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Show I ' '- PEEKS VERSUS PEOPLE. I The Lord's Irish Record. I : Reviewing the record of the house of lords In regard to Ireland in recent ' times, Mr. Harold Spender in the Daily Chronicle, after pointing out that ail j Irish land bills introduced prior to 1SS0 1 were either killed or withdrawn )t through the opposition of the lords, ; says that those refusals were followed I - by reverberating sequels in the Fenian I 't rising, and the Clerkenwell explosion, i !' It required the roar of gunpowder to i make the English people listen to jus- tlce, and the same agent that broke I the door of the Clerkenwell prison I wnashed the Irish church, and the Irish t ; .landlords. IMr. Gladstone's land bill of 1870 the lords' amendments destroyed for all 1 practical purposes, and when in 18S0 IMr. Gladstone first attempted to moet the Irish land crisis by introducing a "compensation for disturbance bill," pivlng to the evicted tenants the mere Just solace of payment for their own I improvements, the lord? threw it out by I 1 sn immense majority, thus sanctioning I the heavy crime of robbing the famirie- 1 stricken. I After describing how the peers finally I beat Mr. Gladstone on the home rule 1 r-'i issue in 1S93, after eight years' strug- I pie. Mr. Spender concludes: "Since then 1 Ireland has gone on bleeding steadily " 1 ti death weaker every year in popu- la-tion, resources, energy and hope. It Js the only great victory of which the lords now openly dare to boast. There are pome of us who still regard It as perhaps the greatest crime of all. It !ls characteristic of that body that its greatest memory should be the extinction extinc-tion of a nation's hope. |