FROM THE ARCHIVES: In 1918, the last year of the first World War and the year before the War of Independence began, conscription was the main issue, helping to build up the movement which led to independence. This editorial on "The State of Ireland" gave a disapproving flavour of the times.
YESTERDAY THE Lords Justices enforced the operation of sections 3 and 4 of the Criminal Law and Procedure Act, 1887, in fourteen counties and two county boroughs of Ireland. In other words, the Irish Government has been compelled to recognise that the ordinary law of the land no longer operates in more than half the whole area of Ireland. The fact was recognised long ago by everybody who knows the country: indeed, it is advertised daily in all the newspapers. A state of lawlessness prevails which encourages crime by intimidating public opinion and making decent men unwilling conspirators in the defeat of justice.
The natural result is a carnival of outrage and violence in many parts of the country. It would be an insult to the least civilised South American republic to compare its conditions with those of a part of the United Kingdom where – as happened yesterday at Tralee – a policeman can be shot in the middle of the day, in the main street of a country town, and his assailants can go their way utterly unmolested. This appalling state of affairs will grow worse unless the Irish Government decides to abolish it with a strong hand. At this moment Sinn Féin is engaged in clearing experienced and responsible men out of all public appointments that depend on the public vote. Already several men who dared to be moderate at the Irish convention have been turned out of their offices. On Monday Mr. Thomas O’Donnell, one of the best of the Nationalist members of Parliament, was deposed from the chairmanship of the Tralee and Dingle Railway in favour of the notorious Austin Stack.
This process of proscription is successful, not because the people desire it or like it, but because they are afraid to call their souls their own. The Government’s proclamations will be denounced in the Nationalist Press. They will be welcomed with secret, but profound, gratitude by the vast majority of Irish Nationalists.
Irish Bolshevism has revived the use of another weapon which depends for its efficiency on a terrorised state of public opinion. The anti-conscription pledge is being enforced by the use of the boycott in its most relentless form. Men who refused to sign the pledge or to contribute to the anti-conscription fund have been made outcasts among their neighbours and have lost their means of livelihood.
We report to-day the fate of six citizens of the town of Wicklow who dared to vote against an anti-conscription resolution at a meeting of the urban council. They were made the victims of a rigid boycott. One of them, a coal and timber merchant, has been forced to close his premises; another, a printer, has been driven to seek employment in England. We gather that the chief fury of the boycott has been directed against the Messrs. Haskins, general traders on a considerable scale, and that they are offering a manly resistance to it.
Their bakery establishment has come under the ban, so that flour is going to waste in Wicklow while bread is being brought in from Dublin. Would the English Food Controller tolerate such a state of things for half a moment?
We shall put one question to the authors and patrons of the anti-conscription movement. Do they hold that the methods by which it is being vindicated against Messrs. Haskins are “consonant with the laws of God?”
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