THE COERCION CODE IN IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 30, 22 November 1873, Page 12

THE COERCION CODE IN IRELAND.

The speech delivered by Mr J. O. Blunden at the Home Rule meeting on Tuesday will be read with approval by many persona who are not themselves Home Rulers. The maintenance of a coercion code in a country notoriously so peaceful, calm, and tranquil as our own is one of the most indefensible acts in the long record of wrongs inflicted by English Parliament on the Irish nation. Mr Blunden has too correctly sketched the constitutional conditions under which we in Ireland now live. In any proclaimed district— and we believe nearly the whole island is proclaimed— the peasant who stirs from his house between sunset and sunrise may be dragged before a petty sessions bench, and if the justices believe that "he was not out of his house on some lawful business he may be imprisoned, with or without hard labour," for any period not exceeding six calendar months. Then, as all the world knows, any newspaper in Ireland may be crushed by the will of the Government without trial, inquiry, or legal process. Again, the man who sells over an ounce of gunpowder or a bullet to an unlicensed person— the farmer who, without a license, carries and old gun to shoot the crows-is liable to the felon's doom. Add to this that any man in Westmeath may be imprisoned for life at the nod of the Lord Lieutenant, not alone without a trial, but without an accusation. A wretched man may, under this cruel and infamous law, rot for years in a jail, the victim of the malicious falsehoods of an unknown slanderer. Let us complete the picture by the fact that the police possess a power of |domiclary visitation far more extensive than any enjoyed by the sbirri of the old Neapolitan regime. Such a code, scarcely defensible m a disturbed country, is in a peaceful and tranquil land an ontrage, an anachronism, and a wrong. Tiue it is that our rulers are better than their laws, sud that some of the worst provisions in the code have been allowed to remain dead letters. But the liberties of a people should repose not on the broken reed of their masters' prudence or good temper, but on the broad basis of Positive Law.—' Dublin Freeman.'