Lord Lansdowne, on the second reading, gave three reasons why the Bill should not be incontinently rejected by the Peers. In the first place, it came to them, he said, supported by an enormous majority in the other House, "and their Lordships always desired to treat attentively and respectfully Bills which came to them with such a recommendation." Secondly, the late Government, as well as the present, had pledged themselves to a measure of reinstatement of some kind, and if they threw out the Bill on a second reading "it would be said that they had receded from a kind of understanding arrived at in 1903," and lastly, "the summary rejection of the Bill might greatly increase the difficulties of the Executive Government in Ireland." One would have thought that the fact that the Bill was given a second reading did little to exonerate the Upper House from similar consequences as a result of their mutilation of the Bill in Committee. In its final form the Act allows an appeal on questions of value from the inspector, to two Estates Commissioners, and from them to Mr. Justice Wylie, sitting as Judicial Commissioner with a valuer. On questions of price there is no appeal from him. Other appeals, on questions of law and fact, are, by Section 6, to be heard by a Judge of the King's Bench, with whom rests the final decision whether a particular planter is or is not to be evicted. Demesne lands and other lands, purchase of which would interfere with the value of adjoining property, are omitted from the scope of the statute, and its operation is limited to the case of 2,000 tenants, whose claims must be disposed of within four years. The power vested in the Estates Commissioners compulsorily to acquire untenanted land, not necessarily their former holdings, for the reinstatement of the evicted tenants, is of no practical value in the case of the Clanricarde estate, since all the land on it is occupied, and the fact that on that plague-spot--the nucleus of the whole disturbance--no settlement will be possible under the Act, shows to what an extent was justified Mr. Birrell's declaration that the final form of the statute was a triumph for Lord Clanricarde, and affords a curious commentary on the repeated declarations of the Unionist leaders, that nothing was further from their desire than to effect the wrecking of the Bill.[10] Rejection of similar measures of relief--notably the Tenants' Compensation Bill of 1880--has led in the past to a recrudescence of strife in Ireland, and Mr. Balfour's unworthy retort to Mr. Redmond's deduction from every precedent in the history of the struggle for the land, that it was an incitement to lawlessness, was a mere partisan retort to an avowal of a danger which every unbiassed observer must see arises from the betrayal by the House of Lords of a confidence in a final settlement which was formerly encouraged by a Conservative Govern merit.