THE PRESS PROSECUTIONS IN IRELAND.
WE do not wonder that many Irish and a few English Liberals are annoyed and uneasy at the determination of Government to prosecute the Irish Revolutionary Press. There is no one point, perhaps, in our national system of government upon which law and practice differ so widely as that of political writing. The law is so severe that if enforced it would seriously impair the liberty of political dis- cussion, the practice is so lenient that the English Press is on all political subjects by far the freest in Europe. It is scarcely possible, therefore, for a prosecution once instituted by Government to fail, as the act complained of is sure to be illegal, yet every such prosecution strikes the public as an -exceptional and high-handed act, calculated to establish a dangerous precedent. The law of England, supposed by some people to be so very lenient, is in theory quite as severe as that of any other civilized country, its definition of sedi- tious writing so wide that it makes any writing whatever -calculated to bring the Government into hatred and contempt punishable with imprisonment. If strictly enforced before hostile Courts, no paper, from the Times to the smallest half- penny sheet which thunders or quavers against the Poor Law, could escape frequent penalties, or it may be ultimate ruin. .Certainly, no attack upon the Constitution or any branch of it, no argument, for example, against a second Chamber, could be published without most serious risk. The single difference between England and France in theory is, that in England offences of the Press are not exceptionally treated, but are punishable only on the verdict of a jury given in Courts pie- -sided over by irremovable judges. In practice, howa,ver, the terrible engine can never be set in motion by Government -without the consent of Parliament, express or implied, and freedom is so great that it is difficult to fix on the limit beyond which the journalist might not go. No English journal, as far as we can remember, ever did publish an article inciting a foreign power to invade this country, but if a journalist were silly and wicked enough to offer such counsel, Mr. Hardy would, we suspect, leave him to the immediate ruin which within twenty-four hours would have overtaken his paper. The enormous fine which the public could and would inflict would seem to him quite sufficient check upon such aberrations. Attacks on hereditary monarchy certainly have been published with impunity, and there is not a branch of the Constitution which has not been repeatedly and openly assailed in language certainly calculated to excite sedition. Even the dismemberment of the Empire is a subject under certain aspects entirely within the competence of the Press. If the Times, for example, next Monday publishes an article advising the Canadians to take a plebiscitum and thereafter declare themselves an independent nation, the Times will -certainly not be prosecuted. Half the statesmen in England, -though loyal to the backbone, would declare that it was -" speaking out " very wisely, and very much to the purpose. indeed, the cession of all the Anglo-Saxon colonies to their -colonists has been repeatedly recommended, and there are still politicians who would regard an Australian declaration of in- 'dependence as a document to be warmly supported on Imperial grounds. It is impossible while such freedom exists in regard to every division of the Empire except Ireland, that Liberals should not be uneasy at the thought of a more rigid regime to be specially applied in the division which, as they always admit, has the most serious grievances to redress.
And yet it is impossible to condemn such prosecutions in the abstract. Not to assert, as is usually done, that every State has a moral right to continue existing if it can—a pro- position which requires limitations, and which we should scarcely endorse in the case of a slave empire like Brazil,—it may, we think, fairly be affirmed that a State in which insti- tutions really representative have been organized, in which the government cannot be directly hostile to the mass of its citizens, has undoubtedly such a right. That right involves the claim to do anything not clearly immoral,—as, for ex- ample, torture is immoral,—needful to the protection of the State. No government, even if strictly representative, would, if Christian, have a right to flog a minority to death, or to inflict any form of torture which brutalized itself as much as
the victim ; but if the "right" of public meeting is dangerous, it is lawful, morally lawful, we mean, to suspend it for the time, or the right of speech, or free printing, or free combination for political purposes. It may be excessively inexpedient to do any one of those things, and in nine instances out of ten it would be inexpedient ; but it certainly is not wrong, would not be wrong even were the law widely different from what it is. All that the State is bound to do is, in Mr. Gladstone's language, not to mistake the magnitude of the offence for clearness of proof, to allow the accused whenever it is physically possible the benefit of a fair trial and a patient hearing in his own defence. The expediency of such trials is of course a very different thing from their morality, depending absolutely upon the imminence and the extent of the danger to be faced. As a rule, and a rule with very rare exceptions, it is safer for a State to allow a disaffected minority to talk its talk out, to trust to discussion and time to uproot or modify even the most dangerous ideas. It can very rarely be wise, for instance, for a civilized government when unprepared to interfere with the post, to drive its enemies to substitute secret for open correspondence, a change which occurred, for example, in India during the Mutiny, to the extreme embarrassment of the Executive. Such rare cases, however, do occur, more especially when the publications involved strengthen the hands of enemies outside the country as no letters could possibly do. When Mr. Seward, for example, suppressed the papers in the North which upheld the Southern cause, he was really putting down forces in strict alliance with men openly hostile to the very existence of the Union, sup- pressing enemies more dangerous than invading squadrons. The case of the Government in Ireland is, we imagine, apart from technical incidents, substantially the same as Mr. Seward's, —that papers like the Irishman intend to encourage the people to aid a party which proclaims itself hostile to the State, and to keep up in the minds of the discontented a strong belief that foreign aid will ultimately give them the victory over the State. Do the conductors of the Irishman really mean to deny that this is their intention ? and if not, on what ground, either of principle, or practice, or precedent, can they deny the right of a representative Government to frustrate it ? They pub- lish as extracts, but with the intention to be deduced from their known and expressed proclivities, proposals for invading Ireland from America and raising civil war. We will put a case to the conductor of the Nation, who complains so bitterly of the prose- cution, which he will thoroughly understand. Let him suppose himself Secretary of an Irish Republic, one and indivisible, and the Orange writers, as Irish as he is, to set up a journal which day after day impelled Orangemen to rise, which sympathized with every Orange " movement " against the Republic, and which, above all, incessantly promised, under one form or another, armed help from the Calvinists of Scotland. Would he or would he not prosecute that journal? We can only say he would not long remain Secretary if he did not, and if we understand at all the political ideas underlying his very elo- quent diatribes against England,—diatribes which it is some- times difficult even for Englishmen to read without a feeling of admiration for their literary skill,—it is a very brief trial that Orange journal would obtain. It would be suppressed in a minute as irreconcilably hostile to a principle very much more sacred in Irish eyes than liberty of political opinion. But the Nation will probably reply, " We should only be pre- venting an imminent civil war, saving the minority from incite- ments to dangerous or impossible insurrections." Precisely, and that is the plea of the Irish Government to which, by the public law of Europe and the practice of all free States, the American Union included, there can be no reply. The State, if freely organized, has a right to put down forces dangerous to its own existence, and the allegation of the Irish Government—which is to be fairly tried before an Irish jury—is that certain jour- nals are so opposed. The expediency of the proceeding may be questionable, though the balance of evidence is in its favour, but its political morality seems to us almost beyond discussion.
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