I wonder if it was by accident or artifice that Mr. BRACE began his plea for the miners with the admission that they had only dropped the demand for the reduction of fourteen shillings and twopence in the price of domestic coal when they discovered that "the money was not there." Anyhow the laughter that ensued served to put Members into a good temper and to cause them to lend a friendly ear to his suggestion that the two shillings advance, though in his view only "dust in the balance," should be "temporarily" conceded, pending the establishment of a tribunal which should permanently settle the conditions of the mining industry. The increase of output which everyone desired would then be brought about. Most of the speakers who followed seemed to think that Mr. BRACE had sown the seed of a settlement. It was left to the PRIME MINISTER, who evidently did not relish the task, to awaken the House from its beautiful dream. He pointed out that to accept the proposal would be to give the miners what they had originally claimed, without any guarantee that the greater output would be forthcoming. If it were not forthcoming and the two shillings were taken away, what would happen? "A strike," cried someone. "Precisely," said Mr. LLOYD GEORGE; only it would have been provoked by the Government instead of by the miners. He was not prepared to do business on those lines. And so the debate came to an end rather than a conclusion. _Wednesday, October 20th._--The Peers plunged into the morasses of the Irish Question. Lord CREWE asked for an official inquiry into the alleged "reprisals" and particularly instanced the attacks upon the creameries. Rather than that Ireland should be "pacified" by such methods as these he would see her engaged in civil war, "fairly conducted on both sides." From these words it may be gathered that his lordship's knowledge of civil war is happily not extensive. Furnished with a voluminous brief from the Irish Office, Lord CURZON made a long reply, the purport of which was that many of the reprisals were bogus, many were actions undertaken in self-defence, while the rest were generally due to men "seeing red" after their comrades had been brutally murdered. The Government did not palliate such cases, and had instituted inquiries and taken disciplinary action against the offenders, when known; but they were not prepared to set up a public inquiry such as Lord CREWE had demanded. It would only substitute "a competition in perjury" for the present "competition in murder"--a somewhat infelicitous phrase by which, as he subsequently explained, he did not mean to imply, as Lord PARMOOR suggested, that police and rebels were engaged in a murderous rivalry.