The progress of the Crimes Bill was more hotly contested than ever in the committee stage, which extended over twenty-four sittings of the House. Clauses were {180} fought word by word, sentence by sentence. The Bill was read a third time on July 8th, and was passed by the Lords four days later, receiving the Royal Assent on the following day. In less than a week 17 counties were proclaimed; and by the beginning of August 170 suspects were in custody. On July 21st the Arrears Bill passed the Commons by 169 to 98. Lord Eversley (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) rightly observes that instead of appealing to justice Mr. Gladstone based his support of the Bill on expediency. For years tenants had been burdened with excessive rents on land which their efforts had raised from prairie value. The wiping out of the accumulated arrears of these unjust rents could hardly be termed a mere act of expediency. On July 31st the Lords returned the Bill to the Commons cut to pieces. Certain minor concessions were made, and the Bill was sent back otherwise in its original form. When next it appeared in the Lords the Irish landlord peers revolted. The Bill promised them part payment of what they had looked upon as a bad debt; and so--not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of that bait of two years' rent--they supported the Bill, which was passed by the Lords on August 10th. On or about August 18th, when it became law, fifty suspects were released. I had addressed an appeal to Mr. Gladstone against the death sentence passed upon a young Irishman on very doubtful evidence. On September 14th he wrote saying that he would certainly bring the appeal under the notice of Lord Spencer. I was in correspondence with Mr. Gladstone throughout November of this year. Ireland did not figure largely in the Parliamentary legislation of 1883, though a number of minor Irish Bills, on tramways, fisheries and so forth, which received the {181} support of Parnell, were carried. Parnell's position in Ireland was impregnable, but the extremists in America were exasperated by his constitutional agitation. Early in 1883 Patrick Ford started a dynamite crusade against England in the _Irish World_, and attempts were actually made to blow up public buildings in London, while a nitro-glycerine factory was discovered in Birmingham. Immediately an Explosives Bill of the most drastic character was introduced by Sir William Harcourt and rushed through the Commons in a single sitting. The Irish Party offered no opposition.