w at executive discretion. Acts
would be innocent or would be crimes, just as it pleased the Irish
minister. Parliament did not enact that given things were criminal, but
only that they should be criminal when an Irish minister should choose to
say so.(236) Persons charged with them would have the benefit of a jury or
would be deprived of a jury, as the Irish minister might think proper.

(M135) Mr. Parnell was in bad health and took little part, but he made
more than one pulverising attack in that measured and frigid style which,
in a man who knows his case at first hand, may be so much more awkward for
a minister than more florid onslaughts. He discouraged obstruction, and
advised his followers to select vital points and to leave others alone.
This is said to have been the first Coercion bill that a majority of Irish
members voting opposed.

It was at this point that the government suddenly introduced their
historic proposal for closure by guillotine. They carried (June 10) a
resolution that at ten o'clock on that day week the committee stage should
be brought compulsorily to an end, and that any clauses remaining
undisposed of should be put forthwith without amendment or debate. The
most remarkable innovation upon parliamentary rule and practice since
Cromwell and Colonel Pride, was introduced by Mr. Smith in a
characteristic speech, well larded with phrases about duty, right,
responsibility, business of the country, and efficiency of the House.
These solemnising complacencies' did not hide the mortifying fact that if
it had really been one of the objects of Irish members for ten years past
to work a revolution in the parliament where they were forced against
their will to sit, they had at least, be such a revolution good or bad,
succeeded in their design.

Perhaps looking forward with prophetic eye to a day that actually arrived
six years later, Mr. Gladstone, while objecting to the proposal as
unjustified, threw the responsibility of it upon the government, and used
none of the flaming colours of defiance. The bulk of the liberals
abstained from the division. This practical accord between the two sets of
leading men made the parliamentary revolution definite and finally
clenched it. It was not without something of a funereal pang that members
with a sense of the old traditions of the power, solemnity, and honour of
the House of Commons came down on the evening of the seventeenth of June.
Within a week they would