The Compensation for Disturbance (Ireland) Bill was read a third
time on Monday by a majority of 66 (303 to 237), in a House from which at least a hundred Members must have been absent. Mr. Forster moved the third reading, in a masterly speech, in which he went over the whole ground again, proved that his statistics, which had been so bitterly attacked, were within the mark of the latest and fullest returns, and repelled with warmth the insinuation that he had not through- out condemned in the strongest way the anti-rent agitation, and committed the Government to the fullest support of the law, whenever they could vindicate the law as just. Colonel Tottenham made another attack on the Bill, but one greatly inferior to his speech in the earlier stage. Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, in a very able speech, showed how entirely local and exceptional is the sanctity accorded to rent by the English law ; Mr. E. Clarke and Lord Elcho attacked the Bill with vigour, and the former with ability; and Mr. Gladstone in his reply pointed out that what they were doing was simply to give that power to the Judges to take exceptional cases into consideration which the Bill of 1870 contained when it left the House of Commons, —extended, however, to tenancies which had arisen since 1870— an extension absolutely demanded by the circumstances of the case, since even the Tory Government had extended to these tenancies the exemption from the law requiring tenants to give up their holdings before receiving out-door relief. Sir Stafford Northcote's reply was hardly anything but an expression of the shrinking hyper-sensitiveness of Property. If personal liberty had been attacked, the withers of the Con- servative party would have been quite unwrung.
