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 mission. He still avoided all active participation in the agitation against Mr. Balfour's rule which his followers were keeping alive in Ireland. But he allowed Mr. O'Brien to announce at Thurles on 28 Oct. that he approved the formation of a new association, the ‘tenants' defence league,’ which Mr. O'Brien sought to establish.

Throughout the year the commission was still sitting, and on 30 April 1889 Parnell was called as the first witness for the defence. He denied that his political action had gone at any period outside constitutional limits, and he held his own with much astuteness during a long cross-examination by the attorney-general on 1 and 2 May. But he cynically admitted that he had deliberately misled the House of Commons when he asserted on 7 Jan. 1881 that secret societies had ceased to exist in Ireland, and that the land league suppressed them. He explained next day that he was referring to secret societies outside the fenian conspiracy. On 12 July Parnell's counsel, Sir Charles Russell (afterwards Lord Russell of Killowen and lord chief justice), retired from the case on the refusal of the judges to order the production of the books of the Irish Loyal Patriotic Union, an association which, it was alleged, had subsidised Pigott. After the delivery of speeches by Mr. Biggar and Mr. Davitt, and a reply by Sir Henry James on behalf of the ‘Times,’ the proceedings closed on 22 Nov. On 3 Feb. 1890 Parnell's action against the ‘Times’ was compromised by the payment to him of 5,000l.

On 13 Feb. the report of the special commission was laid on the table of the House of Commons. The verdict fully acquitted Parnell of all sympathy with, or responsibility for, the Phœnix Park murders; or of having conspired, as chief of the land league, to secure the absolute independence of Ireland; or of having incited persons to the commission of crime other than intimidation. But the judges asserted that Parnell and his colleagues had incited to intimidation, and ‘did not denounce the system of intimidation which led to crime and outrage, but persisted in it with knowledge of its effect.’ It was held that he and his followers had defended persons charged with agrarian crimes; had supported their families and compensated persons who were injured in the commission of crime; and had finally, in order to obtain the pecuniary assistance of the physical force party in America, abstained from repudiating or condemning the action of that party. The evidence showed that Parnell and the other respondents received large sums of money from America for the purpose either of promoting agitation or of paying salaries to Irish members of parliament. They declined to account for the expenditure in detail; the accounts, it was obvious, were loosely kept, and the money was largely under Parnell's control.

Both parties professed satisfaction with the report. The exposure of Pigott's forgeries was all the liberals claimed to have desired; the land league's procedure was ‘ancient history’ of no practical interest. The unionists, on the other hand, while admitting that Parnell's direct complicity with the outrage-mongers was unproved, held that his failure to openly denounce them laid on him a heavy moral responsibility, and rendered it impolitic to endow him with greater political power. Mr. Gladstone vindicated Parnell with passionate energy all along the line. On 3 March William Henry Smith, the leader of the house, formally moved that the report should be entered in the journals. Mr. Gladstone proposed, in a speech of exceptional eloquence, that the house should express ‘its reprobation of the false charges of the gravest and most odious description, based upon calumny and forgery,’ which had been brought against Parnell, and should give some sign of regret for the wrong inflicted. He panegyrised Parnell as a man charged with ‘the leadership of a nation and with the daily care of a nation's interests,’ and described him as the victim of ‘a frightful outrage,’ to whom reparation was due in the name of Christian charity. The debate was protracted, amid much heat, until 10 March, when Mr. Gladstone's amendment was rejected by 339 to 268 votes.

Through the remainder of the session the liberals lost no opportunity of marking their resentment of the government's attitude to the special commission's report, and Parnell followed in their wake. When Mr. Balfour's Land Purchase Bill—largely extending the principles of Lord Ashbourne's Act—came on for second reading on 21 April, Parnell moved its rejection after consultation with Mr. Morley. Parnell and Mr. Morley each published, in November 1890, accounts of this negotiation, differing in details. The facts appear to have been that Parnell expressed a wish to amend the bill, but Mr. Gladstone inclined to a more extreme course, which Parnell ultimately adopted. The bill was afterwards dropped, and when reintroduced next year in a modified shape, together with a Congested Districts Bill for effectively relieving distress in the poorest parts of Ireland, it was carried with Parnell's assistance. Meanwhile, on 20 May 1890, he presided at a meeting in London of the National League