adjourned. The second night's proceedings were preluded by an animated criticism on the action of the Irish Executive in proclaiming two meetings at Brookborough, Co. Fermanagh; one called by the Land League, and the other by the Orange party. The Chief Secretary (Mr. Forster) said that sworn information having been received that the meetings, if held, would endanger public peace, they were prohibited. Mr. O'Kelly said that the Government were misinformed in supposing that there was any danger to be apprehended from a collision between the two bodies, as the Orangemen were in full sympathy with the objects of the Land League. This view, as well as the contention that police interference with a meeting called to discuss a constitutional question was illegal, was supported by the Home Rulers; Mr. Forster defending the Dublin Executive, by citing cases where disturbance had arisen in other districts between Orangemen and the Land League. The discussion then took the form of a complaint as to the insecure foundations on which the right of public meeting rested in Ireland—the will of the Irish magistrates; who were denounced as responsible for a large share of the ill-will with which British rule was regarded by the Irish people. Mr. Forster next stated that during the recess five counties had been proclaimed: Galway, Mayo, Kerry, Limerick, and Leitrim; the West Riding of the County of Cork, and the barony of Innishowen, Co. Donegal; he promised to lay forthwith upon the table a return of the number of agrarian outrages, but would not promise them during the debate on the Address. According to the figures communicated to him, the number of outrages up to the end of December had been 2,573, including, as he afterwards explained, 1,327 cases of threatening letters; whilst special police protection was afforded to 153 persons.

The debate on the address was then resumed by Mr. Parnell, who rose from the front Opposition bench below the gangway to move the Amendment of which he had given notice in a speech (which the spokesman of the Conservatives, Mr. Gibson, afterwards described as one of the most adroit, intelligent, sagacious speeches he had heard in the House of Commons). Mr. Parnell complained first of the conspiracy of the London press against the good name of Ireland, and then passed on to explain the objects of the action of the Land League, denying that that organisation had either excited to outrage or had failed to reprobate it where it occurred. As to the necessity of coercive measures, he quoted statistics to show that at the present moment the state of crime there was below the average of the last forty years. Coercion would contribute to crime and outrage, by encouraging the landlords in the practice of eviction. The question was whether the House would have an open organisation or a secret conspiracy. What the Land League had done was to organise the Irish people to resist unjust laws by constitutional means, and this course had been forced upon them by the rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill in the last session of Parliament. In Ireland the people

had, unfortunately, an evil and unhappy history. They had been tempted and driven too much in the past to rely upon murder and outrage for a redress of their grievances; and the politician who attempted to originate a movement in that island must do so with the knowledge that there would be crime and outrage where there was distress, and where there was eviction, and that he would be accused and made responsible for the results of the unhappy experience of the country. Resistance to unjust laws sometimes became a high duty, and he could conceive of no higher duty on the part of the Irish people than a willingness to go to gaol, to endure hard labour, to encounter other sufferings, rather than surrender their rights. Those for whom he spoke had undoubtedly called upon the Irish people to resist-constitutionally, without violence and by organisation, by refusing to take farms from which tenants had been evicted, and by refusing to deal with the persons who kept those farms, or to supply them with provisions-the unjust laws which were the result of the legislation of England. But the emergency was such that there was no other course open to them after the rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill. From 1796 to 1823 there were nine Coercion Acts, of which three were for the suspension of Habeas Corpus. From 1830 to the present time there had been 48 Coercion Acts, including seven suspensions of Habeas Corpus. The Government said that they could not get evidence, and that coercion was necessary to enable them to do so. He was reminded by that of the old saying that one man could lead a horse to the water, but many could not make him drink. It was not intimidation, but the force of public opinion, that was influencing the people of Ireland. He regretted that many tenants, owing to the dread they had of their landlords, had not the courage to say that they would not pay their rents. He regretted that some of them went to the landlords and said that they could not pay for fear of the consequences to themselves, that their cattle would be houghed, or some other punishment visited upon them. Intimidation was not the work of the Irish National Land League.

In conclusion Mr. Parnell entreated the House of Commons not to be again made the catspaw of the landlords; and amid loud cheers from the Irish members, moved, as an amendment to the Address, the words: "But we humbly assure her Majesty that we are convinced that the peace and tranquillity of Ireland cannot be promoted by suspending any of the constitutional rights of the Irish people."

Mr. Tottenham, Orangeman, and the Conservative representative for Leitrim, declared Mr. Parnell's representation of the state of Ireland to be absolutely misleading and inaccurate. The English newspapers, far from exaggerating the condition of affairs, were altogether ignorant of a tithe of the violence and lawlessness in the country. He declared that tenants not only refused to pay a fair rent, according to Griffith's or anyone else's valuation, but avoided all payment whatever. He thought that the Government

were to blame for having "for four months permitted the state of things in Ireland daily to grow worse, until it had reduced that country to a pandemonium of crime and outrage which was a disgrace to civilisation, and had made both England and Ireland the laughing stock of the civilised world." The State trials were a lame, impotent attempt to restore strength and vitality to the law, which had fallen into contempt because the Government, in a state of coma, had allowed the Peace Preservation Act to drop, and neglected the warnings which he (Mr. Tottenham) had given them before the close of the previous session. Mr. O'Connor Power in a spirit of prophecy characterised the Coercion Bill as strong, and the Land Bill as inadequate. In the latter he professed to discover merely an amendment of the Act of 1870, together with some proposals for the reclamation of waste land, and assisting emigration. As regarded the last palliative, Mr. O'Connor Power held that emigration only meant the removal of the young and able, and the leaving of the old and infirm; and that to properly carry out a scheme of reclamation, the Government should in the previous autumn have advanced the sum of ten millions, by the help of which 100,000 tenants from over-populated districts might have been earning their livelihood and increasing the wealth of the country.

The Chief Secretary for Ireland (Mr. W. E. Forster) then rose to defend the Government policy and course of action during the recess. Although no coercive measures would, he admitted, redress the wrongs of Ireland, it was nevertheless the first duty of any Government to protect life or property. If Mr. Parnell had shown in his speeches elsewhere the moderation he had displayed in moving his amendment, the task of the Executive would have been easier. Unfortunately, experience had shown that the Land League meetings, instead of preventing outrages, as Mr. Parnell stated, were usually followed by attacks upon persons or property. Quoting from that member's speech at Ennis, Mr. Forster found in it a clear recommendation not only not to take farms from which others had been evicted, but a threat that those who took them should be cut off from all social intercourse and treated as lepers. From this and similar advice he concluded that it was the object of the member for Cork and his party to replace the law of the land by the unwritten law of the Land League. He did not charge Mr. Parnell with having himself incited to the outrages which occurred, but he held that he must have known very well what would be the result of his speeches and of his action. This remark drew forth an angry protest from the Irish party, but Mr. Forster, only slightly altering the words, declined to withdraw the charge he had brought against Mr. Parnell. He recapitulated the long list of outrages committed during the closing months of the previous year, dwelling especially on the widespread cases of intimidation. He next passed on to show by reference to dates that, had the Conservatives remained in office after the General

Election, they would have found it impossible to pass a new Peace Preservation Act, or to continue that which was in force down to May 31, 1880; and he defended the existing Government from the charge of dilatoriness on the ground that he had come to the conclusion that every officer of the law in Ireland, from the Lord Lieutenant to the youngest policeman, had been taught to rely too much on British power. His interview with a deputation of Irish magistrates convinced him that there was a very sorrowful reliance in Ireland, not upon Irish determination to support the law so much as upon English help to see that the law was carried out. The desire of the Government was to exhaust every means by which the existing laws might be enforced before applying for extraordinary powers; and to do this they had strengthened the police in all the disturbed districts, and raised the number of troops in the country from 19,000 to 26,000. To 217 applications for enforcing rights, assistance had been given in all but three cases; and in some instances as many as a hundred men were sent to support the sheriffs or their officers. Sir Stafford Northcote had alleged that in not putting down the meetings of the Land League the Government had been guilty either of want of foresight or of criminal negligence. As these meetings had been going on since April 1879, such a charge recoiled upon the Conservatives, who, when in power, made no attempt to stop them. The concluding portion of Mr. Forster's speech was received somewhat coldly by all sections of the House, for, not unnaturally, in his wish to satisfy the reasonable desires of moderate men, he disappointed alike the extreme views of revolutionists and reactionaries.

Mr. Gibson, who had ably filled a responsible office in the previous Government, insisted that the state of the country was far worse than was represented in the Queen's Speech. He was confident that had the Conservatives been returned to power after the General Election they would have found no difficulty in continuing the Peace Preservation Act; at any rate the Liberals could scarcely claim want of time as an excuse, seeing that they had claimed credit for the abandonment of the measure in the Queen's Speech of the previous session. The consequences of the supineness of the Government had led to a condition of things which was that of organised lawlessness and an ostentatious terrorism that sought unjustifiable ends by unscrupulous means. The agitation was not only not constitutional, but was adverse to the best interests of the Empire. Its real object was not the reform of the Land Laws. The want of Ireland was resident landlords and capital, yet the League had adopted a machinery which would make every landlord in Ireland an absentee. This state of things was known to the Government when the Prime Minister spoke at Guildhall on the 9th of November, and if Parliament had been summoned then two precious months might have been gained from the agitation, and the Irish people saved from allowing themselves to be misled by expectations that would never be realised.