The debate on the motion to go into Committee on
the Crimea Bill dragged drearily through Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thurs- day, Members feeling that the subject is intellectually exhausted. Nominally, the discussion turned on an amendment by Mr. T. R. Reid, who, in a moderate speech on Tuesday, endeavoured to show that the object of the Bill was to put down combinations to. resist unjust rents, and that it would compel the tenants to fall back upon Secret Societies and outrage generally, an argument which implicitly asserts that in Ireland moderate criminality is beneficiaL Mr. Balfour replied, showing that the Bill at most would only enable landlords to use the powers conferred on them by the Bill of 1881, and that the grand cause of evictions was the intimidation of the Land League. The grievance, so- far as it was a true grievance, consisted in this,—that a few landlords exacted 14 per cent, more rent than they would have exacted if they allowed fully for the fall in prices. He wished they would conciliate their tenants ; but was that a grievance sufficient to justify the existing intimidation P It was absurd for the Opposition to assert that the Bill war+ intended to urge on purchase at high rates, for the House did not even know what the Government scheme of pur- chase was, and the scheme for relieving tenants now before the House of Lords met with nothing but denunciation. After this speech, the debate of Tuesday languished, Mr. Mundella, the only Member of mark who spoke, really confining himself to an assertion, made at great length, that a British Parliament must fail in legislating for Ireland ; while on Wednesday the discussion was positively futile. The Irish Members are away stumping the country, with this result only, that they cannot complain of any limitation on their speech ; and the majority are sick of hearing the same things perpetually repeated. The question of Ireland has the property attributed to some men, notably the late Emperor Napoleon,—it lowers by its mere presence all intellectual capacity.
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