After the fall of Mooltan General Whish joined forces with Lord Gough, who, as described above, had driven the enemy from their encampment at Ramnuggur on November 22. It was believed that the rebellion was broken, and that the Sikhs would not again meet our army in the field. But our generals had still to learn the extraordinary resolution and resources of this fine race. Chuttur Singh and his son Shere Singh still commanded nearly 40,000 men with sixty-two guns, and had captured Attock, a fort defended by Major Herbert. |Battles of Chilianwalla and Goojerat.| Gough advanced to attack the chiefs on January 13, 1849, in their position on the Upper Jhelum near the village of Chilianwalla, a name of melancholy associations in British annals. The Sikhs, indeed, withdrew, but they carried with them four British guns and five stand of colours. The British loss was terrible, amounting to twenty-six officers and 731 men killed, and sixty-six officers and 1,446 men wounded. Lord Gough was blamed for bad generalship in this action: he was recalled from his command, and Sir Charles Napier was appointed in his place. But fortune was kind to a brave soldier. Before the orders from home could reach him, Gough, having followed the enemy, retrieved the disaster of Chilianwalla by inflicting on Shere Singh a crushing defeat at Goojerat on February 21, pursuing him into the Khoree Pass. On March 6 Shere Singh surrendered unconditionally, and on the 29th a proclamation was issued by the Governor-General permanently annexing the Punjab to the British Empire.

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CHAPTER V.
1846–1850.

The Irish Famine—Smith O’Brien’s Rebellion—Widow Cormack’s Cabbages—The Special Commission—Revival of the Chartist Movement—The Monster Petition—Its Exposure and Collapse of the Movement—Revolutionary Movements in Britain compared with those in other Countries—Growing Affection for the Queen—Its Causes—Royal Visit to Ireland—The Pacifico Imbroglio—Rupture with France Imminent—Civis Romanus Sum—Lord Palmerston’s Rise—Sir Robert Peel’s Death—The Invention of Chloroform.

THE condition of affairs in Ireland, with which it had fallen to the Russell Ministry to deal on entering office in 1846, had become truly appalling. Nearly a million of money had been expended by Peel’s Government in relief of the distress caused by the failure of the potato crop in 1845, and the disease had reappeared with greater intensity in the following season. |The Irish Famine.| Further measures of relief were brought forward by the Prime Minister; charitable subscriptions poured in from every town in England and Scotland; nearly every country in Europe, including even Turkey, contributed help in the hour of need, and the United States Government freighted some of their war vessels with grain for their starving cousins.

Nevertheless, the situation was one of extraordinary perplexity. In the footprints of famine stalked sedition. Agrarian murders rose to a frightful figure; secret societies grew apace; midnight drilling went on in almost every county; and that very peasantry whose destitution had touched the hearts of the whole civilised world, proved themselves able to buy enormous quantities of arms and ammunition. In Clonmel alone, 1,138 stand of arms were sold in a few days, and everywhere, to quote a letter written at the time, “the peasantry are armed or are arming almost to a man. The stores of the armourer are more frequently exhausted than the provision stores.” So brisk was the demand as to cause a revival of the gun trade in Birmingham, where the existing stock of small arms was entirely cleared out. But there could be no doubt of the reality and severity of the distress. It was worst in the south and west; famine and famine-fever carried off thousands, and the population of Ireland, which had stood at eight millions in 1845, could only be reckoned at six millions in 1848. The difference, however, was not entirely due to deaths by starvation or disease. The westward stream of emigration had set in, and tens of thousands of Irish families sought and found the means of better existence in the land of plenty beyond the Atlantic.

But the ferment of rebellion was spreading swiftly among those who remained. All the misery of the famine was laid at the door of the land system; not unfrequently coroners’ juries returned verdicts of wilful murder against the Prime Minister or Lord Lieutenant, holding them directly responsible for not averting the disasters of the country. Once more the Government had to undertake the hateful task of bringing forward a Coercion Bill, for the people seemed on the brink of civil war. Technically that limit was actually transgressed, though the means were ludicrously inadequate to the end—repeal of the Union. The “Young Ireland” party, inflamed by the successful revolution in France, separated from and plunged ahead of O’Connor’s Repealers. O’Connor had precipitated the rupture by endeavouring to induce his party to pledge themselves against any except constitutional means. His proposal was laughed to scorn. William Smith O’Brien, brother of Lord Inchiquin, claiming descent from Brian Boruibh, placed himself at the head of the “Confederates,” as the new party was called, with Meagher, Dillon, and others as his lieutenants; the United Irishman newspaper was started in opposition to the less inflammatory Nation, the organ of the older party. It was managed by John Mitchell, who filled its columns week by week with the most violent and acrid sedition.

It was impossible for the Government to allow this sort of stuff to be circulated among an excitable peasantry, smarting under imaginary wrongs and real distress and armed to the teeth; but the existing law contained no provisions framed to stop it. The Prime Minister, therefore, introduced and passed what is known as the Treason Felony Act, making written incitement to insurrection a crime punishable with transportation, and enabling the Executive to imprison persons charged with contravention of it. Mitchell was arrested at once, but Smith O’Brien continued to hold armed meetings in various parts of Ireland: matters looked threatening, and there was grave apprehension in England as to the result. On the morning of August 7 it was turned into mirth by the arrival in London from Liverpool of one of the first telegraphic despatches of importance ever published in this country. |Smith O’Brien’s Rebellion.| Rebellion had actually broken out: Smith O’Brien in person had led a considerable force to attack a body of fifty or sixty police, who defended themselves in the house of one Widow Cormack, near Ballingarry, in Tipperary. A good deal of firing took place but very little bloodshed; thanks, on the one hand, to the indifferent arms carried by the rebels, and, on the other, to the forbearance of the police, who could easily have shot O’Brien, so theatrically did he expose himself during the brief contest. |Widow Cormack’s Cabbages.| The chief damage was done to the poor widow’s cabbages, which the Confederates trampled to pieces in the garden adjoining the house. The affair was soon over: the patriots, not relishing a few rounds from the muskets of the police, melted quickly away, and the heroic O’Brien was arrested in the act of taking his railway ticket at Thurles station. It is unlucky for any cause—it is worse, it is fatal to it—when it becomes ridiculous, and people have never since been able to mention Smith O’Brien’s cabbage garden without a grin. But the general state of Ireland had grown to be no laughing matter. |The Special Commission.| The number of persons arrested for complicity in seditions, or for the frequent murders of landlords, agents, and policemen far exceeded what the ordinary tribunals of the country could deal with, and a special Commission of judges was appointed to try them.

The spirit of revolution was astir in many lands besides Ireland in the year when Louis Philippe was forced from the throne of France. In England the Chartist movement was sympa­thet­ic­ally inflamed into renewed activity. |Revival of the Chartist Movement.| A Chartist convention assembled in London in spring and made arrangements for a monster demonstration to be held on Kennington Common on April 10. But the Convention had hardly begun deliberating before disunion appeared in its councils. There were two parties among the Chartists—the constitutional Radicals and the physical force party. The latter were for assembling on Kennington Common under arms; but the venerable leader of the whole movement, Feargus O’Connor, would have nothing to do with unconstitutional or violent proceedings. The consequence of this was a rupture in the camp. Every preparation was made by the authorities to protect London from the ravages of a mob: the troops were under arms: the police mustered in great force: thousands of special constables were sworn in, and the Chartist procession was prohibited. But about 20,000 Chartists did assemble on the Common to listen to harangues by O’Connor and others. O’Connor then went to the Home Office, interviewed Sir George Grey, and told him the meeting had taken place without disorder. “Are you going back to it?” asked Grey. “No,” replied O’Connor, “I’ve had my toes trodden on till I’m lame: my pocket has been picked, and I’ll have no more to do with them.”

It was ridicule—that universal solvent—which finally shattered this once formidable Chartist League. A monster petition to Parliament had been in course of signature for some months. |The Monster Petition.| Feargus O’Connor, in presenting it, declared that 5,700,000 names were attached to it. It was remitted in the ordinary course to the Committee on Public Petitions, who employed a number of clerks to examine the signatures. The result was speedily made known. Instead of nearly six million names, less than two million were appended to it. Whole sheets of these were found to have been written by the same hand. |Its Exposure, and Collapse of the Movement.| But the crowning exposure, which convulsed the whole nation with laughter, appeared from the analysis of the names themselves. Those of the Queen and Prince Albert, of Ministers and leaders of Opposition were of frequent occurrence; noted names in fiction, especially that of “Cheeks the Marine,” a familiar character in Marryat’s novels, then very popular, appeared in every sheet, besides all sorts of ribaldries, indecencies, and buffooneries. Chartism was a genuine and an earnest movement: it was an upheaval against class privileges, a revolt against class grievances. But these privileges and grievances were in course of removal; the extension of the franchise had brought about repeal of the corn laws, laid the foundation of free trade, and redressed some, at least, of the evils prevalent in factories and mines. Much remained to be done, which has been done since, but Chartism was to have no hand in the doing of it. As a political force it collapsed; as a social movement it crumbled away under the intolerable ridicule of the Monster Petition.

It will be long before English statesmen forget the lessons of 1848–9. During these years the whole of Europe was convulsed by violent popular conflicts with authority. In France the Bourbon dynasty collapsed with the abdication of Louis Philippe, and then, to repeat Mr. Justin McCarthy’s happy phrase, “came a Red Republican rising against a Republic that strove not to be red,” to be drowned in blood by Cavaignac. |Revolutionary Movements in Britain compared with those in other Countries.| The Pope was chased from Rome, the Emperor of Austria from Vienna, the Italian princes from their duchies, the German rulers from their principalities; there were sanguinary struggles in Poland, in Naples, in Sardinia; while Great Britain had only to blush for Widow Cormack’s cabbages and the picking of Feargus O’Connor’s pocket at Kennington. Yet there was no doubt of the earnestness of the leaders of agitation and insurrection in England: no question about the reality of the grievances.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press, no ineffective safety valves in times of discontent, were tolerated in the United Kingdom—then, as now—far beyond the limits of public security, as these were reckoned by every other European State. But the chief safety of England lay in the faith of the masses in the power of Parliament to devise measures of redress, and their confidence that the Sovereign would interpose no bar to remedial legislation. Nor have that faith and confidence been betrayed. Throughout all the years that have elapsed since the dissolution of the Chartist League, Parliament has been diligent in devising measures to meet the ever-changing and growing wants of the people, and the Royal Assent has always been cordially given to them. The Queen and her Consort do not appear very prominently or very often in the chronicles of these early years, but all the time there had been growing silently that popular affection for the Sovereign which disappeared entirely from practical politics with the active reign of George III. The qualities of Prince Albert, his industry, his untiring anxiety for the welfare of the people, his unobtrusive influence in favour of freedom, were becoming known: the Crown was becoming more than the decorative centre of the Court—the mere frontispiece of the aristocracy—it was becoming recognised as the actual head of the British people.

|Growing Affection for the Queen. Its Causes.| The growing affection of the people for their Queen was stimulated about this time by the act of a harebrained scamp who, on May 17, discharged a rusty pistol, loaded, it is believed, with no deadly missile, at Her Majesty as she was driving in Constitution Hill with three of her children. The fact that the wretch was an Irishman was regarded rightly as being of no political significance, and it was a happy—it was more, it was a wise—project which was carried into effect by the visit of the Queen and Prince Albert, with the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal, to Ireland in August 1849. |Royal Visit to Ireland.| The Royal yacht was escorted by four warships, but the reception they met with at Cork, at Dublin, and at Belfast proved that to be but a formal precaution. Perhaps, had it been possible in later years that the Monarch and her family should become more familiar to the warm-hearted Irish, many subsequent misfortunes and misunderstandings might never have taken place.

The Parliamentary session of 1850 must ever be memorable for two events—the sudden rise of Lord Palmerston into fame and popularity, and the equally sudden removal of the most illustrious figure in the House of Commons. The debate, which was the occasion of the first, and immediately preceded the second of these events, arose out of one of the most trivial and least creditable matters that ever agitated the Councils and menaced the peace of a great nation. Certain British subjects had suffered loss in the destruction of their property during the disturbances at Athens in 1847, and had lodged claims for compensation against the Greek Government. |The Pacifico Imbroglio.| The principal sufferer was a Portuguese Jew, named Pacifico, a British subject in virtue of having been born in Gibraltar. The Greeks were needy and delayed a settlement. Then there was Mr. Finlay, too, the historian of Greece, long resident at Athens, who had a grievance of a different sort, arising out of a demand made by the Greek Government that he should surrender a piece of land at less than he considered its value. The strange thing was that Palmerston took up these private claims as an international question, although neither of the claimants had tried the experiment of litigation in the Greek courts. A British squadron was ordered to the Piræus, all the Greek vessels in that harbour were seized, and Athens was blockaded. The Greeks appealed to the governments of France and Russia, who remonstrated with Great Britain touching this high-handed dealing with a weak State. Russia was rudely outspoken and menacing: she was told bluntly by Lord Palmerston that it was none of her business. France was more conciliatory, and by her aid a convention in regard to the disputed claims was arranged in London. But there was so much delay in communicating the result to the British Ambassador in Athens, Mr. Wyse, that he was left in ignorance that a modified payment had been agreed on, and continued to press for payment of the full claims. |Rupture with France Imminent.| Thereupon arose serious misunderstanding between the British and French Governments, England being accused of breach of faith. Appearances were certainly against her; the French Ambassador was recalled from London, and two great nations seemed on the brink of war.

The Government had a wretchedly bad case to defend in Parliament; a case, too, which had been damaged by the introduction of that element which had told with such fatal effect against the Chartists and Smith O’Brien’s Confederates—the element of ridicule. For the grasping Jew Pacifico had specified in his bill against the Greek Government various possessions strangely out of keeping with what had always been his modest household. Among the articles alleged to have been destroyed by fire were a bedstead, valued at £150, sheets for the same at £30, and a pillow-case at £10. Ministers already beaten in the Upper House stood in a critical position in the Lower. But Lord Palmerston rose to the occasion, and exhibited eloquence which hitherto he had not been suspected of possessing. He spoke with great vigour for nearly five hours, and wound up with a peroration which, spoken by a man of other mould than “Old Pam,” might have savoured of claptrap, and read in cold blood at this day, seems to rise no higher than what Americans call “spread-eagleism.” |Civis Romanus Sum.| “If,” he asked, “a subject of ancient Rome could hold himself free from indignity by saying Civis Romanus sum, shall not a British subject also, in whatever land he may be, feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong?” Civis Romanus carried the House and the country with the speaker: Palmerston’s appeal saved the Government.

|Lord Palmerston’s Rise.|

Sir Robert Peel made his last speech in opposition to the vote of confidence: though, in referring to Palmerston’s defence of the Government, he declared that “his speech made us all proud of the man who made it.” He delivered his last vote on the fourth day of the debate, about four o’clock in the morning of June 29. Next day at noon he attended a meeting of the Royal Commissioners of the Great Exhibition which was to be held the following year. After the meeting he mounted his horse, went to write his name in the Queen’s book at Buckingham Palace, and then rode up Constitution Hill. He stopped to talk to the Hon. Miss Ellis, whom he met riding down from Hyde Park: something frightened his horse, which, by a sudden bound, unseated him. Peel in falling kept hold of the reins and pulled the horse on the top of him. He was internally and fatally injured, one of his ribs having been broken and forced into the lung. |Sir Robert Peel’s Death.| He died on July 2, after terrible suffering. The doctors were unable to deal with the injuries owing to the intense agony caused by the slightest movement. It brings to one’s apprehension what an incalculable boon to suffering humanity has since that time been discovered in the use of anæsthetics. Chloroform had already been invented, it is true, in 1850; but its employment was little understood. Three years earlier Charles Greville had witnessed one of the first operations under chloroform in St. George’s Hospital. How many suffering ones and friends of suffering ones have had cause to echo the feeling expressed in his journal: “I have no words to express my admiration for this invention, which is the greatest blessing ever bestowed on mankind, and the inventor of it the greatest of benefactors, whose memory ought to be venerated by countless millions for ages yet to come.” In spite of this, it is greatly to be feared that the names of Guthrie the American and Soubeiran the Frenchman, who simultaneously discovered chloroform in 1831, and Lawrence of London and Simpson of Edinburgh, who first employed it in our hospitals, have been almost forgotten by the many.

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CHAPTER VI.
1849–1851.

Prince Albert’s Industry—His proposal for a Great Exhibition—Adoption of the Scheme—Competing Designs—Mr. Paxton’s selected—Erection of the Crystal Palace—Colonel Sibthorp denounces the Scheme—Papal Titles in Great Britain—Popular Indignation—The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill—Defeat of Ministers on the Question of the Franchise—Difficulty in finding a Successor to Russell—He resumes Office—Opening of the Great Exhibition—Its success and close.

REFERENCE has been made already to the wise restraint which Prince Albert imposed upon himself in respect to politics and legislation; but those would greatly misinterpret the motives and impulses of that active intellect who should attribute this reserve either to apathy or constitutional indolence. Prince Albert did not admit that, because he was withheld by recent developments of representative government from personal interference in legislation and diplomacy, it was the less incumbent upon him, as Consort of the Head of the State, to make himself thoroughly informed on all the leading political questions of the day, as well as on the special work of the public departments. |Prince Albert’s Industry.| Added to this was the active part he took in schemes of social and commercial improvement, and in scientific and artistic progress. An early riser at all times, it was his custom, summer and winter, to dispose of a couple of hours’ work before breakfast, and it is no figure of speech to say that few of the Queen’s subjects can have been more constantly or more laboriously employed than her husband. The Prince had lived down any popular prejudice which he had to encounter in the early years of his married life; people had come to understand and appreciate his abilities and disposition, and the time had come when his genius and industry were to bear remarkable fruit.

Prince Albert was President of the Society of Arts, a body which, dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, had, from time to time, offered prizes for specimens of British textile, ceramic, and other manufactures; but the project of holding a competitive Exhibition on an international scale originated with the Prince himself. |His Proposal for a Great Exhibition.| In the course of July 1849 he had laid his proposals before some of the members of the Society, and means were at once adopted to arouse the interest of manufacturers at home, abroad, and in the colonies, and to open negotiations with foreign governments. The idea caught on at once; the States of Europe were at peace, and nothing could more surely tend to obliterate the recollection of recent disturbances than to join in friendly rivalry in the arts of peace. |Adoption of the Scheme.| A Royal Commis­sion was appointed to carry out the preparations, and the scheme was formally inaugurated on March 21, 1850, at a banquet given by the Lord Mayor to the Chief Magistrates of all the towns in the United Kingdom, to which Prince Albert and the foreign Ambassadors were also invited.

Somerset House had been placed at the disposal of the Commissioners for the purposes of the Exhibition, but the fervour with which all nations embraced the idea soon made it manifest that no permanent edifice could contain more than a small fraction of the exhibits. There was no time to be lost—the 1st of May 1851 had been fixed for the opening ceremony. |Competing Designs.| The difficulty was not the cost, for a guarantee fund of £200,000 had been speedily subscribed; but the designs and specifications had to be submitted, the materials prepared, and the erection completed, all within the space of nine months. A site in Hyde Park was chosen, and the Commissioners set to work to examine no fewer than 245 designs and specifications sent in by architects all over the world. |Mr. Paxton’s selected.| They had almost decided in favour of a design by a French architect, when a certain Mr. Joseph Paxton—not a professional architect, but superintendent of the Duke of Devonshire’s gardens at Chatsworth—produced a scheme so original and simple that it was adopted at once in preference to all others. It was an enormous conservatory of glass and iron—1,848 feet long, 408 feet broad, and 66 feet high—with transepts constructed so as to contain some of the elms still growing in Hyde Park. The decision of the Commissioners was not arrived at till July 26: not a single casting or piece of material had been prepared yet; but the contractors, Messrs. Fox, Henderson & Co., undertook to deliver the building ready for painting and fitting on December 31. |Erection of the Crystal Palace.| The ground lying between Albert Gate and Knightsbridge Barracks on the east and west, between Rotten Row and St. George’s Place on the north and south, was handed over to them on July 30; the first column was raised on September 26, and on the stipulated day Messrs. Fox and Henderson handed over the structure of the Crystal Palace, as it was called, to the Commissioners. Though the great fabric vanished with the leaves of a single summer, yet this achievement of the contractors deserves record among the most famous exploits of industrial enterprise, affording, as it did, a practical illustration of the dominant object of the Great Exhibition, as Prince Albert had defined it in his speech at the Mansion House; namely, “To give us a true test and living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived ... a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.”

There were frondeurs, of course, as there always are in the projection of any scheme involving novelty; and the Times lent its sonorous voice to swell the clamour raised against the desecration of Hyde Park by the introduction of a commercial speculation. It may appear to some that the British retain to this day some traces of insular prejudice against foreigners, but such a feeling was far more prevalent in 1850 than one is apt to realise now. |Colonel Sibthorp denounces the Scheme.| It found fitting expression in the House of Commons from the lips of Colonel Sibthorp, who declared that “when Free Trade had left nothing else wanting to complete the ruin of the Empire, the devil had suggested the idea of the Great Exhibition, so that the foreigners who had first robbed us of our trade might now be enabled to rob us of our honour.”D The circumstances of the moment secured the gallant Colonel more sympathy than his grotesque speech and exaggerated fears would otherwise have won for him. The Protestant spirit of England had taken alarm at a Papal bull re-establishing in Great Britain a hierarchy of bishops deriving titles from the sees to which they were appointed. |Papal Titles in Great Britain.| This might have seemed a higher compliment to Great Britain than the arrangement under which the Roman Catholic bishops, which had existed ever since the Reformation, held their appointments, under fictitious titles in partibus infidelium. But a good deal had occurred in recent years to arouse Protestant jealousy of Papal aggression. The Tractarian movement had resulted in the secession of Newman, Manning, and other conspicuous clergy and laymen to the Church of Rome; people both in London and Rome had begun to prognosticate a general secession from the Church of England, and there was something peculiarly startling in the appointment at this juncture of Cardinal Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster. |Popular Indignation.| Most Englishmen greatly preferred that the Pope should continue to regard and call them “infidels,” than that he should be permitted to bring them under his immediate patronage in this formal and ostentatious manner; and the feeling of irritation was intensified by Wiseman’s pastoral letter to the English people on October 7, 1850, in which the new Archbishop announced that “your beloved country has received a place among the fair churches which, normally constituted, form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion.” Either the Protestant Reformation, for which Great Britain had paid so heavy a price, was a precious reality, in which case, so it appeared to most Englishmen, this was an insolent and significant aggression by the Court of Rome, or it was an obsolete blunder, and Rome was going to forgive it and resume her spiritual sway over our people.

The Prime Minister lost no time in showing how the affair presented itself to his mind. |The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill.| Within less than a month he had proclaimed that the Pope’s action was “a pretension of supremacy over the realm of England, and a claim to sole and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the Queen’s supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the spiritual independence of the nation as asserted even in Roman Catholic times”; and he vindicated the sincerity of these expressions by introducing, immediately after the meeting of Parliament in February 1851, a Bill to prevent the assumption by Roman Catholics of titles taken from any place within the United Kingdom.

It was a hazardous measure to steer through the Imperial Parliament. Outside popular passion was aflame; effigies of the Pope and Wiseman, sixteen feet high, had been dragged through the streets of London on the Fifth of November instead of the usual Guy Faux. On the other hand, both the Radicals and the Irish Catholics in the House might be counted on to offer fiercest opposition to the Bill. Ministers themselves dreaded enacting anything that savoured of religious intolerance, and the Queen herself has left on record her feelings about the subject.

“I would never have consented,” she wrote to the Duchess of Gloucester, “to anything which breathed a spirit of intolerance. Sincerely Protestant as I have always been, and always shall be, and indignant as I am at those who call themselves Protestants while they are, in fact, quite the contrary, I much regret the unchristian and intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at the public meetings. I cannot bear to hear the violent abuse of the Catholic religion, which is so painful and so cruel towards the many good and innocent Roman Catholics. However, we must hope and trust this excitement will soon cease, and that the wholesome effect of it upon our own Church will be lasting.”

No wiser words have ever been written or spoken by a monarch. It was both necessary and desirable to give effect to the national repugnance to spiritual interference; but it was imperative that spiritual freedom should be left absolutely unfettered. The progress of the measure through the House of Commons was like that of Samson’s foxes through the Philistines’ corn; it kindled every slumbering sentiment of acrimony and hatred. The Radicals, through Mr. Roebuck, exclaimed against it as “one of the meanest, pettiest, and most futile measures that ever disgraced even bigotry itself.” The Irish employed all their inexhaustible resources in resistance; nor was their opposition modified in the least degree by the Government agreeing to exclude Ireland from the Bill. Nevertheless, after four nights’ debate on the motion for leave to introduce the Bill, the division list showed a majority of 332 in favour of it.