Mr. Sullivan, proprietor of the Nation, has published a long
and eloquent appeal in the Times against the Press clauses of the Coercion Bill. His great points are that the Bill enables the Crown to ruin the printing-office from which a seditious paper issues, though the printers may not in the least sympathize with its tendency ; and that no suit for redress against the Crown in Ireland ever succeeds ; and that the French Government is very much milder to the Republican papers, which are much more violent. The answers to those points are that the printers must read the articles before they strike them off, and so can protect themselves ; that Mr. Gladstone has in the Act thrown the onus of proof on the Crown, and not on the printer ; and that the object of French Republican fury is not social war, but political change. The real objection to this part of the Bill is that it may possibly fail. No government, not even that of Rome, which did not- suppress the post, ever stopped the circulation of lithographed sheets twice as dangerous as any newspapers. That risk is, how- ever, one for the Executive to judge.
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