The Mold rioters have received a terrible, but we fear
not a need- lessly severe, sentence. It will be remembered that on June 2 two men were sentenced at Mold, Flintahire, to imprisonment for assaulting the manager of a colliery. Their comrades attempted to rescue them, and stoned the police and the soldiers, who, after some severe wounds had been inflicted, were ordered by a magis- trate to fire. Six men were tried on Monday as prominent among the rioters, and five being found guilty, were sentenced by Lord Chief Justice Bovill to ten years' penal servitude. The sentence was, as we said, a terrible one, but it is coming to this all over England, that resistance to the law must be held to be the gravest of offences. The law has lost prestige, and must show that it possesses force. Note that the journals which approve this sen- tence abuse the judge who gave fifteen years to a man who beat a witness nearly to death for giving evidence. In each case the criminal tried to defeat the law by force ; but, in the first, he was only violent ; in the second, maliciously cruel. Yet the shooting of the violent rebel is approved, and the legal sentencing of the maliciously cruel rebel condemned.
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