Such are the difficulties of this crisis. To a great extent they are of your own making. And what have you done in order to get out of them? Great statesmen have sometimes committed great mistakes, and yet have by wisdom and firmness extricated themselves from the embarrassments which those mistakes had caused. Let us see whether you are entitled to rank among such statesmen. And first, what,--commanding, as you do, a great majority in this and in the other House of Parliament,--what have you done in the way of legislation? The answer is very short and simple. The beginning and end of all your legislation for Ireland will be found in the Arms Act of last session. You will hardly call that conciliation; and I shall not call it coercion. It was mere petty annoyance. It satisfied nobody. We called on you to redress the wrongs of Ireland. Many of your own friends called on you to stifle her complaints. One noble and learned person was so much disgusted by your remissness that he employed his own great abilities and his own valuable time in framing a new coercion bill for you. You were deaf alike to us and to him. The whole fruit of your legislative wisdom was this one paltry teasing police regulation. Your executive administration through the whole recess has been one long blunder. The way in which your Lord Lieutenant and his advisers acted about the Clontarf meeting would alone justify a severe vote of censure. The noble lord, the Secretary for the Colonies (Lord Stanley.), has told us that the Government did all that was possible to caution the people against attending that meeting, and that it would be unreasonable to censure men for not performing impossibilities. Now, Sir, the ministers themselves acknowledge that, as early as the morning of the Friday which preceded the day fixed for the meeting, the Lord Lieutenant determined to put forth a proclamation against the meeting. Yet the proclamation was not published in Dublin and the suburbs till after nightfall on Saturday. The meeting was fixed for the Sunday morning. Will any person have the hardihood to assert that it was impossible to have a proclamation drawn up, printed and circulated, in twenty-four hours, nay in six hours? It is idle to talk of the necessity of weighing well the words of such a document. The Lord Lieutenant should have weighed well the value of the lives of his royal mistress's subjects. Had he done so, there can be no doubt that the proclamation might have been placarded on every wall in and near Dublin early in the forenoon of the Saturday. The negligence of the Government would probably have caused the loss of many lives but for the interposition of the man whom you are persecuting. Fortune stood your friend; and he stood your friend; and thus a slaughter more terrible than that which took place twenty-five years ago at Manchester was averted.