TOPICS OF THE DAY.
POLITICS AND MURDER.
T ORD HUGH CECIL'S letter in the Times of Friday, October 29, is as welcome as it is timely. He has said the right thing in the right way, and at the right moment- a combination which might be defined ass proof of states- manship. With almost all he says about reprisals we are in hearty agreement. But thoug,h that part of his letter is good, what is even better is the wise and fearless tone which he adopts in regard to the appalling tolerance of murder which prevails, or at any rate seems to prevail, throughout England and Scotland. Finally, and best of all, is his plain-spoken reminder that, after all, there is a difference between right and wrong, and that mankind, if any civilization worthy the name is to be maintained, cannot adopt a doctrine of relativity in the moral sphere. No doubt the moral code is not an easy one to draw or to interpret, but there is an absolute and essential difference—a difference not merely of degree, bat of kind, between right and wrong. Those who deny or forget or wilfully ignore this fact do so at their peril. To confuse right and wrong is to repudiate the teaching of Christ and to destroy the Kingdom of God within us. We and Lord Hugh Cecil may differ as to the causes and consequences of such deviations from religious truth, but we do not differ by a hair's-breadth in believing that there is a gulf deep as eternity between right and wrong, and that inevitable consequences depend upon whether we choose the right or the wrong. The consequences of our acts, great or small, cannot be cancelled, changed, or recalled.
"Not even the Gods upon the past have power."
But we are straying from our purpose of to-day, which is not theological, but purely ethical. There is nothing wrong, nothing oppressive, nothing intolerant, nothing illogical, nothing unjust in holding murder the greatest of crimes. That there can be killing without murder we do not, of course, deny. In battle or in self-defence or to prevent crimes, we all know that killing is no more criminal than when it is done by an order of a Court of Justice or other regular tribunal. But murder in the true sense (we will not define it, because short definitions on great matters are apt to be misleading to confuse rather than to explain) is perfectly well understood by the plain man. He does not need to be told how to draw distinctions between killing a man in battle, or in suppress- ing a riot, or in preventing the commission of a felony, and the" removing" of an inconvenient civilian, an informer, or a man who has not carried out his oath for a secret society or is suspected of betraying that society ; or, again, the shooting of a policeman or a soldier in the back, or the killing of a magistrate or administrator in the way practised in the Dublin tramcar murder. Killing of this kind, whether for gain, hatred, vengeance, or policy, is murder, and nothing else. And murder, as every unsophisticated man and woman knows and feels, is the supreme crime.
"Other sins only speak ; Murder shrieks out."
If we want a further distinction we may read it in the eyes of those who have murdered and those who have killed without murder. There is no real murderer, unless a madman or drunkard, who does not bear about with him the primal curse. Yet to what a situation have the sophistries, encouraged by ill-restrained sentiment here and party politics there, brought us ! A foreigner reading the English newspapers of to-day might judge that a nation, once so sane on the subject of crime, and the need of not allowing men to take the law into their own hands, had suddenly lost its moral sense.
Every day brings its fresh crop of Irish murders of the most brutal and inexcusable kind. These murders of policemen and soldiers cannot, as a rule, be justified as little battles in which resistance is offered to the action of the police when carrying out arrests or some other form of compulsion. Again, they cannot even be excused as "removals" of men who are supposed to have planned some evil to Ireland or to be inciting to cruel and oppressive measures. They are quite clearly not political crimes passionencs, but rather the results of the Machiavellian
Sinn Fein policy of making law and order impossible in Ireland by killing the minor and innocent instru- ments of the Government, the men whose duty it is to obey their officers and their orders—orders such as to proceed along this or that road, or to patrol this or that street in order to prevent crime and outrage. If ever murders cried aloud to heaven, they are the murders of the policemen and soldiers who have been done to death in Ireland during the past year. They are crimes without a vestige of excuse--pure crimes of black-hearted, diabolic policy.
We have no desire to endorse any more than has Lord Hugh Cecil the reprisals carried out by the police and the soldiers. But, at any rate, these reprisals are not like the murders committed by the Sinn Feiners and the Irish Republican Army—murders of men obviously innocent in their own persons and intentions. The reprisals have not been inspired by the sophistries of Hell, but by the most intense provocation. As a rule, too, they have not taken the form of killing, but of destruction of property, intended to prevent the murderers and encouragers of murder from feeling that to assassinate or to shelter assassins will henceforth have consequences more un- pleasant than the shooting of rabbits. No doubt there have been cases of lynching of individuals by the police and soldiers ; but here, again, the provocation has been so great as to explain it, not to excuse them. When a body of policemen or soldiers have been killed by persons who are perfectly well known to the police, but who have done their work of killing so thoroughly that they have done it without danger and have escaped with ease ; and when the Government say that they cannot get sufficient evidence to convict, and therefore can do nothing in the way of hitting back, who can wonder that the friends and comrades of the murdered men have recourse to the worst forms of wild justice ?
Such crimes, for crimes they are, must of course be strictly dealt with ; but they will only be effectively suppressed by the Government doing by rule of law, that is to say regularly, what the police and the soldiers have been tempted, by Governmental inaction, to do irregularly and wrongfully.
And here we come back to the demoralization of publie opinion, which we deeply regret to see has been accepted, nay encouraged, by Mr. Asquith and other members of the Liberal Party. They, of course, in their hearts hate the murders committed by the Irish Nationalists as much as we do. Unfortunately, however, they have not the courage or the honesty of purpose to say so, except in a few perfunctory words. They make the whole world ring with their attacks upon our soldiers and policemen for defending themselves or for doing summary execution on the men who have murdered their comrades and who are planning to kill them ; but they do not, like Lord Hugh Cecil, condemn equally strongly, or as they ought far more strongly, the hideous provocations to revenge offered by the Sinn Feiners. After all, these things end by being very simple, and who can deny that this awful campaign of murder was begun by the Sinn Feiners ? They began the game of killing policemen and soldiers because, after due consideration, they came to the conclusion that it was easier, cheaper, and safer to murder policemen or soldiers here and there than to run the risk of a true appeal to arms.
Once more, if the Liberal Party and the other supporters of the Sinn Fein movement in this country want to put themselves right on the moral question, they can easily does
without any surrender of the principles of political dis- integration which they profess. Let them speak in plain terms to the Sinn Feiners and Nationalists and the members of the Roman Church in Ireland who are pressing for Irish independence and are doing their best to make the govern- ment of Ireland impossible and to injure the British Govern- ment in America and in every foreign country. They should say, We will do nothing to help any schemes for Irish freedom as long as your campaign of murder goes on.
Till you, the Nationalists and moderate Sinn Feiners, come into the open and denounce murder, not as the Roman Church does in Ireland, but in deadly earnest, we will not only have nothing to do with you, but we will put you under our political ban and do everything to stop and discountenance your policy. We will make no pact with murderers, but will put every spoke possible into the murderers' wheels. Murder is murder, and no excuses will prevail with us with regard to it."
Who can deny that if the liberals wonld take that line instead of fixing upon reprisals as if they were the cause of the murders and not the effect, providing thus a topsy- turvey excuse for the Sinn Feiners' crimes, the effect would be great and immediate ? "No, it would have no effect at all." Well, let us admit that for the sake of argument. It is surely always worth while to try to stop murder. But we note with disgust that it has not been tried. We have searched Mr. Asq_uith's speeches and the writings of the Liberal Home Rule Press without finding any, straightforward warning to the Sinn Feiners that if the murders do not stop, and stop at once, the liberal leaders and the Liberal Party will make no more excuses and show no more sympathy for the Sinn Feiners, but, on the contrary, will become their bitterest opponents.
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