Mr. Healy has been the political prize-fighter of the week,
and some of his blows have certainly been unworthy of any fair pugilist. Thus on Thursday week, he dragged into his speech an accusa- tion against the wife of a Sub-Inspector of Constabulary, which came to this,—that she had lived with her husband before she had been married to him, an attack on a woman quite un- exampled in the House of Commons, and which Mr. Trevelyan did not characterise with more vehement censure than it deserved. On Saturday last, Mr. Healy revenged himself on Mr. Trevelyan for the scornful condemnation passed on this nnparallelled in- trusion into private life, by declaring that if the Irish Con- stabulary were to return to the practices of Cromwell's time, and to spit babies on their bayonets, the Chief Secretary would have got up and defended the practice with just as much aplomb as he had shown in defending the other abuses of the Irish Con- stabulary. "The Irish Members," said Mr. Healy, "were the exponents of the state of feeling which existed in Ireland, and which inspired the great mass of the people of Ireland with hatred and contempt of her Majesty's Government."
