are all familiar. Thus, to punish a Ritualist for not conforming to the
judgment of the Privy Council, to enforce vaccination at Leicester, to
compel a Quaker to pay tithes, to eject an Irish tenant from the farm he
has occupied, to drag him into Court and seize his goods if he does not
pay his rent, to punish severely resistance to the Sheriff's officer, or
to the bailiff who gives effect to the rights of an Irish landlord, are
in popular estimation proceedings which according to the nature of the
law put in force are stigmatised as persecution or Coercion. They
certainly differ from the compulsion by which common debtors are
compelled to pay their debts, or thieves are prevented from picking
pockets or breaking into houses. The difference lies in this. Where the
enforcement of the law is called "Coercion," not only does the criminal
think himself in the right, or at any rate think the law a wrongful
law, but also the society to which he belongs holds that the law-breaker
is maintaining a moral right against an immoral law. The anti-vaccinator
is deemed a martyr at Leicester, the farmer who will not pay his rent is
thought a patriot at Cork. Where the enforcement of the law is not
popularly deemed coercion the law-breaker does not suppose himself to be
in the right, and still less do his associates think him morally
praiseworthy. A thief does not in general hold any theory about the
rightness of larceny, and there is no society in the United Kingdom at
least who deny the moral validity of the Eighth Commandment.

_Secondly_.--Coercion means the enforcement of law by arbitrary and
exceptional methods which tend to diminish the securities for freedom
possessed by ordinary citizens. Thus the suspension of the Habeas Corpus
Act, the abolition of trial by jury, the introduction of peculiar rules
of evidence to facilitate convictions for a particular class of crimes,
a suspension (speaking generally) of what would be called in foreign
countries "constitutional guarantees," in order to secure obedience to
particular laws, would be called coercion.

An enactment, then, which in ordinary language is called a Coercion Act,
has one or both of the two following characteristics.[25] It is an Act
which either enforces some rule of law (e.g., the law that tenants must
pay their rent, or that trades unionists must not molest artisans who
accept lower wages than the scale prescribed by the union), which does
not command the moral assen