The debates in Parliament were rendered memorable by the appearance of a cool and adroit gladiator on the Irish benches, whose business-like methods of attacking the Prisons Bill in Committee extorted admiration from all old Parliamentary hands. This was Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell. It was known to be his intention to obstruct the Prisons Bill, in defiance of the wishes of Mr. Butt, the leader of the Irish Party. But it was assumed that a combination of the two great English Parties would easily crush opposition of the frivolous and factious order with which Mr. Beresford Hope and a section of the Tories had met Mr. Forster’s Ballot Bill.[100] But Mr. Parnell had evidently foreseen this contingency, and he met it by inventing a higher and more scientific type of obstruction than Mr. Hope had been capable of devising. His obstruction paralysed the two front benches, because he took care that it was not frivolous. He had evidently spent many nights and days in the minute dissection of the Bill, and he had manifestly toiled without stint in reading up the whole question of Prison discipline. It was not till he had made himself master of the entire subject that he intervened in the Debates, and then the House, to its amazement, found that the Home Secretary himself, when pitted against this bland young Irish squire with his soft voice, his lugubrious intonation, his funereal manner, and dull, prosaic Gradgrind-like form of speech, was but a poor amateur wriggling in the firm grip of a pitiless expert. To the dismay of the three leaders of the House--Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Hartington, and Mr. Butt--there was no easy means of getting rid of Mr. Parnell, simply because his amendments--and their name was legion--were not vamped up. Nay, with Machiavelian ingenuity he had draughted them so skilfully that most of them appealed strongly to the sympathies of other sections of the House than those connected with Ireland. Indeed, but for the persistency with which Mr. Parnell and one or two of his friends “bored” the House with the sufferings of certain Fenian prisoners under discipline, one would have thought that his treatment of the Bill was simply that of an English country gentleman, who had made himself an authority on the question, and had a genuine desire to eliminate from it stupid provisions which had been palmed off on a credulous Home Secretary. Nor was it in mastery of detail and skill of draughtsmanship alone that Mr. Parnell showed himself formidable. His ingenuity in inventing amendments drawn on lines that appealed to English popular feeling was inexhaustible. If at one moment the Home Secretary found himself contending with Mr. Parnell in the guise of a healthy-minded Tory squire, who was a hater of centralisation and a champion of the rights of visiting justices, at another he found himself battling with a philanthropist in whom the spirit of Howard lived again. Few who witnessed the long duel between Mr. Cross and Mr.