Mr. Forster, having gone to Dublin, to enter on his
very unenviable respeuaibilities under the new Coercion Act, Sir William Harcourt on Tuesday moved the introduction of the Irish Disarming Bill in a apoech of too much Blimp- ness as well as great power. He qaoted Mr. Justice Fitz- gerald's language in December aleeut every farmer's boy, every farmer's son, being armed with a rifle and revolver. He quoted Mr. Dillon's advice to the farmers to march to their meetings in military order, and to drill themselves, and to use the right they had. of possessing a rifle, so that the police should be unable to arrest them for being out at night if they wished. He illustrated the /welts of this advice by the very numerous outrages which had occurred of which firearms were the instruments, pointing out that only last Monday in the county of Kerry a band of. fifty men paid a number of domiciliary visits to collect firearms and money in the vicinity of Ballymacelligott ; that on the same day Mr. Hearne was wounded in six placee, by an assassin near Ballinrobe, and is not expected to survive; and that on Sunday night Mr. George Scott's house at Tyrwilly was fired into, and shots embedded in the wall at the head of his bed. Sir William Harcourt argued that the diffusion of firearms in the country was a very needless temptation to crimes of this kind, as well as a facilitation of deliberately criminal designs, and quoted
the fine passage from King John, beginning, "How oft the sight of means to do ill deed, makes ill deeds done !" The Bill was
introduced by a majority of 186 to 26, and read a first time by a majority of 188 to 26 on the same night.
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