Ireland, represented by the new National Party, under Mr. Butt, gained little during 1875, but she gained something. Under a Liberal Government half the Home Rule Party could have been bribed by places into silence. But an ostentatiously hostile Tory Ministry could not offer them places, and yet they had to be quieted somehow, for the Irish people had by this time lost faith in their insincere Parliamentary action. Fenian agents were telling the Irish peasantry that they could expect no concessions unless they extorted them by revolution. The Government, accordingly, relaxed the existing Coercion Acts, and the debate on one of these--the Westmeath Act--was, on the 22nd of April, 1875, rendered historic by the intervention of Mr. Biggar, who talked against time for five hours, by the simple device of reading long extracts from Blue Books.[85] Shortly after this feat, Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, a young Wicklow squire, who had been educated at Cambridge, and was notable for his shyness, his aristocratic reserve, and his faltering and confused speech, took his seat as Member for Meath, in succession to John Martin, who had died. Nothing was known of him save that he had the reputation of being a Protestant landlord who was on good terms with his tenants, that from his mother--a daughter of the celebrated Commodore Stewart of the United States Navy--he had inherited Republican ideas, that he was a lover of field sports, and that he was a cadet of the family of which his great-grandfather, Sir John Parnell, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in 1782, was a distinguished member, and the head of which was the present Lord Congleton. That his beautiful estate of Avondale was heavily mortgaged was _not_ regarded as noteworthy. Mr. Joseph Gillies Biggar, whose quaint b_ourgeois_ humour had already made him, if not the favourite, at least one of the privileged “diversions” of the House, and who was destined to be Mr. Parnell’s coadjutor in organising the largest and most powerful Irish National Party of the Victorian period, was a prosperous provision-dealer, of Scottish extraction, trading in Belfast. His experience of affairs had been gained as Chairman of the local Water Board.