h sides. The government (Mar. 3) proposed a motion that the House
adopted the report, thanked the judges for their just and impartial
conduct, and ordered the report to be entered on the journals. Mr.
Gladstone followed with an amendment, that the House deemed it to be a
duty to record its reprobation of the false charges of the gravest and
most odious description, based on calumny and on forgery, that had been
brought against members of the House; and, while declaring its
satisfaction at the exposure of these calumnies, the House expressed its
regret at the wrong inflicted and the suffering and loss endured through a
protracted period by reason of these acts of flagrant iniquity. After a
handsome tribute to the honour and good faith of the judges, he took the
point that some of the opinions in the report were in no sense and no
degree judicial. How, for instance, could three judges, sitting ten years
after the fact (1879-80), determine better than anybody (M147) else that
distress and extravagant rents had nothing to do with crime? Why should
the House of Commons declare its adoption of this finding without question
or correction? Or of this, that the rejection of the Disturbance bill by
the Lords in 1880 had nothing to do with the increase of crime? Mr.
Forster had denounced the action of the Lords with indignation, and was
not he, the responsible minister, a better witness than the three judges
in no contact with contemporary fact? How were the judges authorised to
affirm that the Land bill of 1881 had not been a great cause in mitigating
the condition of Ireland? Another conclusive objection was that--on the
declaration of the judges themselves, rightly made by them--what we know to
be essential portions of the evidence were entirely excluded from their
view.

He next turned to the findings, first of censure, then of acquittal. The
findings of censure were in substance three. First, seven of the
respondents had joined the league with a view of separating Ireland from
England. The idea was dead, but Mr. Gladstone was compelled to say that in
his opinion to deny the moral authority of the Act of Union was for an
Irishman no moral offence whatever. Here the law-officer sitting opposite
to him busily took down a note. "Yes, yes," Mr. Gladstone exclaimed, "you
may take my words down. I heard you examine your witness from a pedestal,
as you felt, of the greatest elevation, endeavouring to press home the
monstrous guilt of