the affirmative. The matter is being considered by the Board of Trade and other Departments concerned.

Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether there is any prospect of the cable being repaired during the summer?

I am afraid I am not in a position to make any statement as to that.

said all who had listened to the Chief Secretary's speech yesterday—everyone, at least, who was interested in the future of Ireland— would feel certainly no very agreeable anticipations for the near future of the affairs of that country. The speech was, from beginning to end, a declaration of war. It was marked by a total absence of those fair prophecies which they had been accustomed to listen to in previous speeches of the Chief Secretary, and which had not been fulfilled. In yesterday's speech he threw away all that mannerism and declared war upon the Irish people, and announced that no measures of reform could be considered until what he was pleased to describe as the policy of social prescription was renounced by the people and put down by the power of the Government. That was language to which they had been accustomed to listen from successive Chief Secretaries, and he had noticed on more than one occasion it was language which generally preceded some really serious attempt to apply a remedy to the condition of Ireland. The Chief Secretary made a very extraordinary declaration, He charged the Irish Party with being more addicted to inflaming the passions of the Irish people with rhetoric than to recommend to the judgment of the House the case of reform and ameliorative legislation. Of course, that was one of the things they had always been complaining of. Ever since the Irish Members came into the House it had been admitted by all English Ministers that one of the enormous evils of the situation in Ireland was that a hearing could never be got from any advocate of Irish reform until the passions of the Irish people had been inflamed to boiling point. It was one of the curses of Ireland that they had ever been taught, generation after generation, that it was not to reason or argument in that House, not to the ordinary methods adopted by free and constitutionally governed people, that they had to look for reforms, but precisely to that, and that alone, which the Chief Secretary denounced in his speech, namely, the inflammation of the passions of the people to some form of social war. Every great reform that had been carried for Ireland during the last hundred years had, first of all, been flouted, denied a hearing—spat upon, he might almost say—in that House, year after year. That was the case with, regard to Catholic emancipation and every one of the Land Acts which had to some extent mitigated the horrors of the Irish land system. It was the case in regard to the abolition of the Established Church and every reform, without exception, which bad marked the history of English government in Ireland, and that was one of their chief indictments against the system of government of their country. They could not encourage their people to hope for any reform until the whole country had been turned upside down, and all the forces of social strife and bitterness had been let loose. What was the use of the Chief Secretary indulging in such absurd tirades, condemning them for inflaming the passions of the people by rhetoric? The real cause of these inflammations and social disturbances were the men who, like himself, admitted that to postpone justice was to deny justice, but who deliberately refused to meet, or attempt to meet, the admitted grievances of the Irish people. He knew the Irish people well, and, with all that had been said about their excitable character, and the excitable Celtic nature, no rhetoric that they were masters of would succeed in letting loose those social wars in Ireland unless they had been originally provoked by that denial of justice which the Chief Secretary himself had admitted within the last few weeks. Three or four months ago, on the debate on the Address, and on the subsequent debate when the Coercion Act was first proclaimed over the greater part of Ireland, the Chief Secretary adopted a tone of cheerful optimism, and treated this as a matter of very small importance, which would all pass over before a little firmness. He addressed to the right hon. Gentleman a warning, which he thought he might have given a little more weight to as coming from a rather old campaigner. He had said that the Irish Government, which embarked on a policy of coercion, was getting on a slippery slope, and would go much further than they expected. Since then, coercion had been proclaimed, and nearly sixty representative men had been put into gaol. Had the situation in Ireland improved? The clouds were darkening round the right hon. Gentleman's course, and he was beginning to realise for the first time the road on which Lord Londonderry and his gang had driven him. He appeared before the people of Ireland as the obedient servant of Lord Londonderry and the De Freyne combination. Not in one single sentence had he attempted to answer the indictment of the hon. Member for Waterford, with regard to the shameful and most scandalous transaction in which Lord Clonbrock and Mr. Smith Barry, members of the De Freyne syndicate, as Privy Councillors, were invited to the meeting to proclaim half Ireland. That brought the Government into direct touch with the conspiracy, and made them, until explanations were offered, the partisans and the slaves of the landlords. The right hon. Gentleman had applied a monstrous coercion law without a shadow of justification in respect to agrarian crime. Ireland today was in every respect more free from disorder and crime than any part of the United Kingdom. One of the counties where coercion was in force was Tipperary, where Mr. Justice Johnson, addressing the Grand Jury at the last assizes, said there were only two cases of crime in the whole county—an English soldier charged with assaulting a little girl, and an Englishman charged with stealing a bicycle. He protested, next, against the infamy of treating these coercion prisoners as ordinary criminals. When Dr. Jameson was convicted, two Tory Members came to him with a petition to get him made a first-class misdemeanant. He signed it, but asked the Tory Members whether they would remember it when the next Coercion Act was before the House, and they said they would, and he believed they did; but it had been ineffectual, and political prisoners were being wrongfully and shamefully convicted as common criminals. Some years ago he was himself undergoing a sentence of six months imprisonment, and he read in a newspaper that was smuggled in to him the account of a case which had been heard in the Dublin Courts. A man was charged with knocking a woman down and nearly kicking her to death. The only defence be offered was that he had mistaken the woman for his wife. He was sentenced to six months imprisonment, the same sentence which he himself was undergoing, and he could not help thinking what a strange country they lived in. He was a Member of Parliament who had done and said nothing which his own conscience condemned, nothing which was wrong in the eyes of the vast majority of his countrymen, nothing which would cost him their votes or their confidence, nothing which would deny him the right to go back to the House in a position of equality with any gentleman in England; and yet, in the eyes of the Government, he was a criminal in every respect—the same as the man who nearly kicked a woman to death. The obstinacy of the Government in pursuing such a system as that was infamous, and he agreed with Mr. Redmond that no nation of men in the world, who did not deserve to be called a nation of cowards and slaves, would be loyal to such a system. If they had power, it would be their duty—if they failed by argument, as they did—to put an end to that abominable system. Turning to the question of the De Freyne Estate and the Associated Estates, the hon. Member ridiculed the statement of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Antrim as to the condition of the De Freyne tenants, and said they were living in a condition that was a reproach to any Government that tolerated it. The bogs on which they lived were wet morasses, which these men and their fathers had won from the wilderness—land not worth a penny an acre, excepting as it had been made worth it by the unrequited labour of these unhappy people. The practice on this and the adjoining Dillon estate had been, when any people married in the old days, to give them six or seven acres at a shilling an acre, and when they had built their house and reclaimed a portion of it to raise the rent to £2 or £3. That was the way the landlords built up their estates, and now they had the audacity to talk about sordid agitators who lived upon the free gifts of the servant girls of New York. That the men who bad obtained these, he would not say ill-gotten gains, because he had no personal animosity against Lord de Freyne, should complain of the present movement, amazed him. He was prepared to agree that the land lords should get a good deal more than the market value of their estates in order to bring happiness and peace to these districts, and allow the people to enjoy the fruits of their labour. The Congested Districts Board did a great work when they bought the Dillon estate, which had so changed that it would not now be recognised by one who had known it before the purchase. Up to two or three years ago there was a horrible green pool in front of every house, breeding typhoid fever; and the pigs, cattle, and children were all together in the house. All over the estate now cattle sheds and dairies were being built; drainage was going on; and improvements on every side; and there were also signs of reviving industry. Although more would have to be done to increase the holdings of the poorer men who had not enough land to live on, the change already effected was like a miracle. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Antrim had never taken the slightest interest in the fate of these poor people, until he went down to back up the evictors. Whether it were soon or late, the De Freyne estate must be sold; and, although the Chief Secretary might repeat his cheap heroics, the day would come, and that soon, when he would be forced by the public opinion of this country, as well as of Ireland, to buy this estate and settle these people in peace in their holdings. This could easily be done, and to postpone the settlement until there had been a further amount of disturbance and bad blood aroused was another instance of the system of Irish government. The argument was all on one side, and the solution was easy. He himself offered, before a single crown of costs had been put on the De Freyne estate, that, if the Government would give them a reasonable hope that they were nearing a solution, he would go down and implore the tenants to pay their rents. The situation on the De Freyne estate was another illustration of the perversity and stupidity of the Government in dealing with Ireland. The action of the De Freyne tenants had been grossly misrepresented. It had been represented as a strike against rents, but it was nothing of the sort. In the case of the Congested Districts Board purchasing Lord Dillon's estate, they offered a good deal less than he subsequently got. He said deliberately that the tenants were offering to buy from Lord de Freyne at their full value the tenants' own property which they had themselves created on the estate. Yet they were called robbers! This was monstrous. The right hon. Member for South Antrim made the amazing statement that the cause of the trouble on the De Freyne estate was not the settlement on the Dillon estate. Judge O'Conor Morris stated from the Bench that the curse of the district was the De Freyne estate, and that the trouble on that estate was the inevitable result of what had been done on the Dillon estate. He (Mr. Dillon) had been tormented by poor people coming to lay their complaints before him about Lord de Freyne's agent and his predecessor. These tenants urged him to go to meetings. He did not tell them to pay their rents, but he did tell them to keep the pot boiling, and keep up a fierce agitation. On the Dillon estate they kept the pot boiling, and they got it sold. The same thing would happen on the De Freyne estate. He challenged the Chief Secretary to say that the condition under which the tenants of the De Freyne estate lived was tolerable. The Chief Secretary could not say that, but he said that there must be no agitation, that there must be peace, they must all pay up, and then he would consider their case. Why had not the Chief Secretary considered their case? Ten years ago the right hon. Member for South Tyrone went over the De Freyne estate at the request of the Colonial Secretary, and denounced, in The Times newspaper, the misery, and poverty, and shame of the condition of the tenantry there. The Chief Secretary thought it was a good thing to use the sufferings of these people to abuse the right hon. Member for Montrose, but the tenants were in exactly the same position, and now they were told if they would pay up, the Government would consider their case. They had been told that not a single acre of land would be bought by the Congested Districts Board in any parish where a branch of the United Irish League was formed. They were not intimidated by that in East Mayo, and the result was that within a year that pledge was broken. He, therefore, hoped that a better day would dawn after some time for these unhappy tenants. The record of the Government in regard to the De Freyne estate was a base record. They had used the sufferings of these tenants when it suited their purpose, but now they threw them aside. The right hon. Member for South Antrim made one of the most cowardly and false statements last night in reference to a very dear friend of his—Mr. Valentine Kilbride—that was ever made in the House. He said Mr. Valentine Kilbride, a well-known Dublin solicitor, had deserted those tenants, and had been instrumental, for selfish purposes, in heaping up enormous costs in regard to these tenants. He characterised that as a most scandalous falsehood, and he said that it was a most cowardly thing for the right hon. Gentleman to avail himself of the protection and shelter of the House to make such statements.

Order, order! To impute falsehood to an hon. Member of this House is not in order.

said he would not impute falsehood to the hon. Member. He imputed falsehood to the statement, and he was going to say, before he was interrupted, that he considered it a most cowardly thing to impute to an absolutely honourable man—a far more honourable man than the hon. Member was himself —a dishonourable line of professional conduct, which he would not desire to repeat outside the House. Turning to the case of Sergeant Sheridan, no one who took part in the debate on this matter last Thursday week on the Constabulary Vote attempted to criticise or find fault with the action of the Chief Secretary up to the presentation of the secret report. He had no fault to find with his action in declining to prosecute Sheridan in regard to the case of the tramp Ryan, who was supposed to have posted the threatening notice; he had no fault to find with him for deciding that the investigation should be a secret one; he had no fault to find with him in deciding—he thought he was entitled to, and was wise and perfectly honest in his desire to get at the truth—to give an indemnity to the police who gave information against Sheridan. That was all fair and defensible and right, and, in his judgment, in view of the circumstances, the best plan of getting at the truth. But on Thursday week the question that was left unanswered by the Chief Secretary was, why, after he got the secret report, he did not arrest and prosecute Sheridan. The Chief Secretary did not attempt to give any reply to that question, but on the other band the Attorney General gave a series of answers. He said Sheridan was not prosecuted because the indemnity given to the witness was of such a character that the Government could not prosecute. He declined to give the terms of the indemnity, and then he made the extraordinary and amazing statement that the question of the prosecution of Sheridan never came before him. Sheridan was a criminal at large, and yet the prosecution of this man never came before the Attorney General. Dealing with the debate of last Thursday week, The Times newspaper said in a leading article—

"One point remains inadequately explained by either the Chief Secretary or the Attorney General. Sheridan himself had no share in the indemnity, and immediately the result of the secret inquiry was known he might have been arrested and put upon his trial, unless the terms entered into with the other constables prevented their being put into the box."

That showed that, even in the mind of so prejudiced a witness as The Times the answer of the Chief Secretary and Attorney General was unsatisfactory. What was the answer of the Chief Secretary last night? He said he had not investigated the secret report with view to the prosecution of Sheridan, who was discharged five months before that secret report was presented; but he took the report in order to see whether any reparation could be made to the persons convicted on the evidence of Sheridan. They had it from the Chief Secretary that he did not consider even the possibility of prosecuting Sheridan. In the report presented to him the Chief Secretary had plenty of evidence against Sheridan, but the deduction lie drew was that there was no sworn evidence. There was abundant evidence to ensure the conviction of Sheridan, and, although the Chief Secretary had had placed in his hands a report showing that this man was engaged in these crimes for years, and that he had convicted many men, it had never occurred to his mind to prosecute him. The Chief Secretary said the indemnity given to the constables was not in writing, and was not submitted to him, and was given by his subordinates. He said that was most improper, and the Chief Secretary's subordinates had no right to give to those constables art indemnity that protected not only themselves, but also protected Sheridan. He refused to believe the indemnity was in that form until he saw it. He held that it was open to the Chief Secretary to put Sheridan on his trial, to put those witnesses into the box and get them to confirm on oath the statements they made to the secret inquiry. If this were the case of an ordinary criminal, the Government would have been free with their rewards to get evidence against him. But this was not the strangest part of the case. Throughout the whole argument it seemed to be assumed that the Government was thrown back on the police evidence, and the whole structure of the case of the Chief Secretary and Attorney General rested on that foundation. Nothing could be more mistaken than that idea. The Government, with the secret inquiry, had at their disposal not only the police evidence, but ample civilian evidence also. There were plenty of civilians only too anxious to give evidence. He received a letter from a man on the 25th July last, before the Government, had announced to the House the result of the secret inquiry. That letter contained, among other things, the following statement—

"Pat Farrell said to them, and is prepared to swear that Sergeant Sheridan asked him to get up a party and break into the house of Michael Carry, a cousin of McGoohan, and half kill him. Carry, and that he (Sheridan) would watch for him. Farrell and Carry were on bad terms, and Carry was to be assailed because he said it was Sheridan who cut the tails off the cows."

There was Sergeant Sheridan organising a moonlight raid. In the writer of that letter they had a man prepared to swear that Sergeant Sheridan was engaged in organising another moonlight outrage, which did not take place, simply because the writer was too decent a man to fall into the trap. There was plenty of civilian evidence upon which to put Sheridan on his trial. Why was not Dan McGoohan's oath taken?

It would be simply one oath against another.

Then why not let a jury decide between them?

said that technically it was necessary to have either two witnesses, or one witness with material corroboration.

contended that Dan McGoohan could have sworn to the perjury, and the cow doctor who went over the field and failed to discover any tracks would supply the corroboration. If it had been a case of hunting down Nationalists, the Government would not have been so particular. The hon. Member proceeded to quote a letter published in September last, and written by Dan McGoohan himself, giving his account of the matter, which he thought gave a vivid picture of the way in which the administration of law in Ireland was regarded by the people. The anger of the judge, the packed jury, the repeated trials, the placing of the policeman's oath above all others, and the advice of prisoner's counsel that a plea of "Guilty" should be entered, to which Dan McGoohan had referred, were all ordinary elements of trials in Ireland, and one could not be surprised that the administration of the law was held in contempt. As to Sheridan himself, many hon. Members seemed to be doubtful whether he was within jurisdiction, after the Government were fully aware of these crimes, and had at their disposal, as he contended, abundant evidence, even without putting the policeman in the box, on which to bring him to trial. He had had a long correspondence with Sheridan, in which the latter denounced the Government, asserted his innocence, and claimed to be ready to prove before an impartial tribunal that he was the victim of a conspiracy. The last of the letters was after the secret inquiry, and in it he defied the Government, and stated that they were afraid to prosecute him, because if he was put into the box he would reveal such a state of things as would astonish the world. Nearly a month after the Chief Secretary had denounced him as a criminal. Sheridan wrote a letter, which appeared in the Independent on September 9th, 1901, dated from New market, County Cork, declaring that the public had heard only one side of the question and that he would be able to show that others had planned and secretly worked his ruin. The sum total of the matter was that the public in Ireland believed that the Government were afraid to prosecute Sheridan and no amount of rhetoric would remove that impression. In the interests of his own police and his own Government, the Chief Secretary was very ill-advised in leaving this matter in its present position. It had been said that the Nationalists were attacking the police force, and trying to make out that it was wholly composed of Sheridans. That was not true. They had never said it, nor did they believe it. He had heard the bitterest complaints in regard to the machinery and the method of management of the police force, and again and again he had heard the complaint that the Constabulary in Ireland was no place for an honest man to succeed in, that spies were constantly found in the barracks, and that only the men who did the dirty work got promotion. There were others who were doing the same kind of work as Sheridan, and they were the men who would get promotion, and the men who did their work honestly found they were passed over when promotion was in question. Those who acted as the accomplices of the police and as the instruments of the landlords, or as promoters of crime, were those who were rewarded by promotion. He was confident that the Irish Constabulary under an Irish Government would become an excellent police force, but it would be because they would find that characters like Sheridan would get no encouragement, and the men who did their duty would be properly rewarded. The Government had given no adequate explanation of their conduct in regard to Sheridan. This man had been at the mercy of the Government, and they had abundant evidence to put him on his trial; and it would have been better to have taken this course, even if the jury had disagreed. There was a profound conviction in Ireland that there was a mystery about this case which the Government did not desire to clear up, and this transaction altogether strengthened the conviction that the Irish Government, at all events, if not in its heads, at least in its subordinates, were still pursuing that abominable policy of agent provocateur, and manufacturing crime; and that was still accepted by the Castle as one of the necessities of Irish government.

apologised to the Committee for taking part in a debate which did not immediately concern himself or his constituency. He had listened with feelings of hopelessness to the vindictive remarks which had been hurled across the floor of the House. He ventured to offer to the Chief Secretary one word of encouragement in the extremely difficult and, thankless task which he had to discharge. There was no more thankless office than that of Chief Secretary for Ireland. As an Englishman, he thought it was both satisfactory and significant to observe that in the speeches they had heard during the last two days the representatives of each section of Irish politics—the United Irish League, the Orange organisation, the landlord and the tenant parties—seemed to consider that it was their one individual interest only which was being oppressed by the Government of Ireland, and that too much toleration had been shown to every other interest. Only a few months ago the United Irish Lengue complained of the application of coercion, while at the same time the representatives of the landlords and Orangemen complained that the measures taken by the Government were not sufficiently strong to prevent disorder. What did they say now? They complained because an Orange demonstration which the Government considered was dangerous to the peace, and which was to have taken place at Rostrevor, was proclaimed. In the speech of the hon. and learned Member for Waterford, and that of the hon. Member who seconded his Motion, three points were raised. They were the case of Sergeant Sheridan, land purchase in Ireland, and the coercive measures now in force, and with the exception of the meeting at Rostrevor, the debate had been more or less confined to those three points. He considered the case of Sergeant Sheridan a most unfortunate one, but he confessed that he, and many others on his side of the House, after having listened to the various debates upon this case, were heartily tired of Sergeant Sheridan. [A NATIONALIST MEMBER: You have only had the beginning of him.] The Leader of the Irish Party had told them that the object in continually raising this question was that the details of this case might be published far and wide wherever Irishmen existed. There was, however, one result of this constant repetition which had perhaps been overlooked, and it was that some of them were beginning to think that all these other cases which had been spoken of, and of which, the House was told, that of Sergeant Sheridan was only an example, either did not exist, or that the Members of the Irish Party were unable to produce them. With the exception of a man named Whelehan, which occurred 15 years ago, they had had no other instance given during the debate of a similar case taking place among the Irish Constabulary in Ireland. He thought he might almost venture to congratulate the Government upon this fact, because the Irish Party admittedly were desirous of finding similar cases, but were unable to produce any other. This one case of Sheridan was the only instance which could be produced of that "mass of villainy and corruption" which the hon. and learned Member said was rampant among the Irish Constabulary. [A NATIONALIST MEMBER: How many examples do you want?] He ventured to think that the Chief Secretary had had before him a hopeless task, and one almost deplored that be took so sanguine a view of the situation as to bring in a Bill which was calculated to meet with the bitterest opposition from the Party opposite. He recollected a speech made before that Bill was brought to the House, in which a Gentleman now sitting opposite, not even knowing what that Bill was intended to promote, or what its conditions were to be, told his constituents that when the Bill was produced the only way to treat it was to spit upon it. That speech convinced him that, however anxious the Chief Secretary might be for the good of the country, and whatever remedies he might wish to propose for the troubles which existed, and whatever Bill he might introduce, his efforts would be received with premeditated opposition and contempt by these ungrateful agitators. What would be the result, even if he brought in a Bill for compulsory purchase? In a speech which the hon. Member for East Mayo made in the North of Ireland, he said, in connection with compulsory purchase—

"If I believed the farmers of Ireland, when they got their land, would sit down as the willing slaves of an alien Government, I would leave them, as far as I am concerned, under the harrow of landlords for ever. As far as I am concerned, I am an advocate for the abolition of landlordism mainly and chiefly because I believe that with landlordism goes the chief prop of the British Government in Ireland."

To Englishmen, compulsory purchase was synonymous with confiscation. The members of the Irish Party complained when a different standard of legislation was applied in Ireland from that which was enforced in England. He ventured to think that no one in England, in his wildest imagination, would ever suggest that a man's property should be taken away against his will, and that he should only be paid such remuneration as would return to him an income barely half that which he would enjoy if he held his property. [AN HON. MEMBER: What about the railway companies in this country?] In England, when property was taken compulsorily, a fair value was allowed to the man from whom it was taken. He ventured to say that, if the same rule was applied in Ireland, so that approximately the same return of income would be given to the landlord to enable him to pay the interests and those unfortunate charges which existed so much on Irish property, and at the same time allowed him sufficient to avoid starving, no compulsion would be necessary, and the land throughout the length and breadth of the country would change from the landlords to the tenants. That the coercive measures of the Government were justified, he thought anyone would admit who had followed the speeches which had been made by Members opposite when in Ireland. He would venture to give one more quotation to show this. In a paper called the Irish People the hon. Member for East Clare was reported to have said—

"Nor, all the police in Ireland, not all the Army in England, not even if they brought Kitchener with his whole gang (groans)—that is, if he had got any of them left, which he (Mr. Redmond) doubted very much—not all the power of England can make them talk to, or walk with, or sell or buy from, or go next or near, any scabby land-grabber."

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will allow me to say that the, quotation which he has just read of my words is absolutely accurate, but I think, in order to be fair, he should have gone on to quote that portion of my speech which I delivered to my constituency in which I warned and exhorted the people to have nothing whatever to do with outrage or violence in any way, and to conduct their movement upon the lines on which the trades unionists conduct their movements in this country.

said that to his mind such speeches as those he had quoted were the justification of any coercive measures the Government might bring into force to prevent the inciting of an ignorant and poor peasantry to forms of cruelty more abominable than even recognised crime.

said he should have expected to hear something better in the way of a speech than that to which they had just listened on behalf of a Government which embraced so many able men both above and below the gangway. He thought it was a somewhat unfortunate position that a new administration, from which they wore entitled to have a definite expression of policy, should be left to the support of the hon. Gentleman who had just sat down. They were all glad to recognise nascent talent on the other side, and they acknowledged that rising Members should get an opportunity of expressing themselves; but he thought the hon. Member, in liberating his soul, would have given greater sustenance to the right hon. Gentleman. While the hon. Gentleman who had just sat down was in his cradle, they had exactly the same speeches from that side. If he would turn to Hansard any time for the past five-and-twenty years, he could read, almost in the exact words, the same kind of feeble support of the Government and the same kind of feeble attacks upon the Irish Members. Permit him to say that he thought that at the beginning of the career of a new administration, on the appointment of a new Prime Minister, they had some reason to complain of the total absence of the First Lord of the Treasury in these controversies. In former times, when a new Ministry was inducted, it was always customary on the part of the Opposition to challenge the Government for their policy in regard to cardinal matters of administration. During the whole of this debate, so far, the First Lord of the Treasury, the new Prime Minister, had remained away, with the exception of one hour, conspicuously from the House of Commons, denying to the Chief Secretary that support and comradeship to which, as a new member of the Cabinet, he should have supposed the right hon. Gentleman was entitled, and leaving him to the support of dolorous, dissonant eloquence such as they had just heard. Where were the other members of the Cabinet? Hitherto, this question of Ireland had been supposed to be worthy of some attention. In regard to the question of Sergeant Sheridan, he thought that the Chief Secretary had acted very well indeed up to a particular point. He would go further, and say that, but for him, they would have been entirely in the dark as to the crimes this man committed. But he failed to see what answer, for his own credit's sake and for the credit's fake of his own administration, he had now to make to the demand that the criminal should be brought to justice. With the disclosures they were now acquainted with, why did he not put the law of extradition in force and put Sheridan on his trial? They all remembered how this House used to be excited in regard to Mr. Jabez Balfour, a member of the Liberal Party in this House, who defrauded some poor people of several thousands of pounds. Every day the Liberal Party were asked why they did not bring Jabez Balfour to trial, and the whole resources of civilisation were employed, and thousands of pounds were spent, in regard to the case of Jabez Balfour, because, being a Liberal Member of Parliament, it was thought that dirt could be thrown on his Party. There was a Liberal peer the other day who went and contracted an irregular marriage in Arizona. It; was not alone that they tried Lord Russell for what he ventured to say, English morality being what it was, was a mere trumpery crime; but they set up in the House of Lords a special chamber to try him, and for that fine pageant they put the country to an expense of several thousand pounds. He would not go into other cases, but they were numerous. Here, in regard to a matter on which the opinion of the House of Commons was unanimous—namely, that they were dealing with a base and shocking criminal—he should have supposed that the Government, in their own interest, would have been glad to have vindicated the Royal Irish Constabulary by giving Mr. Sheridan what he demanded—a full inquiry. Why was it not done? If they could have the truth about this matter the Chief Secretary had a much better defence to make—only he could not make it—than he had given to the House. He ventured to say that this was what had occurred: The Chief Secretary was young and ingenuous when he went to Ireland. He detected this man red-handed in convicting, one after another, four innocent men. One of the judges was involved in it, many policemen were involved in it; and he was probably told by older officials that he had burned his fingers, and that he had better go no farther, because, if he did, he (the hon. Member) believed the whole fabric of the Royal Irish Constabulary would fall to the ground. He would say this: Well as the right hon. Gentleman up to this point had acted, he did not believe they would ever have heard of Sheridan's crime, but that Sheridan was a Catholic, and that Irwin, his sub-inspector, was a Protestant. If Sheridan had been a Protestant, he would be still holding high office in the Royal Irish Constabulary. He did not say this as against the right hon. Gentleman, for he believed he was entirely free from bigotry. He was speaking of the immediate chiefs of this man; and every one of them, from the highest to the lowest, and every engine of the Royal Irish Constabulary, would have been set in motion in order to screen him. Why did the Government not try him now? He did not believe they could convict Sheridan now, and that was probably what was also in the mind of the Chief Secretary, because of the class of jurors which they got in Ireland. Did they think they would give the Nationalists a triumph? Did they think the Crown Prosecutors would give the Nationalists a triumph? Did they think that the judges would be anxious to throw dirt on the decision of one of their own number when he had harangued the jury for the conviction of the unfortunate M'Goohan? No; the old Juggernaut car of British justice in Ireland was not made to "reverse engines!" They could not grow figs on thorns, and they could not get justice in Ireland in a case of this kind. He maintained that there was a horrid contrast between the fairness of the justice administered to ordinary criminals—thieves, garroters, prostitutes —and the justice administered the moment anything approaching to an attack was made upon a landlord, upon an intolerant Protestant, or the moment in which any member of the ascendency class was involved. In any of these latter cases there was no chance for any man to get justice in Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman, he must say, made a very brilliant speech last night but he regretted its tone and its temper. The right hon. Gentleman was, as he understood — although as yet there was no official knowledge of the fact—to be put in that cabinet with sole charge of Irish administration. Well, they were told that the Chief Secretary's office was a thankless office. Fifty years ago Dan O'Connell said that the Chief Secretary's office was that of a "shavebeggar," that it was an office into which a man was put while he was learning his duties for other posts. That was the misfortune of the position. He could remember 13 different Chief Secretaries in 22 years, and in that time they had spent a million of money on the Chief Secretary's office, and another million on the Lord Lieutenant's office; and the only change that he could find that they had made—the only reform which they had brought about in the case of Dublin Castle—was that they had saved the salary of one kettled ruminer—amount, £12 10s. For the twenty-two years they had been debating Castle reform, that was, as far as he knew, the sole result of the attacks they had made on the Castle system. He was saying that the right hon. Gentleman, in his tone and temper last night, was ill-advised. Perhaps from the right hon. Gentleman's point of view it was not unnatural for him to say that Nationalist Members were "more apt to excite the passions of the Irish peasantry by rhetoric than to convince the House of Commons by argument." Did any one suppose that if, instead of eighty Irish Members—picked up, owing to the necessities of the case, from the desk, the shop, the counter, and the farm—they had eighty Demosthenes, all speaking with the tongues of angels—did the Committee think that they could make any impression on the hon. Member who had just sat down? He must say that, when, in the course of time, the hon. Member was rewarded—of course, he did not know when that would be, but when he was rewarded with a position on the Treasury Bench—he might, perhaps, be even Chief Secretary: he was just the timber that Chief Secretaries were made out of—he ventured to say that his invincible ignorance would cling round him still. The right hon. Gentleman said that the Irish Nationalist Members could not argue with the House of Commons. One would think, from what the right hon. Gentleman said, that it was the House of Commons which ruled Ireland. It was not the House of Commons that ruled Ireland; it was the House of Lords. What representation had they in the House of Lords? They might send Bill after Bill affecting Ireland from this House up to the House of Lords, but these would be smothered in that lethal chamber, and scarcely a bubble would rise above the surface to denote their asphyxiation. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, he was quite sure, was carrying out a policy in which he did not believe. It was forced upon him by Lord Londonderry and his friends. Did any man on the Conservative Benches believe that, if an Irish Chief Secretary could have his way, and could rule Ireland from his own personal point of view, he would rule it from the point of view that the present Chief Secretary was doing now? The right hon. Gentleman dropped something yesterday which they heard on these Benches. The right hon. Gentleman was asked something about providing money for land purchase; and he was heard to exclaim under his breath, "How could I get over Beach?" That was the trouble: he could not get over Beach. But he had many another five-barred gate to get over. There was Balfour, and Long, and Hanbury.

Order, order!

said that of course he used their names as cyphers. He did not mean to offend the right hon. Gentlemen in the slightest degree, and he had the highest admiration for all of them. What he was going to say was—how was the right hon. Gentleman to get over Lord Londonderry? The Chief Secretary, in order to bring about any reform in Ireland, had either to threaten a Cabinet crisis, or be assisted from Ireland by a blunderbuss. There was no other alternative. The wheels of legislation were clogged. They had their own English Bills, their Water Bills, Education Bills, Electric Railway Bills, and all their other Bills, year after year. They had their own interests to consider, and the notion that one man in the Cabinet dealing with the urgent affairs of Ireland with nineteen ignorant Englishmen could overcome the vis inertia of these nineteen Gentlemen was an absurd suggestion. Then it was said that the Irish Members had to argue with the House of Commons. No, Sir, they did not come there to argue. He had never argued on anything in this House, and he never would. They came there to state their opinions, and they told the Government to take the consequences. That was the position they assumed. But he had some hope with regard to the Irish Land question, though all of them on this side did not see eye to eye on that question — that the right hon. Gentleman would have been able, with his great experience of Ireland, to demand, as a right, a competent portion of time for debating Irish interests. That was denied to them. What became, then, of the Act of Union? They did not come there to discuss Estimates. What was it to him whether the right hon. Gentleman got £5,000 a year or £500 a year? That was for himself to consider. They did not come there to discuss Africa; they came there to talk about their own parishes and their own counties. They did not care a groat for the British Empire. The British Empire could take care of itself. They were there to look after the small concerns of the daily life of the people of their country. They had no other concern under heaven. England destroyed their little Parliament. England took it away by corrupting the very same gang which were now in the ascendency. It was not the common people who sold the Irish Parliament. It was the predecessors of Lord Londonderry and his friends who sold it for gain. They asked from the Government a competent portion of time to discuss the affairs of their island. He had said years ago in this House that if they took out a volume of the statutes passed in any year by this miserable Ascendency Parliament in Ireland which was destroyed—and remember every one of these men were Protestants, belonging to the little narrow ascendency knot who were the curse of the country—that, bad and all as they were, these statutes, mottled though they were with Coercion Acts from time to time, contained on almost every page something about canals, roads, piers, harbours, fisheries, grazings—something about lightening the taxes, something in the interests of the country. All the noble public buildings in Ireland were erected by the Irish Parliament. But what had this Parliament done for Ireland? It was said by some one in Russia that when England was expelled from India nothing would be left as a monument of English rule but railways and soda water bottles. There would not be even the soda water bottles in Ireland; and as for the railways, these had been turned into an engine of oppression of the Irish people. Turn to the statutes today, passed by this great civilised Parliament, this Parliament of the Empire—go back for any period of the last century — and what was the attention they had given to this neglected, this miserable Ireland, this sick child of the British Empire? He ventured to say that if one Act a year was passed for the benefit of Ireland, forty were passed for Great Britain, leaving out of account altogether the hundreds of private Acts passed for the benefit of the municipalities and big towns. How many Bills per annum would a native Parliament enact for Ireland in all those years? Would the burning question of the moment be handled there as it is treated here? This Land question was so simple as to be almost ridiculous. It was so simple that even the hon. Gentleman who had just sat down knew something about it, because he had said it was simply a question of price. They asked for a fair amount of time to deal with the matter; they spoke as the representatives of the Irish nation, the representatives of "My brave Irish soldiers" who fought so well in Africa, and so many of whom were now in the poorhouses in Ireland. But the answer they got was, "No, we have no time for your trumpery affairs." But while he demanded that the Irish Land question should be dealt with as a whole, because his constituency was as much entitled to legislation as any other part of the country, this terrible horror on the De Freyne estate was a measurable question which could be dealt with by the application of a few thousand pounds. Why was it not forthcoming? Two hundred and fifty million pounds had been sunk in the sands of Africa to please the Jews and to get the franchise for the Uitlanders. Where was the Uitlander now? But when Irish Members, asked not for two hundred and fifty or fifty millions but only for a few millions to deal with this terrible question in Connaught, the answer was, "Oh, no, we cannot do anything out of the British Treasury." His generous English friends should remember how Ireland was being robbed all this time. Ten million pounds were being extracted year after year out of the country for the upkeep of "Sergeants Sheridan," with no good that any human soul could see resulting from the existence of British Government in Ireland. He would rather that the Turks were there. He would cheerfully exchange the rule of the Sultan for that of His Majesty King Edward VII. He would, at any rate, make a trial of him, and see how they could get on with the Bashi Bazouks. A more appalling system of administration was never inflicted on any country. It was impossible to know where the Government of Ireland was. In fact, there was no Government. There were a few gaugers taking in the money, and a few policemen for putting agitators into jail, and that was the sum total of Government in Ireland. There was no paternal administration, no shepherding of the industries and interests of the people. He was surprised at the fuss the English made about law and order in Ireland. The Chief Secretary yesterday held up his hands in holy horror because some speeches which he did not like were made in the Cork Court House. One would have thought that the Ark of the Covenant had been violated. The right hon. Gentleman declared that a grave scandal had been committed. What was the grave scandal? Every stone of the Court House was paid for by the ratepayers' money. It was their Court House just as much as that hat [The hon. Member held up his hat] was his hat; and the grave scandal consisted in the fact that the representatives of the ratepayers gave an hour's shelter to a number of gentlemen whoso speeches they were anxious to hear. According to the view which seemed to prevail, the sheriff should have ordered the constabulary to fix bayonets and drive out of that polluted temple of justice, sacred to the oaths of "Sergeants Sheridan," the leaders of the Irish people. That was the reasonable position taken up by the Chief Secretary. It was an absolutely hopeless position. There was not, so far as he knew, a single ounce of sense in the Government of Ireland. Could not the Government quietly take the ten millions a year out of the pockets of the Irish people, and leave them alone? Could they not make a ring, and see fair play between landlord and tenant? Lord de Freyne had commenced an action against his hon, friends on the civil side of the Court. Why did not the Government leave him to his remedy? Lord De Freyne, who, presumably, was well advised, said that he could recover heavy damages in the Chancery Division against everybody who had taken money out of his pocket. Why, in addition to that, did the Government give the Nationalist Members the plank bed to boot? Was that holding the scales evenly? Why, when they robbed the Irish people of this £10,000,000 a year, and got the Irish soldiers to enlist in their regiments, did not the Government leave these great proprietors alone to fight out their battle with their tenants, instead of coming in and throwing the Sword and the Crown into the scale on behalf of landlords like Lord De Freyne? His views on this Land question, as well as on the conduct of public affairs, were such that it was not easy for him, differing as he did as to details of policy in many respects from some of his hon. friends on that side of the House, to state without conflict, which he wished to avoid, what he thought ought to be done for the Irish tenants. He certainly conceived that when they got down to the machinery of purchase it was largely a question of price. He believed that if they could get the landlords to leave their case, such as it was, in the hands of skilled and temperate men—who, after all, could be obtained for a consideration—and, on the other side, the representatives of the tenants to put forward their case, they could settle three-fourths of the Irish Land question, and that whatever be draggled tail remained behind the English people would be quite willing to deal with on the lines of compulsory purchase. But much as he differed from some of his hon. friends as to some of their recent action the notion that the Irish people could be dragooned and driven by Coercion Acts was absolutely absurd. There, was no justification whatever for the proclamation of the Coercion Act. He had stated in a former debate that a Coercion proclamation should not issue unless the Government were able to make a case for a Coercion Act in this House. No such case had been made, and the right hon. Gentleman was in the unhappy position of being, with good intentions and instincts, powerless to deal with the Land question; and he would go, as other Chief Secretaries before him had gone, either to promotion or to—he would not say perdition— somewhere else. Let him remember, however, when he had only Coercion to offer that there was no more ungrateful gang under the sun of heaven than the Irish landlords. The right hon. Gentleman would be broken on the wheel in this conflict with the Irish people, or he would be promoted, he did not know which. After he had excited the ire and indignation of the Irish people and their representatives, the landlords would turn on him as they turned on his predecessors. He had seen the present Prime Minister standing on the steps of the throne in the House of Lords, with his face as white as paper, while his uncle. Lord Salisbury, was appealing to the Irish landlord gang not to throw out a Water Bill, which they were anxious to do, because it would add 3d. a thousand gallons to the contribution of Kingstown and Pembroke to the City of Dublin. The late Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, appealed to the Irish Peers to stand by their own Chief Secretary, who had stood by them in regard to the Coercion Act in Ireland, hut they derided that appeal from their own Prime Minister, although he told them that if the Bill was not carried the Chief Secretary would resign; and the Clonbrocks and the Londonderry's, and the rest of this piteous collection in this Chamber of Horrors went into the Lobby against the Chief Secretary for Ireland on the question of 3d. per thousand gallons for Dublin water, and they were prepared to ruin him and break him on the wheel in order to gratify the wishes of a little ascendancy gang which is the curse of Ireland. The hon. Member concluded: I do not know what question will come up, but the present Chief Secretary will get from the landlords exactly the same treatment as his predecessors. The Irish Question will still remain, after all your Coercion Acts, to baffle British officials. The Irish people have staggered along this thorny road for a century with bleeding feet, now gaining, now losing, now driven back, but never despairing. After all these years you have not brought them one whit nearer to your Empire. You have not won the allegiance of a man of them; and you yourselves by your own policy, in order to please a number of men who are no credit to you, who have done nothing in England, nothing for your arts, industries or discoveries, who have not even led your armies—for the sake of these men, and the miserable considerations that lie at the root of this conflict of centuries which they have waged against us, you deny yourselves the affections of as brave and gallant a people as were ever seen on the face of this earth.

said he wished to draw attention to one specific case. The hon. Gentleman who spoke last but one complained that in the course of this debate the Irish Members had brought forward only a very few cases of grievances, but the reason for that was that only a few Irish Members had spoken. There was not a single Irish Member in the House of Commons who could not bring from his own personal experience cases in connection with the Constabulary and their system of governing Ireland, which would shock the mind of any impartial person either inside or outside of the House of Commons. After the eloquent speeches which they had heard from the Irish Benches, he would only refer to one case which he regarded as a police outrage, which occurred in his own presence and with which he was to some extent connected. Those English Members who had recently visited Ireland had been, shocked because they were "shadowed" by the Royal Irish Constabulary, but what would English Members think if, instead of being "shadowed," they were brutally and outrageously assaulted by the police and prevented from addressing the people who wanted to hear them? Last October he attended a public meeting at Kilmaine, in South Mayo, which had not been proclaimed, accompanied by the Member for the Division. The audience consisted mainly of farmers and labourers. The meeting had hardly commenced before a police officer pushed his way through the crowd at the head of fifty or sixty policemen armed with rifles. He came up to the platform, and addressing him said, "You are a stranger, but I have heard that your name is Mr. Redmond." He then gave notice that he would allow him to speak, but that he would not permit the hon. Member for South Mayo to address the meeting. He had seen many exciting scenes in Ireland, but he had never before seen a Member of Parliament ordered by a common police inspector not to address the men who sent him to Parliament. That was exactly what took place, and what was reported in all the newspapers. The meeting proceeded, and he spoke strongly and without any hesitation whatever, but when the Member for the district rose to speak, the officer in charge of the police at once gave the word, and the Member for South Mayo was seized arid dragged away with the greatest possible violence to the police station, where he was kept in charge. And his only crime was that he wished to address a meeting of the men who had cast their votes for him. Not satisfied with dragging this Member of Parliament through the streets and preventing him from addressing his constituents, this police officer gave orders to charge the crowd. The crowd had come together without any prohibition; they had not been warned that the meeting was illegal; they were an ordinary crowd come to an ordinary meeting in the ordinary way, and the police dispersed them in the most violent and outrageous way, driving men and women right and left and beating them and knocking them down, and several persona were seriously injured. When the crowd was dispersed, he walked up to the police station where his hon. friend the Member for South Mayo was in custody. He spoke very strongly to the police, and told them they had no right to detain his friend without there being a charge against him, and, after some hesitation, the police released his hon. friend. Later in the evening he again addressed a meeting in the village, in order to test the question, and he asked the police officer to say by whose orders he prevented the hon. Member for South Mayo from speaking, and told him that he himself was prepared to say everything that the hon. Member could say, and he challenged the officer to lay a finger upon him. Again he was allowed to speak, and again the hon. Member for South Mayo courageously insisted on asserting his right to speak to his constituents. Again the police were ordered forward, and again the hon. Member was seized and torn away from the meeting, and again the people were batoned and bludgeoned and beaten right and left, a man standing by him on the platform being struck on the head and beaten when he had fallen to the ground, and having one hand broken. The Committee would bear in mind that this was not a proclaimed meeting, arid that no notice or warning of any kind had been given to these people. He had been to many proclaimed meetings, and the people who attended them who were injured were not injured without some warning; they had some inkling of the treatment which might be meted out to them. In this case there was no warning whatever. The Protestant clergyman of the village, a man who could not be described as being partial to the Nationalists, was present at the meeting and watched what took place. That gentleman subsequently wrote to the papers complaining that the report published was exaggerated, but he did not deny any of the facts stated in it; he only said the people had not been so much injured, and there had not been so much disturbance as the report stated. But that was not all that occurred, and he pledged his personal honour and reputation on the statement he was about to make. After these two futile attempts to address a meeting in this village, they mounted the wagonette and drove out of the village. Immediately the police officer ordered a large number of police to follow them on cars. As they drove out of the village, they came upon a large crowd of people, also going away from the meeting, and all those people did was to raise three cheers for their Party representative and for the United Irish League; no attempt was made to speak; these people only cheered their Member. The police leapt from the cars and at once charged the people, beating them wherever they could; the people scrambled over the ditches on each side of the road and ran as far away as they could. That surely might have been considered sufficient to satisfy the police; but, no! the police pursued them over several fields, and he was so horrified and disgusted at what he had seen that he would not trust the description of it to any newspaper reporter, and he telegraphed directly he reached a telegraph office a statement of what he had seen. That statement had never been contradicted, and upon that statement he staked his character and reputation. The Chief Secretary and the Attorney General know no more of what took place at Kilmaine from their own personal knowledge than they knew of what took place at the capture of Pretoria. What was the result? They applied to their police officer who would, no doubt, give his version of what took place—the police officer who did these things, against whom he made this charge—and that illustrated what took place in Ireland. The police behaved in this way; their conduct was condoned by the Irish Government; Members of Parliament laid a solemn complaint, and their complaint was set aside upon the report of the police officer who was guilty of the act. What reason was there for this action on the part of the police? He had never been in the district before, and was ignorant of any circumstances that would render the meeting Undesirable. There was the fact that there was an evicted farm in the neighbourhood, but that was no justification for the police following the people who came to hear an address from their Member of Parliament. He applied to the Chief Secretary to look into these matters, and give an assurance in this House that innocent people should not without warning, proclamation, or notice of some sort, be beaten and driven as lie saw these unhappy people of Mayo driven, whose only crime was listening to the man they had elected to serve them in Parliament.

I agree —and I am afraid it is the only remark with which I do agree—with one observation made by the hon. gentleman who spoke from the Benches opposite a few moments ago, that it is both the right and duty of members who represent English and Scottish constituencies to take part in these debates, remembering that this Imperial Parliament in which Ireland is represented governs Ireland today, as it has done in the main over since the Union, in accordance not with Irish but with English and Scottish opinion. We should therefore, I think, be neglecting the responsibility which the Constitution casts upon us if we did not vigilantly scrutinise, when proper opportunity offers, and unflinchingly criticise, the action of the Irish Executive. I am not going to deal with any of those larger questions of general policy which, not unnaturally, have occupied some share, at any rate, in this debate; but I am going to confine myself to one particular point, I mean the case of the man Sheridan. I shall speak of that case very briefly, and I hope dispassionately, and as it presents itself, not to an Irishman either on one side or the other, but to one who has some acquaintance with English law and the principles of English administration. I need not say that I do not associate myself in the leas with some of the charges which have been made against the Chief Secretary in relation to this matter, or with the suggestion, which I do not think is really seriously put forward, that the Chief Secretary acted at any stage in these proceedings from a desire to screen guilty persons, or to prevent further disclosures, if they could have been made—a suggestion which is not only prima facie incredible, but is contradicted by all the materials the House has before it. On the contrary, I will start by saying that to the right hon. gentleman is duo the entire and undivided credit of having unearthed and unmasked these villainies —for villainies they were—which had been going on undetected, and, as far as we know, unsuspected for years past. and had resulted in the conviction of three, if not four, entirely innocent persons. I gather that the hon. Gentleman opposite, to whom I referred, and his friends are tired of hearing of this case; but I think that is not a very creditable sentiment. If this case had happened anywhere but in Ireland, if it had happened in any colony, if it had happened here in England, it would have been a very long time before the House of Commons would have ceased talking— and rightly talking—about it, until it was satisfied that every step had been taken that policy and statesmanship could suggest, not only to bring the offender to justice, but to prevent the possibility of the offence recurring. I am sure the Chief Secretary will not demur from what I have been saying so far; and great credit is due to the right hon. Gentleman for the steps he took in investigating this matter, and probing it as far as he could. I also agree that after the case of Ryan, when suspicion seemed first to be aroused, there was not adequate material in the possession of the right hon. Gentleman, or of the Irish Executive, to justify a prosecution. I think it extremely probable that the result of the prosecution would have been the acquittal of Sheridan, and it might have stopped all those further disclosures that have taken place, and have rendered Sheridan himself at any rate incapable of doing further mischief in Ireland. Nor do I think that the right hon. Gentleman was wrong—and I do not believe that my hon. friend the Member for Mayo will differ from me here—in the circumstances in ordering a secret inquiry. I think it extremely doubtful whether an open public inquiry would not have defeated the purpose which the right hon. Gentleman had in view. And, therefore, putting myself so far as I can in his place, and supposing I had had to deal with a similar situation, up to that point I do not see how any one could have done differently. But now I come to the points on which it appears to me that the action of the Executive is open, not only to criticism, but to censure. They are three. In the first place I think it was a great mistake that the right hon. Gentleman should have left to some subordinates of his— for so I understand the statement he made last night—the task of formulating, the terms of the indemnity which should draw confession from the accomplices of Sergeant Sheridan. Could you have a more delicate and difficult matter than that? Here were the men who ex hypothesi were accomplices or accessories to the crime. They were to be tempted to come forward and give evidence— evidence which, I agree, they could not have been compelled to give at the trial, for no man can be compelled to convict himself. Everybody knows that that is a most difficult situation indeed; and it appears to mo that what the right hon. Gentleman ought to have done was to insist that he himself should first carefully consider, and then as carefully formulate, the terms on which these men were to be invited to come forward. We do not now know what those terms were; but it would rather seem, from the interpretation which the right hon. Gentleman puts upon them, that they must have been so vague—I was going to say so mischievously and fatally comprehensive—that they actually, in his view, put him under a moral or honourable obligation to reinstate in the police force, or in a position in which they would receive the same emoluments, these men who, by their own admission, were accomplices in most disgraceful and criminal breaches of trust. Therefore, my first criticism is that the form of indemnity was one which ought to have been most carefully safeguarded by himself, and that the course pursued was a course of laxity, which has led, I cannot but think, to regrettable and discreditable consequences. But my next criticism is of a more serious nature. An inquiry was held. Evidence was given that convinced the right hon. Gentleman, and I have no doubt rightly so, that Sheridan had been for years engaged in the systematic manufacture of bogus crimes, and, what is still more serious, in the organised and deliberate conviction of innocent men. I need not use rhetorical language to describe that which, by the unanimous judgment of this House, is one of the basest and foulest crimes it is possible to bring home to a human being. When you have a minister of the law abusing the trust which the State has reposed in him, and you got, what it is no exaggeration to call the stream of justice polluted at its very source, no action that the Executive can take can be too strong, no punishment you can inflict can be too severe, and no measure, of precaution against the recurrence of similar things can be too vigilant or drastic. What was the course the right hon. Gentleman should Lave taken? I do not hesitate to say— and I have never uttered an opinion in this House with a clearer conviction of its truth—I do not hesitate to say that at all costs he ought to have prosecuted Sheridan. I do not care for this purpose what the precise form of the charge was. There were many charges that could have been made—such as perjury or conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. It would not take the ingenuity of a skilled lawyer to frame half a dozen indictments against him. But I do not care what the precise form of the charge was; I do not even care if, in consequence of what I call the regrettable laxity in regard to the form of the indemnity, the evidence given at the trial by the accomplices did not come up to the mark. I think in such a case you would have had plenty of evidence. You would have had the evidence of this unfortunate man McGoohan, whose most pathetic and moving statement the hon. Member for East Mayo read in the House today. I do not think it possible for the imagination to conceive a more terrible position than that in which McGoohan was placed, except, indeed—for there is one more terrible still—the position of that still more unfortunate innocent man who, on the advice of his solicitor, pleaded guilty to a crime which he had never committed. I cannot help thinking that there is not a jury in Ireland— you would not need what is called a packed jury—who, if Sheridan had been put on his trial and these men had told their story, even if the corroborative evidence of the accomplices was open, as it would have been, to much observation, would not have convicted him; and there is not a judge in Ireland that would not have been glad to pass on him the heaviest sentence that the law allows. [A You don't know them.] I say that because I am certain there is not a judge on the Irish Bench who would not feel it his duty to do so. I deeply regret that the right lion. Gentleman let that opportunity slip; and I must say I cannot think that even now all is being done or has been done that might be done to bring about the conviction of Sheridan. Where is he? I understand he is somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, and the presumption is that he is in some country or other between which and this kingdom there is a treaty of extradition. Reference was made by my hon. friend the Member for North Louth to the case of Jabez Balfour. I remember it well. I was at the Home Office at the time; and, as my hon. friend truly said, we were assailed month after month, week after week, almost day after day, with Questions in this House and comments in the Press, for our supposed slackness in trying to obtain the extradition of Jabez Balfour. He was in a country where there was no extradition I treaty at all or at all events none relating to the crime of which he was guilty; but at any rate we did succeed after a long and laborious task, and at much: expense, in bringing him back to this country. If that could be done in a case of that kind, infinitely more difficult than this, why cannot you, if Sheridan is in a country with which an extradition treaty exists, and if he has committed extraditable crimes—why cannot you demand his extradition even now, and have him brought before an Irish judge and jury to answer for his crimes? My third criticism on the action of the right hon. Gentleman is this. I give him full credit for scrupulous observance of an honourable obligation, but I cannot help thinking that he has made a great mistake in putting these officers who were accomplices and accessories in the crime of Sheridan back into the police force. I do not think any promise of indemnity— certainly no promise of indemnity that was properly and reasonably framed— could possibly have imposed on the Government the obligation of bringing back into their service men who, by their own admission, had been proved guilty of a gross dereliction of duty. I am sure it would give great satisfaction to the Committee and to the House of Commons and to public opinion outside if the right hon. Gentleman, on both points to which I have referred, would now reassure us, namely, that, whatever happens, these officers will not be regarded as in any sense members of the public service in Ireland, and, secondly, that the deplorable omission made at the time in the failure to prosecute Sheridan is now about to be repaired, and that if he can be discovered in the country where he is thought to be ho would be brought back to Ireland, and there made amenable to justice for the heinous offences which he has committed.

said the Leader of the House, now that attention had been called to the Sheridan case, ought to impress upon the Chief Secretary the necessity of taking steps to see whether there were not other cases of abuse. The Chief Secretary, on the previous evening, made a speech leading the House to believe that this was a perfectly isolated case. There was nothing singular about the case except the fact that this was the first occasion on which the Irish Government had acted with reference to those men who had been inciting to commit crime. The wonder was, not that the case had not been prosecuted, but that the case of Sheridan had been exposed by the Irish Government at all. The case of Sheridan was not nearly so glaring a case as that of Sergeant Sullivan, which occurred a short while ago. In the case of Sheridan there was no incitement to murder. In the case of Sergeant Sullivan there was a letter written to which a name was forged, urging an acquaintance of the person whose name was forged to go and raid a house and to shoot the man inside the house. The evidence was perfectly clear. He had the documents in his own hand, and if the Chief Secretary would examine them he would find that the forged letter was written by a man who was still in the police force. In Ireland they knew perfectly well that there were such cases as that of Sheridan, from time to time, in which no prosecutions had taken place. He was engaged in the case of Sullivan, but the proofs happened to come under his notice, and in a subsequent trial some witnesses who were being examined stated that, under the sanction of the county inspector and of the district inspector, the whole constabulary force of the district had subscribed to the fund for the defence of Sergeant Sullivan, who was tried before a Sligo jury. And that brought him back to the question of jury packing. The right hon. Gentleman said, where was the use of admitting men into the jury box to whom the doctrines of the Irish Land League had been preached, and who were in sympathy with these principles? But on the same principle the Attorney General ought to exclude from the jury box men who were the sworn life-long opponents of the principles of the United Irish League. Every Nationalist, and every man who was supposed to be in sympathy with the United Irish League organisation, was excluded from the jury. Of course the result was that this packed jury told the judge they wished to hear no more evidence, and acquitted Sergeant Sullivan. If the right hon. Gentleman was anxious to go back on the history of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Irish Members could give him a number of cases where the suspicion was strong in the public mind that this system of manufacturing evidence had been organised by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary who were desirous of getting promotion. The temptation was very great. The men with whom they had to deal were the landlords and magistrates in the district, and the constables naturally wanted to make friends of them. If the Irish Executive was not sufficiently strong to inquire closely into cases where suspicion was aroused and their attention was directed to them, these officers could go on with their evil practices with impunity. There could be no doubt that constables had invited threatening letters to be written, and the case of O'Halloran was notorious in County Clare. That man had been going round with money in his pocket to all the fairs, asking people to join in moonlight meetings. He did not want to blame the Chief Secretary. That right hon. Gentleman differed from all his predecessors, in that he had the courage to probe Sheridan's case to the bottom. The Irish Members invited the right hon. Gentleman to go a step further, and make an inquiry into the whole system; and if the right hon. Gentleman was anxious, to show that the police force in Ireland was above suspicion, the Irish members would assist him. If the Chief Secretary would only take the trouble to go through the papers in the Sullivan case, he would find that it was worse than that of Sheridan. The right hon. Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland had made the extraordinary statement that the government of Ireland could not be carried on without jury packing. What the Irish Members said was that if England could not govern Ireland without jury packing, then they should give up governing Ireland. English Members could not realise what the system of challenging jurors was in Ireland. In an ordinary trial in England there was no challenging. The right was there, of course, but it was hardly ever exercised. He would give a concrete case. Two men from County Mayo were tried at Sligo for conspiracy in connection with the United Irish League. The panel of jurors that was to try them consisted of 258 men. Such a panel in a criminal case was absolutely unknown in England. Why were 258 jurors called? To enable the Government to challenge 246 of them before they selected their twelve jurymen to go into the box. Under such a give such confidence to the people in the system there was no man, however innocent, who could get a fair trial, especially whore political differences were so strong as they were in Ireland. On that panel, out of the 268, 168 were Catholics, and not one of them was admitted to the jury box, simply because the men to be tried were Catholics; and the jury which did try them wore exclusively Protestants. As a matter of fact, the men were found guilty; but the foreman of the jury, when announcing the verdict, said that they wished to recommend the men to mercy, because they were the dupes of the United Irish League. Again, there was the case of the hon. Member for North Leitrim who was brought to trial in Dublin. The jury panel consisted of forty-eight, but only twenty-eight answered to their names; and the Attorney General refused to go on with a panel of only twenty-eight, although right the accused had only a challenge of six—leaving the right hon. Gentleman twenty-two to operate upon. The trial was postponed for a week, when thirty-six jurors answered to their names. The Crown challenged the first name balloted for; and, after the accused had exhausted his six challenges and the Crown theirs, it was found that there ware only eleven jurors in the box. The Crown had therefore to accept the first juror whom they had challenged. All this was provided for in Sligo, where they had a panel of 248, and it would be absurd if, out of a panel of 248 or 258, they could not select twelve men according to their own choice and of their own mind. The result was that in the case of the hon. Member there was a disagreement of the jury. He could never appreciate the sense of fair play of the right hon. Gentleman in excluding from the box men who were known to be in political—if not in religious—sympathy with the accused. Was it the case that men in political sympathy with the accused would not find a just verdict, however strong the case might be? If it were so, indeed he was afraid the practice of jury packing in Ireland would go on for a very long time. Even if there should be a failure of justice occasionally, it was preferable that the Government should administration of justice as would promote a good spirit among them, rather than that they should challenge everybody known to be in political sympathy with the accused. Another matter to which he desired to draw attention, was a matter affecting the constituency he represented, and that was the demand made in the previous year, or in the beginning of the present year, upon the municipal authorities of Dublin in regard to its police rate. Dublin, in regard to this matter, was in an extraordinary position; although they were taxed far beyond the limit of other towns in the United Kingdom for police, they had no control whatever over the police; the police gave no assistance for fire brigade purposes, or for carrying out the sanitary laws. They were-there as a foreign body. Some three years ago the Dublin Corporation made a bye-law to regulate the placing of newspaper placards all over the street where they were not only a nuisance to everybody but, owing to their flying up in front of horses, a source of danger to the people. The Corporation, having passed the bye-laws, called upon the municipal authorities to carry it out. Up to now the police had refused to carry it out.

interrupting, said that any discussion of the police on the present Vote would be irregular unless by consent of the House and the Chair.

said he had consuited Mr. Lowther the previous night, and he told him it could he done if the Chief Secretary did not object.

suggested that as the hon. Member was the chief magistrate of Dublin and wished to bring the matter forward, he should be allowed to do so.

said that under the now Act power was given to the Corporation to make further bye-laws for the regulation of the traffic, and one bye-law which they made was that every vehicle should carry lights at night and that all bicycles should carry lights. In that case the police had refused to carry out the bye-law without an indemnity being given to them before they attempted to enforce it, and a large correspondence had taken place between the Corporation and the police upon the subject. Dublin was taxed to the extent of 8d. in the £ for police, and that contribution was fixed fifty years ago, yet, although the population had increased three-fold since then, the tax had remained precisely the same. The people of Dublin were contributing 8d. in the £ as against 3d. in the case of Bradford, 3¾d. in the case of Glasgow on rents over £10 and 1¾d. in the case of rents under £10, 5d. in Sheffield, which was the highest rated town in England, and if they took Belfast, which they ought to compare, perhaps, most with Dublin, the police rate was only 3d. The cost of police per head was 8s. 2½d. in Dublin and 11d. in Belfast. In no town in England did they approach the Dublin figures. In addition to the fixed maximum rate of 8d. the Irish Government constantly made demands. This year they demanded £5,000, which demand was finally abandoned because it was made on a basis which could not be supported, but he feared the demand was only abandoned for the time. These figures resulted in great injustice to the community, because the Treasury refused to make grants for im-improvements on the ground that the rates were so high, and the rates were high because the Irish Government would not treat them as English towns were treated. If this could be justified by any increase of crime, there would be a reason for it, but it could not. In 1863, when this rate was fixed, the indictable offences in the year amounted to 9.520, in 1901 they were 2,196, and the cost of police in the same time had been doubled. The number of offences dealt with summarily in 1863 was43,694, and in 1901 29,736. So that while there was this enormous diminution in crime there was this enormous increase in the rates. He hoped the Chief Secretary would direct his serious attention to this matter, which so greatly affected the whole community of Dublin.

said it was with no feeling of disparagement to the Chief Secretary that he said he recognised that the speech of the right hon. Gentleman was, both in substance and in form, almost identical with the speeches he had heard from successive Irish Secretaries for the last seventeen years. There was the same strenuous assertion made in earlier years of this dispute of an intention to vindicate the law, and the same protestation of infallibility on the part of the executive and administrative officers of the law in Ireland, and no doubt that speech accurately represented the attitude of the Irish Government. The economic conditions of Ireland still offered the same field for exploration as it did in 1887 and 1888, but the position now was worse, perhaps, than then because former Chief Secretaries had the sympathy of what was called the loyal minority. The right hon. Gentleman was the first Chief Secretary to be without the support of the loyal minority in Ireland. This recrudescence of Irish disturbance was due not merely to the fact that legislative reforms were not introduced, but to the fact that there was inequality in the administration of the law between this country and Ireland. In England the magistrates and judges were independent of the Executive, and not under its control; it had no power to remove them. Superior judges could only be removed by Parliament, and the inferior Judges by the constituted judicial authority of the country. In Ireland there existed the extraordinarily anomalous state of things that the resident magistrates (improperly so-called) were chosen at the will and caprice of an executive officer, and sent down as the servants and creatures of that officer to try political offenders. In the event of a person charged being committed for trial in England, the jurors were called according to the alphabet, but in Ireland they were called according to their political and religious creed, and were invariably composed of Protestants. The answer of the right hon. Gentleman would probably be that if a Catholic jury were empanelled it would be impossible for the Crown to secure a conviction. But purely the converse of that argument also held good. If a Catholic jury was unreliable in the interests of the Crown, he thought it was established that a Protestant jury was equally unreliable in the interests of the prisoner; and it was a principle of British justice that if injustice was likely to arise it was far better that the Crown rather than the prisoner should be the sufferer. As to the suppression of meetings, in Ireland it appeared to be done at the mere caprice of the Chief Secretary or his officials, whereas in England a meeting could not be prohibited unless satisfactory or reasonable grounds were afforded in the view of those responsible for the maintenance of order that violence, upon either persons or property, would be exercised, he had little sympathy with the methods by which Orangemen conducted their political propaganda, but he was at a loss to understand en what principle the meeting at Rostrevor was prohibited. It was the duty of the Executive to protect lawful public meetings such as, apparently, that at Rostrevor was; but he had also heard of other gatherings for peaceful and lawful objects being suppressed by the strong arm of the law because it was supposed they might militate against the interests of the Government. He fully associated himself with all that had fallen from the right hon. Gentleman the late Home Secretary with regard to the Sheridan case. There was probably no graver scandal in the history of the administration of our law than the action of the Irish Executive in failing to prosecute Sheridan. He agreed that probably the material at the disposal of the Chief Secretary when the Ryan business was discovered was not sufficient to justify legal proceedings against Sheridan, but on further inquiry being made it was found that three innocent persons had been convicted on false evidence. One would have thought that then nothing in the world would have prevented the Chief Secretary instituting a prosecution against the persons concerned in the concoction of false evidence, but instead of that an indemnity of the widest possible character was given. To have given an indemnity to one person was surely the fullest length to which the right hon. Gentleman need have gone. Even apart from the evidence of the constables, ho believed it would have been almost impossible for Sheridan to escape conviction. But assuming it would have been difficult to secure a verdict, it was the duty of the Government to have shown their solicitude for the police force to be as far as possible above suspicion, and even though Sheridan on some technical point had escaped conviction, the Government would have been amply justified in placing him on his trial. It was not yet too late to make some reparation. This matter concerned not Ireland alone, but the whole administration of British law, and ho submitted that it was the duty of the Government to cause an extradition warrant to be applied for. For the satisfaction of public feeling in England, as well as in Ireland, he, as an English lawyer, urged that this stop should be taken; and, beyond that, it was incredible that men who had been morally convicted of the crime of procuring the conviction of innocent men should still be serving in the police force.

said that the very fact, referred to by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Armagh, that these debates recurred year after year was the strongest proof that the course now being pursued by the Chief Secretary was reactionary and pernicious. Why was the same old story perpetually being told? Because the Irish people had no confidence in the administration of law in Ireland. That peculiarity was a reproach to England which ought long since to have been removed, and a misfortune to Ireland, which could and ought to be remedied, he was in hopes that they would have initiated a bettor system than the one which previously prevailed, but instead of this the Chief Secretary had gone back and reversed the policy which prevailed in Ireland ton years ago. From 1893 up to the present year coercion was asleep, and that incident of unconstitutional oppression, the Coercion Act, was not put in force by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Montrose Burghs. From 1895 up to the present time the immediate predecessor of the Chief Secretary, the present President of the Hoard of Trade, was able to govern Ireland without the Coercion Act. He thought scant justice had been done to the President of the Board of Trade by his own party, by whom he had been persecuted because he had not revived that odious system of coercion. In 1898 they got the first instalment of Home Rule in the shape of the Local Government Bill, and why did the present Chief Secretary for Ireland not follow up that example and give them a still more generous Land Act, and a still better development and expansion of local Government in Ireland. Instead of this they had had a proclamation of some of the most important parts of Ireland, followed by the imprisonment of several Members of Parliament and others. These men had been subject to the ignominy of imprisonment, at the behest of magistrates who were removable at the pleasure of the Lord Lieutenant. He arraigned the present administration for reviving this system of coercion. They should bear in mind that this landlord "combine," which was formed to counteract the organisation of the Irish tenantry, was formed by a circular issued on the 7th of April, and on the 14th of April a meeting of the Privy Council was called, and on that day the Coercion Act was put in force. The proclamation reviving the Coercion Act was signed by two of the leaders of the landlords' combination, the object of which was to stamp out the present agitation, not in the interests of the country, but in order to secure the payment of their rents. It was at the instance of these landlords that the Coercion Act was revived. How could any hon. Member defend that conduct who had any sense of justice, for in this case the landlords were the judges of their own cause, whether it was right or wrong. This point had not been answered. The Chief Secretary had passed over this argument in his eloquent speech last night, and while he attributed to the rhetoric of his hon. friends below the gangway and their agitation responsibility for oppression in Ireland, the right hon. Gentleman forgot that he himself was one of the greatest offenders in the abuse of that rhetorical power. There was no occasion for coercion in Ireland, and its application was unnecessary and unfair. Want of confidence in the administration of Ireland on the part of the people was at the root of all the misfortunes of the country and this was the bed rock on which all its calamities rested. This want of confidence in the administration and in the fairness of the British Government, as exercised in Dublin Castle, had been fomented and increased by the course which the right lion. Gentleman had taken. One might imagine that lie was reading the history of Ireland a hundred years ago in regard to that dreadful rebellion of 1798. The revival of coercion in the present year had boon brought about and initiated for the purpose of driving the people into such a state of desperation as would warrant a further suspension of the constitution and a further persecution of these poor wretches. There was nothing in the state of the country or in any of the districts proclaimed to warrant the resuscitation of this odious Act Want of confidence in the administration was at the root of all the trouble. It was pointed out by Mr. Lecky in one of those admirable books, which he wrote when he was not a Member of Parliament, that four years after Catholic emancipation there was not a single Catholic lawyer on the Irish Bench. While three-fourths of the Irish people were Roman Catholics, out of eighteen judges in the superior court in the year 1902, whoso incomes ranged from £4,000 to £8,000 a year, only three of those judges were Roman Catholics by religious profession. Was that a fair proportion having regard to the population? Out of twenty-one County Court judges, there were only seven who were Roman Catholics. As an Irish barrister, he held that that was not doing justice to Catholics, and it was not calculated to inspire confidence in the law in Ireland. They could not expect an ignorant peasant to bare: the same confidence in judges who belonged to a different religious persuasion. Under this state of things, the suspicion of unfairness was enough to create a feeling of despair, and a sense of oppression and wrong that nothing could overcome. He did not say that the Chief Secretary was responsible for this state of things. In the cause of his country and in the cause of justice, lie (Mr. Hemphill) thought it was his duty to call public attention to what he believed to be unreasonable and unfair. The interference with public meetings in Ireland had been grossly abused. He agreed that every Government had a right to prevent public meetings, if there was any reason to suppose that a breach of the peace would ensue from it. That power in such a case must be exercised, and it had been exercised even in England. He did not, however, think that any Government had the right to prevent a Member of Parliament addressing his own constituents on the public topics of the day, even though he might wish to argue in favour of a compulsory purchase Bill, or any other measure. It was monstrous that at a meeting of that sort, before it was known what the member was going to say, should be interrupted and broken up by the police. Such a thing could not exist in England. If it had existed, England would not be what it was now. It was the right of public meeting, the right of calling for the redress of grievances, and the right of protesting against oppressive laws, that had brought England to the height of prosperity of which they were all so proud. Why should Ireland be prevented from a like opportunity? Why should the people of Ireland not have the right of assembly in order to make their voice heard all over the three kingdoms in pressing for any legislative change? If there was a breach of the peace the police were bound to interfere, but they were not bound to interfere when a meeting was called for the purpose of hearing a Member of Parliament address his constituents on political subjects. At Cork the other day the court house was occupied by the county Council, and because some question arose after the business of the Council was over—he understood that many members of the Council were also members of the United Irish League—the sheriff came in and endeavoured by force of arms to break up the meeting. That was grossly illegal, because the Local Government Act provided that the court house should be under the control of County Council, and that—he was giving a paraphrase—if any difference arose between the Sheriff and the County Council as to the use of the court house, it should be laid before the Lord Lieutenant and decided by him. That course was not pursued in this case. The course taken by the Sheriff' was a lawless proceeding which deserved the reprobation of this House. In the De Freyne estate dispute he maintained that the Chief Secretary should have followed the example of his famous predecessor, Thomas Drummond, who refused the forces of the Crown to enforce tithe, and told those who sought the aid of those forces to resort to the ordinary Courts of law. In the case of Sheridan there had been a monstrous failure of justice. There had been a monstrous deviation from executive morality in allowing Sheridan to go unpunished. One of Sheridan's accomplices was still in the police force in a depot. Was a man powerless for evil because he was in a depot? He regarded the action of the Chief Secretary in the Sheridan case as a compounding of felony. Sheridan should have been brought to trial and the responsibility of discharging him thrown upon a jury. What the Roman satirist said should have been remembered—Quis custodiet ipsos, custodes. The responsibility should have been thrown upon a jury of deciding whether he was to go unpunished. Then the Chief Secretary would have been able to say that he had done all he could to bring this monstrous betrayer of his trust to justice.

said the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Tyrone had censured the Chief Secretary for holding a secret inquiry in the Sheridan case.

I did not say a word about the secret inquiry. I studiously avoided that. But I did presume to censure him for not bringing Sheridan into court for trial.

said the right hon. Gentleman the Member for East Fife made his censure cover the action of the Chief Secretary in regard to the indemnity. He complained that the Chief Secretary had not exercised sufficient care in the preparation of the indemnity so far as the exact terms were concerned. They had in this case to look not merely at the form of the indemnity, but to those men who had to read it, and who had to form expectations as to what would inevitably arise after the inquiry.

It was stated to be a verbal indemnity.

thought the House would feel that the Chief Secretary had taken a bold course in the Sheridan case, which required much courage, and should be appreciated in persons in his position who were apt to be much dissuaded by persons of influence. A poor reward had been meted out to him in the censures levelled at him in the House. Let it be remembered that the indemnity to the police constables preceded and did not follow the discovery of Sheridan's guilt, and that the Chief Secretary's course was taken with a nobler object than that of exacting vengeance against Sheridan. It was undertaken with what he would call the nobler object of freeing from prison innocent men, and of establishing their innocence in the face of the world. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for East Fife said that Sheridan ought to be prosecuted at all costs. He did not agree with the view of the right hon. Gentleman, that it was in accordance with English tradition to go forward with a prosecution of this kind, where there was infirmity in the evidence and difficulty of corroboration. The right hon. Gentleman stated that if a conviction had taken place there was not an Irish judge who would have thought he had done his duty except by inflicting a severe sentence. He was sure the right hon. Gentleman was right in his estimate of the Irish judiciary. But it would have been not less the duty of the judge to warn the jury against convicting upon prejudice or on uncorroborated testimony. Even with such a risky proceeding in trying to get a conviction by the help of the prejudice surrounding this case, there would not have been much chance of obtaining a verdict. The hon. Member for Harbour Division of Dublin had complained of the cost of the police, in Ireland, and had stated that in the city of Dublin it was equal to a rate of 8d. in the £ on the valuation of the city. But in Liverpool the police rate was 8d. in the £ of rateable value, and in Manchester and Salford it was only a little less. These figures showed that the cost of the police in Ireland was not so wasteful as it appeared to be. The charges brought by hon. Members opposite against Ministers were also an indictment against a whole people who had been, to a steadily increasing extent, refusing to be brought into unjust sympathy with the case of the Irish tenants, because they had begun to sec the practices by which the grievances of the Irish tenants were used for political purposes. As to compulsory purchase, it was necessary to persuade the British people to part with their money for that purpose; but that would not be done by exaggerating the case and by working up theatrical agitation. They had been told that because the Government had gone so far with a generous policy of land purchase, and because they had put the tenants of one estate in a better position than those on another estate, they were bound to take another step forward, not because of financial considerations, but on account of geographical contiguity. He could assure hon. Gentlemen opposite that as they had failed at every election since 1886 in England, they would continue to fail to elicit sympathy here for their agrarian grievances so long as they were paraded before the British electorate as had been this case of the De Freyne tenantry.

said that the right hon. the Chief Secretary, in his very gloomy speech, rebuked the right hon. the Member for Haddington for impartiality. At all events the right hon. Gentleman's own speech was singularly free from that vice. There was a time when the right hon. Gentleman was suspected of impartiality in Ireland, but he had told the Committee the previous day, that, as the result of a longer experience, he had found that impartiality would not do; and he seemed from some of his latest speeches, to have gone far in abandoning any spirit of impartiality. It was certainly a remarkable fact that every question that arose in connection with Irish administration provoked an extraordinary heat and temper in the course of the discussion. For his part, he thought the only explanation of this lay in the fact that every grievance, however small, every detail, however insignificant it might appear in itself, was connected in the minds of the people of this country, and in Ireland, with the general grievances and the general problems which were vital to the whole interests of the country. When he spoke of small matters, he did not include amongst them the Sheridan case. He regarded that as a great and a grave matter. The shame and displeasure all Englishmen and Scotchmen felt was no small matter that a man drawing their pay and wielding their authority should ha re been guilty of the conduct of Sheridan. But that was the least of it. he felt bound to say, after having listened most respectfully and carefully to all that the right hon. Gentleman had stated about his past action and present attitude, that, in his opinion, there had been a very grave error of judgment which had led to a most unfortunate and serious failure of duty on the part of the right hon. Gentleman. What was the situation at the moment? At the best it was riot that the position of the Royal Irish Constabulary was seriously affected. But must it not be a bitter humiliation to every honest member of that force that he wore the same uniform as the man who had been concerned in acts which had been universally condemned? Was it not the fact that there remained an untried case, and allegations generally made against the Royal Irish Constabulary? At the worst they had allegations made by hon. Gentlemen from Ireland, which he himself did not believe, but he submitted that, at all events, Sheridan ought to have been put upon his trial, and what had been said by the hon. Gentleman who had just sat down had done nothing to remove that impression from his mind. He admitted that at an earlier period there might have been a difficulty in proceeding with die trial of Sheridan; but he sincerely trusted that the right hon. Gentleman would remove the painful impression made on the minds of hon. Members by endeavouring to find whether there was not evidence on which he could go forward with a reasonable hope of conviction. He maintained that even if the Government had failed in the prosecution to secure a conviction on account of the evidence breaking down, they would have been in a better position in Ireland than now if they had made the attempt. Some British Members of this House had incurred the displeasure of the right hon. Member for Antrim by interesting themselves in Ireland. That was a great misfortune from which they might never recover, but they must hear it as best they might. It seeded to be the newest brand of Unionist opinion that English and Scotch Members were not to take an interest in Irish affairs, or if they did, that they were to get their information from the right hon. and gallant Member for Armagh, who produced to the House few newspaper extracts. It was high time that hon. Members tried to see and learn the facts for themselves and think for themselves. When he said that they had been so unhappy as to incur the displeasure of some hon. Gentleman who represented the Irish landlord interest, he wished particularly to state that he knew very well that that had not been the spirit of the right hon. Gentleman in regard to their desire to inform themselves. Neither was it the spirit in which they had been received by Lord De Freyne's agent against whom he had no complaint to make, who had given them all the information that he could give after the instructions he had received. He did not understand why the Irish landlords should resent their interests in this matter. For himself he desired to say that whatever position the Irish landlords take in Ireland he was perfectly satisfied that they could not move forward in this matter at all unless they took a most reasonable and even generous view of the position of these landlords. He could not see what the landlords had to gain by having this question postponed. His opinion was that they were in a falling market.

continuing his speech, said the landlords in Ireland must not count on an indefinite prolongation of the present state of affairs, and it was impossible that the patience of the people of England will allow other matters to be delayed by these questions of Irish administration. Much of the evil was, no doubt, due to the unhappy dissociation of Irish administration from local opinion and control, and that was a matter he would like to have discussed. But he was aware that that could not be done satisfactorily on such an occasion. The other great centre of aggravation was the position of the land. The statements which had been made by some hon. Members as to the poverty on the Do Frcyne estate had been travestied in the House, and had been described as exaggerations by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Antrim, who had assorted that in reality the district was prosperous and the people were well off. He had himself had it suggested that his own visit to the estate was too short to enable him to form a fair opinion. He did not desire to intrude his own opinion on the House, but he meant to see more of that district, and he hoped other hon. Members would do the same. Ho would willingly spend a much longer time there if he could hops that longer acquaintance would produce in his mind that spirit of cheerful optimism which the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Antrim had; for he would do a great deal to forgot many of the scenes he witnessed on the estate, It would be much better if the landlords dealt with the problem which confronted thorn in a reasonable and businesslike spirit. They could not expect the people of this country to submit for ever to allow this difficulty to remain unsettled, and he suggested that the time had arrived for the landlords to make the best bargain they could with the tenants. Delay in this matter was no more to the interest of the landlord than it was to the tenants. It was impossible that the inflated value of the rentals on this estate should continue; there must be a decline, and he believed that every year's postponement of the settlement involved a further shrinkage of value which would have to be paid for when the settlement was made. Let the landlord drop the heroic strain, and proceed to negotiate on businesslike lines. They must know that a rapid development of land purchase under compulsion was a necessity of the situation, and they had better make up their minds to face the fact. What was the complaint hon. Members on the Nationalist benches were making? It was as to the inaction of the Government in this matter. The Government alleged that the present movement was the work of agitators, but he was bound to confess that, in his opinion, the principal agitator in the whole matter had been the Chief Secretary himself. He had made it a reproach to hon. Members on the Opposition Benches who were now advocating a development of the scheme of land purchase that they were acting inconsistenly, with what was done by their own loaders years ago. But even if it were the case, the party formerly opposed compulsory Sand purchase, it would not prevent him now ad vocating it if he thought it the best solution of the difficulty. Further than that, to resist the beginnings of land purchase was very different to opposing; the completion of a work on which they; had already embarked. Had hon.; Members seriously thought of the responsibility of this country and of the Government for the economic condition of Ireland? He admitted that the landlords were not responsible for the rents now charged, because those rents had been fixed for them. Now they were revising the bargain and securing a different settlement much more advantageous to the tenants, and he could not help feeling that in creating the second kind of bargain they had invalidated and put an end to the first one. The Irish Government was a great agitator, and had placed a bad object: lesson before Irishmen. Its present helplessness, its position as a mere spectator of the war between the combinations on each side, was really deplorable. Why was it not taking active steps to deal with and alleviate the situation? Instead of doing that, it had intensified the immediate difficulty of the Irish situation. They did not say they believed that a large reconstruction on the basis of purchase was possible, but they fabricated all kinds of difficulties, which, if they were real, should have prevented them entering on their present course. They had no right to upset existing arrangements unless they intended to go on with constructive work. Parliament had created the situation, and it was the duty of Parliament to deal with it, and the responsibility of the Government was not limited to the preservation of public order. They had an economic responsibility as well. They were responsible for a proper land system for Ireland. It was too late now to object to Government interference between landlord and tenant; it was too late to say that land purchase meant confiscation, for it was no more confiscation that the legal regulation of rent. In principle they were the same. We were committed to State action, and action must be taken. Every act of the Chief Secretary's administration, so far as there had been any action, was a confession that the present state of things could not continue and that land purchase was the solution. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer was the obstacle, then let that matter be openly discussed. He believed there was a bridge to be built between what the landlord could afford to take and what the tenant could afford to pay, and the country owed it to itself to build that bridge. In the sense in which we used the word in this country there was no "landlord" in Ireland. The Irish landlord had no function except that which could be discharged equally well by a bank or a rent collector. Under the existing system on these estates there was no possibility of paying a rout out of the produce of the soil; it was not sufficient even for the maintenance of the occupier. The rent had to be obtained from sources very different. The right hon. Gentleman complained of the agitation on the De Freyne estate, but it required very little agitation to convince Irish tenants of their grievance; but it would be neglect of their duty to those they represented if Irish Members did not press this land question by every legal means. The stupidity of the situation was that the Government had provoked a state of things which they might easily have foreseen, and now refused to deal with it. The hon. Member for East Mayo only last Juno told the right hon. Gentleman that, if ho would promise to attempt to deal with the matter, he himself would do his utmost to end the agitation, but the right hon. Gentleman said never a word in reply. Why had ho taken no notice whatever of that offer in which there was every hope and possibility of securing a better state of things? They were prepared to see that the law was obeyed, but they refused to accept their responsibility for the economic situation which had grown up. They were placing the power of the Empire at the back of the landlords who were only one of two parties to a great industrial dispute, and he was bound to say he could not regard with anything like equanimity the refusal of the Government to apply any constructive treatment to the difficulty This was a matter of vital importance both to this country and to Ireland. He was not one of those who look with gloom and apprehension on the prospects of Ireland; he believed she could bear all her burdens, and that they would be able to leave the heritage as great and honourable as when it passed into their hands. But they could only do that by remedying injustice and by not making their power an instrument of wrong and misfortune to the people under their control. It was not by malice or intention that we in this country had acted towards Ireland as we had done; but it had been through inaction, inattention, neglect and mismanagement that we had got into a false position and now found ourselves on the wrong side in a great question of justice.

said he could not allow this singularly important debate to pass without claiming the attention of the Committee for a few moments. The Chief Secretary wound up his speech last night with a very bravo and menacing peroration such as he had heard pretty often from Chief Secretaries at the Table of the House, and such as he had known them to swallow very soon afterwards. The Chief Secretary was cheered last night with the usual enthusiasm. According to his experience in that House, he had always found plenty of men, like that superior English person the hon. Member for Tynemouth, ready to cheer on any lisping, halting words of the Chief Secretary, who ran across to Dublin Castle for a few months and then set himself up to lecture the Irish Members about their own business and their own country. It was this that had left the Tory Government and the right hon. Gentleman in the position in which they were to-day; and he could promise the Chief Secretary that he would have to begin over again the Conquest of Ireland hundred years after the nominal union. He noticed that even the enthusiasm of the hon. Member for Tynemouth somehow got frozen out when he came to speak of the case of Sergeant Sheridan. Apparently that case was so sore a case that the Chief Secretary himself, in the very short portion of the speech which he devoted to the subject last night, really devoted less energy and less passion to denouncing the crimes of Sergeant Sheridan than he devoted to denouncing the crime of the unfortunate Sheriff of Cork in not driving out with fire and sword the representatives of the people from the Council Chamber which belonged to their own Council. He was not surprised that the Chief Secretary felt keenly the position of humiliation and shame to which he had brought himself by the assisted emigration of Sergeant Sheridan and by his compassionate allowance to his accomplices. After the crushing exposure of the facts that was made by his lion, and learned friend the Member for Waterford, and by his hon. friend the Member for East Mayo, even he was himself disposed to extend a certain amount of compassionate allowance to the Chief Secretary himself if he would clear out of the country without further inquiry like Sergeant Sheridan.

He has cleared out of the House.

said he did not accuse the Chief Secretary of want of valour. Probably he was occupied elsewhere. The grand point that the Chief Secretary made was that no doubt Sheridan was a most abominable scoundrel, but that the case was not typical; that Sheridan was a mere Iusus natural such as might be found in any country; and that he was the one black sheep in a flock of spotless lambs. His triumphant point was that the House would never have heard of Sheridan's infamies only that Dublin Castle itself was the first to take action. That was precisely the point. The deadly difficulty, the almost terrific difficulty of unmasking a case of this kind was that Dublin Castle blocked the way as it always did. Dublin Castle was the first to take action in this matter. Let that be to their credit for a moment. But why did they take action? Simply because the rogues fell out. Because Sergeant Sheridan fell out with his equally shady superior officer District Inspector Irwin, the nominee of County Inspector French. If action was taken by Dublin Castle, it was action not to bring out the whole truth, but to cloak it and hush it up in the fear that bad as was Sheridan's case worse remained behind. Sheridan's case was not an exceptional case; there were at least dozens; and he was sorry to say he believed scores of cases at least as atrocious. The only difference between the case of Sergeant Sheridan and the other cases, was that Sergeant Sheridan was found out under circumstances which compelled Dublin Castle to disavow him. His hon, and learned friend the Member for Waterford last night gave the tragic story of the crime of Head Constable Whelelan and all its terrible results; but the Chief Secretary in his long speech did not by one word attempt to contravert the statements. He might go back to the case of the man James Ellis French, the detective director and county inspector and head of the whole Criminal Investigation Department of Ireland, and one of the foulest monsters that ever cursed the country; yet that man among his other horrible deeds organised an attempt to murder. He believed the hon. Member for South Tyrone was one of the jury who in the end convicted this man.

One of the third jury who tried him.

said that it was only after three trials that they succeeded, so desperate was the attempt of the officials at Dublin Castle to screen him. He came to a more recent case. He did not know whether the House was aware that while the United Irish League was struggling into existence an attempt was made to strangle it by involving it in a murderous plot. Another sergeant, Sergeant Sullivan of Mulranny forged a letter inviting a number of young men to commit an outrage. At the hour appointed for the outrage a double patrol of armed policemen under the command of Sergeant Sullivan was lying in ambush at the appointed spot. He was brought to trial and upon the trial the Crown became the nominal prosecutors. How did the Crown use its powers? The Crown used their power to pack the jury with an exclusively Unionist and Protestant jury to acquit Sergeant Sullivan exactly as they would have packed a jury to convict his victims if he succeeded in the attempt to carry out that object. It was at the Sligo Assize and in that venue where the population of Catholics and Nationalists was nine out of ten every single Catholic and Nationalist in the panel was ordered by the Crown to stand by. That process was now confessed by the Attorney-General for Ireland. An exclusively Protestant and he might say Orange jury was sworn to try the case. Here they had the double action system of foul play going on. They had a jury packed to acquit a policeman in exactly the same way as they had a jury packed to convict the innocent victims of Sergeant Sheridan. It was the same judge who tried the two cases, Judge Gibson, and Judge Gibson expressed his belief—he was sure he regretted it now—that there was not a shadow of doubt about the guilt of McGoohan the victim of Sergeant Sheridan. The partisanship of this jury packed to acquit the policeman was so flagrant that even the judge had publicly to rebuke the jury because in the middle of the case they actually intimated they had already made up their minds to acquit the prisoner even before the most important witness for the Crown was examined at all. That was so abominable a miscarriage of justice that when this man, Sergeant Sullivan, was afterwards proceeded against in a Civil Court, where juries could not be packed in the county of Dublin which was undoubtedly a Unionist venue, eleven out of twelve jurors beyond all manner of doubt were convinced of this man's guilt, and he was only saved by one true blue. He alleged, and it was in the knowledge of a great many, that every judge in the four Courts, and every man who heard the evidence in this case that came before an unpacked jury, were absolutely convinced that this ruffian was guilty. And if the Chief Secretary had the least doubt upon the subject, he invited him now to have a public inquiry, as they had challenged him 500 times to have. But there was this difference between Sergeant Sullivan's case and Sheridan's case, that the rogues did not fall out in Sullivan's case. Sullivan did not fall out with his superior officers. On the contrary, this man's superior officers, county and district inspectors were guilty of the infamy of proffering themselves as bail for the man committed for trial upon this atrocious charge, and these officers actually authorised a sort of national subscription among the policemen of Ireland for his defence. There was no falling out between the Sergeant and his superior officers in this case; and accordingly, instead of cashiering Sergeant Sullivan, as Sergeant Sheridan was cashiered, the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary stood up in this House and declared this miscreant to he a highly honourable person, and Sergeant Sullivan was still an honourable member of the force. Literally, thousands of pounds of public money had been spent in sheltering him, and paying his expenses in the trial in which eleven of the twelve Dublin jurors were convinced of his guilt and the Chief Secretary to this day held that justice had been done in the case of Sergeant Sullivan. He ventured to say the case of Sergeant Sullivan was even a more atrocious case than the case of Sergeant Sheridan; because Sergeant Sheridan committed his crimes off his own bat and for the mere sordid purpose of promotion; but nothing was more certain than that Sergeant Sullivan acted in this matter, with the deliberate design of crushing the United Irish League by attempting to involves its leaders in the responsibility for a murderous outrage; and that he was instigated and directly encouraged to it by the Crown Solicitor of Mayo and other underlings of the Government. The Chief Secretary, who claimed so much credit for having been the first to dismiss Sergeant Sheridan at the instigation of District Inspector Irwin, the protégé of Ellis French—the Chief Secretary to this day constituted himself the mouthpiece of the officials who shielded from justice the Mulranny forger who packed the jury deliberately to acquit him where they were the prosecutors, and spent thousands of pounds in saving him from justice, and trying to thwart the efforts of private individuals. That what was about as atrocious a crime as ever was perpetrated in a civilised country; and yet, bad as it was, that was quite the usual fashion of Dublin Castle. After the Mulranny affair no doubt they had dropped their first plan of campaign of attempting to tar the United Irish League with the guilt of crime and bloodshed. The Mulranny affair was too close a shave. Even, their own criminal statistics, their own judges, had shamed them out of their original Parnellism and crime plan of campaign against the United Irish League. They had now changed their tactics, and it was one of the curious developments of Irish life that the only Irishman who was now subject to the coarse imputation of palliating crime was not one of the Nationalist members, but was the hon. member for South Tyrone. It must be a pleasant reflection to the Chief Secretary as to the success of his administration in Ireland that that coarse kind of imputation was now necessary against a man who was the most powerful Unionist in all Ireland. Nobody dared to deny on the other side of the House that he was the most powerful Unionist in Ireland. They never dared to deny it in the Home Rule days when they wanted him and when they were ready to black his boots, as they were now ready to blacken his character. He was speaking as an impartial witness, for he beat him in South Tyrone as a Unionist, where a Unionist landlord, the Hon. Somerset Maxwell failed. Beyond all comparison the hon. Member was the man to whom was most due the defeat of Home Rule in England, and, with the usual wisdom and generosity and gratitude of the Tory party, it was just because he was now giving them their last chance of saving Presbyterian Ulster— [Mr. T. W. RUSSELL (Tyrone, S): Hear, hear,]—by a Compulsory Sales Bill, that they were treating him in the very fashion that aroused in them so much horror when it was the case of Nationalists treating a boycotted landlord. He willingly bade the Chief Secretary to go ahead with his attacks on the hon. Member for South Tyrone; and by and by, when the Home Rule days came again, as come they would, they would probably be glad enough if they still found the hon. Member sitting on the Benches opposite, having in the meantime given the Presbyterian farmers compulsory purchase. As to the Chief Secretary's taunts to the hon. Member for South Tyrone about ambiguous hints, he would have supposed that nobody ought to have realised better than the Chief Secretary that the Member for South Tyrone was a master of exceedingly plain and incisive English; and that if the Chief Secretary had a grievance as to ambiguousness he had better address himself to a certain Dr. Rutherford Harris. What were the ambiguous hints of the Chief Secretary himself? He need not tell the Committee that the: right hon. Gentleman had expressed his contempt for "sordid agitators." They were used to being calumniated and misrepresented in their cause, and the worst injury the right hon. Gentleman could do them would be if he could find anything for which to praise them. The Chief Secretary had attacked the character of the leaders of the people down in Roscommon, and had attributed to them the basest, most mercenary, and dishonest motives. This rich man did not think it beneath him to quote for the derision of this House the hotel bills of the professional organisers who, with the sumptuous salary of 30s. a week to keep body and soul together, were fighting the battle of the people. They were discussing tonight the modest salary of £4,500, which this Gentleman, who so loftily elevated above sordid motives, unselfishly accepted for governing Ireland in defiance of the will of the majority of the people. How would the right hon. Gentleman like it if they were to follow his example, and get hold of his wine bill and his own servants' gossip, and retail how he expended his £4,500, and entertain the House with a burlesque account of his expenditure? When the right hon. Gentleman thought fit to indulge in coarse and vulgar imputations of that kind against men who were as good as he, he wanted to know by what divine right he expected he was to be the only man who was to be caressed with silken courtesies. But the right hon. Gentleman had plainly insinuated that the Trustees to whom the De Freyne tenants entrusted their money would probably turn out to be swindlers. He said that was foul play. If it were Parliamentary to say so—he knew it was true to say it—it was just as foul play as the actions of Sergeants Sullivan and Sheridan for the Chief Secretary to take advantage of his privilege as a Member of the House to say things of his opponents in Ireland, which he would not dare, even before an Orange jury in Belfast, to attempt to justify in the witness box. These were the realities of Irish life; these were the things which made the name of England so beloved in Ireland. He did not hesitate to say that if Prince Henry and his German Fleet, when they steamed into Bantry Bay the other day, had landed an army and 200,000 rifles, he did not think it would have required many organisers to bring every young man who was worth his salt in the country to his side. That might be shocking, but he had learned that shocking an Englishman was the first step towards convincing him. Englishmen were lovers of fair play, and could be convinced by mighty Englishmen like Mr. Gladstone, but after twenty years experience he was sorry to say that, in his opinion, it was as idle for the representatives of Ireland to attempt by mere reason to affect the minds or consciences of the majority of this House as if they were to address them in their own Gaelic language. Every Irish Act in the Statute Book was a confession that the Irish were right, and that the English Government wrong, and these Acts had failed just in proportion as the English had followed their own instead of Irish advice. They had to be taught now, just as they had always been taught, not by reasoning, but by something as near revolution as it was possible to go. His answer to the right hon. Gentleman's appeal last night was that the only amendment as to the conduct of the affairs of Ireland was that England had to learn to know that she knew nothing of Ireland. He noticed that the right hon. [Gentleman had not one word of apology to offer on the subject of the new landlord conspiracy, run amongst others by a pair of perjured Privy Councillors. [HOM. MEMBERS: "Oh."] He had no hesitation in saying it.

Order, order! It is not in order to attribute dishonourable motives to Members of the other House.

said the Deputy Chairman had not waited until he had mentioned the names of the Privy Councillors.

The hon. Member referred to two Members of the House of Lords.

said he was not anxious to controvert the Deputy Chairman's ruling; one of the Privy Councillors to whom he referred was Lord Clonbrock, and at that moment he really did not know whether his Lordship was a Member of the House of Lords. He knew very few Irish Peers who were Members of the House of Lords. As to the other Privy Councillor, so far as he knew, he was not a Member of the House of Lords, and was a drummed-out Member of this House. At all events, these two gentlemen were landlords and were Privy Councillors, and on the 7th April they formed a secret association for the purpose of waging a civil war in Ireland, and seven days afterwards these same men, not acting in their capacity as landlords, but as Privy Councillors, went up to the Castle and proclaimed eleven counties of Ireland— the most peaceful country on God's earth—in pursuance of the landlords' sordid, selfish, and brutal conspiracy. He ventured to promise the Chief Secretary that the people of Ireland would know how to deal with it still more effectually whenever these landlord conspirators had got together their £100,000 with which to begin operations. They could not pretend to misunderstand the peroration of the right hon. Gentleman the previous night. They accepted his declaration. For the moment, no doubt, owing to the decencies of Coronation times, prosecutions had rather slackened off. Before a month was over, as soon as the backs of the Colonial Premiers were turned, they would have the prosecutions beginning again in hundreds and in thousands, prosecutions not against criminals—for how dared they to say there was any crime in the country except of their making— but against the best and most representative men in the country, and men who would be worth a million to England if they could only conciliate them, men who were publicly attacked in every vile form by miscreants of the stamp of Sergeant Sheridan. They would have all the forces of England that the right hon. Gentleman could command placed at the service of the Lord Londonderrys, and the Smith-Barrys, and the Clonbrocks, to nurse up another generation of young Irishmen in hatred and detestation of English rule. The right hon. Gentleman the previous night talked triumphantly of his majority. He had his majority, he had his bayonets. The Irish would not be able to fight as the Boers had fought. If they only repealed the Arms Act for a few years, they would probably find that neither the will nor the pluck was wanting. They probably would not be able to fight England in the field, but they would be able to cover her with disgrace and humiliation before other nations; they would be able to hang upon her flanks; and some day or another they might find that they might be in a fix when they would find it not quite so cheap or easy to laugh at Irish disaffection. Before very long, sooner or later, now as always, they would come to see that in this question of compulsory sale and of the resettlement of the land in Connaught the Irish were right and the English wrong, as the Irish had always been right and the English had always been wrong. Their Statute-book was the best proof of that. They would come to see it after the usual period of suffering and of persecution, and they would yield, as they must sooner or later, and when they yielded, they would as usual, in a way for which nobody would thank them and everybody would despise them. Up to the present moment, the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary had exercised a certain fascination for certain soft-hearted or perhaps soft-headed Irishmen, by playing the part of the coy and unwilling victim, rather than the ally of the landlord faction in the Cabinet, by posing as a sort of Lydia Languish of the Treasury Bench, whose one function was in the House to look beautiful and address captivating speeches. He had now thrown off the mask, and they now knew him as the open confederate, the ministerial emergency man of the Smith-Barrys and the Clonbrocks. Let him go on with his proclamation of war, and do his worst, and let England judge by-and-bye of his success. At all events, they in Ireland were perfectly justified, and they deserved to be termed the most arrant cowards if they did not face this infamous coercion in the most peaceful country in the world, smash it, and make the right hon. Gentleman and his landlord confederates rue the day when they even attempted to break the spirit of an unconquerable—in spite of the effort—an unconquerable race.

I suppose the majority of this House wore not here in the years from 1880 to 1886, when the Home Rule policy was announced. If they had been, they would recognise that in Ireland the Irish question remains very much what it was nearly twenty years ago. No Gentleman on the other side who has listened to the speech of the hon. Member who has just sat down will deny, after reflecting what a position he has occupied and still occupies in Ireland, that the Irish question is still alive and is still actual and burning. One expression used by the hon. Member, I must say, seems to me to go beyond the fair line of Parliamentary language. The expression which he applied to Mr. Smith-Barry and Lord Clonbrock seems to me, who am without any sympathy whatever with the policy or aims of either of these two gentleman, to be a wholly unjustifiable expression. It was no intention of mine to interpose in this discussion; but when one reflects that this is, after all, comparatively a new Parliament, a new century, a new King, a new Prime Minister, I think it is well for the House to pause and reflect, after listening, for example, to such a speech as we have just heard, and see where we stand in respect of the Irish question. I have listened very carefully to the whole of the debate; and as for the particular administrative details which were brought to light in the course of that debate, I will only say a very few words—and I would not say them except for the fact that I was myself for a certain number of years responsible for Irish administration. The case, for example, of the choice of Mr. Harrel to constitute one of the two magistrates of this Coercion Court and the letter of Sir David Harrel in the matter, has been referred to and I think not unnaturally. I agree with all the Chief Secretary has said as to the disadvantage and impropriety of bringing Civil servants into our discussions. Sir David Harrel was appointed during our administration. I will never use any language except that of respect and confidence of my friend Sir David Harrel; but I think that whoever authorised or instructed the Permanent Under Secretary to appoint Mr. Harrel to one of these Courts—if the Chief Secretary was responsible, I blame the Chief Secretary—was guilty of want of tact, and, it plain English, of common-sense. Then a second point. The proclamation bringing certain counties under the Crimes Act was signed by two Privy Councillors. You must get two Privy Councillors, no doubt, to sign such a proclamation; but surely Gentlemen opposite will see the utter absurdity, the imbecility, of getting two Gentlemen, as to whom personally, I am not going to say a word, but who were identified with the formation of a new syndicate in the new war between landlord and tenant, to sign that proclamation. After all, Irish Privy Councillors are not such rare birds as to make a choice of this kind inevitable. I think the Dublin Executive showed an enormous want of common sense and of tact. There is another case which was referred to last night by my hon. friend the Member for South Tyrone—the appointment of a Protestant lady to inspect places where children under the Poor Law are boarded out. I am not acquainted with the circumstances of that case except as told in the House by my hon. friend. If my hon. friend's story is an accurate story—and I, who have had many a year of contest with my hon. friend will admit this of him, that I do not think I ever found him out in an inaccuracy of detail—I am bound to say that there, again, the Chief Secretary, if he is responsible, has shown an extraordinary want of tact and—again, I must use the word—of common sense. As to the case of Sheridan, the House has heard a great deal about it, and I, for one, see perfectly all the difficulties which the Chief Secretary had to encounter in this case. Put I cannot absolve him from an administrative indiscretion, first of all, in not prosecuting Sheridan, whether he was likely to get a conviction or not. The all important thing in Ireland is to try to convince the people—a difficult task, I admit, especially for a Government in the position of the present Government, existing in antagonism to the wishes of the majority or the Irish people. It is most difficult for them to try to get into contact with the feeling of the community. But surely this was a case where you ought at all costs to have convinced the public opinion of Ireland, being what it is, suspicious and jealous, often ill-informed, that the Chief Secretary and the Irish Government were not intent upon shielding any constabulary officer guilty of any offence so gross, cruel, and monstrous as that of Sheridan. I think, therefore, that the Chief Secretary was guilty there again of a very great indiscretion in not running the risk of not getting a conviction, in order to show to the people of Ireland that he, at least, had nothing to conceal, and had no intention of masking any of these misdemeanours. Then, I cannot for the life of me understand by what administrative rule, moral or political consideration, the right hon. Gentleman was actuated when he retained in the constabulary force a, man whom he knew to have been an accomplice in crime of the most monstrous kind, both in itself and in its consequences. That is a thing the Committee ought really to consider. In his own narrative last night, the right hon. Gentleman said—

"One of these two men was a party to crime. The other two knew that Sheridan was not speaking the truth, and if they had had sufficient moral courage might have exposed him, hut they did not do so."

It is all very well to use a moderate expression of that kind about moral courage, but the point in this case is not the moral courage of this or that constable; it is whether the victims of these abominable proceedings were to suffer a wrongful punishment, and whether those who had been the means of this wrongful punishment being inflicted were or were not to be in a position which indicated—to a certain extent, at all events—confidence on the part of the Executive Government, in spite of their being kept in the depot. That is all very well, but it comes to very little: they were retained in a position which indicated that they still retained the confidence of the Executive Government. I do not believe that it can be stated either by the Chief Secretary or by any one else that that represents anything else than a monstrous indiscretion. If I had been Chief Secretary, while admitting all the difficulties about the evidence of this accomplice, or quasi accomplice, I certainly would, conviction or no conviction, have had the case tried out, to show Irish opinion that I was perfectly fearless of any exposure that could be brought to light. In that connection there is an alarming thing about the position taken up by the right hon. Gentleman. I did not hear an accent or sentence in his speech which indicated that he owed any responsibility whatever to Irish opinion, or that he cared one straw—I am sure he does care —whether Irish opinion is pleased or displeased, or expresses its confidence in him or not. He is very careful about the constabulary and the landlords, but for the majority of the people of Ireland, whom it is his business to govern, and whom, if I may say so without impertinence, if he were prudent, he would take care to conciliate, he apparently has no care. Some language has been used on this side of the House which indicates an opinion that Sheridan is a typical example of the Royal Irish Constabulary. I have had a great deal to do with the Irish Constabulary in a particularly delicate and dangerous operation. When the Home Rule Bill of 1893 was brought in, among its proposals was a proposal to disband the Royal Irish Constabulary. The right hon. Gentleman, at all events, will not deny that that was a very delicate and dangerous proposal— I mean dangerous for immediate adminis-strative purposes. I made it my business to see a great deal of the Irish Constabulary, their officers and men, and when any one tells me that Sheridan is a type of the Irish Constabulary, I can only say that I disagree with him, root and branch. I was glad to hear this afternoon the hon. Member for East Mayo say particularly that this is not his view, and that it cannot be the general view of the Irish Members. To say that Sheridan, this abominable scoundrel, is the ordinary type of the Irish constable is a calumny and delusion. [Several IRISH MEMBERS: No one here said that.]

What I said was that I was sorry to think that there were dozens, and oven scores, of such persons; that I said and that I stick to.

The Royal Irish Constabulary consists of 12,000 or 13,000 men, and, under an abnormal system of government, I daresay you will find among them half a dozen, if you like, of men as bad as Sheridan. So you would in any other force. But this I would say of the Royal Irish Constabulary. A great deal is said of the collisions between them and the people. A great deal depends in those matters on the spirit in which they are supervised, the vigilance exorcised, and upon the spirit which they know to prevail among the governing authorities. The right hon. Gentleman seemed to think ho had made a point, but how I did not gather, when he defended the necessity for there being in Ireland an armed and drilled police force, by quoting from a speech made in 1893 by a brilliant Member of this House—I wish he were a member now— Mr. Sexton—in which that gentleman insisted that there should be of necessity a drilled and armed police force. Well, of course, nobody in his senses would suppose that, considering the temper and the position of affairs in some parts of Ireland—and, by the way, in some parts, especially where they wear very broad phylacteries, as in Belfast—it could be otherwise. The right hon. Gentleman seemed to think he had made a point when he said that under the Home Rule Bill of 1893 there was to be a drilled and armed police force.

No, not in the Bill, but in Amendment proposed by Mr. Sexton, and seconded by the hon. and learned Member.

That is not so. I think 1 remember very well the policy of the Bill of 1893. It was the policy of 1886, and I discussed it twenty times with Mr. Parnell, and Mr. Parnell, like Mr. Sexton, would have been sorry to have made himself responsible for the government of Ireland in the county of Kerry as it then was, and I hope the hon. Member for Clare will allow me to say— in the county of Clare as it then was. ["Sheridan had been in Loth."] But what was the proposal? It is a by-point, but the Chief Secretary chose to raise it—the policy was that you should have in central depots an armed and drilled force, very much like what the Royal Irish Constabulary is, but you should have in the counties, if you have anything like proper local government, a purely local force entirely under local administration. But if there was a disturbed area, and the local force was not adequate to deal with it, then the armed and drilled force would be called from the depot. I have never taken a sentimental view of Irish administration, but I have always know very well that in a country so ruined, so demoralised by your administration and government, you cannot, right away, trust the people with the same local government principles as prevail in our more fortunate country. The Chief Secretary last night talked about the agitation, as he regards it, now prevailing in Ireland, and used language which has already been referred to tonight. The blame, he said, "rests on those who find it easier to inflame the peasantry of Ireland with rhetoric than to persuade the House by argument." Now I would really ask the Committee whether they think that any rhetoric is required to persuade the De Freyne tenants living on the edge of the Dillion estate that they have a grievance which ought to be redressed? An hon. Gentleman, speaking from below the Gangway, though a supporter of the right hon. Gentleman, at once perceived, having knowledge of the circumstances, that you do not want rhetoric and argument to persuade a man who is paying 33 per cent, more rent than his neighbour over the border is paying, and who knows that his neighbour's privilege is due to the action of the Government—I say you require no rhetoric to convince a man on the De Freyne estate that he has a grievance. The right hon. Gentleman has overlooked a good deal, and I do not object to hon. Members referring to this. What single reform in the Irish land system—I mean what great reform—has been achieved by argument in this House? Not one. Last night my hon. and gallant friend the right hon. Member for North Armagh said Ireland is extremely prosperous; he spoke of large funds in the savings banks, and ho made a very remarkable admission, which I noted—he said that since the passing of the Act of 1881 the position of the Irish tenants had unquestionably been very different from what it ever had been since the Act of Union. I wonder whether my right hon. and gallant friend supported the passing of Mr. Gladstone's Act of 1881?

I was not in the House at the time.

Then that was a loss to the House. Every one of the class of which my right hon. and gallant friend is the spokesman, it would be safe to say, opposed that Bill, denounced it, and did all he could to prevent its passage.

That is not accurate. [Cries of "What is not?"] That every Irish landlord opposed the Act of 1881. ["Oh, oh."]

Every one of them did. Mention one who did not.

The right hon. Gentleman surely does not mean to say that Irish landlords as a class ever used language towards the Bill but that of the strongest denunciation and even vituperation?

I do not know what the right hon. Gentleman means by a class. If he says that every Irish landlord voted against the Bill, I say that that is not so.

Mention one.

My father did not.

Our records show that Irish landlords opposed that Act of 1881 which the right hon. and gallant Member for Armagh says, and truly says, placed Irish tenants in a position far more favourable than they had ever been before. I welcome the admission, because it is the fashion—I will not say in this new Parliament—but it has been the fashion for gentlemen sitting on that side of the House to denounce the Act of 1881 as an Act of confiscation and spoliation. But I come back to the point, a very painful point, but you must not forget that the history of Ireland is full of painful points. Was the Act of 1881 obtained by argument; was it got by rhetoric? No, when the Government of 1880 was formed there was no notion, I think, in the mind of a single Minister of passing that great Act. Why was it passed? I am ashamed to give the answer to my own question. It was passed because there was violence in Ireland, and for no other reason. It has been admitted by Members of that Cabinet that, if they had trusted to argument and to rhetoric alone, that great charter of the Irish peasant would never have been passed. Therefore the right hon. Gentleman is leaning upon a broken reed when he appeals either to Irishmen or to impartial Englishmen to insist upon the Irish peasants trying to put everything right that they think wrong by argument alone. History will not bear them out in showing the validity of that proceeding. I am bound to say, a more extraordinary expression I have seldom heard in this House than that used by the right hon. Gentleman when he talked of the operations for reducing rents as a sordid enterprise which this chivalrous race is asked to undertake. Why is it more sordid for the United Irish League to combine for the purpose of reducing rent, or of effecting what other agrarian changes may be their object, than for the right hon. Gentleman and his friends to combine and make a syndicate? Is not that sordid? What is the use, therefore, of the right hon. Gentleman's saying anything of that kind of an operation which, after all, is the only kind of operation that has ever gained a single boon to the Irish tenantry, and entirely passing over the combination of the landlords, which, of course, is equally justifiable? I think the right hon. Gentleman last night was extremely unfair to the Member for South Tyrone. He certainly was repaid in the most tremendous and crushing piece of invective that it has ever been my fortune to hear either in this House or out of it. He said my hon. friend endeavours to palliate outrage, boycotting, and so forth, and he said my hon. friend—who is well able to take care of himself—is guilty of gross inconsistency because he used certain language in 1890 and uses different language in 1902. Is my hon. friend the Member for South Tyrone the only person who uses inconsistent language? I have got what was a classic piece of language in old days—the language used by Lord Salisbury about boycotting. This is to show how futile are charges of inconsistency either against the Member for South Tyrone or almost anybody who takes part in an Irish discussion. If there is a single man dealing with the Irish question for a course of twenty years who takes a point of view at the beginning of the twenty years and holds to it at the end of the twenty years, you may be pretty sure he is mistaken. It is a very shifting question. In 1885, on the eve of an election, Lord Salisbury presented an audience with this philosophic view of Irish boycotting, and I commend it to the attention of candid Gentlemen on the other side of the House as well as to some candid friends of my own. He said—

"Boycotting is an offence which legislation hag very great difficulty in reaching. The provisions of the Crimes Act against it had a very small effect. Boycotting grew up under the Crimes Act. And, after all, look at boycotting. An unhappy man or his family goes to mass. The congregation with one accord get up and walk out. Are you going to indict people for leaving a church? The plain fact is that boycotting, after all, is more like excommunication or the interdict of the middle ages than anything we know now. The truth about boycotting is that it depends upon the passing humour of the population."

It is important to remember that in the month immediately preceding that polished apologetic of boycotting, some of the most violent boycotting speeches ever delivered in Ireland had been made. Therefore, when the right hon. Gentleman taunts the Member for South Tyrone with inconsistency, let him reflect on the inconsistency of his own leader and his own party. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman talked about the County Councils, some of whose doings were reported last night by the Chief Secretary, and he made, in effect, two pointed observations. He said—

"When you were arguing for Home Rule, you used to tell us that if you only gave them Home Rule, they would be perfectly fair, and would make friends with the landlords and Unionists, and all would be well."

And then the right hon. Gentleman said—

"See what happens now. They do not admit Unionists on to the County Councils."

Surely he must see that this exclusion, as to the extent of which I am not well informed, but granting it is total—this exclusion goes on at a time when the war for Home Rule is still unsettled. It does not at all follow, because they exclude Unionists now, when they have not been granted their demand, that they will exclude them afterwards, when that demand has been granted. That, at all events, is a possible position. Supposing they do exclude Unionists from the County Councils, where would they find an example for a policy of exclusion What did the right hon. Gentleman's friends ever do on the old county Governing bodies, to give the common people in Ireland an atom of a share in the management of affairs? Then there is a more important matter raised by the right hon. Gentleman. He said that the hon. Gentleman below the Gangway had missed a great chance in the line that they took about the Boer War. Many of the manifestations of feeling in Ireland about that war were as disagreeable to me as they were to anybody in this House. But let us consider why they took up that attitude with regard to this war which has concluded in South Africa. What is it that the Irish Members did or that other Irishmen did? The right hon. Gentleman and his friends have held Ireland in the hollow of their hand for centuries. But it is not England that they hate; it is the landlords; and for very good reasons. And to argue that because they show absolute want of sympathy to English sentiment in respect to the war while England refuses their demands for self-government, to argue from that that they would persist in the same course of animosity when their demand was conceded, is logic which for the reasons I have stated I do not admit for one moment. I certainly have not got in my pocket a draft of any Home Rule Bill, but there are one or two remarks I should like to make, because here we are now, after seven years of Unionist government, and in what position are we placed? You know perfectly well, from your conversations with one another, that the question of Ireland is as much alive as it ever was. You may seek to drive it under the surface—I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman will or not—but the question is alive; and, therefore, perhaps I may be allowed for a moment or two to interpose a few remarks in reply to something which has been said in the course of the debate in respect of this situation. It is said, I know, that Home Rule is dead. I do not think so. We are told that we shall do well—we who are in favour of the extension of self-government in Ireland—that we shall do well "to go step by step." Step by step ! Step by step is a mere phrase, it is nothing more. When I ask my lion, friends what it is they mean by going step by step in the extension of local government to Ireland I have never been able to get from one of them an intelligible or even plausible reply. It is said, for example, "We will give Ireland a local body to deal with education !" Now just think of that. The education question in this country is not a very smooth subject to grapple with, but in Ireland it is a particularly difficult problem, more so than it is here; and yet we are going, according to this suggestion, to proceed step by step and to throw upon a raw and unfledged council the task of finding a resolution of the most difficult of all questions. You will have the Ulsterman and the Catholic disputing about education, and you will have England looking on over the fence with a not very sympathetic, but jealous eye. The case I put is that without the full power of Parliamentary responsibility this is a mere infatuation—as great an infatuation as it is possible to conceive.

Whose prescription is that?

It is a current prescription; it certainly is no prescription of mine. Then there is another favourite formula which is heard on both sides in a reforming spirit. They say, "Reform Dublin Castle." What does the reform of Dublin Castle mean? I know something of Dublin Castle. I do not think so ill of it as some of my friends below the gangway do. I think that as governing Ireland against its will it is extremely efficient. But what does this reforming of Dublin Castle moan? It means that you want to give the Irish people control over their own Executive. How can you give the Irish people any control over their own Executive, as we have it in Scotland and in England, unless you have a Legislature to provide the Executive? The more that formula is examined, the more hollow and unsubstantial it appears. This is not my view alone; it was the view held by Mr. Gladstone when he brought in the Home Rule Bill of 1886. Upon that occasion he said: "There are those who say 'Let us abolish the Castle.' "I only present those points as showing the unworkability and unreality of the policy of step by step. The right hon. Gentleman said last night that I had suppressed thirty-nine public meetings. I think the House were probably deceived by that. They supposed that these were political meetings. They were nothing of the kind. They were not even agrarian meetings. They were gatherings which any policemen in the world would have suppressed, because they were meetings to intimidate individual? Do you suppose that, I or any of us, would tolerate intimidation of individuals? After all, will you be good enough, when you mock at that assertion, to remember two things —first, that everything we did was done under the ordinary law, with no coercion and no exceptional legislation; and secondly, that when we left the Irish Government, Ireland was never in a condition of better order. Therefore, I beg the right hon. Gentleman, when he talks about our having suppressed thirty-nine meetings, to remember that that has no point in it. The Attorney General for Ireland charges me with jury-packing. I do not care about recrimination. It is the thing I desire least in the world, if I may say so without discourtesy to the right hon. Gentleman. Will he tell me one single case—he has all the archives of Dublin Castle under his hand—in our Administration in a criminal case outside the North where there was a jury exclusively Protestant? That is jury-packing. The right hon. Gentleman, when he makes that statement again, will be good enough to introduce that qualification. Now I want to explain the reasons why I am going to, give the vote I shall give tonight. I think since 1895 I have never voted against the Chief Secretary's salary. But the vote tonight is a vote of want of confidence in the Irish Government, which 1ms introduced coercion, without attempting to set forth, as used to be the fashion in the old days, the foundations of the case upon which such extreme measures were based. In old times we used to have to bring figures and quote charges. It was felt to be so serious a thing to suspend the right of trial by jury in the most important class of cases, that a very strong case must be made before the House of Commons was asked to assent to it. The right hon. Gentleman has placed no such case before us. He has contented himself with a vague phrase. He has said that Ireland is "seething with a spirit of discontent and revolt" It is admitted that Ireland was never more crimeless; and does the right lion. Gentleman say that because the country is, as he thinks—though I believe it is a most exaggerated description—does he mean to say that that is a reason for suspending the right of trial by jury in the very class of cases where the right of trial by jury is of the most precious and inestimable value? The Gentlemen who are for step by step will, I think, recognise in this proceeding that this new policy is a policy step by step backward. Never before has coercion, repressive legislation, been brought to bear—never before—without a proper statement being made. The right hon. Gentleman, I am afraid, belongs to that school—that bad school—who have been described as preferring to perpetrate a great amount of injustice rather than to create a small amount of disorder. You had much better, as Lord Salisbury said in the passage I have quoted, have used the ordinary law vigorously and vigilantly, if necessary taking your chance cf convictions from time to time—there are plenty of devices apart from jury-packing for securing convictions—than resort to the repressive measures you have adopted. We have now in England a great body of important gentlemen from the Colonies, I wonder what one of these colonial Ministers will say when he sees that in Ireland, by a stroke of the pen, without a case stated to the House of Commons or the House of Lords, the Irish Executive can suspend jury trial and the constitutional guarantees for as long a time as they think fit. I think our colonial friends will well understand what it is that causes disloyalty and discontent in Ireland. It is on these grounds that we say at this moment you have no Irish policy. I will ask—and it is my last question— what is your Irish policy? What are you going to do for Ireland? There is the Catholic College. The Prime Minister has expressed his strongest opinion that that is a necessary reform in Ireland, and I believe every one of those seven ex-Chief Secretaries to whom I referred, certainly most of them, approve of it. The Chief Secretary himself admitted, when he brought in the Land Bill, that there was an urgent case for it. He now says there is nochance—or the Irish see, at all events, that there is nochance—though sorely needed, of that Bill passing. What is your Irish policy now, at the beginning of a new reign, with a new Prime Minster, and a Chief Secretary apparently about to take a more responsible position? You have no policy, except this wretched, ragged, universal failure, the policy of coercion. And on that account I shall vote for the Amendment.

I made yesterday evening so large a claim on the patience and indulgence of the Committee that I hardly feel justified in rising again tonight to trespass upon their kindness; but it will be felt that some reply is required by the speech to which we have just listened, and, indeed, by many others that have preceded it in the course of the afternoon and evening. Let me take some of the last words which fell from the right hon. Gentleman before I attempt to deal with his speech as a whole. He said that in former times preceding Governments—and I have no doubt he had in his own mind the Government probably, of Lord Spencer, and the Government in which the present Prime Minister was Chief Secretary —had founded the case for what is called coercion by adducing statistics of crime, in the sense of violent crime against the person and against property, and by citing the charges of judges. Well, I suppose that the right hon. Gentleman will tell me that had I done that I should have shown at any rate a laudable desire to convince or conciliate Irish opinion. But had that been done, we should have been told that the statistics were cooked, and that the judges were the mere tools of the Executive. That being the reply which any man of ordinary intelligence must have anticipated, I hold that it is bettor and franker to keep close to the facts and give for the policy of the Government the reasons which actuated us in adopting that policy. Those reasons have not been, and I have never said that they were, that a number of persons in Ireland have been murdered or maimed. Those reasons are that there is in Ireland at the present moment an interference with private liberties which makes it impossible in that country for agriculture to prosper, or for any substitute for agriculture to be introduced with any prospect of success. It may be said that this House ought not to govern Ireland. Of course, this is not the occasion for arguing on Home Rule—and I doubt if the right hon. Gentleman would even have touched upon that great theme had he not wished to give a back-hander to those who would approach it stop by step—this is not the occasion for arguing on Home Rule; but that being so, so long as this House is responsible for the government of Ireland, it is the duty of the Government, resting on the support of this House, to see that the people of that country enjoy that modicum of liberty which must be the foundation of any superstructure of industry or of civilisation. The right hon. Gentleman took exception to my pointing out that he had prohibited thirty-nine meetings in Ireland. I thought I had made it clear last night that I was not using a tu quoque argument. I was enforcing the point that every Administration finds it necessary, fortunately, to do in this country.

Is it true that in this country no Administration breaks up a disorderly meeting?

I am not pleading for England robed in a white sheet of innocence—that is not the point. The charge is that the Government of Ireland do things which stand in need of justification very clear and convincing. But I say that in Ireland every Government—even a Government allied with the Nationalist Party for the purpose of achieving Home Rule—found it necessary to break up thirty-nine meetings in the course of three years. The right hon. Gentleman says that he did that to protect individuals. Does he charge me with having done it for any other reason? He made a great point of the fact that, during the three years he was responsible for the Government of Ireland, he did not use what is called the Crimes Act, although he kept it on the Statute Book. But, although he did not institute any prosecutions under the Crimes Act, he did proceed in 279 agrarian cases under the provisions of the Statute of Edward III. But that, again, is an exceptional method called for by exceptional circumstances, called for by circumstances with which the House is quite familiar—namely, that in Ireland it is the business of certain people to endeavour for the advantage of their country, as they say, to plunge it into disorder by looing on one set of men on to the backs of another set of men. It is not that the farmers are looed on against the landlords, or that the Irish people are looed on against the Irish Government. That is not what takes place. What takes place is that a certain number of persons in a village are set like a pack of hounds on some individual in that village who happens for advantitious reasons to be unpopular. I believe the object is at all costs to create a situation which calls for the intervention of the Government, and then to charge the Government with intervening without any just cause, and then to appeal to this House, and to this country, and say: "See the tyranny of the Government! Give us Home Rule !" The right hon. Member at the beginning of his speech said quite truly that many of those who listened to him were not in this House during the late eighties, when we had a party in alliance with the Nationalist Party for the purpose of obtaining Home Rule for Ireland. Yes; but we had the old situation revived on a small scale this evening; and I am glad that hon. Members who are now in the House, but were not in the House then, have had the unique opportunity of hearing the hon. Member for Cork City followed by the right hon. Member for the Montrose Burghs. The right hon. Member listened to the speech of the hon. Member for Cork City. He would, I suppose, have wished to agree with it all, but he could not do so, and in that conciliatory manner which he recommends to me and to all Chief Secretaries, he ventured so far as to say that the hon. Member for Cork City had used one word which went beyond the limits. But I never heard beyond the limits of what, because there was such an uproar on those Benches from the hon. Member and his colleagues at the bare idea that one of them could have gone beyond the limits in anything. Well, that is indeed the old situation. The right hon. Gentleman went on to say: "We have a new King, a now century, a new Prime Minister; let us pause and see where we stand." We stand exactly where we did. We have a right hon. Gentleman in his position trying to work with the Nationalist Party, and finding it impossible to do so unless he is prepared to condone words and actions which are repugnant to him, as they are to every Member of this House. The expression that went beyond the limits was a charge levelled at two hon. Gentlemen. [Cries of dissent from the Nationalist Members.] There you have it. Two men, let me call them, are placed by hon. Members opposite outside the pale of humanity, not for any action they have done, or refrained from doing, but simply because, being Irishmen, they happened also to be landlords. What a peaceful prospect for the future of Ireland if the right hon. Gentleman, in spite of these small exceptions he takes to the hon. Member for Cork City, completed his purpose of handing that country over to the tender mercies of the hon. Member for Cork City arid the organisation which he directs and controls. Then to show how hollow this whole case is, the right hon. Member put up a charge, repeated by the hon. Member for Cork City, and on which the changes have been rung throughout the debate— a charge I did not notice because I thought it so trivial, so beside the issues which this Committee has been considering for two days—the charge that the proclamation which brought certain provisions of the Crimes Act into force was signed by two landlords. I have been taken to task because I have not taken serious notice of that which was made almost the gravamen of the whole of the attack of some of the speeches to which I listened. But the right hon. Gentleman knows that the signature of such a document by the Privy Council has as much to do with its contents as the stamping of a letter in the post office before it goes through it. He knows perfectly well that the policy of reviving coercion is a policy for which I am the Minister responsible.

The Statute says—

"By and with the advice of the Privy Council."

The hon. and learned Member is a lawyer, and he will hardly contend that all the language of a statute corresponds so very closely to the realities of modern life. I am glad he thinks it worth while to get up and make this preposterous charge, because every one in the House knows that the revival of the Coercion Act is the collective action of the Government of the country, not of the Irish Government alone, but of the whole Cabinet. Of course I am responsible, because, if I disapproved that, I should have resigned; but it is an action which the Government has taken for reasons they approved; and yet, I suppose, an hour and a half of our time has been taken up by fulminations against these gentlemen for signing the proclamation, and against myself for a gross dereliction of duty, because until 11.30 on the following night I have not taken notice of so small a matter.

Of course, I knew perfectly well that Mr. Smith-Barry and Lord Clonbrock had nothing to do with the issue of the proclamation. My point—a small point if you like— was that it showed want of tact to choose these two gentlemen to sign— formally and mechanically, of course— that proclamation.

If that was all that the right hon. Gentleman had to urge—a want of tact and thoughtful stage management—his case against the Government is not such a very strong one. I am told that I ought to have conciliated Irish opinion by putting Sergeant Sheridan on his trial, even although I thought—as I do think—that that would result in a divided jury. Imagine the result of that policy of conciliation! Every single hon. Member on those Benches would have got up one after another and said I had packed the jury to rehabilitate the character of Sergeant Sheridan. I do not wish to add to what I said yester-day, except to correct a point I had left in doubt. Not two constables, but one constable remains at the depot; he was not an accomplice in the crime, and he still protests his innocence. He is not believed by those who conducted the inquiry to have been guilty of more than this. Whilst his own evidence was probably true, he must have doubted some of the evidence of Sergeant Sheridan, and had not the moral courage to stand up and expose him. That was on the second trial when the man accused pleaded guilty. I suppose there are many men, unhappily, who would not have had sufficient moral courage when a prisoner himself pleaded guilty to get up and give the lie to a superior officer without any prospect or hope that his word would be taken against that of his own superior officer. I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman invited me to attempt a policy of conciliation. He must know that that is the dire offence with which I am always being taunted. I am not ashamed to say—and I do say it again here tonight with all emphasis—that on proper occasions I have invited, that on proper occasions I shall continue to invite, the House to do what I believe to be the duty of all true Unionists—to discharge in the spirit as well as to the letter the pledges given by Pitt and Castlereagh at the time of the Union, and, if not as a matter of duty, of expediency and common sense, to devote as much attention to Ireland at our door as to Egypt over which we have no sovereign rights at all; but this is not the proper occasion for advancing such arguments, because if they were advanced they would be misunderstood by hon. Members opposite as well as by those who sit upon this side of the House. In the face of the direct challenge to Government to proceed at its peril on its primary duty of protecting property and liberty, it is absurd to talk of remedial measures, of a policy of regeneration. You do not abandon it; but you do not insult the intelligence of everyone who is listening to you by pushing it into the forefront as a reply to assailants who are doing their best, as I hold, to ruin Ireland. Now, let me turn to the hon. Member for Cork City in the very few words more which I have to say. I listened to his speech. It was a fearless speech. He dreaded only one thing. He dreaded that I might in some moment of aberration bestow some praise upon his conduct in the course of this debate.

No; I did not.

The hon. Member spoke of being in danger of being praised! but I do praise him for the skiliulness with which the subject of the De Freyne estate has disappeared altogether out of the discussion in this House, and for the way in which the defiances of the Government uttered in the Cork Court-house the other day have formed no portion of the hon. Member's speech; and I notice that after being in Ireland for a year, he has not said here those things which he said in Ireland.

I had to compress my remarks, or I should have been delighted to refer to the statement which was deliberately made by the right hon. Gentleman in this House during my absence—that I was responsible for the starting of the no-rent campaign on the De Freyne estate. I should have been proud to meet that statement with the pretty conclusive evidence of an affidavit sworn by Lord De Freyne himself this week. That affidavit, a couple of hundred folios long, which gives a history of the whole struggle, never makes the smallest allusion to my name, or the smallest suggestion that I had anything to do with it.

The words of the hon. Member which I quoted are those:—

"I have already taken the liberty of suggesting that the only means of bringing this question of compulsory sale and of the terms of purchase to an issue in the south, is that the tenants of each estate should make a combined demand next November for an abatement of rent equivalent to that made to the tenant purchasers."

There is no recommendation of non-payment of rent on the De Freyne estate there.

The phrase "combined demand for an abatement of rent" suggests to my poor intelligence that, if that payment is not complied with, the tenants will show their displeasure on the lines which the hon. Member has again and again expounded.

Of course I suggested that the tenants should bring their demand before the landlord; and I urged that they had as good a claim to purchase as the tenants on the neighbouring estates; but the question, raised in this House was not the demand, but how it was to be enforced. I said distinctly in the passage which the right hon. Gentleman quotes how I proposed to enforce it, and it was not by withholding rent, but by a system of social excommunication of the landlords, such as you have practised with such success against the pro-Boers and the hon. Member for South Tyrone.

The hon. Member's method is social excommunication of the landlords, some of whom are non-resident and cannot therefore be excommunicated. In that event would he advise the tenants to go no further, but to pay their rent at the rent office? If he would, he agrees with me and with the Bishop of Elphin, who thinks that the best advice which could be given to the De Freyne tenants is "to pay up." In his speech the hon. Member attacked me in most violent language because I had given that advice. He said that I made coarse and vulgar imputations; that I quoted the expenses of one of those who were stirring up this strife. So I did. But my words were a verbal quotation from the discourse of the Bishop of Elphin. I have been advised to associate myself with the efforts of the Catholic clergy in this district. I took the advice. I associated myself with their efforts. I quoted their words, and I pointed out to the tenants on the De Freyne estate, as far as I could reach them, that unless they took that advice there was no better fate in store for them than that which overtook the earlier dupes of the hon. Member for Cork City. [Cries of "New Tipperary."]

I acknowledge New Tipperary.

The hon. Member is himself incorrigible, and then complains that we will never be taught. But who is it that enters his disciplinary school? It is not we, the Members of this House, who sit here in safety and ease. Those who arc the subject of his bitter correction are the poor tenants on these estates, who are, if not deluded, mystified by this ambiguous language, supposing it to be ambiguous, which I deny. For I say it is a direct incitement to the refusal of rent. They are either directly incited to refuse to pay rent or mystified by ambiguous language, and, overtaken by the inevitable results of that action, then to whom are they to look for assistance? Not, I think, to the hon. Member for Cork City.

said he had challenged the right hon. Gentleman to quote out of some 500 or 600 speeches he had made in the course of the United Irish League movement one single sentence in which lie advocated nonpayment of rent as a weapon in their struggle, and the right hon. Gentleman had never succeeded, even with all the powers of Dublin Castle.

I hope the hon. Member will join with me and the Bishop of Elphin—

Indeed, I will not.

And advise the tenants to pay up. I draw the attention of the Committee to the contrast between the speech of the hon. Member made tonight and the speech he made in the Court-house at Cork the other day. He stood there on the platform with the leader of his party. The hon. and learned Member for Waterford made a speech in which he seemed to advise the Irish people to proceed to lengths which would force the Government not alone to revive coercion, as it is called, but to disfranchise the country and to turn Ireland into a Crown Colony. That is very tall talk, the key to which is to be found in one sentence in the speech made there by the hon. Member for Cork City—

"You have a perfect legal right," he said, "to know how your landlords stand upon this question of compulsory sale, and whether they mean to persevere in their policy of vengeance upon evicted tenants. If the landlords refuse to receive you, or if they will hear of no terms, what is there to prevent you, if you are in earnest, from treating them, as I hope you treat every landgrabber that pollutes the soil? What is there to prevent you from issuing a sentence of social excommunication against every landlord?"