The Irish Evicted Tenants' Commission has suspended its sittings, and
it is far from certain that it will ever resume them with any seriousness or hope of practical result. Sir James Mathew will be welcomed back to England, where his help is really needed by his colleagues on the Bench, and we cannot believe that he will be much missed in Ireland even by the Anti-Parnellites, who counted their chickens so long before they were hatched,—it seems highly questionable whether they will ever be hatched,—when they exulted in the prospect of finding an easy way of fulfilling the engagements in which they had been so rash as to involve themselves towards the true victims of the " Plan of Campaign,"—namely, not the landlords, but the tenants themselves. Sir James Mathew has taken a good deal of one-sided evidence, much of it mere hearsay, and has hardly heard anything on the other side,—a natural con- sequence of his imprudent partisanship on the first day's sitting. His one-sidedness has ruined the hopes fostered of the results of the Commission. It is hardly possible to pro- pose to Parliament to take action on a mass of one-sided evidence which even the moderate Gladstonians in the House of Commons will find it difficult to treat as if it were unques- tionable, or as if it justified the application of an immediate remedy.
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