Smith, a vote taken, and the Address disposed of on the 17th of February. The Government lost no time in preparing to meet the obstruction with which their Coercion Bill was already threatened. They circulated their new rules for debates, and on the 21st of February Mr. W. H. Smith moved the adoption of the Closure, vesting the initiative in applying it not in the Speaker, which was the old rule, but in a bare majority of the House, provided always that at least 200 Members voted for it. The Liberal Leaders supported the proposal on principle, but complained that the new rule was still too weak, and that it ought to be applied unconditionally. Their view was confirmed in the following year, when Mr. W. H. Smith was forced to reduce the necessary quorum of 200 to 100. Meanwhile events had been moving apace in Ireland. The Chief Secretary, Sir M. Hicks-Beach, finding that the landlords were cruelly straining their rights against the poorer tenantry, urged them to be merciful for the sake of peace. He put upon them what he called “pressure within the law,” which practically meant that he hinted to them that he would refuse them the aid of the police in enforcing warrants of the Courts. In other words, he seemed to be exercising the “dispensing power” of the Executive, little more than a year after Mr. Morley had been forced to apologise for even suggesting its exercise. In Ireland evictions were resisted by force, and lurid pictures of the state of the country were drawn by the supporters of the Government. The prosecution of Mr. Dillon and other Irish leaders for a conspiracy to defeat the law, because they advocated the Plan of Campaign, broke down through the disagreement of a Dublin jury. The negotiations between the Liberal Unionists and Liberals at the “Round Table Conference” were said to be producing happy results, and it was soon noised abroad that the Government not only hesitated to demand a Coercion Bill, but that Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was ruling the Irish with a hand so light that they were lapsing into lawlessness. The _Times_ published a series of articles designed to prove that Mr. Parnell and the Irish Home Rule Members were secretly in league with the Party of Assassination. Mutterings of mutiny were heard from the Irish Tories, and at this crisis Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, against whom these complaints were directed, suddenly resigned. This step, however, had been rendered necessary in consequence of his failing eyesight rather than from considerations of a political character. To his post Lord Salisbury appointed his nephew, Mr. Arthur James Balfour, pledged to carry out an unflinching policy of Coercion. Sir George Trevelyan, one of the secessionists from the Liberal Party, about this time showed by his public utterances that he had now returned to Mr. Gladstone’s party.