a speech of 3-1/4 hours. Well
received by the House at large. _Query_, the Irish popular party?

Lord Dufferin, an Irish landlord, watching, as he admits, with
considerable jealousy exceptional legislation in respect to Ireland, heard
the speech from the peers' gallery, and wrote to Mr. Gladstone the next
day: "I feel there is no one else in the country who could have
recommended the provisions of such a bill to the House of Commons, with a
slighter shock to the prejudices of the class whose interests are chiefly
concerned." He adds: "I happened to find myself next to Lord Cairns. When
you had done, he told me he did not think his people would oppose any of
the leading principles of your bill."

The policy of the bill as tersely explained by Mr. Gladstone in a letter
to Manning, compressing as he said eight or ten columns of the _Times_,
was "to prevent the landlord from using the terrible weapon of undue and
unjust eviction, by so framing the handle that it shall cut his hands with
the sharp edge of pecuniary damages. The man evicted without any fault,
and suffering the usual loss by it, will receive whatever the custom of
the country gives, and where there is no custom, according to a scale,
besides whatever he can claim for permanent buildings or reclamation of
land. Wanton eviction will, as I hope, be extinguished by provisions like
these. And if they extinguish wanton eviction, they will also extinguish
those demands for _unjust_ augmentations of rent, which are only
formidable to the occupier, because the power of wanton or arbitrary
eviction is behind them." What seems so simple, and what was so necessary,
marked in truth a vast revolutionary stride. It transferred to the tenant
a portion of the absolute ownership, and gave him something like an estate
in his holding. The statute contained a whole code of minor provisions,
including the extension of Mr. Bright's clauses for peasant proprietorship
in the Church Act, but this transfer was what gave the Act its place in
solid legal form.

(M90) The second reading was carried by 442 to 11, the minority being
composed of eight Irish members of advanced type, and three English
tories, including Mr. Henley and Mr. James Lowther, himself Irish
secretary eight years later. The bill was at no point fought high by the
opposition. Mr. Disraeli moved an amendment limiting compensation to
unexhausted improvements. The government majority fell to 76, "a result to
be exp