The second reading of the Peace Preservation (Ireland) Bill,
the Bill for disarming the people,—was carried at a rather early hour on Friday week, the Irish resistance collapsing rather suddenly. Mr. Parnell made a speech against it, which, from its rather faint and feeble tone, did much to accelerate the collapse. He regretted Mr. Dillon's words expressing Mr. Dillon's willingness to shoot as many of an evicting party directed against his own home as he could, and expressed his disapproval of them, while vainly trying to make them mean much less than they did mean. He was answered by Mr. Mitchell Henry, who boldly accused Mr. Parnell of attempting to prove that language uttered by members of the Land League was not to bear its ordinary meaning, and assailed him for his own advice to Irish tenants to commit "one of the most hateful and spite- ful acts that could enter into the mind of man, by rendering useless the laud that was devoted to pasture," before they gave it up to this landlord. Mr. A. M. Sullivan made a feeble attempt to defend Mr. Parnell, but the debate languished in the hands of diitheirtened men, and. the Bill was read a second time, in a thin-Hon:so, about nine o'clock, by a majority of 111 (145 against 34).
