Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

strike at the printer-to march soldiers with fixed bayonets to the printing-offices, dismantle the plant, seize the type and the essential portions of the printing-machines, and carry them off to Dublin Castle without offering the smallest compensation to the printer. This was done without the smallest process of law, on the mere arbitrary fiat of the military authorities in Ireland. Seven papers-one daily, one bi-weekly, four weeklies, and one monthly

[ocr errors]

were suppressed in Dublin by the actual use of this method or by the threat of it. In no case was any prosecution directed against any of the writers or editors of the papers. This was a case in which it was possible to achieve the maximum of suppression with the minimum of publicity.

I have been asked in America "Does not the Defense of the Realm Act, which confers such absolute power on the military authorities, apply to Great Britain as well as to Ireland?" It does; but the application is different. This is well illustrated by what took place in the case. of one of the papers suppressed, the "Irish Worker." After it had been stopped by a military raid on the printingworks, the proprietors got it printed in Glasgow. The military authorities did not dare to interfere with the Scottish printers; they simply waited until the copies of the paper arrived in Dublin for distribution, met the boat, and seized

every copy.

A similar discrimination is shown in the stoppage of American newspapers from entering Ireland. They are freely admitted into England,-even the "Irish World" and the "Gaelic American,"but are strictly censored in entering Ireland, and anything containing either news or opinions likely to "excite" the Irish people is not permitted to pass through. As it was put by Mr. P. H. Pearse, headmaster of St. Enda's secondary school, Rathfarnham, at a meeting last May: "Our isolation from the rest of the world is now almost complete. Our books and papers cannot get out; the books and papers of other nations cannot get in."

At first the Defense of the Realm Act altogether abolished trial by jury, substituting trial by court-martial for any offense under the Act. Thanks to protests by English constitutional lawyers, the Government was obliged to modify this, and give to "British subjects" tried under the act the option of claiming trial by jury. But a clause was slipped in, saying, "This shall not apply in the case of offenses tried by summary jurisdiction." The effect of this is that whenever the military authorities wish to avoid trial. by jury, they have only to decide, which they have absolute power to do, that the case shall be tried by "summary jurisdiction"; that is to say, by a paid magistrate, always a mere tool of Dublin Castle, without any jury or any right of appeal to a jury.

Only one man charged under the Defense of the Realm Act has been accorded trial by jury in Ireland. The history of his case is instructive. John Hegarty was a post-office official with long service and an excellent record. When the war broke out, he was stationed in Cork. He was ordered, without any accusation being made against him, to leave Cork and take up a position in the postal service in England. He refused, pointing out that his home and friends were in Cork, and that there was no justification for arbitrarily turning him out. The answer of the postal department was to dismiss him from the service without pension or compensation. Immediately thereafter he was ordered by the military authorities to leave the city of Cork. He obeyed, and retreated to a remote spot in the Cork Mountains, in Ballingarry, where he proceeded to support himself by agricultural labor. Within a few weeks the military ordered him to leave the County of Cork, still without making any charge against him or giving him any chance to defend himself in court. He went to Enniscorthy, in the County of Wexford, and stayed with friends there. Last February he was arrested in Enniscorthy, dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, brought to Dublin, detained in a military

barracks for a month, then transferred to the civil authorities and allowed trial by jury, but not by an Enniscorthy jury, which would have been his right under the ordinary civil law. A long series of charges was brought against him, including the writing of seditious notices and the possession of arms, ammunition, and explosives. He was tried three times between April and June by three different juries; in each case the Crown and the judge made desperate efforts to secure a conviction. Two of the juries acquitted. him on two different charges, the third disagreed. Then the military authorities. sent Major Price to Hegarty in Mountjoy Jail (I was in the same jail at the time, and Hegarty told me the facts in the exercise yard) and offered to release him if he would agree to go to America. Hegarty refused. Then Major Price offered to release him if he would agree to remain in some spot indicated by the military authorities, and never leave it. Hegarty replied that he was willing to go to Ballingarry, from which the military had driven him; he was then released, on the understanding that he would go there at once, which he did. The military also asked him to sign an undertaking that he would not go more than ten miles from Ballingarry without leave. He refused to give the undertaking, and it was not insisted on, but he was given to understand that if he left Ballingarry he would be arrested. A youth named Bolger, who was arrested along with Hegarty in February, and who, like him, had been kept in jail for four months, was released at the same time, without ever having been brought to trial at all, on the understanding that he was not to leave his home in Enniscorthy.

It remains to be told, as the sequel to the Hegarty case, that in July the annual convention of the Gaelic League elected Hegarty to a place on the executive of that body. This, like the persistent refusal of the Dublin juries to convict, shows what popular feeling in Ireland thinks of the persecution of Hegarty.

and Bolger cases that Sir Matthew Nathan, under-secretary to the lord-lieutenant (that is, chief civil executive officer in Ireland), wrote the following letter to the editor of a Dublin newspaper:

Immediate and Confidential.
Chief Secretary's Office, Dublin Castle.
8th April, 1915.
Dear Sir,

I am given to understand that the request which I made on the telephone on the 30th ultimo, with regard to reporting the proceedings against Messrs. Hegarty and Bolger, was taken only to apply to the application for bail made on the 31st ult.

My intention was that it should apply to the subsequent trial, as it is considered against the public interest that details of the evidence or the speeches of counsel in this trial should be given to the public press. I shall be much obliged if you would arrange for the reports to be merely a bare outline of the proceedings.

I am writing in similar terms to all the newspapers in Dublin.

Yours faithfully,

MATTHEW NATHAN.

One of the facts brought out in the Hegarty trial, which the press, duly intimidated or bribed, did not report, was that for many months no letter or parcel had reached Hegarty without being opened and examined by the secret police while passing through the mails. This process of "Grangerizing" has been carried to a fine art in Ireland; not even in Russia is there a more complete system of espionage on the correspondence of all persons even remotely suspected of disaffection toward the English rule of Ireland.

Hegarty's was the first and last case in which the military authorities gave the option of trial by jury to any prisoner charged under the Defense of the Realm Act. The others were brought before the paid magistrates, and automatically convicted and sentenced. The sentences ranged from a fortnight (which was

It was in connection with the Hegarty given to a Dublin boy for kicking a

recruiting-poster!) to twelve months, six of them with hard labor, which was my sentence for making a speech "calculated to prejudice recruiting." I went on hunger strike, and was out in six days, with a license under the Cat and Mouse Act, which renders me liable at any time for the rest of my life to rearrest and imprisonment for the balance of my sentence without further process of trial, a convenient method of getting rid of an opponent.

Trial by jury had failed to get convictions; trial before paid magistrates got convictions, but also gave undesirable publicity. The batch of cases of which mine was one raised a storm not only in Ireland, but in England. In Dublin meetings of protest were held outside the jail, and placards denouncing the sentences were posted up all over the city. Mr. G. Bernard Shaw wrote a letter, declaring that if I deserved six months' hard labor, Lord Northcliffe deserved about sixty years. Mr. Conal O'Riordan, the distinguished Irish dramatist and novelist, wrote dissociating himself from my point of view, but condemning my sentence; Mr. Robert Lynd, one of the ablest Irish journalists on the London press (literary editor of the "Daily News") did the same; and the indignation was steadily growing, in range and intensity, throughout the English radical and labor press up to the moment of my release.

One result of this was that the Dublin Castle authorities did not rearrest me under the Cat and Mouse Act, although I had ignored all the conditions of the license as to reporting my movements to the police, and did not interfere with my departure for America. They made, however, an unsuccessful attempt, through Sir Horace Plunkett, to exact from me a pledge that I would not speak or write anything against England in the United States. Another result was that even trials by paid magistrates were found to give too much publicity; accordingly, the next method tried was arbitrary deporta

This

tion without trial or accusation. had been adopted, in the form of orders. to leave a certain county or district, in many cases besides Hegarty's, but now a wider extension was given to the method. In July four organizers of the Irish Volunteers were ordered by the military authorities to leave Ireland within a week. They refused. The military then had to arrest them and try them; but to avoid undesirable publicity, they charged them only with disobeying a military order, the grounds for the issue of such an order not being disclosed. The judicial tools of the castle duly sentenced these four men to three and four months' imprisonment.

Even this has not stopped publicity, for even the Redmondite party has been stung into protest against this latest arbitrary action, and has demanded, through Mr. Joseph Devlin, M.P., that these four men get a new and fair trial, and that the grounds for the deportation order be openly stated at that trial.

Meantime O'Donovan Rossa, the old Fenian, has been buried in Dublin with a great display of military force by the Irish Volunteers. The funeral oration, pronounced by Mr. Pearse, was a defiant assertion of Ireland's unconquerable resolution to achieve independence. Recruiting for the English army, despite all kinds of pressure and advertising, languishes, while the recruiting for the Irish Volunteers is so brisk that the headquarters of that body cannot keep pace with it.

And when peace comes, Ireland, with the other small nations, will stand at the doors of the Hague conference, and will claim her rights from the community of nations. Shall peace bring freedom to Belgium and Poland, perhaps to Finland and Bohemia, and not to Ireland? Must Irish freedom be gained in blood, or will the comity of nations, led by the United States, shame a weakened England into putting into practice at home the principles which are so loudly trumpeted for the benefit of Germany?

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][graphic]
« AnkstesnisTęsti »