Scotland Yard. And in this connection the Royal Commission on Loss of Life at Sea claims notice.

This Commission was the outcome of a controversy raised by a statement of Mr Chamberlain's, as President of the Board of Trade, that the annual loss of life among the sailors on British ships amounted to one in sixty, a statement which, though based on the statistics of his Department, was vehemently scouted by shipowners. Lord Aberdeen's success on the Railway Accidents Commission led to his being asked to preside over this new Commission, and among the most prominent of its members were the Duke of Edinburgh, Mr Chamberlain himself, and Mr Justice Butt. Lord Aberdeen was good enough to wish for my help again, and I wrote to Sir William Harcourt, who was then away in the country, asking for the Secretaryship of the Commission. Sir William had recently done me a great injustice, and so, more suo, he replied in the kindest terms, assuring me that he would gladly comply if Sir Edmund du Cane had no objection. Sir Edmund gave his consent most cordially, and in November 1884 the Commission was appointed with my name as Secretary. On the change of Government in 1886, Lord Aberdeen became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and a new warrant was issued appointing Mr Shaw Lefevre Chairman, and adding Admiral Sir Cooper Key and Mr (now Lord) Heneage to the Commission.

VOL. CLXXXVII.—NO. MCXXXI,

The report was presented in August 1887.

In these pages I am dealing only with the lighter side of things, and I have no intention of discussing the merits of Royal Commissions in general, or of this one in particular. But I claim special credit for the result attained in this case. The interests represented seemed irreconcilable, and yet the discussions were amicable, and the report was signed by all the Commissioners. For the public benefit I must reveal the secret of my success. That "an

army marches on its stomach was one of Napoleon's favourite aphorisms. And "feed the brute" was the advice the young wife received from her matronly friend, when she complained of her husband's temper. Here then is my secret. The refreshment allowance sanctioned by the Treasury was so inadequate that "sandwiches and sherry" was the stock luncheon of Royal Commissions, and on the Railway Accidents Commission I often noticed that the members were more intractable after after that repast than during the morning sitting. I proposed therefore that we should supplement the Treasury pittance by a general whip," and have a good "sit down repast in the Secretary's room. This was agreed to, and I made the necessary arrangements with one of the best West End caterers. results were marked and manifest. It is not merely that having a comfortable meal and a good cigar soothes the nerves

E

The

and smooths the temper, but the forty minutes' chat round the luncheon-table brought the Commissioners together socially, and this influenced their discussions in the board room.

To me personally this was both a pleasure and a benefit on other grounds, for I thus came to make the acquaintance of the members. I may mention specially that I thus gained the honour of the Duke of Edinburgh's friendship. For H.R.H. did not approve of hurrying over the cigar stage of the luncheon recess; and when his colleagues rose, he usually kept me with him. And on H.R.H.'s leaving to take up his command in the Mediterranean, he desired me to write to him regularly about the work; and on his return to England he did me the honour of giving many proofs that he had not forgotten me. The year 1880 was an epochmaking time in Ireland. Then it was that "boycotting" was inaugurated that crime which, as one of the Irish judges lately said from the Bench, makes the life of its victim a living death. If taken in hand at once, boycotting might have been easily checked. But once the people were allowed to prove the power of this terrible system of coercion, counter-coercion of a drastic kind was needed to suppress it. And, as Lord Morley's 'Life of Gladstone' tells us, any proposal to coerce the lawless who were thus coercing the law-abiding was resisted by the Premier. Mr Forster was a very different man from Mr Birrell, and the

magistrates and police were encouraged to do all that was possible under "ordinary law" to check the forces of disorder. But the effort was hopeless, and when Ministers returned to London after the vacation, the Cabinet at last decided to take action.

If

more

Parliament met a month earlier than usual (6th January 1881), and three weeks afterwards Forster's "Suspects Act," as it was called, was introduced, a statute under which 955 persons were imprisoned under warrants issued by the Lord - Lieutenant. all the guilty had been arrested under it, the arrests would have been tenfold numerous. For the reported outrages in the preceding year totalled 2590, and these were only a fraction of the crimes committed. But the guilt of these crimes does not rest mainly upon the peasantry of Ireland. For they were the outcome of persistent incitement by their political leaders, and they were condoned by the Gladstone Government.

Ireland cannot be governed without & "Coercion Act." There have been shameful and disastrous intervals, such as 1880-1882 and 1907-1909, during which the Government of the Crown has been practically suspended in many parts of the country; but Government has never been maintained there without "coercion "; and when the legislative Union rescued that unfortunate land from the intolerable evils of "Home Rule," a drastic coercion code, framed in the

Irish House of Commons, passed as a legacy to the Imperial Parliament.

A Coercion Act, I should explain, is defined to be a statute which is not a part of the general law, but applies only to some specified portion of the kingdom. And within the limits to which it applies it arms the police with powers unknown to the ordinary law, and sometimes foreign to the spirit of that law. For example, under one leading statute of this character any police constable may call anybody to account whom he finds loitering in any place after sunset; and if the constable considers that the account which the loiterer gives of himself is unsatisfactory, he may arrest him and bring him before a police magistrate, who may send him to hard labour for a month, and this without appeal. If such a law were enforced in disturbed Ireland to-day we should hear very little about cattle-driving! "Monstrous!" the reader will exclaim; "no free people would ever tolerate such a law." a matter of fact, 7,000,000 of free people in London tolerate it, for it is a typical clause of the Police Acts under which the Metropolis has been governed for seventy years. There is no great city in the world in which life and property are so safe as in London, and this is largely due to our being governed, not by ordinary law, but by police law. For London, like Ireland, could not be governed without a Coercion

Act.

As

I have been betrayed into this digression by impatience with the claptrap we hear about coercion -"blatherumskite" they call it in Ireland. When I went off the rails I was about to explain that in the year 1880 the immunity enjoyed by agrarian crime in Ireland stimulated stimulated the fomentors of political crime, and a revival of Fenian activity on that side of the channel excited the cited the conspirators over here. And it was in these circumstances that Sir William Harcourt re-enlisted me for Secret Service work.

I should say here that in this country we know nothing of "Secret Service" in the Continental sense of the term. In England the duties thus designated are such as any competent police force would discharge. But with us the expenditure of public money must be open and subject to audit. In the annual estimates, therefore, a specified amount is taken for secret service; and, as regards this fund, the controlling authority must accept a certificate under the hand of a Secretary of State that it is expended for purposes authorised by the statute in that behalf. But for this no Government could obtain information about conspiracies against the State.

Such work was never to my taste, and at this time I had definitely turned away from it. I was still in communication with Major Le Caron and some other prominent American Fenians, but I was out of touch with the leaders of the

ascertain who the London leaders were was an easy task, but how to get hold of them was the problem. They solved that problem for me by forming a plot to discover who their enemy was at Whitehall. A letter came to Whitehall from a man whom I knew by repute as one of the most active and dangerous of the London Fenians. He wished to give information to Governmentthat was the bait but he would deal only with "the gentleman at the head of the Intelligence Department." He would hold no communication with the Police.

I met the fellow by appointment one night in a house in Westminster. He lied to me for an hour, during which I listened as though I believed all he was telling me. This, as I expected, led him to ask for money. I then pretended to lose my temper. He had asked to see me in order to give information to Government, and I had come prepared to pay him handsomely, but I was not to be fooled by the yarns he had been giving me. As I spoke I took a handful of sovereigns out of my pocket and jingled them before him. The greedy look on his face told its own tale. He pleaded that if I would give him time he would get me all I wished to know, and he meekly asked for his "expenses." I saw that the bait had taken, so I gave him a couple of pounds.

The man made good his promises; but lest he should fail me, I was anxious to get

The London Fenians at this time had copied the American plan of having a public side to the conspiracy; and in furtherance of this scheme they had started a brass band, and the instruments were placed in charge of one of the most trusted of their members. I learned by chance one day that, being "behind with his rent," this fellow had pawned these instruments, and that he was in a state of trepidation owing to their being wanted for an anniversary procession, and he had not money to redeem them. This gave me my chance, and within a few weeks of my being commissioned by the Secretary of State I had the two most influential London Fenians in my pay.

These particulars may be given to-day without breach of confidence, or injury to the public service, and they will explain what secret service work means. What grand copy it would have been for the newspapers of that time if, in describing the Fenian procession that followed, they could have added that the band instruments had been taken out of pawn with money supplied by the Home Office! I will only add that the hold I thus obtained upon the London organisation prevented the commission of Fenian outrages at a critical time; and further, that the information I received from these men was never used to bring a criminal charge against any member of the conspiracy.

To prevent outrages was by