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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIET?
FORCE NO REMEDY.
------ >------
By
ANNIE BESANT.
------ ♦-------
There is excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish question
at the present moment; Tories are howling for revenge on a
whole nation as answer to the crime committed bj a few W
are swelling the outcry; many Radicals are swept aw
current and feeling that “something must be done they
endorse the Government action, forgetting to ask X^/Vm
“ something ” proposed is the wisest thing. A few stand fiim,
but they are ve?y few; too few to prevent the Coercion Bill from
passing^into law. But few though we be, who lift up voice of
protest against the wrong which we are powerless to prevent, we
may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration by so
rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal When
the measure is understood by the public half the battle will be
won; it is accepted at the moment from faith in the Govern
ment • it will be rejected when its true character is grasped.
The murders which have given birth to this repressive measure
came with a shock upon the country, which was the more terrible
from the sudden change from gladness and hope to darkness
and despair The new policy was welcomed so joyfully; the
messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen was dry
which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measure of ven
seance ; but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while
the measure of vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people.
I plead against the panic which confounds political agitation
and political redressal of wrong with crime and its punishment.
The Government measure gags every mouth in Ireland, and puts,
as we shall see, all political effort at. the mercy of the Lord
Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police.
.
Th.© point round which, rages the whole of the struggle in Ireland is the land. The absence of manufactures—destroyed by
past English legislation—has thrown the people.wholly on the
soil. From this arises the fierce competition which has forced
rents up to figures impossible to pay ; from this the terrible truth
that “ a sentence of eviction is a sentence of death; ” from this
�2
Force no Remedy
bornXhe
Ir, sb^an 5lrned off the land, and the revenge
i
born of the despair striking down the author and the messengers
of the ej ection. M hat the rack-renting has been is proved by the
In hiTb .twdU T °f TtS ma1de by tbe Land Commissioners,
bv ieadini
WaS v-dy paid by tbe Connaught peasant
g starvatl0T1 Me; in his worst, he was pushed over the
Vi tb|6 bl,’ink of wbich be was always tottering.
Men who see the life slowly drained out of their dearest by the
pi-?fS?5e
landl°rd—who have seen aged mother orwife
with the new-born babe at her breast, die on the turf whereon
iosTaZhc^aidby„tbebailiff.^0 unroofed the cabin-such men
lose all thought of the sanctity of human life when the lives of
the dearest are reckoned as less worth than the shillings of
overdue rack-rental, and either catch up the rifle to revenge
their own pain, or stand with folded arms in sullen indifference
when landlord or agent falls dead under bullet, with a dim feel
ing that the crime m some poor fashion makes more level the
balance of misery, and that the pain in the mud-cabin has in some
sort reacted m the anguish thus caused in the hall
Hf
r® reP°rtr°iMr“ °n tbe Condition of the Peasantry
C°nnty of Mayo, m 1880, speak of the misery which pre
ceded the present “ social revolution: ”_
il do n°t believe that tongue, or pen, however eloquent,
could truly depict the awful destitution of some of those hovels
lhe children are often nearly naked. Bedding there is none
everything of that kind having long since gone to the pawnothce, as proved to me by numerous tickets placed in my hands
for inspection in well-nigh every hovel. A layer of old straw
covered by the dirty sacks which conveyed the seed potatoes and
artificial manure in the spring is the sole provision of thousands
—with this exception, that little babies in wooden boxes are
occasionally indulged with a bit of thin, old flannel stitched on
to the sacking. Sometimes even charity itself had failed and
the mother of the tender young family was found absent, begging
tor the loan of some Indian meal from other recipients of
charitable relief the father being in almost every instance away
m England laboring to make out some provision for the coming
winter. Men, women, and children sleep under a roof and
within walls dripping with wet, while the floor is saturated with
damp, not uncommonly oozing out of it in little pools. The
construction and dimensions of their hovels are, as abodes of
human beings, probably unique. On the uplands they are
mostly built of common stone walls without plaster, and are
often totally devoid of the ordinary means of exit for the smoke
as it may also be almost said they are devoid of anything in the
shape of furniture. On the low-lying lands, on the other hand
they may be briefly described as bog holes, though by a merciful
dispensation of the architect these are undoubtedly rendered
somewhat warmer by their very construction out of the solidified
�Force no Remedy.
3
peat and mud. Their dimensions are even more extraordinary
still, varying from 12 feet by 15 feet down to one half that
limited space. Yet all of them are inhabited by large families
of children, numbers of whom sleep on a little straw spread on
the bare ground, with nothing to cover them save the rags and
tatters worn during the day. I invariably found them on the
occasion of my visits crouching around the semblance ot a tire,
lighted on the open hearth. And this at midsummer, shewing
how terribly low must be the vitality amongst them ....
“We visited more than thirty hovels of the poor, principally
in the townlands of Culmore and Cashel, in which I beheld
scenes of wretchedness and misery wholly indescribable. In
some of those hovels evicted families had lately taken refuge,
so that the overcrowding added to the other horrors of the
situation. In one hovel, in the townland of Cashel, we found a
little child, three years old, one of a family of six, apparently
very ill, with no person more competent to watch it than an
idiot sister of eighteen; while the mother was absent begging
committee relief, the father being in England. In another an
aged mother, also very ill, lying alone, with nothing to eat save
long-cooked Indian meal, which she was unable to swallow. In
another, in the townland of Culmore, there were four young
children, one of whom was in a desperate condition for want of
its natural food—milk—without which it was no longer capable
of eating the Indian meal stirabout, or even retaining anything
whatever on its stomach. I took off my glove to feel its emaciated
little face, calm and livid as in death, which I found to be stone
cold. My companion gently stirred its limbs, and after a while
it opened its eyes, though only for a moment, again relapsing
into a state of coma, apparently. It lay on a wallet of dirty
straw, with shreds and tatters of sacking and other things
covering it. The mother was in Foxford begging for relief, the
father being in England in this case also. In no Christian
country in the world probably would so barbarous a spectacle be
tolerated, except in Ireland.”
Mr. Fox further remarks on the absence of crime, borne witness
to by the police themselves ; on the action of absentee landlords,
one of whom, an Irish peer, was “ drawing £30,000 a year out of
the country, whose tenants are everywhere living upon the
Indian meal which we have had so much labor in collecting
from the four quarters of the globe.” Even Mr. Forster
admitted that the “normal condition” of the peasantry and
small tenant farmers was one predisposing to fever—famine
fever.
The Land League was founded by Michael Davitt to win such
a change in the tenure of land as should prevent the “ normal
condition ” of the people in the future being such as was de
scribed by Mr. Forster. The organisation was, at least, an
enormous advance on previous attempts at settling the question,
�Force no Remedy.
and its tendency was to lead the people to look to public and
open agitation for a remedy, instead of to secret conspiracy and
armed redress. That outrages resulting from misery and long
ing tor vengeance should continue side by side with the healthier
movement was not wonderful, but Michael Davitt—alone among
the leaders of the Land League—strove with strenuous effort to
raise the new movement out of the old ruts in which Irish agita“-ad ^un so
an(i would probably have succeeded had
not the Government silenced him, and helped the outrage
mongers by throwing him into Portland Prison. His imprison
ment became the answer to those who urged that peaceful
agitation was the best road whereby to win redressal of wrong,
and the old secret societies gathered new force and wider immn.
mty when the gaol held the founder of the Land League, and
the Coercion Act—to quote Lord Cowper—drove discontent
under the surface.”
The complete failure of the Coercion Act as a repressor of out
rages is now so generally recognised that it would be idle to
dwell upon it. Mr. Gladstone himself, in the debate on the
second reading, described it as “a bill of an invidious and offenriTrejC^iaraC^e^'
Pass^nSs wonder with what adjectives Mr,
Gladstone will describe the new Coercion Act a year hence.)
The Goverment. determined that it should become a dead letter,
and that a policy of redressal of wrong and relief of misery
should take the place of coercive legislation. This decision being
carried out shortly after the murders of Mr. Herbert and of
Mrs. Smythe, a plainer declaration could scarcely have been made
that suspension of constitutional liberty did not touch crime.
The murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish and of Mr. Burke fol
lowed, and on this Mr. Gladstone stated that these had forced
the Government to “ recast their policy.” The new Coercion
Bill is the recasting. But the question is inevitable : “ If it was
right to reverse a policy of coercion after the murders of Mr.
Herbert and Mrs. Smythe, why is it also right to return again to
the policy of coercion after the murders of Lord F. Cavendish
and Mr. Burke ? ” It is impossible to avoid seeing in the present
proposal of . the Government the result of personal feeling and
personal pain ; that the feeling is natural all must admit; that
the murder of a colleague and a relative should make deeper
impression than the murder of a stranger is not marvellous ; but
the treatment of a nation should not be swayed by such feelings,
and if two murders were followed by the lightening of coercive
pressure, two others ought not to be followed by the increase of
the same pressure. The plain fact is that the murderers have
succeeded. They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of
England and Ireland ; they knew that friendship would follow
justice, and that the two countries, for the first time in history,
would clasp hands. To prevent this they dug a new gulf, which
they hoped the English nation would not span ; they sent a river
of blood across the road of friendship, and they flung two corpses
�Force no Remedy.
5
to bar the newly-opened gate of reconciliation and peace. They
have succeeded.
The new Act will not prevent crime, but it will still further
alienate the Irish people. The daily life of each citizen is put
under the most aggravating restrictions, and under a constant
menace, while criminals will easily slip through the. clumsy
•mesbes of the new Act. Secret societies are said to be aimed at;
but never yet was secret society destroyed by repressive legisla
tion. Secret societies are only destroyed by the destruction of
the social wrongs in which they strike their roots.. In.Russia we
have a standing example of what repressive legislation, can do
against a secret society : its Czar is shivering in Gatskina, and
dares not even to publicly assume his diadem. Yet repression
there is carried on with a brutality and a thoroughness which
public opinion in England would not tolerate, even in Ireland.
If measure after measure of growing cruelty is to be levelled
against secret societies within these realms, we may yet.come to
a period when an English Prime Minister will be trembling in a
new Gatskina, and the rulers of free England, encircled by police
and by soldiery, will be degraded to the level of the agents of
continental tyranny.
Let us examine the Bill, dividing it into the clauses that give
new judicial powers, and those which deal with “ offences.”
Part I. : Power is given to the Lord Lieutenant to issue a Special
Commission, forming a court to try persons accused of certain
crimes. The court is to consist of three judges, who shall try
prisoners without a jury, the prisoner, if convicted, to have the
right of appeal to a court consisting of not less than five judges,
none of whom must have sat in the first court. This part of the
Act is met by a protest from the Irish judges, who object to the
new duties forced upon them, and, if passed, will therefore be
administered by a reluctant Bench. The abolition of trial by jury
is, I venture to submit, both unwise and useless. It would be
better, if any change be made, either to take the verdict of a
majority, as in Scotland, or to legalise the transference of trials
for certain offences to England, where a jury composed of Irish
men living in England would not be in terror of their lives. But
really it is not a question of justice failing because of the failure
of juries to convict; the difficulties in Ireland do not lie with the
juries ; the difficulties are the non-finding of the criminals, and
the failure of witnesses to give evidence, the first being by far
the greater. In the returns of agrarian offences for January,
February and March of the present year, this important fact is
very clearly shown. In January 479 outrages were committed
(of these 290 were only threatening letters and notices and 46
more “ intimidation otherwise than by threatening letters and
notices ”); for these 31 persons only were rendered “ amenable
to justice ; ” of these 12 were convicted, 16 were not convicted,
and 3 are awaiting trial; in 448 cases out of the 479 no
persons were brought to justice. In February, out of 407
�6
Force no Remedy.
Bases, only 23 persons were charged; 7 of these are await
ing trial, and 4 were convicted. In March 531 outrages, and
only 46 persons charged; 18 are awaiting trial, 5 have been
convicted. No. details are given as to the convictions in
January, the 12 in February, or the 23 in March, so we cannot
judge whether in these the jury or the witnesses broke down.
Now how will the new Court help us ? They cannot try in the
cases where no persons are charged; they cannot convict without
evidence if the persons are charged ; and even supposing that
they convict every person brought before them, with or without
evidence, they will make very small impression on the roll of
outrages. If such a Court had existed during January, February
and March, and had condemned every prisoner brought before
it, out of 1417 outrages, 1317 would have remained unpunished,
28 persons would be awaiting trial, while only 72 would have
been condemned. It is hardly worth while to abolish trial by
jury for such small results, and it must be remembered that even
judges sitting without jury must have some evidence before they
can convict.
The “ Court of Summary Jurisdiction,” erected by the Bill, is
even more objectional than the Special Commission Court. It is
formed of one police magistrate in Dublin, and two resident ma.
gistrates elsewhere. “Any offence against this Act” may be
dealt with by this Court, and from its decision there is no appeal.
So that while the decision of three judges may be appealed
against, the decision of one or of two petty magistrates stands
above all revision. When we remember the woful abuses of
magisterial authority in Ireland (see “ Coercion in Ireland and
its Results”), we may well stand aghast in considering the tre
mendous powers vested in them under this Act. For let us see
what the “ offences ” are. Some are crimes of violence and
assaults which need no statute to become punishable offences.
But a new one is “intimidation,” defined as “ any word spoken
or act done calculated to put any person in fear of any injury or
danger to himself .... business, or means of living.” Under
this clause a Major Clifford Lloyd and a friend may send to gaol
for six months any person who uses any sort of argument to his
neighbor to persuade him to, or dissuade him from, any course of
action. Any suspicion, any private spite, may cause two magis
trates to see in the most harmless discussion an attempt at “ in
timidation,” and against their abuse of authority there is no
appeal.
Another offence is taking part in an “ unlawful assembly.”
Such an assembly may be construed as consisting of any number
of persons over three; and the Lord Lieutenant has power to
forbid any proposed assembly if he considers it “ dangerous to
the public peace or the public safety.” What political leader will
dare to call a public meeting in Ireland when the new Act is in
force ? Every person present at such meeting, if it be forbidden,
comes at once under the power of the court of summary jurisdic
�Force no Remedy.
7
tion, and even idle curiosity becomes punishable with six months’
imprisonment. The great political question there is the question
of the land ; the agrarian outrages arise because of the evil system
of land-tenure ; any political meeting called to ask for the redressal of grievances connected with the land will most certainly
be regarded as “ dangerous to the public peace
and the people,
denied all open expression of their grievances, will be more than
ever thrown back on violent means.
Not only is liberty of meeting taken away, but liberty of the
press is also annulled. The Lord Lieutenant may confiscate any
newspaper which “ appears ” to him “ to contain matter inciting
to the commission of treason, or of any act of violence or intimi
dation”—intimidation being as before defined. The publisher
of such forfeited newspaper is to be made to give security to the
extent of £200 not to repeat the offence, and if he has not given
this within fourteen days, any paper he issues is to be seized,
whether it be mischievous or not. So that if a paper is wicked
enough to complain of Major Clifford Lloyd’s destruction of huts
sent to shelter from the weather the miserable victims of land
lord cruelty, the paper will be forfeited, and the publisher’s
journalistic career cut short.
Liberty of person follows liberty of meeting and of press.
Any person criminal enough to be out of doors (in a proclaimed
district) one hour later than sunset or before sunrise, may be
arrested by “ any constable ” who chooses to consider the cir
cumstances “ suspicious,” while any stranger may be similarly
arrested at any hour. It is very certain that the victims of police
vigilance will not be the intending committers of outrages, who
will always be provided with some ostensible reason for their
walk, but silly, harmless, nervous people, terrified out of their
wits by the sudden arrest. No quiet evening strolls for Irish
men and Irishwomen during the long cool summer evenings ; no
saunterings of man and maid side by side ; what court of sum
mary jurisdiction will believe that Pat, loitering near a stile, is
only peeping over the hedge to watch for Bridget’s coming ?
Love-making will be too dangerous a pastime to indulge in for
the next three years on Irish soil.
Kight of search at any hour of the day or night is also to be
a power granted by the Lord Lieutenant, and this right is one
which may be very easily made intolerable. The Alien Act is to
be revived, and the cost of extra police and of compensation for
injury is to be levied on the district where outrages take place.
This last enactment is the only rational one in the Act.
To sum up: When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of
public meeting, liberty of press, sanctity of house, will one and
all be held at the will of the Lord Lieutenant, the irresponsible
autocrat of Ireland, while liberty of person will lie at the mercy
of every constable. Such is England’s way of governing Ireland
in the year 1882. And this is supposed to be a Bill for the
“repression of crime;” it will strike at the personal comfort
�8
Force no Remedy.
and dignity of everyone living in Ireland for the next three
years, but will leave criminals absolutely untouched. Such a
law, administered by a Mr. James Lowther, as it may very likely
be, will cause more crime and more bloodshed in Ireland than
any measure passed during this generation, and it will turn
passive alienation from law into active, and perhaps violent,
hostility.
It may be fairly asked of me : Would you, then, do nothing ?
No; I would do something, but the something should be levelled
against criminals only. Instead of keeping thousands of soldiers
concentrated in large bodies, I would draft off infantry enough
to hold headquarters not too far apart in each district where out
rages took place: to these headquarters I would send cavalry,
and a part of the cavalry each night should be divided into small
bodies of six or eight men each, well mounted and lightly armed,
who should patrol the district from end to end. Every isolated
farmhouse should be regularly visited, and should be further
provided with signal lights or rockets, to be used in case of
attack. The knowledge that aid was within reach would
give courage to the inmates of any attacked house to hold
out for a short time against their assailants. These patrol
ling parties should have orders, if they came across any attack
ing party, to take every man prisoner, alive or dead. And in case
of attack, where help came after the criminals had escaped, or
of murder where the body was found after the disappearance
of the assassins, or of wounding when the assailants had
vanished, I should be inclined to put a muzzled bloodhound on
their track, and literally hunt them down. Men caught in the
act of committing outrage, or found with blackened faces and
armed, should be sent straight to Dublin for speedy trial, and
penalties on all crimes of violence should be increased. Firing
at a person or firing into a house should be classed as murder,
and punished as such. The measures would be severe, but their
severity would fall wholly on criminals. Innocent men do not
attack houses, nor wander about armed at night with blackened
faces, and the man who fires into a house, and whose bullet may
strike the child in its cot or the mother with babe in her bosom,
is a murderer in will and should be treated as a murderer. No
innocent man or woman would run the smallest chance of suffer
ing by such laws, and for the scoundrels who make Ireland’s
name a shame throughout the world no mercy need be shown
nor felt.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
London: Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Beadlaugh, 28, Stone
cutter Street, E.O.—1882.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Force no remedy
Creator
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Besant, Annie Wood [1847-1933]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh
Date
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1882
Identifier
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N065
Subject
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Ireland
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Force no remedy), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
Ireland-History-1837-1901
NSS