to be purchased at any
Government printers. The first of these Bills, the Bill of 1886, was,
indeed, rejected by the House of Commons on the second reading, and
never ran the gauntlet of full Parliamentary debate. But the second,
the Bill of 1893, occupied fully five months of Parliamentary time, and
was carried successfully by Mr. Gladstone through all its stages in the
House of Commons. It was amended on many points without the
interference of Government authority. It presents a full scheme of
self-government for Ireland, so clearly and minutely considered as to
provide an efficient and reasoned basis for the measure of 1912.

THE BILLS OF 1886 AND 1893

The aim of both these great measures--the Bills of 1886 and 1893--was
to give the Irish control of their own local affairs and to distinguish
as clearly as possible between those affairs and Imperial matters. The
method chosen in both Bills is to follow the Parnell scheme of
enumerating the subjects excluded from the legislative power of the
Irish Parliament. The excluding clause became considerably enlarged in
the Bill of 1893 as it was left by the House of Commons. The 1893 Bill
also contains a far more definite and stronger assertion of Imperial
authority, which is inserted twice--first in the Preamble, and then in
the second clause of the Bill.[43]

In both Bills there was a safeguarding clause as well as an excluding
clause. The safeguarding clause also grew considerably between 1886 and
1893. It is almost entirely directed to preventing the Irish
Legislature from establishing any new religious privileges, or
interfering with any existing religious rights. The clause, as it
emerged in 1893, not only forbade any new establishment or endowment of
religion, but seemed to leave the claims of all denominations precisely
as they stand at present.

This safeguarding clause reappears in the Bill of 1912, but it has been
shortened and redrafted by the Government. It contains very important
additional safeguards to prevent the adoption by the Irish civil power
of the principles contained in the recent Papal Decrees against mixed
marriages, and in regard to the right of Catholic clergy to claim
exclusion from the courts of justice. The Irish Parliament will be
debarred from acting on these decrees, and thus the whole agitation
against "Ne Temere" falls to the ground.

THE TWO CHAMBERS

The 1886 Bill established, as we have seen, an arrangement by which
Ireland