Mark
you, all the forms--all the precautions--all the outward seeming of
English law and liberty--are in these Irish courts. The outside is just
the same as in any court that meets in the Old Bailey; but it is all the
mask and the drapery, behind which the real figures are the foregone
verdict, the partisan judge--the prepared cell or constructed gallows.
In the regime of coercion which has just expired, the whole machinery
was in motion. The last sentence of the law was not resorted to in
political offence, for the days of rebellion in the open field had
passed. But there were the Resident Magistrates ready to do their master
Balfour's bidding, and to send men to imprisonment, in some cases
followed by bread-and-water discipline--by stripping of clothes and
other atrocities, which made the court of the Resident Magistrate the
antechamber to the cell, and the cell the antechamber to the tomb. In
all these ghastly and tragic dramas, enacted all over Ireland, Mr.
Carson was the chief figure--self-confident, braggart,
deliberate--winding the rope around his victim's neck with all the
assured certainty of the British Empire, Mr. Balfour and the Resident
Magistrates behind him.
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