we are in this House, the policy that caused the one led to the other. It was the consistent and continuous achievement of a man who is entitled above all others to the reverence of Protestants and that is Cardinal Cullen. For if there be one man in the world more than another to whom the fall of the Papacy is attributable, it is His Eminence. He was and has been the prime promoter in this country of the alliance between Liberalism and the Papacy. And now, Sir, see what has occurred. The Roman Catholics having reduced Ireland to a spiritual desert,. are discontented, and have a grievance; and they come to Parliament in order that they may create for them a blooming garden of Eden.

The Prime Minister is no ordinary man. (Ministerial cheers.) I am very glad that my sincere compliment has obtained for the right honourable gentleman the only cheer which his party have conferred upon him during this discussion. The right honourable gentleman had a substitute for the policy of concurrent endowment, which had been killed by the Roman Catholics themselves. The right honourable gentleman substituted the policy of confiscation. You have had four years of it. You have despoiled churches. You have threatened every corporation and endowment in the country. You have examined into everybody's affairs. You have criticised every profession and vexed every trade. No one is certain of his property, and nobody knows what duties he may have to perform to-morrow. This is the policy of confiscation as compared with that of concurrent endowment. The Irish Roman Catholic clergy were perfectly satisfied while you were despoiling the Irish Church. They looked not unwillingly upon the plunder of the Irish landlords, and they thought that the time had arrived when the great drama would be fulfilled, and the spirit of confiscation would descend upon the celebrated walls of Trinity College, would level them to the ground, and endow the University of Stephen's Green.

I ventured to remark at the time when the policy of the right honourable gentleman was introduced that confiscation was contagious. I believe that the people of this country have had enough of the policy of confiscation. From what I can

see, the House of Commons elected to carry out that policy are beginning to experience some of the inconveniences of satiety, and if I am not mistaken, they will give some intimation to the Government to-night that that is their opinion also. I conclude from what has passed that we shall not be asked to divide upon the amendment of the honourable member for King's Lynn (Mr. Bourke). Let me say on the part of the honourable member that the object of his motion has been much misunderstood, and misunderstood especially by the right honourable gentleman the Prime Minister. The right honourable gentleman is greatly mistaken if he supposes, in the first place, that his was a party motion. It is nothing of the kind. It was a spontaneous motion on the part of the honourable member, and had been adopted by him in consultation with only a few academic sympathisers, who I believe chiefly sit on the other side of the House, and has been brought forward simply because there seemed to him to be a strange apathy with regard to this question in this bewildered assembly, and because he thought that some discussion would make us understand the question more fully than we appeared at first to do.

When the right honourable gentleman introduced this measure, after listening to his speech, I humbly requested three weeks in which to consider it a period of time which did not appear to me to be unreasonable. That request the right honourable gentleman with great amiability refused. He told me that I was not to judge of the measure by his perhaps too lengthy address, because, when the Bill was placed in my hands, as it soon would be, I should find it of the simplest possible character. I think by this time the right honourable gentleman has discovered that my request was not unreasonable, and that the House of Commons has discovered that three weeks was not too long a period in which to study a composition so peculiar and so complicated in its character.

Although I was far from willing to make this question the basis of anything like a struggle of party, although on the contrary I have endeavoured to prevent such a struggle, I have

been hindered in that endeavour by the right honourable gentleman himself. It is the right honourable gentleman himself who has introduced so much passion, and so much, I may almost say, personal struggle into this question. It was the right honourable gentleman who, as the First Minister of the Crown, in introducing a question of a nature somewhat abstruse, and which to the majority of the honourable members of this House must have been not easy to comprehend, commenced his harangue by saying:-I am introducing a measure upon which I intend to stake the existence of the Government.' That was in my opinion an unwise and rather an arrogant declaration on the part of the right honourable gentleman. I have certainly known instances where ministers introducing into this House large measures which had been prepared with great care, and feeling for them as much solicitude as the right honourable gentleman does for this Bill-I have certainly known instances where, after protracted debates, and when opinions appeared to be perhaps equally balanced in this House, ministers have felt themselves authorised, under such circumstances, to say that they were prepared to stake the existence of their Government upon the question at issue.

But, on the other hand, I do not recall an instance of any minister who, on an occasion similar to the present, prefaced a laborious exposition, which by its very length and nature showed that it dealt with a subject which only the transcendent powers of the right honourable gentleman could make clear and lucid to the House by saying: But I tell you, in the first place, that I stake the existence of the Government upon it.' I trust the right honourable gentleman has profited by the remarks which have been made in the course of this debate, and that he now feels that upon the occasion of introducing this measure his vein was somewhat intemperate. No one wishes to disturb the right honourable gentleman in his place. If the right honourable gentleman intends to carry out a great policy that of confiscation-I wish at least that he shall not be able to say that he has not had a fair trial for that policy. I wish the House and the country fully to comprehend all the bearings of that policy of the right honourable gentleman.

But, Sir, although I have not wished to make this a party question, although I certainly have no wish to disturb the right honourable gentleman in his seat, although I have no communication with any section or with any party in this House, I may say, with any individual but my own immediate colleagues, I must do my duty when I am asked, 'Do you or do you not approve of this measure?' I must vote against a measure which I believe to be monstrous in its general conception, pernicious in many of its details, and utterly futile as a measure of practical legislation.

COMPENSATION FOR DISTURBANCE BILL, August

1880.

[The Compensation for Disturbance Bill was a measure introduced by Mr. Gladstone's Government immediately after his accession to office as a temporary expedient for putting an end to the disorders of Ireland till Parliament should reassemble in the following spring. The gist of it was the suspension of the right of eviction for the ensuing eighteen months; in other words, it proposed that under certain conditions eviction for non-payment of rent which the tenant was unable to pay in consequence of the bad seasons should be deemed to be 'a disturbance' within the meaning of the Act of 1870, and entitle the evicted person to compensation accordingly. The Bill was only carried through the House of Commons by the votes of the Irish party; but in the House of Lords was rejected by a majority of 282 votes to 51. On the second night of the debate, August 3, Lord Beaconsfield, following the Duke of Argyll, spoke to a very full House, and was listened to with profound attention on both sides.]

THE

HE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD: My lords, the measure we are called upon to consider to-night on the second reading is very brief in its terms. In consists of only three clauses, but they are clauses which in their consideration require some reference to the past, some deep attention to the urgent present, and scarcely can be touched upon without some speculation upon the consequences to which, if this Bill is adopted, they will lead. My lords, the origin of the question of landlord and tenant in Ireland in modern days was the famous Devon Commission. In the report of that Commission, drawn up by men of great ability, admirably qualified for their office, and one of the most valuable reports which was ever presented to the consideration of Parliament-in that great source of information on a question the most complicated probably of the public questions that can engage the attention of the Legisla