PROTECTING SOCIETY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 114, 16 May 1942, Page 4

PROTECTING SOCIETY

Most people will heartily endorse the logic of the Chief Justice's statement on the appropriate punishment for subversive activity such as that for which Michael Young was sentenced on Thursday.

Your appropriate punishment, in my opinion, said his Honour, would be incarceration for the duration of the war, and deprivation of civil rights for a lengthy period, for it is paradoxical to my mind that a person who not only refuses to help his country and the men who are fighting to save its freedom, but actually does his best to injure it and them, should have the right by his vote to take part in the ordering of the lives of those men on their return to the Dominion.

Penalties of this kind would not be in the least vindictive, or even a punishment as the term is usually understood. Incarceration for the period of the war would be reasonable preventive action for the community to take against one who, even if his subversive activities are less effective than he intends, may. yet cause trouble and expense to the police. Deprivation of civil rights is a logical sequence to obstinate refusal to accept civil and military responsibilities. Civil liberties are threatened. Those who will take no part in defending them, but even seek to impede those who are bearing the defence burden, should surely be treated as having forfeited their privileges. If it were not for the sacrifices of the truly conscientious— those who do not shrink from backing their consciences with their lives —there would be no liberty left to the subversive objector. The objector, then, cannot complain if he .loses part of his civil privileges, for he professes a willingness to face the surrender of all rather than share the war sacrifice. The real defender, on the other hand, may reasonably object to having his peace life ordered in even the least degree by those who would not share his war sacrifices. Society has every right to protect itself against the internal obstructor as well as the external aggressor. It has the right, also, to

declare that those who will not keep the social contract —giving as well as taking—shall be excluded from that contract.