“UNIVERSITY CLUB,

    “DUBLIN, March, 1907.

“DEAR MOORE,—­I see that as a supplemental question you asked the other day whether the delay in land purchase was due to the continued absence of Mr. Bailey.  I do not know, of course, what was your object, but it may interest you to know that for the last year I attended more days in the office than either of my colleagues, and that, as a matter of fact, I did not take much more than half the vacation to which I was entitled.  You will thus see that you have been strangely misinformed, and I can only surmise that another of my colleagues was meant.

    “Faithfully yours,

    “W.F.  BAILEY.”

To this Mr. Moore replied:—­

    “ULSTER CLUB,

    “BELFAST, March 19th.

“DEAR BAILEY,—­You were appointed by a Unionist Government to see fair play between Wrench and Finucane, and you have sold the pass on every occasion.  The first thing my colleagues and I will do when we come back, which will not be very far off, will be to press for an inquiry into the working of your department.  You can destroy your evidence now, and show this to whom you please.

    “Yours truly,

    “W.  MOORE.”

In reply the Estates Commissioner wrote:—­

“Mr. Bailey desires to acknowledge receipt of Mr. Moore’s letter of the 19th inst., and inasmuch as it contains grave statements of a threatening and unfounded character he will take an early opportunity of bringing the matter under notice in the proper quarter.”

The final letter was Mr. Moore’s reply:—­

    “ULSTER CLUB,

    “BELFAST, March 25th.

“Mr. Moore hopes that when Mr. Bailey publishes the correspondence he will make it clear that Mr. Moore’s reply was directed to a disloyal attack by Mr. Bailey on one of his colleagues in his letter to Mr. Moore.  This is all that was omitted from Mr. Moore’s reply.”

The next step in this discreditable incident occurred on July 23rd, on which day Mr. Moore denounced Mr. Bailey in the House of Commons for his partisanship towards the Nationalists, and gave a graphic picture of the private letter which Mr. Bailey had written to him to protest against his personal attacks.  Mr. Redmond rose and asked that Mr. Russell should read to the House Mr. Moore’s reply, and Mr. Russell thereupon read the second of the letters given above, upon which Mr. Balfour, regardless of his own share in the partial suppression of the Wyndham-MacDonnell dossier a few years before, demanded the production of the whole correspondence.  This was done on July 26th, when Mr. Moore read the letters in the order given above.  In his personal explanation he represented it as an extremely suspicious circumstance that Mr. Bailey had been seen in the Lobby in conversation with the Nationalists.  “That may be legitimate,” he said, “but I think it very undesirable,” and in the very next breath he confessed that another of the Commissioners was a particular and personal friend of his own, to whom he would have shown the first letter from Mr. Bailey if it had not been marked private.