A host of earnest and wide-awake persons are engaged in the task of doing what they are told not to do.  Their enthusiasm takes the form of resistance to some statute made or proposed.

The conscientious women who throw stones through shop windows, and lay violent hands on cabinet ministers, do so, avowedly, to bring certain laws into disrepute.  They go on hunger-strikes, not in order to be released from prison, but in order to be treated as political prisoners.  They insist that their methods should be recognized as acts of legitimate warfare.  They may be extreme in their actions, but they are not alone in their theory.

The Insurance Law, by which all workers whose wages are below a certain sum are compulsorily insured against sickness and the losses that follow it, is just going into effect.  Its provisions are necessarily complicated, and its administration must at first be difficult.  The Insurance-Law Resisters are organized to nullify the act.  Its enormities are held up before all eyes, and it is flouted in every possible way.  According to this law, a lady is compelled to pay three-pence a week toward the insurance fund for each servant in her employ.  Will she pay that three-pence?  No!  Though twenty acts of Parliament should declare that it must be done, she will resist.  As for keeping accounts, and putting stamps in a book, she will do nothing of the kind.  What is it about a stamp act that arouses such fierceness of resistance?

High-born ladies declare that they would rather go to jail than obey such a law.  At a meeting at Albert Hall the Resisters were addressed by a duchess who was “supported by a man-servant.”  What can a mere Act of Parliament do when confronted by such a combination as that?  Passive resistance takes on heroic proportions when a duchess and a man-servant confront the Law with haughty immobility.

In the mean time, Mr. Tom Mann goes to jail, amid the applause of organized labor, for advising the British soldier not to obey orders when he is commanded to fire on British working-men.

Mr. Tom Mann is a labor agitator, while Mr. Bonar Law is the leader of the Conservative party; but when it comes to legislation which he does not like, Mr. Bonar Law’s language is fully as incendiary.  He is not content with opposing the Irish Home Rule Bill:  he gives notice that when it has become a law the opposition will be continued in a more serious form.  The passage of the bill, he declares, will be the signal for civil war.  Ulster will fight.  Parliament may pass the Home Rule Bill, but when it does so its troubles will have just begun.  Where will it find the troops to coerce the province?