finally permitted to return there, after refusing to sign an undertaking that he would not go ten miles from Ballingarry without leave.
One of the facts brought out in the Hegarty trial, which the press, duly intimidated or bribed, did not report, was that for many months no letter or parcel had reached Hegarty without being opened and examined by the secret police while passing through the mails. This process of "Grangerizing" has been carried to a fine art in Ireland; not even in Russia (happily the verb should now read "was") there a more complete system of espionage on the correspondence of all persons even remotely suspected of disaffection toward the English rule of Ireland.
Hegarty's was the first and last case in which the military authorities gave the option of trial by jury to any prisoner charged under the Defense of the Realm Act. The others were brought before the paid magistrates, and automatically convicted and sentenced. The sentences ranged from a fortnight (which was given to a Dublin boy for kicking a recruiting-poster!) to twelve months, six of them with hard labor, which was my sentence for making a speech "calculated to prejudice recruiting." I went on hunger strike, and was out in six days, with a license under the Cat and Mouse Act, which renders me liable at any time for the rest of my life to rearrest and imprisonment for the balance of my sentence without further process of trial, a convenient method of getting rid of an opponent.[1]
Trial by jury had failed to get convictions; trial before paid magistrates got convictions, but also gave undesirable publicity. The batch of cases of which mine was one raised a storm not only in Ireland, but in England. In Dublin, meetings of protest were held outside the jail, and placards denouncing the sentences were posted all over the city. Mr. G. Bernard Shaw wrote a letter, declaring that if I deserved six months' hard labor, Lord Northcliffe deserved about sixty years. Mr. Conal O'Riordan, the distinguished Irish dramatist and novelist, wrote dissociating himself from my point of view, but condemning my sentence; Mr. Robert Lynd, one of the ablest Irish journalists on the London press (literary editor of the "Daily News") did the same; and the indignation was steadily growing, in range and intensity, throughout the English radical and labor press up to the moment of my release.
- ↑ Note.—This Is the matter that rendered Mr. Skeffington persona non grata to the English Government and led to his murder finally.
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