such inspector being appointed for every 100,000 inhabitants, to overlook public-houses, and see that the law was enforced. The Bill set up no rating qualification in the case of public-houses. A rating qualification only existed in the case of beer-houses, and with this the Bill would not interfere. Inasmuch, however, as there was reason to believe that many of the worst-conducted beer-houses existed under false pretences, the Bill would give the magistrates power to institute a special valuation, which would weed out a number of low houses. The Bill might be called a moderate measure, but it would diminish the tendency to an undue multiplication of public-houses, and simplify the .existing law, without interfering with the just rights of property.

In the course of the debate on the second reading the Bishop of Peterborough (Dr. Magee) made a remarkable and courageous speech. He pleaded for the right of the ratepayers to have some voice in the regulation of the liquor traffic, by giving them representatives on the Licensing Boards, but he said incidentally that he was not only not pleading for the principle of the Permissive Bill, but that he abhorred it :-" If I were given the choice, I should say that it would be much better that England should be free than that England should be sober,-for with freedom we must eventually obtain sobriety, but on the other hand we should lose both freedom and sobriety together."

The Bill, however, passed through Parliament with but little debate and almost without alteration. Sir Wilfred Lawson denounced it as a very weak Bill, but the Licensed Victuallers accepted it as a compromise; and a rival Bill, introduced by Sir H. Selwin Ibbetson, was ultimately withdrawn. The first part of the new statute relates to illicit sales of spirits, and declares the penalties to be enforced; and the penalties for drunkenness are increased from 108. for a first, to 40s. for subsequent offences. The Act then imposes penalties on adulteration of liquors with "coculus indicus, chloride of sodium (otherwise common salt), copperas, opium, Indian hemp, strychnine, tobacco, darnel seed, extract of logwood, salts of zinc or lead, alum, &c." On the vexed question of the hours of closing, the Act provides that they shall be in the City of London or liberties thereof, or any parish subject to the Metropolitan Board of Works, or within four miles radius from Charing Cross, on Sunday, Christmas Day, and Good Friday, during the whole day before one o'clock, and between three and six o'clock in the afternoon, and after the hour of eleven of the clock at night, and on other days before five o'clock on the following morning shall be closed; if situated beyond those places, on Sunday, Christmas Day, and Good Friday, during the whole day before the hour of half-past twelve (or, if the licensing justices direct, one) in the afternoon, and between the hours of half-past two (or, if one be the hour of opening, then three) and six in the afternoon, and after the hour of ten (or if the licensing justices direct, any hour not earlier than nine and not later than eleven) at night; and on all other

1872.]

Justice Keogh's Judgment on the Galway Election.

[79

days before the hour of six (or if the licensing justices direct, any hour not earlier than five, and not later than seven) in the morning and after the hour of eleven (or if the licensing justices direct, any hour not earlier than ten and not later than twelve) at night.

This effort to make people virtuous by Act of Parliament created at first great excitement out of doors. During the progress of the Bill Lord Kimberley and Mr. Bruce were waited upon by a number of deputations to urge upon them changes and modifications in its provisions; and on its coming into operation, as it did immediately on receiving the Royal Assent, riots that threatened to be serious greeted it in many parts of the country. At great meetings held in London and the principal provincial towns the general feeling was expressed with sufficient clearness. Oxford and Exeter were prominent in opposition to the Act; but opposition did not induce the magistrates to show themselves willing to avail themselves of the discretion vested in them with reference to the hours of closing.

At the general annual licensing meeting of the borough of Folkesstone, intimation was given to the publicans that in future 11 p.m. would be the hour of closing. On Saturday evening (August 31) a number of fishermen, roughs, &c., assembled at the lower part of the town, many of them carrying large bottles and cans of beer, which they took to the front of the Pavilion Hotel. Lights were burning in some of the rooms of the hotel, and the crowd demanded that as the "little houses" were closed the "large ones" should follow their example. Stones were thrown and several windows broken. The crowd, after hooting, singing, and making hideous noises outside the hotel for about half an hour, paraded through the town to the other hotels, and some lights being visible in the windows of the Albion, several panes of glass were broken by the rioters.

The magistrates of Stroud adopted the Act with such rigour, that by a reading of their own they will succeed in entirely closing, after the present year, nearly every full licensed public-house in the district. At Liverpool, Norwich, Colchester, Coventry, York, and other towns, memorials very largely and influentially signed were rejected, and a resolution of the Oxford magistrates to alter the hours of closing to half-past eleven on weekdays and half-past ten on Sundays, was almost a solitary exception to the rule of Spartan severity. In the City of London the Licensing Act was put into operation without difficulty of any kind; but the general and widespread discontent aroused by this measure do not seem likely to pass away with the riots which were its first consequence in many parts of the country.

During the laborious weeks which preceded the Prorogation, the progress of business was interrupted by an exciting debate on an Irish topic which had created much interest in the country. An account of the Galway election has been given in a preceding chapter. The petition against Captain Nolan's return was heard by Mr. Justice Keogh, who gave his decision in a judgment which occupied nine consecutive hours, with an interval of a quarter of

an hour only, and unseated Captain Nolan on the ground that his election was procured by undue influence and clerical intimidation. The judgment was conceived in a very one-sided spirit, and couched in very passionate and undignified language, and while it condemned with great force and just severity the high sacerdotal influence used in favour of Captain Nolan, and invalidated his election, on account both of the physical and the spiritual terrorism exercised on his behalf, it justified the counter-combination of the landlords for Captain Trench, and had nothing but panegyric for their conduct in the election. After reviewing the state of things in the county, and the circumstances preceding the recent election, the learned judge deals with the question of treating and the question of the undue influence of the Roman Catholic clergy. Briefly disposing of the first of those questions, he goes on to the second, some fortyfive pages of the judgment as printed being devoted to the analysis of the conduct of a number of individual priests in the matter of the election, and as witnesses in the court before him. His comments on this conduct are strong and severe, and he sums up his determination thus:-"I shall state to the House of Commons the result of all the evidence that I have now investigated as regards the organized system of intimidation which has pervaded this county in every quarter, in every direction, in every barony, in every town, in every place. I shall report to the House of Commons that the Archbishop of Tuam, the Bishop of Galway, the Bishop of Clonfert, all the clergymen whose cases I have gone through, and who have not appeared (with one exception, which I tore out of my paper lest I should make any mistake about it), and all the clergy who have appeared, with, I think, a few exceptions, which I will look most carefully into (I observe that the English judges have frequently reserved that power as to particular cases), have been guilt of an organized attempt to defeat the free franchise and the free votes of the electors of this county, and that Captain Nolan by himself, and Mr. Sebastian Nolan, his brother, as his agent, in company with all those episcopal and clerical persons whom I shall set out by name, have been guilty of these practices; and I will guard the franchises of the people of this county for seven years, at least, for the statute will not allow any one of those persons to be again engaged in conducting or managing an election, or canvassing for a candidate aspiring to be the representative of Galway."

In the course of this judgment Judge Keogh said that the Galway election presented "the most astonishing attempt at ecclesiastical tyranny which the whole history of priestly intolerance afforded." He also defended Oliver Cromwell from the abuse to which his name had been exposed " by the vile tongue of that audacious and mendacious priest, Father Conway." He said the gentry had been hunted through the fields by "the fellows who followed that obscene monster, Pat Barrett." He spoke of an agent of Father Loftus as a man "called upon to vamp up the debauched evidence of that priest," and altogether used language apparently intended to convey

the passion of a partisan rather than the reprobation of a judge. He expressed his intention of reporting that Archbishop M'Hale and two of his bishops had been guilty of using undue influence in the election, and spoke of Captain Nolan's great crowd of 2800 supporters as "mindless cowards, instruments in the hands of ecclesiastical despots."

The excitement aroused in Ireland by the delivery of this judgment was unbounded, and furnished a rare theme to the journalists. Never was a public man, not to say one of the judges of the land, an object of such unmeasured abuse as Mr. Justice Keogh. It poured upon him in torrents from all the Roman Catholic journals, whether professing Liberal, National, or Fenian politics. Their differences were for the time forgotten, and they all joined with hearty zeal in a chorus of execrations. All the old stores of vituperation which they had kept in reserve for special occasions were searched for epithets to express their rage and fury. The Freeman complained that neither prelate nor priest escaped the " torrent of vituperation which foamed in increasing volumes from the judgmentseat," and contrasted the "courtly phrases applied to the aristocratic prosecutor of the prelates and priests of Galway and the insolence of judicial insult indulged in against the prelates of the people." It even asserted, as a matter of fact, that "the organized attempt of the bishops and priests to put down freedom of election, which the most learned Judge asserts to have been proved before him, and on which he bases his judgment, existed only in the extravagant harangues of the lawyers and the excited fancy of the Judge." The cry of the Freeman was caught up in the provinces, and repeated with all the vehemence of the weekly press. Some of the journals engaged in this exercise every day, and devoted not one but several articles to the subject. The Nation was especially profuse in its invective. It said the "scandalous speech" of the learned Judge "has excited throughout the length and breadth of Ireland feelings of the most profound disgust and indignation;" that "the blood boils in the veins of honest men as they read his villanous diatribe against the clergy of Ireland, and some of the most illustrious and venerated members of their sacred order." There is "no good Irishman living," it said, "who does not feel, like a personal wound and insult, the outrage offered by that swaggering upstart, the pledge-breaker of Athlone, the whilom friend, companion, and political conspirator of John Sadleir, to the great and good Archbishop of Tuam." It described the whole proceeding as "the Galway plot," got up by the Galway landlords to have revenge of the bishops and priests, and to ruin Captain Nolan by piling up the costs of a deliberately protracted inquiry.

The Irishman described the rhetoric of the Judge as "plainly modelled after that of Jeffreys," and the Weekly News assailed it as "like the man himself, coarse, vulgar, insolent, impudent, and outrageously truculent." A subscription was started for Captain Nolan, the results of which were not quite adequate to the general

G

enthusiasm. Justice Keogh was burned in effigy in many parts of the country. The Catholic Clergy, under the presidency of Cardinal Cullen, published a long protest in the form of an Address to the Catholics of the Archdiocese of Dublin. The meeting of clergy at which it was adopted was held with closed doors. Its tone may be judged from the keynote which is struck in the opening passage:— "Dear Brethren,-A great scandal has come upon us. A judge -a professing Catholic, clothed in the ermine of calm reason and matured wisdom-is reported to have uttered from the judgmentseat words of fiercest insult-words which have roused up the sleeping monster of bigotry throughout the Empire, which have been echoed back to us from England in menaces of renewed persecution, which have brought disgrace on the cause of justice, and filled the friends. of discord and disloyalty with unutterable joy."

It alludes to the wise policy of English modern statesmen, which had "done much to rear up a throne for justice in the affections of the people of Ireland," and states that the events of the past few days have well-nigh shattered that throne by "rousing into almost unprecedented indignation the feelings of a whole nation." For centuries the Bench was regarded by the people as the stronghold of their oppressors, until better times came round, and they began to look at it as the seat of impartial justice; but the words of passion which have lately come from it have done much to awaken the memories of wrongs which they were willing to forget. Only those who are conversant with their inner feelings can sound the depths of their indignation. They feel that "the laws of decency have been violated in order that their reverence for religion might be wounded," that "by the unjustifiable language of a public officer, paid by their industry to administer justice, their religion has been blasphemed throughout the Empire." The Address goes on to say that the clergy do not feel called on to canvass the merits of the decision at which the Judge arrived, and leave to others the task of criticizing it, if criticism be called for; but they enter their "solemn protest against the outrage on all propriety implied in the most unbecoming language, which the reports of the public journals put into his mouth." They "with unfeigned indignation repudiate the calumnious misrepresentation by which it is attempted to be established that the priesthood of Ireland was prepared to prostitute the most sacred institution of religion to the unworthy purposes of low political intrigue." In the strongest terms which the sanctity of the place in which they stood would allow, they resented the tone of the "harangue," which was full of "insults to the religion and honour of the people." There was nothing so sacred that it could hope to escape the "sacrilegious invasion of this wild effusion." The Holy Father was sneered at, the national priesthood maligned, the discipline of the Church distorted, the unhappy cleric who was dragged before the tribunal "mimicked to cause amusement for his enemies." The following passage is suggestive :

was