MR. O'BRIEN'S SPEECH.

Mr. W. O'Brien rose amid loud and prolonged cheers from the Irish members, and speaking for the first time in this House since his release from Tullamore Jail, said: All the speeches which have been made in support of the Government have seemed to follow the keynote struck by the Chief Secretary. They all appeared to be more or less artfully designed to draw angry retorts from these benches. It is one of our national faults to be very ready to resent injustice, and a most generous use our opponents have made of that characteristic. ("Hear, hear.") The whole policy of our opponents towards Ireland, and the whole object of the powerful London newspapers, seems to be to get at the worst side of Irish and of English character, and to sting and goad us into doing things which will put new life into national prejudices that are expiring in spite of you. (Opposition cheers.) Irishmen and Englishmen are becoming only too united for your purpose. Yours is a noble ambition! But you have failed in Ireland, and you will fail, I promise you, in this House also. There was a time when we came here with our hand against every man's, and every man's hand against us. We expected no quarter, and to the best of our ability we gave none. It seemed to no purpose to struggle against the tremendous and cruel forces arrayed against us; but that is all at an end forever, thanks to the right honorable member for Mid-Lothian. (Cheers.)

We have come to this House no longer as enemies among enemies. We count ourselves Ishmaelites no longer in this House, nor in this land of England. We are now among allies and friends who were not ashamed nor afraid to stand by our side and by the side of our people in many a bitter hour of trial and calumny last year. (Opposition cheers.) We come here now among a people whose consciences, I believe, have been deeply stirred by the sufferings of our unfortunate people; and though we are confronted by a hostile majority, callous to those sufferings, we know that that majority does not represent Scotland and Wales. (Opposition cheers.) We believe that it does not even represent England. (Renewed Opposition cheers, and counter Ministerial cheers.) It is a majority obtained by foul means and upon representations which have turned out to be utterly false. We know that it is a majority who, two years ago, were not ashamed to receive their offices at the hands of the men whom they are now libelling in England and torturing in Ireland. (Loud Opposition cheers.) We have no respect for that majority. I doubt whether in their secret hearts many of them have much respect for themselves. ("Hear, hear.") I know very well that they are extremely ill at ease. We believe, as I say, that we are winning. (Cheers.) The right honorable gentleman opposite (the Chief Secretary) has failed in Ireland. (Home Rule cheers.) He has failed to smash our organization. He has failed to break the spirit of our people. He has failed to degrade us, I won't say in the eyes of our countrymen, for that would be absurd, but in the eyes of every honest man within these three realms. He has failed in every one of those calculations in which he indulged so confidently last autumn.

I shall prove before I sit down that failure is written on every clause and upon every provision of this act, abject failure, discomfiture, and disgrace. I shall be able to prove that sorely as our people have been tried and wronged, that they have managed to survive one of the most horrible Coercion Acts that has ever been directed against human liberty: that they have been able to crush and baffle it at every point, and that without one deed that they look upon with shame, but by sheer force of an incomparable national feeling. (Cheers.) Now, in the first place, I shall try to deal very shortly with my own case; and if I refer to it at all, it is, not in order to notice the coarse sneers of the honorable member for South Tyrone (Mr. T. W. Russell),—I do not think it would be as parliamentary as it is true to say malignant sneers ("Hear, hear"),—I think it possible that before very long those sneers may be answered in the only way they deserve, by the electors of South Tyrone,—it is because I recognize that I am the very worst parliamentary criminal under this act. I am the only one who could have been proceeded against under the ordinary common law, with the shadow of a chance of conviction. Every colleague of mine who has been punished is being punished for new and statutable offences for which no jury in the world would convict under the ordinary law. The point I press upon the House is that if I can justify my offence, then I say, with a thousand times more force, the conviction of every one of my colleagues is an outrage upon justice, and their treatment in prison is an indelible disgrace to the man who planned it. I find that foul misrepresentation has been resorted to to mislead and to deceive the English public as to the offence for which I was sentenced.

Within the last week I have been reading the papers, and I am sorry to find that Lord Salisbury was not above stooping to encourage and to lead this attempt most unfairly and untruly to poison the English mind against me. He made a speech at Oxford, in which he indulged in flouts and gibes at my own humble expense. I do not complain of that. It is not the first time that he has been accused of making flouts and gibes at the expense of persons with whom he was more intimately allied than he is with me. (Opposition cheers and laughter.) But here is how this great nobleman describes my case to an English audience. He says, "What is there in the case of Mr. O'Brien to make him a martyr?" And then he goes on with his creditable witticisms. He says, "I do not refer to his small clothes. (Laughter.) Their vicissitudes would furnish a theme for an epic (rewewed laughter), and I hope an Irish bard will arise worthy of the subject. (Continued laughter.) But taking the man apart from his clothes." (Roars of laughter; Ministerial cheers.) I notice that your cheers do not rise to a roar. (Opposition cheers.) I do not answer these remarks. The noble lord went on, "What is there to excite the sympathy of the loyal subjects of England? He broke the law; he incited others to break the law, and recommended that the men who were endeavoring to collect just debts should be met with violence. In consequence of his recommendation, they were met with violence. They were scalded with hot water, and some of them were brought next to death's door. What is there to excite the sympathy of the loyal subjects of England?" (Cries of "Nothing.")

Now I shall tell you briefly the circumstances under which my advice was given, and the results of that advice. I will ask any candid man in England, after he has heard me, whether that speech of Lord Salisbury is not calculated to convey to the average Englishman an impression, so false, so misleading, that I am afraid I should be obliged to travel beyond the region of parliamentary epithets to characterize it. Now, on the 2d of August, this House had, practically speaking, passed the Land Bill, enabling over a thousand people of Mitchelstown, who were leaseholders, to have their rents revised. On the 8th of August, word reached me that the police and the military were gathering in Mitchelstown to carry out an eviction campaign. The effect of that campaign would have been to forestall all the operations of the Land Bill, and, practically speaking, to defeat the intentions of Parliament, and to fling these poor people naked upon the world before the relief, which was actually entering the door, could reach them. (Opposition cheers.) That was technically legal for the landlord for a few days longer, but I hold that if ever there was a crime committed against society, it was that which was being attempted the day I went down to Mitchelstown. Well, but what was to be done? If the right honorable baronet, the late member for West Bristol (Sir M. Hicks-Beach), were still Chief Secretary, at all events, in his early manner, we might have had some hope that the Queen's troops would not have been made accomplices in such an act.

On the day I reached Mitchelstown, on the appeal of these poor people, I found that evictions had already been carried out on the non-residential holdings, where there was no possibility of resistance. Ah! It is an old story in Ireland. No mercy for the weak who can make no resistance, no scruple about perpetrating a wrong when it can be done in the dark. (Home Rule cheers.) That was the bitter thought which passed through my mind that day, when these poor people, my own constituents, came to me in helplessness and despair, to know what was to be done to save them from the ruin that was impending. There was just one hope for these people in all the world, and it was this. The Northwich election was pending (Opposition cheers), and the Irish evictions were an awkward topic for a Tory candidate. The stories of Glenbeigh and Bodyke were beginning to horrify the English mind. I knew that Tory statesmen would not scruple to lend troops if it could be done without commotion, but I thought they might hesitate, lest they should lose the Northwich election. I had not a moment to consult anybody, and absolutely on my own responsibility, and on the spur of the moment, I did there and then, in the open square of Mitchelstown, and in the hearing of a number of policemen, tell the people if, under these special circumstances, the evictions were carried out before the Land Bill, which was almost law, did become law, it would be no outrage of the law, and that they would be justified before God and man in defending their homes by every honest means. (Cheers.)

I might have been right, or I might have been wrong. I have no doubt that technically it was illegal for me to save the people, as it was legal for the landlords in a few days to ruin them. Technically speaking, I dare say, it would be an evasion of the law to hold the arm of an executioner if the executioner and I knew that a reprieve was actually arriving. That was precisely the case with these poor people. The reprieve was coming, and the reprieve has come. (Cheers.) Whether I was right or wrong in law, the result proved that I did not miscalculate the statesmanship and the morality of the Tory Government. What happened? The moment that it became evident that those eviction scenes would ring throughout England, the eviction campaign was abandoned. The very day I made that speech in Mitchelstown, all was peace with the tenants. Not another eviction took place, and Captain Plunkett, who came down to superintend the eviction campaign, remained, I am glad to say, and proud to say, only to turn his energies to getting up a prosecution against me. Not a single eviction has taken place there from that day to this; not an act of violence has been committed; not a blow has been struck; not a single hair has been injured of any police officer or bailiff in consequence of that speech of mine. Not one; and yet Lord Salisbury is not ashamed to say what he did.

What was the result? That those poor tenants, who but for our action—but for the action of John Mandeville and myself—would have been beggared and homeless men, were able to take advantage of the Land Act, such as it was, while we were in prison. A Land Sub-Commission, carefully chosen, was sent down to the Mitchelstown estate to prophesy against us, and to prove the guilt and the dishonesty of the Plan of Campaign. But they could not do it. These picked Tory officials, two of them convicted rack-renters, were obliged to declare that these poor tenants were entitled to remain in their homes, and on lower terms and at a lower rent than had been demanded. (Loud cheers.) What has happened since? The landlord has actually taken refuge from the judgment of even a Tory Land Commission in the moderation of the Plan of Campaign. Three days ago my honorable friend and collegue, the member for South Tipperary, signed, sealed, and delivered a treaty which secures these poor people safely to their homes. This is the transaction as to which Lord Salisbury is not ashamed to say that I "recommended that the men who were employed by the Crown in the recovery of just debts should be met with violence, and that in consequence, some were maltreated and scalded and brought to death's door." (Opposition, cries of "Shame.") The fact is, that not a single act of violence took place in any way on the estate after my speech. But justice was secured to those people and their children in their homes. (Cheers.)

If there is anybody who has reason to blush at the name of Mitchelstown, and to remember Mitchelstown apart from the blood that was shed there, I should think it is not I, but her Majesty's Government. They had neither the humanity to forbid these evictions, nor the courage to persevere with them. They superintended and sanctioned them as long as there was any prospect of resistance; they had the cowardice to abandou them the moment they threatened to become inconvenient to a Tory candidate, and they had the incredible meanness, while my hands were bound in prison, to present a story to the English people, in a false and untruthful guise, in order to reconcile Englishmen to having me treated worse than a thief or a cutthroat, for saving my own constituents from the fate which now the Land Commissioners and everybody on this earth acknowledge would have been a most unmerited and a most awful calamity. I won't weary the House by going into all the miserable circumstances, all the foul play, and the violence and the indecencies that were resorted to against us. Unfortunately they are common-place and every-day occurrences in Ireland, through the infamous tribunals you have set up. I certainly am not going to enter into any recital of the miserable little prison torments and iniquities that were employed to give us pain and humiliation, and to besmirch the character of the Irish representatives in the eyes of the people of England and Ireland. I think we can afford to pass these things by. I believe that our opponents are not all so lost to generous and manly sentiments as not to feel ashamed rather than exultant about the Chief Secretary's exploits.

There is another class of opponents. I am sorry to think that men who are capable of inflicting pain of this description are quite capable of deriving a still keener pleasure in knowing that the torments have told, and that their victims smart under their wounds. I cannot gratify them, for the simple reason that I do not feel wounded. I do not feel in the least degraded. I rather suspect that the right honorable gentleman, under his jaunty bearing, has his conscience not quite so easy as mine. I confess that I did feel keenly when in prison a letter which the right honorable gentleman published to a Mr. Armitage, not making any honest charge against me, but conveying a stealthy and loathsome insinuation that I sheltered myself under the plea of illness from being forced to wear prison dress. I challenge the right honorable gentleman to refer to any one of the three official doctors who examined me, for one tittle, I will not say of foundation, but even of countenance, for such an assertion. (Loud cheers.) Here we are now face to face. (Great cheering from the Opposition.) I challenge him in defence of his own character, for it is his own character that is at stake (cheers), to appeal to any one of those three officials to give him the slightest countenance. ("Hear, hear.")

I have said I was angry about it when in prison, but since reading the letter over fully, I am angry no longer; I confess it would be an ample vengeance, if I were a much more vindictive man than I am, for a statesman who had any reputation to lose, to pen such a letter. (Cheers.) The letter conveyed a hideous and cowardly imputation against a man whose mouth was shut. (Cheers.) That letter breathed in every sentence of it the temper of a beaten and an angry man (cheers),—I was going to say, of an angry woman (laughter and cheers), but I don't want to say it, because it would be a gross libel on a gentle and tender sex. ("Hear, hear.") From all I have been able to learn in England since, I feel that it is no longer necessary for us to defend ourselves to the English people. (Cheers.) I feel there is not a Tory of the fifth or sixth magnitude, who really in his heart believes for one instant that Irish members are such poor creatures as to cry out against the appearance of a prison. (Cheers.)

The honorable member for Tyrone (Mr. T. W. Russell) said that we attempted to set up a distinction between members of Parliament and the peasants, our comrades and friends who are convicted under the act. There is not a shadow or a tittle of foundation for that statement. ("Hear, hear.") We have claimed nothing for ourselves as members of Parliament that we don't claim equally for every man convicted under the summary clauses of the act; for if he is a criminal, there is no reason why he should not be tried before the ordinary tribunal. ("Hear, hear.") We do not ask poor men to make a hard fight harder by resistance to prison rules; but if we win, they shall win as well as ourselves. ("Hear, hear.") Our position simply this: You are perfectly welcome to treat us to all the punishments that your courts of law prescribe for the very vilest miscreant in society,—the plank bed, or bread-and-water diet-solitary chnfinement, or deprivation of books and writing materials; you are perfectly welcome to heap every physical degradation on us, if that is your generous and chivalrous treatment of political prisoners, and you will never hear a word of complaint from us if you stick to that; but if you not only do that, but go further, and try and subject us to moral torture, from which criminals are altogether exempt, when you ask us to make a voluntary acknowledgement of our equality with criminals, then we say, "No; we will die first (cheers from Irish members), and you will have to learn the distinction between your criminal classes and Irish political prisoners, even if it should take a coroner's jury and their verdict to make the distinction." (Loud cheers.) I can only say that if any one has reason to blush, it is not we. ("Hear, hear.") I hope I am not detaining the House. (Cheers.)

The only thing I can plead is, that I shall not have an opportunity very soon of claiming your attention; but I should like to ask, "Where is all this to end?" What object has it accomplished? and if it is to go on for ever and for ever, what object can it ever possibly accomplish, except misery to a weak people and eternal worry and shame to yourselves? (Cheers.) Is it the object of the right honorable gentleman to convert the Irish people, or to dragoon them out of the aspirations which are as deeply lodged in the breasts of millions of men as the blood in their hearts? Does the right honorable gentleman in his wildest hour imagine that he has made one single genuine convert through the length and breadth of Ireland? (Cheers.) Even to take it on the lower and meaner sphere of brute force, I ask the right honorable gentleman to name one single village club that he has effectually stamped out. (Cheers.) Can he produce a single man from our ranks that he has really frightened, as the result of all the terrific power that he has been wielding in Ireland?

I ask honorable gentlemen opposite to remember with what a shout of exultation they passed the Crimes Act last session, and how they triumphed over us. I can well remember the shouts and peals of delight with which they welcomed the declaration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I think, when he said this was to be a duel to the death between the National League and the Government, and that they accepted the challenge. Well, are they satisfied with the results? (Cheers and laughter.) I ask honorable gentlemen whether they would have yelled so loudly last autumn if they could have foreseen the results of the most terrible Coercion Act ever passsd, giving the most unchecked powers that ever a despot was armed with, would be so miserable and ignominious and mean? (Cheers.) Did you or did you not expect that the act would crush the National League? Honorable gentlemen are silent. (Cheers.) I remember the shout of derision which came from the other side of the House when I ventnred to intimate a doubt whether the act, terrific as it looked, would succeed in crushing the Plan of Campaign. Has it been crushed, or even crippled? (Cheers.) Ask the deputation of Irish landlords (laughter and cheers) who waited on Lord Salisbury the other day with a begging letter,—ask them how many of them would be willing to try a fall with the Plan of Campaign in the morning. (Cheers and laughter.) It has never had so uniform and unbroken a course of victories as it has had this winter.

The greater number of the important struggles in which we were engaged when this act was passed has been brought to a victorious conclusion under the mouths of the right honorable gentleman's guns. (Cheers.) And upon what terms? I could speak for an hour, giving you instances of the results; but the one thing that applies to them all is, that in every single instance at least the original demands of the tenants have been acceded to. ("Hear, hear.") Every evicted tenant has been reinstated (cheers), and every shilling of law costs incurred in the struggle has been borne as an indemnity by the landlords. (Cheers, and "No.") You could have got as good a result as that without the act. On Lord de Freyne's estate, when the act was passing, the agent, Mr. M'Dougal, wrote this letter: "Spot the men in your district who are able to pay and won't; we will see, now that the Coercion Act is about to become law, whether we won't make them honest men." It turned out that the dishonest men beat Mr. M'Dougal and his master. They had confidence in the Crimes Bill and the right honorable gentleman last autumn. Where is Mr. M'Dougal to-day? He is gone, dismissed, and everything that the tenants were then demanding has been conceded.

The very day after I came out of prison, I learned that the new agent had had an interview with two of the most prominent of the campaigners on the estate, and he not only agreed to the tenants' terms, but he agreed to refund the sum of over £1,700, which Mr. M'Dougal had dishonestly extorted from the tenants before the Plan of Campaign. (Cheers.) This money was wrung from the tenants by terror, by serving one hundred and fifty writs of ejectment before they had the protection of the Plan of Campaign.

Then as to the estate of Bodyke, where the proceedings last summer horrified England, and for which her Majesty's Government could provide no remedy; what is the result? Last year, Mr. O'Callaghan, one of the hardest rack-renters, refused an offer of £907 for a year and a half's rent of fifty-seven tenants; he has now accepted £1,000 to wipe off two years' rent of seventy-two tenants. (Cheers and laughter.) That is to say, after losing all his money, and after costing the British taxpayer £40,000 for the expenses of his evictions (cheers), he has now come to the conclusion, and he is one of the most desperate of rack-renters, that the Crimes Act is no go, and he has struck his flag to the Plan of Campaign upon worse terms for him by far than he would have got before the passing of the Crimes Act. (Cheers.) Only this very day a letter came to my honorable friend, the member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), from the principal man who stood almost between the living and the dead on that estate,—the Rev. Peter Murphy,—in which the writer said: "A thousand thanks for check. You have acted nobly by us, and we have every reason to thank and be grateful to you. What pleases me most of all is, that our victory over Colonel O'Callaghan is complete, and approved by all who understand the matter fully. He did his utmost to get the tenants to purchase. He would have sold on any terms rather than yield to the plan, but we absolutely refused to purchase as long as the rope remained round our necks. (Cheers.) We would not entertain the idea of purchasing at all, until restored to our holdings and free as the mountain air to meet him on equal terms." (Cheers.)

"The next gale," the writer says, "is not to be asked until the end of June. Reductions suited to the different degrees of poverty, of fifteen per cent upwards to twenty-five and thirty per cent are secured." (Cheers.) That is the way the right honorable gentleman is abating the power of the Plan of Campaign. (Renewed cheers.) And remember that these poor tenants have won in spite of him, not merely by adhering to the Plan of Campaign, but also because every man of them who was evicted retook possession of his holding in defiance of the Crimes Act, and has held possession of his holding for the last six months. (Cheers.) And the lesson the right honorable gentleman, this triumphant Cromwell (laughter), has taught them is that, thanks to their own pluck, and not to his mercy, they are more secure in their homes to-day,—well, than the right honorable gentleman was in his tenancy of the Treasury Bench. (Cheers and laughter.)

I am at this moment officially aware of several estates where the struggle is still proceeding. The landlords are placing their hopes, and are opening their negotiations, not with the right honorable gentleman, or with Dublin Castle, but with the man who sits there, my honorable friend, the honorable member for East Mayo (loud cheers), and with other members of this criminal and illegal conspiracy; a conspiracy as to whose dishonesty we have heard so many homilies from honorable gentlemen opposite. Why, I sometimes wonder that the homilies they address to us and to our suffering people upon the violations of the ten commandments do not blister the lips that utter them. ("Hear, hear.") This dishonest conspiracy. No land court that has ever revised their demands has been able to pronounce them to be other than most just and moderate. ("Hear, hear.")

My honorable friend, the member for Cork, mentioned the other night that there were only three really great estates in Ireland on which the landlords are offering any resistance. One of them is the Brooke estate, in the county of Wexford, where the agent, Captain Hamilton, is an emergency man by profession. ("Hear, hear.") The second is Lord Massareene's property, in the county of Louth, where the agents also are emergency men by profession; and the third is the estate of Lord Clanricarde. It must be a proud thing for Englishmen to know that the right honorable gentleman on that estate was exercising one of the most abominable systems of petty persecution that ever was practised, in order to strike down the defenders of those poor people, to smother their voices, and to tie their hands in their struggle with a man who in the Queen's own law courts has been branded as a monster of cruelty and avarice! (Loud cheers.) I wish her Majesty's Government joy of all the credit that they will get out of their holy alliance with Lord Clanricarde ("Hear, hear," and laughter), and I wish him joy of all the rent he will get out of them. (Cheers and laughter.)

The fact is, and there is no use in blinking it, that, instead of overthrowing the Plan of Campaign, the right honorable gentleman has only made it more secure and more irrestible, by driving us to do our business with less publicity. ("Hear, hear.") The machinery of the plan has been now perfected to such a degree that we find that one single campaign on an estate is sufficient to keep the peace of a whole county. (Cheers.) Aye, and to settle the rents of a whole county more satisfactorily and more honestly than an army of land commissioners. ("Hear, hear.") I will tell you why. It is a very simple reason. Because the penalties of such a struggle are so heavy as to intimidate any tenantry from putting forward an unjust demand, and they are also sufficiently great to terrify a landlord from resisting a just demand. ("Hear, hear.") It may be a rough-and-ready method; no doubt it is; but what is the result? That in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred last winter it succeeded without any struggle at all.

I challenge honorable gentlemen who speak of the immorality and dishonesty of the Plan of Campaign,—I challenge the right honorable gentleman to name any single deed of outrage or of crime that is traceable to the Plan of Campaign, from end to end of Ireland. (Cheers.) I challenge him to name any one case in which the demands we have put forward have been declared by any land commissioner or judical tribunal in the country to be dishonest or exorbitant. I challenge him more than all to adduce to the House to-night one solitary case in which he has succeeded, with all his powers and his terrors, in breaking up a combination that was once formed on an estate. (Cheers.) And remember always that this Plan of Campaign is the merest segment of the Irish difficulty. It is a mere rough-and-ready way, which has been found effective to cure the blunders of your legislation, and to cure your folly in not closing with the bill of my honorable friend, the member for Cork. (Cheers.) My honorable friend and myself and others are the mere Uhlans and cadets to the army of millions of Irishmen who stand ranked under the standard of my honorable friend, the member for Cork. (Cheers.)

Now, as to the National League, I want to examine the right honorable gentleman. (Laughter.) We have heard it stated over and over again in most portentious accents in this House, that the authority of the National League and of her Majesty's Government could not co-exist in Ireland; that either one or the other must pack up and go. What has all this tall talk come to? ("Hear, hear.") Is the Leage gone, or does it show the slightest sign of going? There are eighteen hundred branches of the National League in Ireland; rather more, I believe now, because the right honorable gentleman's act has added some more. (Cheers.) Not more than two hundred and fifty of those branches have been nominally grappled with. There are about fifteen hundred branches, or over five sixths of the whole organization, on which not a finger has been laid. Why? Is it that the right honorable gentleman has conceived a sudden affection for the National League? (Laughter.) Is it that these branches are declining in power, or is it that they have abated their principles one jot in terror? No; but because the Government has made such a disastrous and grotesque mess of their attempt to suppress a couple of hundred branches that they dared not face the ridicule, the colossal collapse, that would attend any attempt to grapple with the whole of this organization. (Cheers.)

Everybody who knows the so-called suppressed counties of Kerry and Clare knows that the suppressed branches hold their meetings just as usual, under the noses of the police. We know it by the figures and by the cash which comes that the subscriptions, instead of falling off, are increasing. The resolutions are passed in the usual way, and I can tell you they are regarded with more sacredness and more efficacy than usual by the whole community. I will read an extract from a branch report in United Ireland the week before last ("Hear, hear"), one of these suppressed branches which have, according to the local policeman, disappeared from view. It says: "A large representative meeting was held on Monday, Mr. George Pomeroy in the chair." No concealment of names. "Balloting for officers and committee took place with the following result, after a most vigorous competition for offices (Nationalist cheers), the only emolument for which will probably be a couple of months in jail: J. O'Callan, 60 votes; G. Pomeroy, 58; S. O'Keefe, 56; D. Hanlon, 50; O'Leary, 60; Power, 44; Fitzpatrick, 47"; and so on. "The first five are elected." (Nationalist cheers.)

There is no disguising the fact that your whole suppressive machinery, the whole machinery for effectually suppressing the League, has totally broken down, and for a very simple reason, because the act was conceived upon the theory that you were dealing with a people who were only pining to be delivered from the terrorism of the National League (cheers), whereas you find to your cost you are dealing with a people who are the League themselves, ready to guard it with their lives, and to undergo any amount of torture rather than betray it. (Nationalist cheers.) Why do you not put the Secret Inquiry clauses in force for the purpose of suppressing branches of the National League? Why! Because you know you would have to send thousands of people to jail who would rather go there than let you wring one tittle of information out of them. Your only other source is informers, and it is our proudest boast that with an organization numbering upwards of 500,000 men, up to this time you have not been able to bring a single informer into the market, though no doubt the market price of the article was never higher. (Cheers.)

I want the right honorable gentleman to tell us here to-night what he has got by all his wild and vicious lunges against the Irish people. I have no patience with talking of "crime in Ireland," outside Kerry. The Moonlighters and the Government have had Kerry to themselves for the last five or six years. Between them be it, and let them divide the honors. (Loud Nationalist cheers.) They tell us of a number of persons partially boycotted. I do not know what the local policeman may be pleased to call "persons partially boycotted"; but I am pretty sure the list would go up or down, according to the requirements of the Government. Let the right honorable gentleman give us a list of new land-grabbers who have taken farms (cheers), or let him give us a list, and I only wish he would, of the land-grabbers who, since this act has been put in force, have accepted their neighbors' farms. As to legitimate boycotting, I shall always hold with the perfect right of the community to exercise legitimate influence on men who for their own base and greedy purposes are the pests of society.

I admit that there are two classes of victims at the mercy of the Chief Secretary,—public speakers and public newspapers Public speeches are the merest appendages of our organization. And why are public speakers at his mercy? Simply and solely because we do not choose to be driven away from our free right of public meeting, but choose to assert it, as Mr. Blunt chose to assert it in the light of day. (Cheers.) If we choose to give our speeches in private, we could run a coach and four through the provisions of this act with absolute impunity. My friends here were for months engaged on the Plan of Campaign. We have no secrets we are afraid to acknowledge. ("Oh, oh.") None. I only hope the honorable gentleman who says "Oh"—(an honorable member: "Rochester".) Certainly. They have actually been for months and months on the business of the Plan of Campaign, even with warrants over their heads.

Talk of me in connection with Mitchelstown. I may be giving the right honorable gentleman a tip, but I do not object to say that my honorable friend, the member for South Tipperary (Mr. J. O'Connor), was far and away a more formidable person than I was in the Plan of Campaign; but because he happens to be a man of few words, he will be walking in this lobby to-morrow night instead of reposing on a plank bed, as he would if he had spoken. (Cheers.) I do not mind telling it, and he will not mind it either, for his work, and he is victorious. I might say a good deal about the meanness of this policy of subjecting journalists to milk-and-water diet, for the simple fact that they recorded the right honorable gentleman's failure ("Hear, hear"), because that is the sting of their offence,—because the meetings are held, and held in spite of the Government. (Loud Nationalist cheers.) You might as well issue a proclamation suppressing the sun in the heavens, and then go about smashing the faces of the sun-dials for recording that the sun is moving on its way in spite of you. (Laughter and cheers.) Worse still is it to attack the humble news venders, and intimidate their wives and their little children. ("Hear, hear.")

The Chief Secretary might have remembered that the right honorable gentleman who sits next him (Mr. W. H. Smith) is a person who in former years might easily have come under the same category. (Nationalist cheers.) The right honorable gentlemen sold United Ireland in his day. ("Hear, hear.") I mention it not as a reproach to him, for he was an extremely good customer; but if he had not parted with his Irish business as he did, under the subsequent legislation of this Government, the right honorable gentleman would have been liable at this moment to three months on a plank bed for having for six months sold the paper. (Cheers.) I hope that chivalry on that side of the House has not died out, and that they will not resent in the case of a miserable shopkeeper at Killarney what they will condone in a Misister of England. I can speak of my own knowledge of that policy, and its absolute and downright failure, even against so vulnerable and perishable a property as we know a newspaper is. But the right honorable gentleman has not succeeded in suppressing a single newspaper, and he never will, although he has proceeded from the editors to the printers, and from the printers to the printer's devils. (Cheers.)

There is only one redeeming feature in the right honorable gentleman's policy, and that is its colossal and monumental failure. That fact actually softens in the hearts of the Irish people the memory of the atrocities he has committed against them. We feel that we have taken his measure now, and that we are a match for him. (Irish cheers.) We feel that he has failed, and that he will go on failing as long as grass grows and water runs. We are almost grateful to him for what he has done to advance the Irish cause by awakening the consciences of Englishmen (Opposition cheers), by knitting the two peoples together in common human sympathy, and common abhorrence of the brutal and cruel system of terrorism which he is exhibiting in full working order in Ireland. The Chancellor of the Exchequer claimed at Hastings that at all events the Chief Secretary had held his own. This was rather a meek and unassuming claim, after the high and swelling boasts that we heard from the same lips in the palmy days of last session. (Cheers.) But has he even held his own? He has demoralized every department of his own Irish government, and every class of his own officials. There is not an office in Dublin Castle that is not at this moment subjected to as much espionage and as many precations against betrayal as if it were the palace of the Czar. ("Hear hear.") He has the distinction of having developed an entirely new phase of the Irish difficulty among her Majesty's soldiers.

My friend Mandeville and myself were whirled away by special train in the middle of the night to Tullamore, and I confess I felt considerably consoled when I heard that the next use the right honorable gentleman had to make of a special train was to take her Majesty's soldiers away from Tullamore for cheering Mandeville and myself. (Laughter and cheers.) Don't let him ride off on the statement that these were mere Irish soldiers. Some of them were, no doubt; but there were also his own countrymen, the Scottish Fusileers. (Cheers.) By some unhappy accident they too had to be hurried off by special train for some awkward manifestations at Mitchelstown. The right honorable gentleman had to employ police patrols to watch the prison officials. He cannot even count on the Royal Irish Constabulary, for to my own knowledge he had to employ policemen to watch the police. (Laughter and cheers.) That is what is called "holding his own in Ireland." He succeeded only in kicking out a few of the bonfires that were lighted on the occasion of our release; but the spirit of nationality that lighted them is beyond his power. It will burn when the memory of his unhappy time in Ireland will be a mere speck among the dark clouds of misgovernment, which are passing away into a forgotten and forgiven past.

The right honorable gentleman and his friends plead for a little more time. There are in this House many members who can remember Mr. Forster's triumphant account of his experience at Tullamore; that he was winning; that the people were with him; that the followers of my honorable friend (Mr. Parnell) were a mere back of broken men and reckless boys, and that you had only to give him (Mr. Forster) a little more time to make his victory appear to all the world. That was seven years ago; but the triumph has not appeared. Does the wildest man in this House imagine that the second Tullamore experience will be more successful? Does the Chief Secretary's best friend claim that he is a cleverer man or a more profound statesman than Mr. Forster? He is no doubt in a position to inflict untold suffering on our poor people. I do not deny that it is no child's play for us. No man's health is exactly the same after imprisonment of the sort that some of my poor friends are enduring to-night; but the sufferings in the prison cell are only small compared with those that the Chief Secretary is bringing on many a humble family ("Hear, hear"), to say nothing of the petty persecution that is going on at the hands of every village constable who has a quarrel with the people, and of the confusion, uncertainty, and ruin into which the right honorable gentleman is plunging the whole business of the country. It is a burning shame that such an ordeal should be inflicted on a people whose only desire is to live in peace, and to rule in peace in their own land. ("Hear, hear.") It is sometimes almost unbearable, but the Irish people will bear it. We are not cowed. We are not even embittered.

The right honorable member for Mid-Lothian has accomplished in two years what seven hundred years of coercion had not accomplished previously (Irish cheers), and what seven hundred more would leave unaccomplished still. He has united the hearts of the two peoples by a more sacred and enduring bond than that of terror and brute force; and our quarrel with England, our bitterness toward England, is gone. (Cheers.) And it will be your fault and your crime if it ever returns,—a crime for which history will stigmatize you forever. We, at all events, are not disruptionists. (Cheers and counter cheers.) It is you who are the disruptionists and the exasperationists and the separatists. We have never made a disguise of our feelings. We say what we mean.

The right honorable gentleman, the member for Newcastle, and many another good friend beside him, have been over in Ireland this winter, and they can tell you that when the name of England is uttered now in an Irish crowd, it is no longer uttered with hatred, but with hope and with gratitude to those awakening British hearts which have never authorized this policy of the Government in Ireland. You are the Separatists. We are for peace and for happiness, and for the brotherhood of the two nations. You are for eternal repression and eternal discord and eternal misery for yourselves, as well as for us. We are for appeasing the dark passions of the past. You are for inflaming them, whether for purposes of a political character I do not know, but for purposes in the interests of that wretched class of Mamelukes whom you support in Ireland, who are neither good Englishmen nor good Irishmen, and who are being your evil genius in Ireland, just as they have been the scourge of our unhappy people.

That is the state of things; and in such a cause and between such forces, I believe the end is not far off, and to the God of justice and of liberty and of mercy, we leave the issue. So far as we ourselves are concerned, we shall be amply compensated, whatever we have suffered and may have to suffer in our grand old cause, if we can be sure that we are the last of that long and mournful line of men who have suffered for it. And, believe me, upon the day of our victory, we will grant an easy amnesty to the right honorable gentleman opposite for our little troubles in Tullamore, and we will bless his policy yet as one of the most powerful, though unconscious, instruments in the deliverance of Ireland. (Loud Opposition cheers.)

Mr. Finlay (who arose amid loud cries of "Balfour" from the Opposition and Home Rule benches) said that the honorable member who had just spoken had charged the Unionist party with inflaming passions and animosity in Ireland that were in a fair way of dying out. He was not aware of any section of the party against which that charge could be made. It had always been the mission of the Unionist party to see that equal justice should be done in Ireland, and to appease those animosities which were the relics of past misgovernment and past misfortunes. They believed that in a country so divided as Ireland was, equal justice might best be done in an Imperial Parliament, and not by handing over one part of the country to the domination of another. The honorable member had said that there was no bitterness on the part of the Irish members towards England. But the party had three voices. One was the voice that spoke in the House of Commons, the second the voice that spoke in Ireland; but to get at the real springs of the movement, they must hear it on an American platform. (Ministerial cheers.) He objected to that House being turned into a court of appeal from judicial sentences in Ireland, and he regretted to have heard the cheers which came from the Opposition side of the House when the honorable member for West Cork had said that he recommended the tenants at Mitchelstown to resist the law by force. (Mr. Gladstone expressed dissent.)

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