In the House of Lords on Thursday, the Irish Crimes
Bill was read a second time without a division, the Liberal Peers decamp- ing at the dinner-hour without providing for the continuance of the debate. Lord Ashbourne, in moving the second reading, gave very impressive illustrations indeed of what boycotting in Ireland really means, and read report after report of National League meetings to show that individual liberty in Ireland is kept under the most severe restraint. Lord Granville passed over these illustrations of a sordid tyranny as lightly as possible. He remarked that the Government had promised one repressive and two remedial measures, and were about to redeem their pro- mise by producing one remedial measure (the less important of the two) and two repressive measures. He did notsay that the second repressive measure is nothing* all but a dropped clause of the first, nor that the Irish Party had themselves rendered the greater remedial measure impossible by the unparalleled obstructiveness of their tactics.
