Sir William Harcourt argued that the provision making the proclamation
of a dangerous Association under the Crimes Act void within a week's time unless Parliament should be summoned to meet within twenty days, proved that this was not a matter left to the discretion of the Administration, but one in which the discretion of Parliament was to be specially associated with the discretion of the Administration. He called the Treasury Bench a Bench of right honourable boycotters, and declared that with them the commination service in which the Solicitor-General for Scotland had accused the National League of indulging so freely, is the daily service of the Administration. "It is their matins and their evensong; it is their creed and their decalogne." He assailed the Government for founding their policy on extracts from the Skibbereen Eagle, and declared that the Times often uses language folly as dangerous and mischievous as the Ski bbereen Eagle. And he concluded by threatening to focus upon the Government in relation to their Irish policy a solar microscope which would magnify every slimy creature contained in that policy of "sewage," so as to warn every one from taking the contaminating draught,—a curious mixture of metaphors which implies that a politician can drink a policy and contract enteric fever from it.
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