In the House of Lords on Monday, on the report
stage of the Amending Bill, Lord St. Aldwyn, with the concurrence of Lord Crewe, moved an amendment diminishing the number of Irish Members who are to sit in the Imperial Parliament (forty-two in the Bill) by the total number of Members allotted under the Home Rule Bill to the counties and boroughs form- ing part of the excluded area. Lord MacDonnell next moved a new clause for introducing Proportional Representation into Ireland, which was carried. On Tuesday, on the order for the third reading, Lord Crewe made a somewhat indefinite speech. He did not go so far as to declare the amendments absolutely unacceptable, but warned the Peers by recalling what happened in the case of the Irish Councils Bill. Though that Bill secured the consent of the Irish Nationalist Party, it failed to secure the approval of their supporters in Ireland, and it was accordingly dropped. "I think," added Lord Crewe, "the fate of that measure has a bearing which ought not to be for- gotten." Lord Crewe went on to admit, however, that what applied to the Nationalists applied also to the Ulster Members. It would be as idle for them as for the Nationalists to agree to anything with which their supporters in the country would not concur. Lord Crewe ended with the pious hope that it might " be possible to reach an arrangement, even if it was an arrangement which nobody believed would represent the per- manent relations in years to come of the two parts of the United Kingdom"—a hope which certainly has a very Exclusionist flavour.
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