gether with an abstention from speech greater than any I have before
enjoyed, may act upon my 'vocal cord,' and partially at least restore it."

Chapter III. The Special Commission. (1887-1890)

My Lords, it appears to me that the measure is unfortunate in its
origin, unfortunate in its scope and object, and unfortunate in
the circumstances which accompanied its passage through the other
House. It appears to me to establish a precedent most novel, and
fraught with the utmost danger.--LORD HERSCHELL.(243)

I

Mr. Gladstone's ceaseless attention to the many phases of the struggle
that was now the centre of his public life, was especially engaged on what
remains the most amazing of them. I wish it were possible to pass it over,
or throw it into a secondary place; but it is too closely connected with
the progress of Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy in British opinion at a
critical stage, and it is still the subject of too many perversions that
affect his name. Transactions are to be found in our annals where wrong
was done by government to individuals on a greater scale, where a powerful
majority devised engines for the proscription of a weak minority with
deadlier aim, and where the omnipotence of parliament was abused for the
purpose of faction with more ruthless result. But whether we look at the
squalid fraud in which the incident began, or at the tortuous
parliamentary pretences by which it was worked out, or at the perversion
of fundamental principles of legal administration involved in sending men
to answer the gravest charges before a tribunal specially constituted at
the absolute discretion of their bitterest political opponents--at the
moment engaged in a fierce contest with them in another field--from
whatever point of view we approach, the erection of the Special Commission
of 1888 stands out as one of the ugliest things done in the name and under
the forms of law in this island during the century.

(M140) In the spring of 1887 the conductors of _The Times_, intending to
strengthen the hands of the government in their new and doubtful struggle,
published a series of articles, in which old charges against the Irish
leader and his men were served up with fresh and fiery condiments. The
allegations of crime were almost all indefinite; the method was by
allusion, suggestion, innuendo, and the combination of ingeniously
selected pieces, to form a crude and hideous mosaic. Partly from