heard of and inconceivable to
institute a royal commission for members of parliament alone.

All arguments, however unanswerable, were at this stage idle, because Mr.
Parnell had reverted to his original resolution to accept the bill, and at
his request the radicals sitting below him abandoned their opposition. The
bill passed the second reading without a division. This circumstance
permitted the convenient assertion, made so freely afterwards, that the
bill, irregular, unconstitutional, violent, as it might be, at any rate
received the unanimous assent of the House of Commons.

Stormy scenes marked the progress of the bill through committee. Seeing
the exasperation produced by their shifting of the ground, and the delay
which it would naturally entail, ministers resolved on a bold step. It was
now August. Government remembered the process by which they had carried
the Coercion bill, and they improved upon it. After three days of
committee, they moved that at one o'clock in the morning on the fourth
sitting the (M143) chairman should break off discussion, put forthwith the
question already proposed from the chair, then successively put forthwith
all the remaining clauses, and so report the bill to the House. This
process shut out all amendments not reached at the fatal hour, and is the
most drastic and sweeping of all forms of closure. In the case of the
Coercion bill, resort to the guillotine was declared to be warranted by
the urgency of social order in Ireland. That plea was at least plausible.
No such plea of urgency could be invoked for a measure, which only a few
days before the government had considered to be of such secondary
importance, that the simple rejection of it by Mr. Parnell was to be
enough to induce them to withdraw it. The bill that had been proffered as
a generous concession to Irish members, was now violently forced upon them
without debate. Well might Mr. Gladstone speak of the most extraordinary
series of proceedings that he had ever known.(251)

III

The three judges first met on September 17, 1888, to settle their
procedure. They sat for one hundred and twenty-eight days, and rose for
the last time on November 22, 1889. More than four hundred and fifty
witnesses were examined. One counsel spoke for five days, another for
seven, and a third for nearly twelve. The mammoth record of the
proceedings fills eleven folio volumes, making between seven and eight
thousand pages. The questions pu