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