added: ‘As to the future government of the country, all previous arrangements must be reconsidered and to some extent recast.’ Parnell, in an impressive speech, attributed the crime to the enemies of the cause with which he had associated himself. That Parnell was shocked and disheartened by these murders admits of no doubt. But such sentiments found no favour with the Clan-na-Gael. His denunciation of the crime was followed by threats from the clan, and he applied for protection to the London police. It was suspected—although no valid evidence was produced to support the suspicion—that he soon sought to regain the clan's confidence by privately assuring some of its members that he was insincere in his denunciations.
Parnell's public action a few days later was not calculated to disarm such a suspicion. The Phœnix Park murders rendered the Kilmainham treaty a dead letter; fresh coercive legislation was announced by the government, and Parnell immediately resumed his attitude of implacable hostility. On 11 May the home secretary (Sir William Harcourt) introduced a new Prevention of Crimes Bill, to last for three years, which created special tribunals without juries and gave the police unlimited powers of search and arrest on suspicion. Parnell passionately contended that the government had no warrant to trifle thus with the lives and liberties of the Irish people, and predicted that so coercive a measure would lead to hundredfold greater disasters than the former acts of the government. Until the bill passed its third reading, on 11 July, Parnell strenuously obstructed it by methods fully comparable to his earlier efforts in the same direction. To the Arrears Act, which was introduced on 15 May 1883, he gave a discriminating support; after much dispute between the two houses, in which the lower house triumphed, the bill received the royal assent on 18 Aug. The obstructive tactics of Parnell proved through the session so fatal to the conduct of parliamentary business that parliament was adjourned in August for little more than two months, in order once again in the late autumn to revise the procedure of the house. The session was not prorogued till 2 Dec., and during the debates on the procedure resolutions Parnell showed as much astuteness in converting the new rules into means of obstruction as he had shown in his treatment of the old. On 23 Nov., on a motion for adjournment, he pointed out what he held to be crucial defects in the working of the Arrears Act.
Nor was his action in Ireland less ominous. On 17 Oct. he attended a national conference in Dublin, at which the land league was avowedly revived as the ‘Irish National League.’ The objects of the new organisation were defined as national self-government, land-law reform, local self-government, extension of the parliamentary and municipal franchises, and the development and encouragement of the labour and industrial interest of Ireland. But the national league, although it inherited much of the prestige of the land league, exercised little of the old association's power. Money from America filled its coffers, but the new Crimes Act, which was vigorously administered by the lord lieutenant, Lord Spencer, and the chief secretary, Sir George Trevelyan, kept its organisers in check. Between 1883 and 1885, although intimidation was freely practised and agrarian crime was far from vanquished, Ireland enjoyed comparative repose.
In January 1883 the prolonged efforts of the Irish police to track out the murderers of Cavendish and Burke were rewarded with success. One of the accused persons, James Carey [q. v.], turned informer, and disclosed the whole working of the Invincible Society which had organised the crime. That body, it was proved, had repeatedly plotted the assassination of Forster. While Carey's revelations were exciting public opinion, practical effect was first given to the advice of Patrick Ford, of New York, in his ‘Irish World,’ to carry the war into England by exploding dynamite in public buildings and public places of resort. On 20 Jan. emissaries from the Clan-na-Gael contrived an explosion of dynamite at Glasgow, and for more than two years this system of terrorism was practised in all parts of England by Irish-American conspirators, a few of whom were captured and sent to penal servitude for life. The most sensational attempt was that to blow up the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London on 24 Jan. 1885.
While English feeling was thus subjected to barbarous outrage, Forster, the late Irish secretary, in speaking on the address at the opening of the session of 1883 (22 Feb.), defended in detail his conduct in office. Turning to face Parnell in the course of his speech, he charged him with encouraging crime. ‘It is not that he himself directly planned or perpetrated outrages or murders, but that he either connived at them or, warned by facts and statements, he determined to remain in ignorance.’ Beyond interpolating ‘It is a lie’ while Forster was pronouncing this sentence, Parnell showed no immediate anxiety to repel the charge. Next day he gave a general denial to the accusation, and declared that he sought
