Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 43.djvu/342

 the bill should report it to the house within a week. After Parnell had vainly opposed this proceeding in a resolute speech, he and his friends left the chamber. The bill was at length read a third time on 8 July, and differed from all its predecessors in the absence of any time-limit. On 12 July an Irish Land Bill was read a second time in the House of Commons; it extended the advantages of the act of 1881 to leaseholders, and dealt with insolvent tenants. Parnell criticised its details, and the government accepted some of his proposals. On 19 Aug. the national league, of which Parnell was still president, was proclaimed as ‘a dangerous association,’ and efforts were made to suppress it. In September Parnell, with Mr. Gladstone, took part in parliament in an attack on the government with respect to their coercive policy; but Parnell, while expressing a fear that outrage might increase in Ireland during the coming winter, appealed to his countrymen to abstain from violence.

In the earlier months of the year the ‘Times’ newspaper had published a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime,’ in which Parnell and many of his parliamentary colleagues were charged with conniving at the commission of crime and outrage in the days of the land league. On 18 April 1887 the ‘Times’ issued the last article of the series, and there supplied in facsimile a letter purporting to have been written by Parnell on 15 May 1882 in extenuation of the Phœnix Park murders. It was a carefully worded apology addressed to an unnamed person for having denounced the crime—a course which was defended as ‘the best policy.’ ‘Though I regret,’ the writer proceeded, ‘the accident of Lord F. Cavendish's death, I cannot refuse to admit that Burke got no more than his deserts.’ The commanding position of the newspaper gave the publication of the letter the utmost weight. The second reading of the Crimes Bill was to be concluded the same evening as it appeared, and at the close of the debate Parnell denied with suppressed passion the authenticity of the letter.

Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues at once announced their belief in Parnell's innocence, and neither Parnell nor the government showed at first any intention of taking further action in the matter. But after Sir Charles Lewis, a private member of the house on the conservative side, had moved that the ‘Times’ references to Mr. Dillon, in the same series of articles, constituted a breach of privilege, the government offered to pay the expenses of a libel action against the ‘Times,’ to be brought by the Irish members implicated. This was declined on the ground that the Irish members had no faith either in the government or in English juries. Mr. Gladstone thereupon proposed that a select committee of the house should inquire into the matter, and on 6 May Parnell, who was not present during the debate, replied by telegraph to a question from the liberal benches that he was willing for the inquiry to be extended to the incriminating letter. The proposal was negatived, and for a year the question was allowed to rest.

Parnell's public speeches were now mainly devoted to emphasising his attachment to the liberal party. At the opening of the session of 1888 he was followed into the lobby by the whole liberal party when he moved an amendment censuring the government for their rigid application of the Crimes Act. His motion was rejected by 317 votes to 229. But at the same time he made it plain that the active agitation in Ireland was not proceeding under his auspices. When he was entertained by the Eighty Club—a Gladstonian association—on 8 May, he expressed himself strongly against the ‘plan of campaign.’ In June he entertained in London many parliamentary followers who, by their activity in Ireland, had incurred punishment under the Crimes Act, and, in accordance with nationalist sentiment, substituted ‘Ireland a Nation’ for the ordinary toast of ‘the Queen.’ In July he announced in the newspapers that Mr. Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of Cape Colony, had sent him 10,000l., to be applied to the Irish home rule funds, on the understanding that Parnell would agree to the retention of the Irish members in the British House of Commons, whenever a new bill for an Irish parliament was introduced into parliament. Late in the year he raised once more in the house the old question of arrears of rent, and joined with the liberals in obstructing a bill for the extension of Lord Ashbourne's Act.

But more personal issues were then occupying his attention. On 3 July 1888 an action for libel against the ‘Times,’ brought by a former member of the Irish parliamentary party, Mr. Frank Hugh O'Donnell, came into court. Some casual references had been made to Mr. O'Donnell in the course of the articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime.’ The plaintiff declined to enter the witness-box, but the counsel for the ‘Times,’ Sir Richard Webster, the attorney-general, proposed to justify the articles, and in a long opening speech offered to prove that Parnell had written not only the letter of 15 May, but others in a like sense, which he read in court. On 5 July a verdict for the defendant was returned.