the lips of any one who reads that Mr. Bright has been making a powerful speech against the Land League would vatarally rise the line "Quis tulerit Gracchos de sedition querentes?"
That John Bright, one of the great founders of the Anti-Corn-Law League, a mau whom twenty years ago good Conservatives would have liked to see Img as a Republican and a revolutionist, should ever be a member of the Cabinet of an English monarch, seemed ut one time strange. Many of our renders will remember bow popular wonder at the transformation found expression in the pages of Punch in a picture of the eloquent quaker in a Court suit admiring himself before the gins. We have got used to this apparent anomaly, but until the present session of Parliament, his opponents have found it impossible to believe that he could earnestly assist the Government in suppressing agitation -in Ireland, or that he could ever be found on the side of the landlords against the tenants. Hoe was said to be the implacable enemy of the landed interest, and it has been a favourite remark of Conservative orators during the last recess, that no measures were taken or would be taken by the present Government to put down disturbances in Ireland, because the Cabinet and the Premier were too subservient to the members for Birmingham, and dared not run counter to the radical opinions of Messrs. Bright and Chamberlain. The result has proved the justice of the old advice that you should never believe more than half the accusations of Opposition speakers; for one of the most powerful diatribes against the Land League, one of the most eloquent it could not help being coming from his lips, was uttered by Mr. John bt on the 27th of January in the House of Commons. Any cause, pro-3 ug to be the cause of liberty, must be bad indeed, which incurs such a condemnation from so long proved a friend of liberty as the senior member for Birmingham; and in the present crisis the reasons given by himself for his action deserve examination.
The occasion was the debate on the leave to introduce the Protection of Person and Property (Ireland) Bill, as it is called by the Government, but the Coercion Bill, as the Irish members preferred to term it, The Home Rule party, aided by one or two advanced Radicals returned by English constitute cies, were doing their best to prevent the required leave being given, on the ground that no such lawlessness existed in Ireland as to necessitate the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. The chief argoments of the Irish members were that the Bill was not required, and that even if required it would not do any good, as outrages wore always worse after the passing of coercion bills than before, and besides that, there were no agrarian outrages to speak of, to be pat down, Mr. Bright began by referring to his well-known opposition to coercion bills during a thirty-seven years' membership of the House. Hoe had refused to vote for such bills before, nob because they were unnecessary bub because they were not accompanied with remedial measures. And so he showed that he was not abandoning his favourite axiom that force is no remedy' by voting for a Coercion Bill now, for it was not force, because it was force, but force left alone to work the required cure, that be had always opposed. Even now, he would leave the Government if he did not know that this Bill was to be accompanied in the same session of Parliament by a large measure of reform for the admitted grievances of Ireland. He did not propose to enter into the arithmetical discussions as to the number of agrarian outrages that bad lately
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.