Then, when the vote for the Irish Police was moved, Lord Randolph Churchill and the Fourth Party vanished into the background, and left the work of obstruction to the Parnellites, who kept it up till one o’clock in the afternoon of the following day (Friday, the 27th of August). The debate was at this stage adjourned till next Monday, when, after further discussion, the vote was carried. During these exciting and troublous scenes Mr. Gladstone was absent from the House of Commons. He had fallen ill on the 4th of July, and had gone for a cruise in one of Sir Donald Currie’s steamers, the _Grantully Castle_, to recover his health. During his absence his duties were taken up by Lord Hartington, who led the House till Mr. Gladstone was able to reappear on the 3rd of September. On the 6th of September Parliament was prorogued. But during the recess the condition of Ireland grew worse and worse. The landlords, dreading the forthcoming Land Bill, pressed on evictions. The Land League urged the people to refuse to pay rack rents, and the League had by this time become so powerful, that it could enforce its decrees almost as surely as if it had been the regular Government of the country. Its favourite weapon of coercion was to pronounce against bailiff or landlord, land agent or “land grabber”--_i.e._, a man who offered to take a farm from which the tenant had been unjustly evicted--sentence of social ostracism. The victim of this sentence was not assaulted or outraged, but he was treated as if he were a leper by his neighbours, and the system came to be known as “boycotting.”[165] Boycotting was indignantly assailed in England, and yet it was in itself a mark of progress. Just as slavery in primitive warfare was an improvement on cannibalism as a means of disposing of prisoners, so boycotting, carefully carried out within the law, was an improvement on assassination as a means of agrarian coercion. But the demand for retaliatory measures against the Parnellites was loud and strong among the upper and middle classes. Mr. Forster at last yielded to it, and it was in vain that Mr. Bright protested in one of his speeches that “force was no remedy.” Outrages increased in Ireland. The ladies of the Tory aristocracy, and some of the great Whig families, made arrangements for devoting their _salons_ during the coming Session, to a social campaign against Mr. Chamberlain and the Radical section of the Cabinet. On the 2nd of November, 1880, the Irish Attorney-General filed an indictment of nineteen counts, against Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, and various leaders of the Land League, for conspiring to incite tenants not to pay rent or take farms from which the occupiers had been evicted, but the trial, after lasting for twenty days, broke down, because the jury could not agree on a verdict. Ere the year ended it was known that the Cabinet, though it had nearly been broken up by the decision, had at last consented to let Mr.