"I also well remember the change of front about the power of Search. The Irish Members in the most determined manner fought against the creation of this power.... Harcourt, who had charge of the Bill, would listen to none of these arguments, but Mr. Gladstone was much moved by them. There was almost a crisis produced in consequence of this disagreement; but Harcourt gave way, and the concession was announced." It is not my purpose in these chapters to speak about my own performances in Parliament, but the foregoing allusion to the concession on the Right of Search tempts me to a personal confession. In the Bill, as brought in, there was a most salutary provision giving the police the right to search houses in which murders were believed to be plotted. After making us vote for this clause three times--on the First Reading, on the Second Reading, and in Committee--the Government, as we have just seen, yielded to clamour, and proposed on Report to alter the clause by limiting the Right of Search to day-time. I opposed this alteration, as providing a "close time for murder," and had the satisfaction of helping to defeat the Government. The Big-Wigs of the Party were extremely angry, and Mr. R. H. Hutton, in _The Spectator_, rebuked us in his most grandmotherly style. In reply, I quoted some words of his own. "There is nothing which injures true Liberalism more than the sympathy of its left wing with the loose ruffianism of unsettled States." "Such a State," I said, "is Ireland; and if, under the pressure of extraordinary difficulties, Ministers vacillate or waver in their dealings with it, the truest Liberalism, I believe, is that which holds them firmly to their duty." In that sad Session of 1882 the troubles of the Government "came not single spies, but in battalions," and the most enduring of those troubles arose in Egypt. For the benefit of a younger generation, let me recall the circumstances.