LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
DOWNWITH MOB LAW
[To VIM Lanes 07 ass " SPIC7/20‘...]
Sive,The recent menaces to the lives, and more often the destruction of the property, of Germans, or of persons who happen to bear German names, read us ono lesson. We mast tolerate no more mob-law. The authors of the recent riots are all of them fools. A few of them are thieves. Allow me to recapitulate the untold injury which these men have already inflicted upon the country :— (1) The rioters have comforted Germany. They have deprived England of that visible calmness which is the source of half her strength. Every German will now believe that England is panic-struck.
(2) The rioters have made it appear, false though the impression be, that the Government, in guarding against the real danger to the country which may arise from the acts of German criminals and traitors, is acting in obedience to the commands of the mob.
(3) The rioters, as the very stupidest of them must now perceive, keep at home for the preservation of order British soldiers who long to be employed in driving the enemies of humanity from France and Belgium.
(4) The rioters, or the beat of them, dream that in wrecking the property and menacing the lives of Germans they are doing a work of justice. No delusion is sillier or leads to more odious wrongdoing. A mob can never perform the duties of a Judge ; it ought never to be allowed to play the part of an executioner. The villains who have disgraced some States of the American Union by the slaying or burning of negroee not convicted of any crime have generally fancied that they were administering retribution for intolerable offences. Germans guilty of the outrages revealed to us by the Report of Lord Bryce and his colleagues have sometimes, I doubt not, imagined that evil deeds somehow promoted righteous ends.
(5) The rioters will in their sober moments maintain that they have hurried on just legislation. This allegation is essentially futile. Hurry is never the companion or the servant of justice. The very argument, on which some apolo- gists for popular violence may rely, throws a groundless slur upon the Parliament of England. No one pleads for a moment that either the crimes of aliens should go unpunished, or that the very strictest precautions should not be taken to guard against perils to England resulting from the residence within her borders of thousands of Germans whose sympathies may during the present war go with our enemies. If stringent laws against Germans inhabiting the United Kingdom are required in order to save the country from a German invasion, let such laws be passed. Even the sufferers under severe legislation meet remember that their privations are at bottom caused, not by the illwill of Englishmen, but by the doctrines of inhumanity taught and the murderous practices encouraged by the Kaiser and his servants. I for one certainly do not ask for leniency towards Germans. I demand only the maintenance of legal justice towards every Englishman or German who is an inhabitant of the United Kingdom. Let the law be made as severe as the dire needs of this terrible crisis require, but let the mob have nothing whatever to do with the infliction of punishment. On another occasion I may, with your permission, make some suggestions as to the methods by which the protection of the country against the possible crimes of its German inhabitants may be best maintained. For the moment I confine myself to two statements. The one is that under the law of England, until or unless it is modified, or has been modified, by Parliament, Herr Miller from Berlin, who has been naturalized in the United Kingdom, say two or three years ago, has now, and has had, in substance, since his naturalization, all the rights of Mr. Miller, the son of English parents, and born in London. The second is that, in England at least, we must all bear in mind that mob-law is no law at all, and that in a civilized country it is nothing but the hideous parody of that legal justice whereof it is in fact the contradiction.—I am, Sir, Sto..
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