y to evict the
malcontents in a wholesale way.

Joseph Biggar had the floor and declared the bill was really a move to
steal Irish children and sell them into perpetual peonage. Biggar was
talking against time, and the House groaned. Biggar was a rich merchant
from Ulster, and he was a big man, although without oratorical ability
or literary gifts. His heart was right, but he lacked mental synthesis.
He knew little of history, nothing of political economy, despised
precedents, had a beautiful disdain for all rules, and for all things
English he held the views of Fuzzy-Wuzzy, whose home is in the Sudan.
However, Biggar was shrewd and practical, and had a business sense that
most of the members absolutely lacked. And moreover he was entirely
without fear. Usually his face was wreathed in cherubic smiles. He had
the sweetly paternal look of Horace Greeley, in disposition was just as
stubborn, and, like Horace, chewed tobacco.

The English opposed the Irish members, and Biggar reciprocated the
sentiment. They opposed everything he did, and it came about that he
made it his particular business to block the channel for them.

"Why are you here?" once exclaimed an exasperated member to Joseph
Biggar.

"To rub you up, sir, to rub you up!" was the imperturbable reply. He
shocked the House and succeeded in getting himself thoroughly hated by
his constant reference to absentee landlords as "parasites" and
"cannibals." And the fact that there were many absentee landlords in the
House only urged him on to say things unseemly, irrelevant and often
unprintable.

And so Biggar was making a speech on the first day that Parnell took his
seat. Biggar was sparring for time, fighting off a vote on the Coercion
Bill. He had spoken for four hours, mostly in a voice inaudible, and had
read from the London Directory, the Public Reports and the Blue Book,
and had at last fallen back on Doctor Johnson's Dictionary, when
Parnell, in his simple honesty, interjected an explanation to dissolve a
little of the Biggar mental calculi. Biggar, knowing Parnell, gave way,
and Parnell rose to his feet. His finely modulated, low voice searched
out the inmost corners of the room, and every sentence he spoke
contained an argument. He was talking on the one theme he knew best.
Members came in from the cloakrooms and the Chair forgot his mail--a man
was speaking.

Gladstone happened to be present, and while not at the time sympathizing
with the intent of