If there is anybody who has reason to blush at the name of Mitchelstown, and to remember Mitchelstown apart from the blood that was shed there, I should think it is not I, but her Majesty's Government. They had neither the humanity to forbid these evictions, nor the courage to persevere with them. They superintended and sanctioned them as long as there was any prospect of resistance; they had the cowardice to abandou them the moment they threatened to become inconvenient to a Tory candidate, and they had the incredible meanness, while my hands were bound in prison, to present a story to the English people, in a false and untruthful guise, in order to reconcile Englishmen to having me treated worse than a thief or a cutthroat, for saving my own constituents from the fate which now the Land Commissioners and everybody on this earth acknowledge would have been a most unmerited and a most awful calamity. I won't weary the House by going into all the miserable circumstances, all the foul play, and the violence and the indecencies that were resorted to against us. Unfortunately they are common-place and every-day occurrences in Ireland, through the infamous tribunals you have set up. I certainly am not going to enter into any recital of the miserable little prison torments and iniquities that were employed to give us pain and humiliation, and to besmirch the character of the Irish representatives in the eyes of the people of England and Ireland. I think we can afford to pass these things by. I believe that our opponents are not all so lost to generous and manly sentiments as not to feel ashamed rather than exultant about the Chief Secretary's exploits. There is another class of opponents. I am sorry to think that men who are capable of inflicting pain of this description are quite capable of deriving a still keener pleasure in knowing that the torments have told, and that their victims smart under their wounds. I cannot gratify them, for the simple reason that I do not feel wounded. I do not feel in the least degraded. I rather suspect that the right honorable gentleman, under his jaunty bearing, has his conscience not quite so easy as mine. I confess that I did feel keenly when in prison a letter which the right honorable gentleman published to a Mr. Armitage, not making any honest charge against me, but conveying a stealthy and loathsome insinuation that I sheltered myself under the plea of illness from being forced to wear prison dress. I challenge the right honorable gentleman to refer to any one of the three official doctors who examined me, for one tittle, I will not say of foundation, but even of countenance, for such an assertion. (_Loud cheers._) Here we are now face to face. (_Great cheering from the Opposition._) I challenge him in defence of his own character, for it is his own character that is at stake (_cheers_), to appeal to any one of those three officials to give him the slightest countenance. ("_Hear, hear._")