Early in the year the Government obtained the consent of Parliament to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, in order to enable the Executive to deal with the Fenian conspiracy. Mr. Mill, however, though he supported the Ministry, very pertinently observed that, after it got fresh powers, it must not go asleep, as it had done for eighteen years, over Irish grievances. The Bill was passed on the 17th of February. The next step was to obtain the Queen’s assent immediately. As her Majesty was at Osborne, this took time, and the Irish Executive could not brook delay. As soon as the House of Lords had read the Bill a third time, a telegram was sent to Earl Granville, who was at Osborne, announcing the result, upon the receipt of which the Queen instantly signed the document authorising the Commissioners to give her assent to the measure. In order to allow time for bringing her authorisation to London, the sitting of the House of Lords was suspended until 11 o’clock p.m., when it was calculated that the special train with the Queen’s messenger would arrive in London. Time, however, rolled on, but no messenger appeared. The hour of midnight struck. Then the clock chimed the half-hour after twelve, when there entered a clerk bearing a despatch-box, which the Chancellor nervously opened and from which he took out the long-expected document. The House of Commons having been summoned, and about fifty members answering the call, at twenty minutes to one o’clock on the Sunday morning the Queen’s sanction was proclaimed, and the Bill became law. Probably no statute was ever passed with so much celerity as this Irish Coercion Bill--the first Act of the new Parliament. The powers of the Act had indeed been put into operation in anticipation of its passing, and on the 16th of February a large number of arrests were made in Dublin and its vicinity. The mischief done by the alarms of this period was, however, irretrievable, but, with the cessation of active movements on the part of the Fenians, a feeling of contempt for the conspiracy took the place of panic. For a few months, therefore, the country appeared to subside into its usual tranquillity. On the 21st of March the Commissioners who had been investigating the negro outbreak in Jamaica finished their inquiry. The feeling in London was as violently in favour of repressive measures against the negroes, as it had been in favour of the Southerners during the American Civil War, and against the German Powers during the war in Sleswig-Holstein. It was therefore with some chagrin that the Party of Panic discovered that the Commissioners extenuated the action of the negroes. There had been a planned resistance to the Queen’s authority in Jamaica; but the chief cause was [Illustration: MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS HELENA. (_See p. 262._)]