A Coercion Act, in the second place, should as far as possible be neither a temporary nor an exceptional piece of legislation.

An Act which increases the efficiency of the criminal law should, like other statutes, be a permanent enactment.  The temporary character of Coercion Acts has needlessly increased their severity, for members of Parliament have justified to themselves carelessness in fixing the limits of powers conferred upon the executive under the insufficient plea that these powers were intended to last but for a short time.  It has also deprived them of moral weight.  An Act which is a law in 1881, but will cease to be a law in 1882, has neither the impressiveness nor the certainty which gives dignity to the ordinary law of the land.  Coercion Acts, again, should be general—­that is, should apply, not to one part, but to the whole, of the United Kingdom.  Powers needed by the Government for constant use in Ireland must occasionally be wanted in England, or, if they do not exist there, in Scotland.  It were the strangest anomaly for the law to sanction a mode of procedure which convicts a dynamiter in Dublin, and not to give the Government the same means for the conviction of the same criminal for the same offence if he has crossed to Liverpool.  The principle forbidding exceptional or extraordinary legislation suggests that Coercion Acts should in the main give new stringency to the criminal procedure, and should not invade the liberties of ordinary citizens.  The object of a Coercion Act is to facilitate the punishment of wrongdoers, not to restrict the liberty of citizens who have not broken the law.  This is a point legislators are apt to neglect.  The distinction insisted upon will be understood by any one who compares the Act for the Better Protection of Person and Property in Ireland, 44 Vict. c. 4, of 1881, with the Prevention of Crime (Ireland) Act, 1882, 45 & 46 Vict. c. 25.  They were each denounced as Coercion Acts:  the earlier enactment was in many ways the more lenient of the two; yet in principle the Act of 1881 was thoroughly vicious, whilst in principle the Act of 1882 was, as regards its most effective sections, thoroughly sound.  The Act of 1881 in effect gave the Irish executive an unlimited power of arrest:  it established in theory despotic government.  The Act of 1882 was in principle an Act for increasing the stringency of criminal procedure.  The one could not be made permanent, and applied to the whole United Kingdom, without depriving every citizen of security for his personal freedom.  The main enactments of the other might extend through the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, and produce only the not undesirable effect of making the whole United Kingdom a less pleasant residence than at present for criminals or conspirators.