The daily papers still continue to publish summaries of the
evidence in the Tichborne Case at the head of the fuller report of the trial, —a very convenient practice for their readers, but one which is not unlikely to bring them into a charge of contempt of Court, if the Queen's Bench continues to take so grave a view of the sort of comments which appear on the trial, as they have hitherto done. The Leeds Evening Express, the Leeds Weekly Express, the Hampshire Chronicle, the Echo, and the Pall Mall Gazette have all got into trouble this week for publishing what was treated as comments on the case, and only those which have given the fullest apology have been let off. We do not see how the short summaries of the general effect of the evidence which most of the penny papers give daily can be regarded as anything but a kind of comment, and a very dangerous kind of comment, on the evidence, and there- fore we omit anything of the kind ourselves,—the more, that we cannot correct it by any full report of the evidence itself, as the daily papers can. We do not say that this stringent doctrine as to criticism of a pending case is otherwise than wise, but we do say it is quite inconsistent with anything but a strictly correct verbal report, and that it is in the power of very few papers indeed to give a strictly correct verbal report of the evi- dence in any trial of this complicated and difficult kind. A false report of a mere smile or frown of the Judge or the defendant might convey the most dangerous and misleading comment on the drift of the proceedings.
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