On Tuesday, it appeared that the communication from Mr. Parnell,:
amounting almost to an instruction," had not been withdrawn, but had, on the contrary, been made absolute. There was a conference on Monday between the Irish leaders' counsel and their clients, and as a consequence, they all with- drew from the Court on Tuesday, by way of making a manifesto against the Commissioners for their decision not to enter on an examination of the books of the Loyal and Patriotic Union. They shook the dust from their feet and departed, leaving the Commissioners to inquire without further aid from the lawyers. Mr. T. Healy, M.P., who pre- sided at the National League meeting in Dublin on Monday, interpreted to the public the action taken by the Irish Members, in a speech in which he said that Sir James Hannen, who had been subjected to "moral torture" by Mr. John O'Connor's unsustained charge that innocent men were hanged in Dublin to the knowledge of the Irish Government, " was the respected gentleman who for a generation had presided over the morals of the British aristocracy in the London Divorce Courts, and in the course of twenty years, while every form of high-placed infamy and low-placed filth had been dragged before him, he was never subjected to moral torture." Mr. Healy does not care to define clearly what he is talking
about, lest its -vindictiveness should be made plain to
all. Sir James Hannen is a Judge, and has no business to complain of hearing the record of crime. But he has the right to complain of hearing the most shocking charges made against persons of high character without even a shadow of evidence, or so much as an assump- tion that evidence for such charges is needed ; and that was the essential point of his remark about the moral torture to which he was being subjected,—the essential point which Mr. Healy, of course, ignored. Sir James Hannen took the withdrawal of the Irish counsel with perfect com- posure, quietly remarking that it deprived the Commissioners
of a certain amount of valuable help, but did not alter in the least the scope and limits of the investigation with which they were entrusted. No Judge ever presided over a Court with more dignity. The coup de Ware fell very flat.
