The discussion which followed was remarkable chiefly for the admission
of the Irish Leaguers that the Land League had criminal followers who perpetrated outrages in their name, and for a curiously subdued tone penetrating almost all their speeches. Mr. Dillon, who once told n meeting that if any tenant took a farm from which another Irish tenant had been. evicted, he would somehow iind his cattle far from prospering on that farm, apologised. for cattle-maiming, 'on the ground of an Irish tradition that cattle were the natural enemies of the small farmers, competing with them for the soil ; and for " night- visits," he apologised on the plea that they were a remnant of Whiteboyism. Mr. Bradlaugh attacked the Government with almost more anger than either Mr. Dillon or Mr. Justin McCarthy, —who excused, by the way, Irish cattle-houghing, on the ground that this is a crime referred to in Scripture. (Pray, what horrible crime of violence is not ?) Mr. O'Donnell alone came up to his old mark in violence of language :—" The Chief Secretary could not mention ten magistrates in any part of Ireland on whose re- presentations the liberty of tens of thousands of persons was going to be sacrificed, without mentioning the mimes of notorious scoun- drels who, in any land in which justice was administered, would be in the hulks or the penitentiary." Mr. Gladstone he called a traitor to his Sovereign, withdrawing the phrase for a milder one, when called to order. The Irish just now are not fortunate in their more conspicuous patriots.
