The most striking lesson of the contest was that no
rule yet suggested can stop a sufficient minority from paralysing Parlia- mentary government. If the Irishmen had only numbered twenty, they could could have gone on speaking to amendments longer than the House could hold together. The rules proposed and passed by Sir Stafford Northcote on Friday week, and discussed by ourselves last Saturday, proved absolutely of no use ; and so would any other rules not involving some kind of cloture. If this method of claiming Parliaments for Ireland is persisted in, the House will be compelled either to allow Bills to pass, after a motion to that effect, without more debate, or to expel Members who delay its proceedings unreasonably, or to consider electoral districts which send up Members with that object guilty of seces- sion, and punish them as corrupt electoral districts are punished, by suspending their franchises for seven years. Mere rules of business will not meet the case. if Members are to be Members, they must debate, and twenty Members bound together in a league could debate about the Mutiny Bill through an entire session of Parliament, five men relieving each other at intervals of six hours, and speaking on each amendment an hour and a quarter a piece. Any one of the present obstructionists is equal to that feat once in the twenty-four hours, and Mr. Biggar, with a heap of Blue-books beside him, would do three times as much. Who would have thought that Irishmen, of all men, would have proved themselves the ideal bores, the very pets of the Philistine Walhalla?
