THE POLICY OF REPRISALS.

New Zealand Tablet, 26 May 1921, Page 39

THE POLICY OF REPRISALS.

Rev. Dr. D. 0. MacGregor, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of England, in a letter to the Times on Irish reprisals, says: To defeat Sinn Fein is a tremendous task that may well tax all the resources of statesmanship. Unhappily our rulers appear latterly to have decided to meet crime with crime. They have first condoned and then actually authorised, on many occasions and in many places, a policy of reprisals not carried out with the remorseless but ordered rigor of martial law, but by means of indiscriminate and unregulated shooting and looting.

The result of the present policy is that British rule is a by-word and scoff in every country in Europe and across the Atlantic. One might despise the infamous cartoons that appear in the comic papers of every language. They are detestable, but the worst is they are partly true. For the good name of Britain, is it not high time that these crimes committed in the name of law and order should cease? Voices of vastly greater authority than mine have uttered their solemn protest, as yet without effect. I wonder whether -the whole Church of God cannot speak with united voice on so clear and crying a moral issue as this.