has been perfectly straightforward and courageous, is entitled to the full support of ourselves, of Europe, and the Porte. Her Majesty's Government would be sorry to acknowledge the possibility of such an outrage as personal violence to His Highness, and, in point of fact, they do not apprehend such a danger.

AFFAIRS OF MALTA-NOTICE OF

MOTION.

MR. MACIVER asked the hon. Member for Glasgow, Whether he intended to proceed with his Notice of Motion relating to the Affairs of Malta, and whether he had any expectation of bringing it forward? He had received many communications from Malta on the subject, and he would be glad to have the terms of his hon. Friend's Notice of Motion.

MR. ANDERSON said, it would require a very sanguine temperament to believe that the House would get through Committee on the Prevention of Crime Bill by Friday next, which was the day he had secured for bringing on his Motion. He intended to bring it on, if he had the opportunity, the terms of the Motion being

"That it is the opinion of this House that the long tried loyalty of the people of Malta to British rule deserves more consideration than it has received; that the several reports of Mr. Rowsell, Sir Penrose Julyan, and Mr. Keenan, as well as the numerously signed Petitions of the people, prove that great changes in the civil administration of the island are urgently required, and that Her Majesty's Government ought to be doing more than they have been doing to carry out the needed reforms, and so to promote the prosperity and secure the contentment of the Maltese people."

PARLIAMENT -RULES AND ORDERS

ORDER OF BUSINESS.

MR. DILLON said, that a much wider interpretation was given to the clause as it stood than the Government attributed to it. He proposed to quote a passage from one of the leading Metropolitan journals, in order to show the construction which was put upon the word "intimidation," as it was introduced by the Home Secretary; and he did so for the purpose of showing the MR. GORST asked Mr. Speaker, absolute necessity of prolonging the disWhether the Government were in Order cussion of the clause, in order that the in putting down as the second Order of Members of the Committee, and persons the Day the Committee on the Arrears outside the House, might be satisfied as of Rent (Ireland) Bill? He believed to the real object and intention of the that on Fridays, by a Standing Order, clause, no definite understanding having the first Order of the Day must be Com-yet been come to as to the exact meanmittee of Supply. Although the House had passed a Resolution giving precedence to the Prevention of Crime Bill, he believed that no precedence was intended to be given to the Arrears of Rent Bill.

MR. SPEAKER said, there was no doubt that the first Order of the Day on

ing of the word. The extract was from a paper which represented a considerable amount of public opinion. It said

was

"The Home Secretary's defence of the clause was ingenious. The latter part, he said, only the interpretation put upon intimidation in the first part. In other words, no person would be held to be guilty of intimidation unless he had

placed compulsion upon others to take part in any riot or unlawful assembly or to resist the processes of the law in regard to eviction."

That was the opinion of The Standard as to what the Government meant by intimidation-namely, that nobody would be guilty of intimidation unless he put compulsion on somebody to take part in a riot or unlawful assembly. In arguing against the adoption of the Amendment yesterday, the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister repeated over and over again the statement that practically this clause was drawn in the same spirit as the Act of 1875. He had had the curiosity that day to look at the debate which took place when the Bill of 1875 was passing through the House, and he confessed that the discoveries he had made from perusing that debate had surprised him very considerably. He, first of all, discovered that the clause as it stood in the Act, and as it had been copied by the hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General, was a clause which was not drawn by the House of Commons at all, but drawn up by the House of Commons, in substitution of the clause accepted by the House of Commons, and sent up to the other House by a small majority, under great pressure from the Government. It was drawn up by the Lord Chancellor, and was substituted for the clause which had been sent up by the House of Commons. On referring to the report of the debates which took place when the Bill was passing through Committee, he found that right hon. Gentlemen now sitting on the Treasury Bench were in Opposition, and that their views with regard

to the crime of intimidation were of a totally different character-indeed, of a totally opposite character from the views they expressed now. The right

-

Those were the words of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Home Secretary in 1875. Great mischief, the right hon. and learned Gentleman thought, might arise from the ambiguity of the clause, and yet the clause referred to by the right hon. and learned Gentleman was nothing like so ambiguous as the clause now submitted to the Committee. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said the clause was so ambiguous that it might give rise to very great mischief. It was moved by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South-West Lancashire (Sir R. Assheton Cross), who had charge of the Bill, and it said that—

"Every person who, with a view to compel any other person to abstain from doing or to do any act which such other person has a legal right to do or abstain from doing, shall use violence to any person."

And the present Home Secretary then contended that the crime of intimidation, as defined by that clause of the Act of 1875, meant using or threatening violence in such a shape that a magistrate

would be entitled to bind the man who resorted to it over to keep the peace; and that, he said, was too ambiguous, and that great mischief might hereafter arise from the adoption of such a definition.

But he (Mr. Dillon) did not rest his argument alone on the authority of the Home Secretary. Going a little further into the debate, he met with another friend of Ireland, in the shape of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster). What did that right hon. Gentleman say? He made two very remarkable statements, and he (Mr. Dillon) certainly wished that the right hon. Gentleman would stick to them. If he did, he would be assisting the Irish Members that day in resisting this Intimidation Clause. The right hon. Gentleman, speaking in favour of an Amendment proposed to a new clause, said—“ This clause, drawn as it now is, would practically amount to this-that if a man looked crooked at the wife or children of a labouring man he might swear that he had been intimidated." Why did that:the right hon. Gentleman use that argument? He went on to explain it by "He agreed with the hon. and learned Mem-saying-"Surely the prosecution should ber for Limerick that great mischief might arise from the ambiguity of the clause. So far as it went beyond the existing law, it was altogether unnecessary."-[3 Hansard, ccxxv. 1583.]

hon. and learned Gentleman who was now Home Secretary was not then in Office; and he found the right hon. and learned Gentleman strongly opposing the Intimidation Clause which was then being passed through the House. The right hon. and learned Gentleman made use of the following words. He said

Mr. Dillon

be left to the man who was threatened; a third party ought not to be brought in." Would the right hon. Gentleman stand up to-day and support his opinion

charge appeared to the Home Secretary to be "This expression of the law in the Recorder's exactly the intention and scope of the Act of 1871; and, so far as he was concerned, his right hon. Friend would have been content to trust that application of the Act in future cases. The satisfied with this construction of the Act. The working-men, too, would, he believed, have been House of Commons thought, however, that it was not desirable to leave the question open to any doubt whatever, and words were accordingly introduced into the present Bill, in order that future rulings in similar cases should be placed on the same footing as in the case tried by the Recorder."-[3 Hansard, ccxxvi. 38.]

of 1875, that the prosecution should be | desire to ascertain who were the persons workleft to the man who was intimidated? ing there, or peaceably to persuade them or That was the view he advocated when any others who were proposing to work there to join their fellow workmen who were contendin Opposition; and he asked whether ing, whether rightly or wrongly, for the intethe opinion the right hon. Gentleman rests of the general body, it seems to me that then expressed, as champion of the there is no evidence sufficient to establish the working men of Bradford, he was precharge that is here made.' pared to extend to the working men of Ireland? The right hon. Member for Bradford moved an Amendment in the direction of the principle he had laid down, and, on the right hon. Gentleman's Motion, the clause was amended by the insertion of the words "on complaint made by the person intimidated." That was one of the things which the Irish Members were contending for in this, and surely the right hon. Gentleman ought to support them in their contention. Not only had the right hon. Gentleman moved the Amendment, but he induced a Conservative Government to accept it; and it was inserted in the Bill. But there was one very important point which he (Mr. Dillon) had dwelt upon the other day, and, on the tion of the hon. and learned Attorney General, the Home Secretary had overwhelmed him with contempt for having made it. It was that it seemed to him that the House of Commons should never have consented to have passed an Intimidation Clause, such as that which existed in the Act of 1875, if it had not been interpreted in a certain fashion. Now, when he went to examine the records of that debate he found the guess he had made was perfectly correct, and the only way in which the Government got the clause listened to was by giving a pledge so that it should be interpreted in accordance with the Charge of the Recorder of London, delivered in the famous case of the cabinet-makers. The Lord Chancellor said

There was no getting behind the statement made by the Lord Chancellor that the clause should be interpreted and ruled by the Cabinet-makers' Case. [Sir WILLIAM HARCOURT: Hear, hear!] The Home Secretary said, sugges

"The Recorder's charge in what was known as the Cabinet-makers' Case embodied the law upon the subject. In the course of his charge

the learned Recorder said

"The question you will have to ask yourselves is, whether the evidence shows that the defendants were guilty of obstructing and rendering difficult of access the prosecutor's place of business, or whether anything which they did was

calculated to deter or intimidate those who were passing to and fro, or whether there was an exhibition of force calculated to produce fear in the minds of ordinary men, or whether the defendants or any of them combined for that purpose. If you think that, it seems to me, then, it will be your duty to find a true bill; but if you think their conduct may be accounted for by a

"Hear,

hear!" If the right hon. and learned Gentleman would be content to be ruled as to the interpretation of the clause by the Charge of the Recorder of London, he (Mr. Dillon) would engage to withdraw all opposition to the clause. But he knew the right hon. and learned Gentleman had no such intention. The right hon. and learned Gentleman wished to persuade them that the English Act contained no proposal upon the Intimidation Clause, when he must have known that at a time when he was a much younger politician than he was now, when he was received as the champion of the rights of English working men, and when his right hon. Friend the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) took a foremost part in the fight, they had both insisted on having a strict definition of the word "intimidation," or else that the Bill should not pass the House. When the Bill came down to the House of Lords to be considered in that House, Mr. Lowe, now Lord Sherbrooke, who was also a champion of the rights of the working men, said, speaking of this open Intimidation Clause, such as it now stood in the Act, having been carried by a very narrow majority

"Nothing could be more dangerous or unfair than the use of ambiguous expressions of this kind."-[Ibid. 711.]

At the beginning the right hon. Gentle- | hon. Member for Sheffield (Mr. Munman had stated that it was a case of law della). The right hon. Gentleman said— between the rich and the poor, and therefore, as Mr. Lowe said

them to combine; and, that being the object and intention of the Bill, if the Committee consented to pass it without a single statement of any definition whatever-for the only statement they had had was a repeated declaration that Her Majesty's Government utterly refused to define it- this sub-section would simply enable the magistrates, in applying the Act, to stop at nothing. The Irish Representatives had, therefore, a tenfold greater right than Lord Sherbrooke, the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Home Secretary, or the right hon. Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) ever had to insist on limitations being placed to the term "intimidation," and they had a tenfold greater right to insist on the limitation of this section. He did not see that the Government, in the course of the discussion upon the Bill, had yielded by a single inch to any of the representations which had been made by the Irish Members. The case stood now exactly as it stood when they first ob

purpose of relieving working men from restraints; and it was well known that if the Intimidation Clause was to be strictly interpreted, the only result would have been that another Bill would have had to have been introduced in the following year to modify it. He was not sufficiently a lawyer or authority to state the effect of the cases which had been decided under the Act; but there was not the slightest doubt in his own mind that the magistrates and the County Court Judges, in ruling under that Act, appealed to the Charge of the Recorder of London, as being protective in the matter of interpreting the meaning of the clause, especially when that view was backed up by the statement of the Lord Chancellor of England himself. If any man contended, as a matter of argument, that that clause would have to be worked in this country against the working men of England and their unions as an open intimidation clause, let him produce his cases. He denied that it had ever been so used, and he challenged the Attorney General or the Home Se-jected to this clause-that the magiscretary to produce any case in which it had been so used, or to show that wherever it had been brought into action--if it ever had been brought into actionthe Charge of the Recorder of London was not only appealed to, but allowed to be a protective definition in favour of any man who might be prosecuted. As he had already stated, if the men who were then advocating the rights of the working men of England had a right to insist, as they did insist, and to press hard for a stricter definition than was given by the Government in the clause, how much more had the Irish Representatives a right to ask for a stricter definition in this clause when they were dealing with a Bill not of restraint, but of oppression? Because the Bill was not brought in to encourage, but to put down combination-not to encourage the methods the farmer, or the agricultural labourer, or the mechanic, all the world over, were obliged to resort to in order to defend their rights against capitalists or landlords, but to put them down. He contended that the Bill was introduced not in order to enable the Government to take off the shackles from the Irish working man in the shape of the small farmer, and enable him to combine and maintain methods of combination, but to make it impossible for

VOL. CCLXX. [THIRD SERIES.]

trates, who were notoriously partizans, and completely under the Ministerial influence of the Treasury Bench, would have it in their power-to use the words of the right hon. Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster)-to send to gaol for six months with hard labour " anybody who looked crookedly at the child or wife of any man in Ireland." Those were not his words, but those of the right hon. Gentleman, and they were applied to a clause much milder than that which the Irish Members objected to. But times had now materially changed with the right hon. Gentleman, and he (Mr. Dillon) saw no course open to the Irish Members but to continue to the best of their ability to endeavour to amend the clause by every means in their power. He trusted that the Government would come forward and accept the fair and reasonable offer made to them to give an undertaking that the interpretation of the Intimidation Clause in Ireland should be ruled by the Charge of the Recorder of London, in the same manner as the clause in the Act of 1875 was interpreted.

SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT said, he had no reason whatever to object to the desire of the hon. Member to amend this clause in any way he thought desirable; but he would ask the Commit[Eighth Night.]

Ꮓ