the outgrowth for the most part of reasonable feeling.  Whoever wishes to meet, and, if need be, dispel the antipathy to Coercion Acts, must try to understand what is the meaning which sensible men attach to the word “Coercion,” what is the conviction represented by the dislike to Coercion Acts, how this dislike may be lessened, and, for the purpose with which these pages are written, how far the disapproval of Coercion Acts provides a reason in favour of Home Rule.

Of all the terms which at the present moment confuse public judgment, none is more vague and misleading than the word “Coercion” when applied to every stringent attempt to enforce in Ireland obedience to the law of the land.

Coercion means and includes two different though closely connected ideas which the laxity of popular thought fails to distinguish.

First.—­Coercion means any attempt to enforce a law among people whose moral sympathies are at variance with the law itself.  In this sense Coercion is opposed to that enforcement of ordinary law with which we are all familiar.  Thus, to punish a Ritualist for not conforming to the judgment of the Privy Council, to enforce vaccination at Leicester, to compel a Quaker to pay tithes, to eject an Irish tenant from the farm he has occupied, to drag him into Court and seize his goods if he does not pay his rent, to punish severely resistance to the Sheriff’s officer, or to the bailiff who gives effect to the rights of an Irish landlord, are in popular estimation proceedings which according to the nature of the law put in force are stigmatised as persecution or Coercion.  They certainly differ from the compulsion by which common debtors are compelled to pay their debts, or thieves are prevented from picking pockets or breaking into houses.  The difference lies in this.  Where the enforcement of the law is called “Coercion,” not only does the criminal think himself in the right, or at any rate think the law a wrongful law, but also the society to which he belongs holds that the law-breaker is maintaining a moral right against an immoral law.  The anti-vaccinator is deemed a martyr at Leicester, the farmer who will not pay his rent is thought a patriot at Cork.  Where the enforcement of the law is not popularly deemed coercion the law-breaker does not suppose himself to be in the right, and still less do his associates think him morally praiseworthy.  A thief does not in general hold any theory about the rightness of larceny, and there is no society in the United Kingdom at least who deny the moral validity of the Eighth Commandment.

Secondly.—­Coercion means the enforcement of law by arbitrary and exceptional methods which tend to diminish the securities for freedom possessed by ordinary citizens.  Thus the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the abolition of trial by jury, the introduction of peculiar rules of evidence to facilitate convictions for a particular class of crimes, a suspension (speaking generally) of what would be called in foreign countries “constitutional guarantees,” in order to secure obedience to particular laws, would be called coercion.