IRELAND UNDER COERCION.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 20, 28 July 1887, Page 2

IRELAND UNDER COERCION.

The Tory Government at Home are losing no time in applying the gag to Irish liberty of speech and the fetter to Irish freedom of action. The Coercion Bill they have fought so hard for is being put into force all over the unhappy country, and the provisions of a tyrannous and iniquitous measure will be rapidly made use of to attempt the stamping out of all national feeling. Coercion has always failed in Ireland, failed miserably, and coercion will be equally as ghastly and utter a failure this time as it has been before. For a while of course, the greedy landlords will gloat with ill-concealed triumph over the system which allows of the eviction game being merrily played and of any opposition to it being impossible, but the result will be the goading of a maddened and exasperated people into acts which all the Crimes Bills and all the soldiery in the world could not repress. Already we are hearing of Irish policemen, sick at heart of the wretched work of eviction, refusing to carry out the odious duty imposed upon them, in some cases even leaving the force in which they earned their livelihood, and prepared to sacrifice place, pay, and pension to doing dirty work for the greedy land monopolists. To carry out the provisions of the Act a largely increased strength of soldiery will be necessary, and it will be a bitterly sarcastic commentary on all the Jubilee fuss and gush that three millions of Her Majesty’s subjects are being virtually governed by bayonets and buckshot, and are being deprived of all the liberties of speech and action which are the vaunted privileges of a British subject.

The Irish people and those who sympathise with their aspirations must not dispair however, The very evil will work Its own cure. It is expensive Work this choking and throttling busirieskj find John Bull will begin to growl dra idfig at the enormous expenses which a military Coercive occupation of Ireland must necessarily entail. Again many of the Unionist-Liberals are showing signs of an early return to their old allegiance, and the opposition to Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet will be then stronger by far. But for the present we must admit the Irish outlook is very dreary, and we fear that we shall have bad neW ffoth the green island before long. Coercion always means reprisals, and when a people is goaded to almost madness by the systematic injustice of their treatment they are apt to do very rash things. We fear that the Tory Coercion Bill is far more likely to cause Crime than to prevent it..