Lord Herschell was hardly in his most judicial mood. He
guarded himself repeatedly from being supposed to feel any sympathy with crime, but the drift of his speech was certainly not just to the Report of the Commissioners, and he was very far from saying what he ought to have said on the cruel and systematic persecution of all tenants who took land from which others had been evicted, or who in any way held aloof from the Land League. Lord Herschell minimised the cruelty and evil of "the criminal conspiracy" of which the Commis- sioners had convicted a great number of the Parnellite Party, and compared it to the criminal conspiracy of which he him- self had been guilty in the United States when he paid, under the head of "sundries," for wine with which, under the Maine law, he could not legally have been provided. That seems to us trifling with a very grave subject. Lord Selborne's speech was not nearly so effective as that which he recently delivered to the Union Club, and Lord Derby alone approached, if he did not equal, the lucid and impartial tone of the Judicial Commissioners. Lord Granville declined to divide the House, though be used strong language in condemnation of the Commission.
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