Mr. H. H. Fowler grows in bitterness, and does not
fall off in ability. His address to his constituents on Thursday on the work of the last Session, which he called "the Session of dupes," was not wanting in either quality. But he hardly made out a sufficient reason for his epigrammatic description of the Session. It is odd to brand a Government with the offence of having duped the House of Commons into not carrying their principal measures ; we shall be told next that the man who put a bad shilling between two halfpennies and passed the whole for a penny, " duped " the recipient into receiving the bad shilling. Mr. Fowler is very angry at the assertion that obstruction prevented the Government from passing either the Irish Land-Purchase Bill or the Tithe Bill, and said they might have passed either or both, if they had been as much in earnest about them as the Government of 1881 was about the great Irish Land Bill. But obstruction has taken a much more serious and subtle form since 1881. Then the whole resistance was delivered in opposition to the Bill which it was desired to defeat. Now there is the greatest reticence in such open obstruction as that. The obstruction is all applied by consuming the time of the House in questions, in motions for adjournment to discuss matters of urgent public im- portance, in prolonging cavils in Supply,—in fact, in nibbling away at the time of the House, which, with its present hour of adjournment, can no longer make the tenacious fight which was possible in 1881. And with the great Liberal Party aiding the Parnellites in their tactics, obstruction has become at once much more serious and much less conspicuous.
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