Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/75

 were not prepared to yield, the Irishmen moved the adjournment of the debate, and were supported by Lord Godrich, Lord Monck, Lord Mulgrave, eldest son of Lord Normanby, whose name was still popular in Ireland, the son of William Cobbett, and a few newly-elected Radicals, and mustered fifty-nine votes. It was plain there would be a protracted and unflinching contest, and after much parley the Government gave way and consented to read all the Bills a second time, and send them to a Committee of the character suggested. To the consternation of the Irish landlords the measure which they had derided for twenty years as "Crawford's Craze" received the second reading, which affirms the leading principles of a Bill, and was to be referred to a Committee, nominated by Mr. Napier and Sergeant Shee, to settle the details. Next day the Times was furious and the Tory Press dumbfounded by this concession.

In the meantime the landlords were not idle. They also had remedies to propose. Lord Lucan submitted a Bill to his peers providing increased powers of eviction, and facilitating distress for rent, which he conceived would meet the real difficulties of the case. Lord Westmeath introduced another Bill inflicting severe penalties on tenants who cut their crops after sundown to the peril of the landlord's claims on the entire cereal harvest. Some more politic proprietors, advised apparently by Isaac Butt, who was the leading spokesman of their opinions, declared that the true specific for the public distress was a revival of the Corn Laws.

Election petitions rained on the new Parliament. More than a fourth of the House had their seats called in question, twenty of the Irish party being assailed in this way, including nearly all the leaders of both branches. My seat was attacked upon various grounds, one of which excited considerable attention; it was alleged that my property qualification was inadequate. I qualified from a rent-charge, and Parliamentary Committees had formerly listened to evidence intended to show that such annuities were legitimately bought and strictly collected—evidence which in certain recent cases nobody was able to believe. What would the Young Irelander do, it was demanded, with respect to a rent-charge which he certainly had not bought and probably