{COMMONS} the by drunken parents. He knew that an administrative w objection was made to any law which was taken to the prevented pawnbrokers from taking little of the machine children's clothes, because it was said an attempt was that the parents might wish to raise money on the clothes of dead children duced which was moment or cast-off suits. But in cases the parents would those efficiently and t to pawn them, but to sell, as they great not want sorts of objecti could get a better price than it was by the 1 social Ο possible to get on a pawn ticket. He was land, or else so ! hon. told that in many cases children were the liberty of provided with clothes for the purpose by many Member of going to church, chapel, or Sunday however, impossibl school, but on Monday morning the without breaking drunken father or mother took the social reform of tl clothes and pawned them till the follow- carried out witho ing Saturday. He thought it would personal liberty, a be a good provision to prohibit pawn- good deal that m brokers from taking children's clothes in enough in ordinary pawn. He understood that in some parts rescue " Oliver Twi of the country, and he believed in Edin- of "Fagin." and burgh, the police acted in conjunction might become neces with the charitable organisations to Nell" away prevent the pawning of children's clothes. With regard to from As to the question of fireguards, the it was accounts of accidents were terrible. Fireguards were extremely chesp, and a great many benevolent people were quite willing to provide them in cases where the parents were too poor to do so. The charges of overlying were often of a very serious character. He heard not long ago of a case where a woman had lost four or five children in this way in succession and apparently did not care whether they died or lived. He welcomed the Bill. and hoped it would soon pass through the House, for he believed it met with general approval. Bill interfered with *SIR HENRY CRAIK (Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities pointed out that under the present condition of discussion after what he had seen it was impossible for these Members no change was called who were not on this particular Com- not understand thei mittee to which this Bill would be was the same with rega referred to have anything to say as to remedy proposed for the form the B weeld take, excert evi ceuli not be re in the present Lintel discussion, though something that would s Tan of them were interested in the the hearts of the careles subject, and had spent their lives in sdg schemes to amellerste the con- food etitions on the children. One thing that had drastic machinery, whi were neglectful of their That could on Stres him in the course of the debate was apt to be ejected to that the ticisms on the Bill had all with personal liberty. bilovat a very sal case. It was dested to dress on th the experience of a cestomed to was that it woul EAKER The bo his risen to a point Deputy-Speaker statement should A cries of OFER: It was I not think Hon. Member RIL 1908} people. He challenged any hon. Member on the Orange benches to get up and say it was so; but, if the hon. Gentleman above the gangway could produce evidence of reasonable ground for suspicion that there was a local Sergeant Sheridan in the case and of police complicity in this outrage, they would do their honest best to help them to track down the criminal policeman and have him punished, although they could. not promise to assent to the immunity and hush money that Sergeant Sheridan and his satellites got from the Unionist Government. But, if there was no allegation of police complicity in this 1 case, why should they have this forensic howl against District-Inspector Preston's Report? If he wanted anything to justify the phrase he had used, which might have been strong, and to which e the hon. and learned Gentleman had 1 taken objection, he could not do better s than quote two or three phrases used by County Court Judge Fitzgerald in delivering judgment in censure of Disdtrict-Inspector Preston. He alluded to y what he called the egregrious document of which had been called the Report of Disotrict-Inspector Preston, and then said as to whether the window was open or not at the time of the explosion. DistrictInspector Preston was of opinion that it was, and he was confirmed in that opinion by the evidence of the Home Office expert. He noticed that Mr. Justice Kenny, in his summing up, said he had three experts on one side and one on the other, and that other things being equal he would prefer the opinion of the three experts to the one. What did that amount to? It was as if after a railway collision the Board of Trade sent down its special inspector to make a report as soon as possible after the accident, and that then when somebody injured in the collision brought an action for damages against the Company he could bring up three experts who were not on the spot for weeks or months, when everything was put in order and tidied up, and the Judge told the jury to prefer the opinion of the three experts to the independent expert who was there as soon as possible after the disaster. Again, County -Inspector Jennings said, and this was going to lead him up to a graver chapter of his argument by and by with the Report against which County | nings was dead against the DistrictCourt Judge Fitzgerald fulminated and Inspector. The only difference of opinion raved so voluminously, and he found that between County-Inspector Jennings and so far from the original Report being District-Inspector Preston was milder than the one upon which very largely the County Court Judge had to adjudicate, the Report before him was a milk-and-water Bowdlerised edition of the Report originally sent in by Mr. Preston, and that if the Report before the County Court Judge was cooked at all it was cooked handsomely in Lord Ashtown's favour. He would exhaust his time if he alluded to the many passages in the original Report which were omitted, in his opinion with gross impropriety, under Castle influence, from the Report upon which the original proceedings were taken, but there were two omissions to which he might call some attention. The inspector said, for instance, in his original Report that he was actually obstructed in the execution of his duty, and that he had difficulty in getting information. He said that Alice Cudd, the sister of the wife of Lord Ashtown's gamekeeper-the more they went into this Ashtown business the more they saw what a merry crowd and how closely related they were-who showed temper at being questioned at all, whose demeanour was flippant, gave impertinence to the District-Inspector who, in the ordinary discharge of his duty, had the audacity to ask her some questions as to the facts relating to the explosion. He said another thing, also omitted from the second edition, and he thought. this was a most important matter. Any man accustomed to study human nature and police cases and criminal trials would see its importance. The Inspector said, in his original Report— At this point it occurs to me to put upon paper what has struck me all along as unusual and not to be expected the fact that the women of the household had taken the whole matter calmly and had never shown the least sign of alarm or natural fear, quite the contrary." He put his own construction upon that, and it was that the ladies of the house were not in the least surprised and had some inkling of what was going to happen. But he would leave District-Inspector Preston's Report. The next sheet-anchor of the people who wanted to make this slur upon an Irish national movement was to say that County-Inspector Jen "Lord Ashtown suspects none of his Waterford tenantry for the outrage. He is of opinion that it was planned by some of his Woodlawn tenants, aided by someone in the neighbourhood of Glenahiery." This remarkable passage followed— "It is inconceivable how any man would risks of detection with practically four armed, approach the house, as in this instance, and run and experts in use of firearms, on the premises. I do not believe any of the natives would countenance or conceive such an outrage." It might be of interest that he should remind the House that Mr. Graham, the mysterious gamekeeper who belonged to Lord Ashtown's menage, was one of those rolling stones that gathered no mosS. He had never kept any responsible employment for any substantial period, and always appeared to treat Glenahiery as a safe harbour of refuge. He had furthermore, to dwell upon the fact that he had been several times in trouble with the police, and that actually since this outrage he had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment for wanton and unprovoked assault, and was, for some mysterious reason that he could not fathom, relieved by the authorities at Dublin Castle of the results. As he said, one sentence that he had just read in County-Inspector Jenning's Report led them up to a graver chapter in the case. They had been blamed for trying to connect the anonymous letters inciting certain Galway people to crime with the Glenahiery bomb outrage, and with Lord Ashtown. But who originally drew in the name of the Galway people to the Glenahiery business? It was Lord Ashtown himself. It was the explanation he gave to the local police. He did not believe any of his neighbours had done it. He said right out two or three times that it was the Woodlawn tenants, with whom he had had difficulties, who were responsible. Before he passed from that aspect of the case, he could not avoid reference to an ugly fact in Lord Ashtown's own conduct. At the first hearing of his claim for compensation he was asked, Was he, or was he not, responsible for an article describing the outrage and life generally in that neighbourhood, that appeared in a very respectable and widely-read weekly paper in London. He point-blank denied all knowledge of the article, of responsibility for it, or of having given his signature, and only at the last moment, when beaten to the ropes under cross-examination by the hon. and learned Member for South Louth, confronted with the presence, at the second trial, of a special representative sent over by that paper to be there and give him the lie from the witness chair, then and only then did he admit that his article in Answers was not a concoction, that he was responsible for it, that he did give his signature for it, and he was censured by Mr. Justice Kenny for his previous evasions. The utmost plea that could be entered for Lord Ashtown was that he was the victim of occasional acute paralysis of the mnemonic faculties. If hon. Members on the Orange Benches preferred that definition of his mental state, he was perfectly willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. It made no difference whatever as to the value of Lord Ashtown's testimony on oath, or the anti-Irish garbage which he retailed for the benefit of the Unionist Press in this country. What was the next fact they had to deal with? It was 1 66 that shortly afterwards a number of letters were posted from Dublin inciting certain Galway men in the precise locality Lord Ashtown had indicated as being the locality that had been most criminal in this outrage, inviting them to plant a bomb outside a local church with a view to injuring him. Those letters were written when Lord Ashtown himself was in Dublin, but more than that happened. Simultaneously he wrote to the police saying that he had good ground to believe that an attempt at this outrage would be made in Woodlawn on the very date bargained for in the letter sent to the Woodlawn people from Dublin. As the hon. Member for Galway had pointed out Lord Ashtown warned the police before he left Dublin, and the County Inspector went to Lord Ashtown and said: Where did you get the information upon which you applied for special police ambush against a proposed outrage upon a definite date? Will you show us the letter or give us the information upon which you proceeded?" But Lord Ashtown point blank refused. The few points he had tried to place before the House in themselves justified the Resolution he had moved, and however strong they might seem to some of his opponents he thought the case justified the words he had used in support of his Resolution. An active campaign was being directed at the present moment by certain hon. Members for Ireland, who were, so far as he knew, and he was happy to know it, the only body of legislators in any legislative assembly in the world who made it their daily task of joy to defame the country in which they lived, and the people they represented. He had never heard of an instance in any Parliament or in any country, where a regularly constituted political Party filled the Notice Paper of that Assembly with Questions tending to show that the people whom they represented were abnormally criminal and required abnormal measures of repression. Lord Ashtown in himself was not a very important individual, and the ratepayers who had been mulcted in a couple of hundred pounds would easily survive that infliction. The fine on those ratepayers, unjust as he believed it to be, was a mere trifle compared with the principle involved, which was that the one thing upon which all the local Wyrley case. There were many of those police, the District and County-Inspectors outrages, and the people who owned and constables alike, were agreed, was that there was no local feeling whatsoever against Lord Ashtown, and the utmost length that County Inspector Jennings-whom it had been attempted to play off against Inspector Prestoncould be got to go, was that when he was asked if he had any opinion as to whether the outrage was done by insiders or outsiders, he said that he would not express any opinion. He absolutely refused under pressure to say that he had any reason whatever to believe that the outrage was inspired by local animosity. With great respect he contended that it was a case for a sworn inquiry, which he felt sure would show that at the bottom of it there was something worse than had yet been revealed and for which responsibility should be tracked down. He begged to move. MR. POWER (Waterford, E.) said that the Glenahiery outrage had naturally excited great interest in Ireland, but it had excited in the constituency which he had the honour of representing a special interest. Hon. Members might not be aware that if an accidental fire occurred, or malicious injury was perpetrated in Ireland, the ratepayers of the district were called upon to pay the damage. In England no such law prevailed, and they hoped to lay before the House in a very few days a Bill for assimilating the law in Ireland in this respect to the law in England, and they would ask the support of hon. Members to bring the present state of things to an end. He had an exceptional opportunity last summer of witnessing how different the laws were in the two countries. He happened to be at Droitwich shortly after the occurrence at Glenahiery, and as Droitwich was a loquacious place that incident was talked about, and he heard all sorts of speculations as to what Ireland was coming to. Matthew Arnold once said that the born swallower of all clap-trap was the British Philistine, and they were well represented at Droitwich. It happened that about the same time in the Midlands there occurred a series of the most shocking mutilations of cattle and horses, including the great the mutilated horses and cattle had to bear the loss themselves or provide against it by insurance. There was one thing about those outrages which struck him, and it was that if anything like them had occurred in Ireland they would have been placarded not only over the whole of England, but possibly over the whole of the world. Fortunately for England, there was not an organisation in this country whose object it was to blacken the character of the English people. It was a very bad characteristic for any person to endeavour to blacken his own country, however bad it might be, but what were they to say of an organisation which took little or no care as to the truth or accuracy of the reports which they circulated broadcast, or of the pictures painted in lurid colours, which were calculated to injure Ireland with the object of imposing coercion upon that country. He might say on behalf of his colleagues and himself that they hated and detested that pandering to the base passions of any people. They did not like raking up those things, but when they went down to the constituencies of those hon. Members who were parading the shortcomings of Ireland, it was rather remarkable that they were able to show such a state of criminality that made the contrast most appalling. His hon. friend who had moved this Resolution had referred to District-Inspector Preston's Report. He did not intend to go into that subject at much length, but he wished to say that they held no brief to defend Inspector Preston, and all he would say was that he hoped he would never witness again such a painful exhibition and want of self-control as he witnessed at the Court where this case was tried. He remembered that District-Inspector Preston ventured to say a word, and in a most peremptory way he was told to sit down or he would be put out of Court. There happened to be slight applause in one of the galleries when he went up there, and the learned and impartial Judge told the police to clear out the ragamuffins, who, by the way, included such men as the Chairman of the County Council and other most respectable people. The same thing had occurred in other parts of Ireland. |