THE WESTMEATH BILL.
THE Government Bill for the better suppression of crime in Westmeath will, we fear, disappoint all the friends of Ireland. It may restore order in Westmeath, but it will not produce security. It was of course pretty certain that its first provision would be the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act within the infected district, for no less violent remedy could be expected to act at once, and in the circumstances of the county every day's delay is a day's refusal of justice to all who respect the law. But the public expected the suspension and a good deal more. Armed with this Bill and a mass of secret information, the Lord-Lieutenant will be able to lay his hand on all the Riband leaders, and either shut them up for two years or force them to quit the country. He will also be able to prevent others from taking their places, to protect menaced lives, and generally to assure the conspirators against order that the law is much stronger than they are. If Earl Spencer uses his power firmly and yet discreetly, if he knows the names of the Ribandmen with anything like accuracy, if they cannot fly to the mountains, and if the society cannot plant itself outside Ireland, then of course the organization will for two years be broken up. But two years is an imperceptible point of time in the history of a nation, and we did hope that this Cabinet, so attentive to Ireland and so well aware of her needs, would have taken advantage of the occasion to introduce some plan which might have been expected or at least intended to produce a permanent result. As it is, at the very best there will be order in Westmeath for two years, there will be no pretence for a renewal of the Act, there will be an angry cry from Irish Members in favour of discontinuing it, and a twelvemonth after its expiration all the existing evils may again be in full swing. The Riband- men will come out of prison, as one witness said, "foaming at the mouth," and enjoy the popular sympathy; they will again appeal to the Irish passion for security of tenure and of occu- pation, public or private ; and they will again resort to the only weapon before which our laws break down, the systematic prohibition of evidence under penalty of death. It hardly matters how few or how many they may be. The experience of all countries, including England itself, shows that a very few resolute men employing assassination as their instrument can terrify men from doing that which they do not par- ticularly want to do, namely, give evidence against their neighbours,—and as our system is based on evidence, that terror paralyzes our laws. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, therefore, is a mere palliative, a temporary expedient which will give the Ministry time to think, but will in no degree tend to extinguish Ribandism in a county Where it is an hereditary tradition to which a great mass of the people— Mr. M. Read says a majority of the people—are as much attached as the workmen of Paris are to their somewhat dif- ferent form of socialism. More radical measures are re- quired if the evil is to be permanently extirpated, the evil, we mean, of assassination—for the Irish notion of turning all trades into "Services," with immutable rights, if irrational is not wicked—and all evidence from West- meath points to three reforms as indispensable to that end. They are all reforms which have been tried both in India and on the Continent, and have succeeded ; they are all within the spirit of our system of legislation, and they are all legal,—are, that is, wholly apart from the resort to mob violence which the Marquis of Salisbury, in a burst of intel- lectual. hotheadedness, took on himself to recommend. If he wants an open civil war between the hundreds who have and the thousands who have not, if he desires to see law suspended in favour of mob violence, if he wishes to give the Ribandmen the right to pose as victims in the eyes of the world, he will again recommend a Vigilance Committee of the rich to put down the poor, of the gentry against the plebeians, of the employers to terrorize the employed. The first object in Westmeath is to restore confidence in the energy, the courage and the impartiality of the magistracy, and this can only be done by replacing the caste to whom power is now confided, a caste hostile to the bulk of the people by tradition, by creed, and by circumstances, with stipendiary magistrates, men intent not on their property interests, but on doing indifferent justice and maintaining order, who will attack the secret societies in the spirit not of Irish landlords, but of Indian civil servants, who strike, and strike hard, not because they hate, but because they are resolved that order shall, in the interests of civilization, conquer crime. One man of the true Indian type, armed with the control of the police, the power of collection of evidence, and the right of committal, would do more to pacify Westmeath than a legion of interested country gentlemen. The next object is to secure evidence, and this can only be secured by enlisting the one witness who is inac- cessible to terror,—the guilty man himself. Permit the sti- pendiary magistrate to cross-examine the accused, and one-half of the difficulty of procuring evidence would disappear at once, while a new and tremendous restraint would be placed on the man who intended crime. He may consider murder war, but by no possible twist of conscience can he make per- jury anything but a mean sin. This system is universal on the Continent ; it is the key-note of the great plan under which Colonel Hervey strikes down the criminal societies of India, and it has nothing in it opposed to the sentiment of natural justice. Why should a man not be questioned when he is accused of crime ? If he is innocent he can explain his conduct much better than anyone else, and if he is guilty there is no need for giving him any artificial protection as a shield against the law. Arrest and evidence thus facilitated, it remains to secure a fair trial, and there is no fair trial if the tribunal either is or may by possibility be under terror of the mob. The way to prevent that is either to suspend trial by jury—a wretched device in a country like Ireland, where an unprejudiced juryman is an impossibility, and " packing " a strictly observed tradition,—or to allow a verdict to be given by a majority, and given by ballot, so that the populace can never know who voted either for acquittal or for punish- ment. With those three reforms the position of an assassin, or of one implicated in an assassination, would be one full of terror and annoyance, while no innocent citizen would be ex- posed to the least additional risk. It is nothing to him that the magistrate is a barrister, or an Indian instead of a squire ; he rather prefers the change, having been suspicious of the squire ever since his own father and the squire's uncle had that dispute about the turf. It is nothing to him that if arrested he must be questioned ; he will rather enjoy the right of telling his own story his own way, and at most exasperating length. And finally, it is nothing to him not to know which way a juryman voted, for he does not want to kill him, and thinks a two-thirds' vote more likely to make a just verdict than an unanimous one produced, as he knows well, by "packing."
The Times says Lord Salisbury talked about the measures which put down Thuggee as measures for imitation in West- meath: Nothing so imprudent appears in the report of his speech, and we question whether, even if he uttered a sentence of the kind, he ever seriously entertained the idea. Thuggee law could be worked only by a benevolent despot in whose benevolence his own subjects sincerely believed. Its backbone is the right of a paternal Government to punish whenever its own conscience is convinced, and its foundation is the evidence of informers who are not confronted with the accused. As no evidence is received except from men who are accusing them- selves as well as others, as a Thug never lies, and as the Indian Government inflicts imprisonment for life on informers as well as accused, the system works, but it is from beginning to end at variance with every principle alike of free government and of ordinary justice. None of the conditions which pro- tect it in India are present in Ireland, and to entrust the power of Thuggee Commissioners to Westmeath magistrates, and of Thuggee witnesses to Irish informers, would be to set up a tribunal worse than the Inquisition, and kill for ever among the peasantry the last hope of justice from English adminis- trators of the law.
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