printer—to march soldiers with fixed bayonets to the printing offices, dismantle the plant, seize the type and the essential portions of the printing machines, and carry them off to Dublin Castle without offering the smallest compensation to the printer. This was done without any process of law, on the mere arbitrary fiat of the military authorities in Ireland. Seven papers—one daily, one bi-weekly, four weeklies, and one monthly—were suppressed in Dublin by the actual use of this method or by the threat of it. In no case was any prosecution directed against any of the writers or editors of the papers. This was a case in which it was possible to achieve the maximum of suppression with the minimum of publicity.
I have been asked in America "Does not the Defense of the Realm Act, which confers such absolute power on the military authorities, apply to Great Britain as well as to Ireland?" It does; but the application is different. This is well illustrated by what took place in the case of one of the papers suppressed, the "Irish Worker." After it had been stopped by a military raid on the printing-works, the proprietors got it printed in Glasgow. The military authorities did not dare to interfere with the Scottish printers; they simply waited until the copies of the paper arrived in Dublin for distribution, met the boat, and seized every copy.
A similar discrimination is shown in the stoppage of American newspapers from entering Ireland. They are freely admitted into England,—even the "Irish World" and the "Gaelic American,"—but are strictly censored in entering Ireland, and anything containing either news or opinions likely to "excite" the Irish people is not permitted to pass through. As it was put by Mr. P. H. Pearse, headmaster of St. Edna's secondary school, Rathfarnham, at a meeting last May: "Our isolation from the rest of the world is now almost complete. Our books and papers cannot get out; the books and papers of other nations cannot get in."
At first the Defense of the Realm Act altogether abolished trial by jury, substituted trial by court-martial for any offense under the Act. Thanks to protests by English constitutional lawyers, the Government was obliged to modify this, and give to "British subjects" tried under the act the option of claiming trial by jury. But a clause was slipped in, saying, "This shall not apply in the case of offenses tried by summary jurisdiction." The effect of this is that whenever the military authorities wish to avoid trial by jury, they have only
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