MR. DILLON'S ARREST I F we express a considerable degree of
astonishment at the protests which are made in regard to Mr. Dillon's arrest, it is not that we fail to understand the arguments and feelings of our political opponents. Neither to us nor to any other Unionist is the arrest of a Member of Parlia- ment anything but a most painful and regrettable incident. Indeed, it is one which we should be only too glad to see considered unnecessary by the Irish Executive. Such acts, we are perfectly willing to admit, embitter feeling, delay conciliation, and so injuriously affect the final solution of the Irish problem. To avoid putting the Irish leaders in prison, we would do everything possible,—everything, indeed, except the one thing which kills government and dissolves the bonds of society all the world over, and in Ireland, perhaps, more quickly than anywhere else,—allow the law to be openly and deliberately defied. Surely, if the Gladstonians who are now denouncing the Government on account of Mr. Dillon's arrest would only look this matter full in the face, they must see that no other course has been open to the Ministry. A law is made by a large majority of the freely elected representatives of the people,—that is, receives that complete and perfect popular sanction which all democratic politicians must admit makes an enactment binding on the whole nation. The law, besides, is passed in a House in which the representatives of that part of the country which is specially affected have proportionally a larger voice than those of any other portion of the Kingdom. The Executive is now asked by a party which asserts that it is the mouthpiece of English democracy, to allow the enactment which has been passed under such circumstances and has received such a sanction, to become a dead-letter, and thus to stultify the deliberate decision of the House of Commons. Surely a more astonishing demand never pro- ceede I from the advocates of the sovereignty of the people than that which asks Parliament not to carry out the will of the majority. Doubtless a considerable amount of the indignation felt among the Gladstonians at the arrest of the Irish Members of Parliament, is due to the feeling that the Parnellite leaders should, when imprisoned, be treated as first-class mis- demeanants,—that is, be regarded as prisoners of war, on whom it is not fair to inflict any worse penalty than depri- vation of the opportunity of continuing hostilities. A motion conceived in this sense is shortly to be introduced into Par- liament, and the House of Commons is to be asked to do what it refused to do last year, declare that the persons con- victed under the Crimes Act shall be regarded as political prisoners. Against such a view, a hundred arguments of logic and of expediency may be produced on the Unionist side. For instance, to admit the distinction of political offences as contrasted with ordinary offences, would be to revolutionise and destroy the whole system of English criminal jurisprudence. Again, to make the distinction would be to admit what no Unionist can pos- sibly admit,—that Ireland is a separate nationality, and that, therefore, those who attempt to make her inde- pendent, if they may be punished, at any rate cannot be regarded as criminals. Instead, however, of employing these arguments, which do not, of course, move in the same plane of thought in which the Home-rulers think, we prefer to take one which at any rate postulates nothing that the advocates of the Parnellite cause will refuse to acknowledge. The Irish Members claim to be treated as prisoners of war. They argue that they are, to use the phrase of one of themselves, engaged in war tempered only by the scarcity of firearms,' and they demand that this fact should be recognised. Suppose we reply :—` We should be quite willing to treat you as prisoners of war if you would only observe the rules of the game. You do not, however, do so. In your political warfare, you do what is equivalent in actual warfare to using poisoned weapons, to firing on non-combatants, to burning and destroying private property. In the field, those who do these things are not regarded as persons who have a claim to be treated as prisoners of war. How, then, can you, who employ the same means, make the demand you do ?' It does not require much reflec- tion to show that such an argument involves no real exaggeration. Is not slander a poisoned weapon ? But the Irish Party have consciously and deliberately used slander to attain their ends. Is not the treatment that the Curtin family and that Norah Fitzmaurice are receiving at this moment an exact equivalent to firing on non-combatants ? Curtin and Fitzmaurice them- selves may conceivably be regarded as having been at war with the League, and so liable to be killed by their antagonists. Under what possible theory of warfare can it be right to carry out savage hostilities against Curtin's daughters, and against Norah Fitzmaurice ? They were not "land-grabbers ;" they had not offended the unwritten law. If they must expect to be attacked, then so must every conscript's wife and family in France or Germany. Again, to blow-up police-barracks or to wreck the Government offices in Ireland, might possibly be reckoned as acts of war. To hack to death a farmer's cows, to burn his cattle in their stalls, to smash the glass in a Protestant church, or to poison hounds, is not war, but simple brigandage. No! Until the Parnellites con- duct their so-called war on more civilised principles, even those who are willing to admit their premisses, to consider that Ireland and England are at war, and to regard the offences of the League as political offences, can hardly wonder that we refuse to consider the Parnellite Members as proper subjects for the treatment which all civilised countries rightly agree in according to prisoners of war. In writing thus, we have intentionally kept the discussion of the Parnellite claim to be treated as prisoners of war clear of the curious circumstance that, in fact, the Home- rule Party do not ask that all Irish prisoners tried for offences under the Crimes Act should be treated as political offenders, but practically only that Members of Parliament and persons of position and education should be exempted from what is considered the degrading part of prison r(fgitae. Imagine a Milanese or Venetian noble thirty years ago asking that he should have better fare and milder treatment than the peasants who shared with him the honour conferred by an Austrian prosecution ! Surely the demand, when it comes from Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien, is very difficult to reconcile with the assumption that the Irish agitation is similar in spirit to that which inspired the unity of Italy. No explanation of this curious fact has, to the best of our knowledge, ever been vouchsafed by the Irish leaders themselves. Their English admirers, if we mistake not, account for it in this way :—` The peasants who are tried and sent to prison for in- timidation and cattle-houghing are no doubt, when really guilty, which of course is by no means always the case, ordinary criminals, and as such deserve the plank-bed. The case of the Irish leaders, however, is different. They are only constructively, if at all, guilty of such crimes, and therefore ought not to be punished as are the actual criminals.' We have no desire here to meet this in what is the easiest and most complete way of meeting it, by showing that the speeches of the men who have denounced " land-grabbers " as outcasts from human society, and hinted that cattle will not thrive on boycotted farms, have a deliberate criminal intention ; and so are, in truth, guilty of offences quite as great as those of the intimidators themselves, or of the actual mutilators of cattle. We wish here merely to point out that it is unreasonable in the Home-rule Party to ask for the specially favourable treat- ment of prisoners like Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Dillon. We will, therefore, confine ourselves to remarking that to meet such an argument as we are met with, it is only necessary to ask whether the principle is to be carried out throughout our criminal administration. Is the man who breaks open the safe with his own hands to be punished with hard labour, while the man of education who has instigated the deed, and who is to get the advantage of it, is to be let off as a first- class misdemeanant merely because his offence was only constructive? Obviously no one would think of employing such an argument. In the same way, if we reason clearly on the question of treating the Irish Members differently from the peasants tried under the same Act, we cannot, whatever be our opinion of the moral right or wrong in- volved, fall to see that those who considered the Crimes Act necessary and just, cannot possibly consent to any treatment being accorded to persons sentenced under that Act which would imply that the crimes it punishes are not crimes in themselves, but only crimes owing to the political circumstances of Ireland. To do so would be to give up the whole Unionist contention.
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