LIBEL AS A CRTAFFI.
THE Members for Northampton really deserve the gratitude of the public for the way in which they spend their time and their money in illustrating and reforming the common or judge-made law, as well as statute law. The Junior Member has provoked from Lord Coleridge an exhaustive and authori- tative statement of the law of blasphemy, and of the constitu- tional law relating to the power of the House of Commons over its own Members. • The Senior Member prefers to devote himself to the study of Club law and of the law of Libel in a strictly experimental and practical method. The judg- ment which he elicited from five Judges, headed by the Lord Chief Justice, on Saturday last, is the latest and best illustration of the advantages of the experimental and scien- tific method as applied to law. The whole honours of the judgment are not, of course, due to Mr. Labouchere ; the experimental method requires not merely care and ingenuity in devising and working experiments, it also needs a due application of mind and reasoning power in drawing conclu- sions from them. Happily, in the Lord Chief Justice the country possesses this reasoning power, when his Lordship thinks fit to apply it, in the highest degree. The application of Lord Coleridge's mind to the facts experimentally worked out by Mr. Labouchere produces that union of thought and fact which, if not ushered in with the thunder-peals which the Poet-Laureate tells us are the appropriate wedding strains for
such unions, is yet none the less productive of important re- sults. By his judgment in the Vallombrosa case, the Lord Chief Justice has put his foot down most emphatically on several flagrant fallacies which have hitherto prevailed, and led to a scandalous waste of public time. The Dake of Vallombrosa, a foreigner residing abroad, thought proper to resent a paragraph
which appeared in Truth, a London paper, to the effect that his father made his money as a French army contractor, and
narrowly escaped hanging for supplying soldier instead of mutton to the troops. Most people would have left such a silly story to take care of itself, even if it was told of them- selves. But there are people who seem to have no measure of the fitness of things, and who think that their own affairs are of such overwhelming importance that nothing is too slight an occasion to justify them in rushing before the public, and putting the whole force of the State in action to revenge any little slight that is cast upon them ; and not only on them- selves, but on their belongings and their ancestors, even unto the third and fourth generations. It is satisfactory to think that the judgment of a strong Court has put consider- able hindrances in the way of future indulgence of this passion. In the first place, it was held that the fact of this Duke of Vallombrosa's being a non-resident foreigner was, if not an absolutely conclusive answer, yet a very strong argu- ment against his right to take criminal proceedings in England. The technical reason for this, that there is no ground in such a case for apprehending a breach of the peace, conceals the more solid and substantial ground that no appreciable injury has been done. But the chief points settled in the case were that to say things against the dead is not libellous, and that. as a rule, the special remedy by information is not open to a private individual, nor indeed to a public personage, unless he is libelled as such.
The restriction on the right of the living to consider them- selves insulted by things said against their dead relations is a most wholesome one. If once it were allowed that sarcasm or
abuse of a man's ancestors gave him good cause for breaking the peace or prosecuting the writer for libel, there would be no end to libel actions. We should have Lord Campbell's repre- sentatives prosecuting Lord Lyndhurst's, and Lord Beacons- field's nephew dragging Mr. Reginald Wilberforce into the dock. Every life of a prominent personage that was published would land its author in the hands of the law, and the popularity of biographies and the importance of the biographee would be measured by the number of informations aimed at the publisher. As it would be impossible to draw the line, one person being as much offended by an imputation on his great-grandmother as another by a reflection on his father,. true history would become im- possible, and biography would resolve itself not only into a panegyric of the particular hero, but also of every one he knew. The imagination falters before the number of eminent persons who would have the right of prosecution for reflections on the virtue of Charles II.'s favourites, or on- the incorruptibility of the statesmen of the eighteenth century. The line must be drawn somewhere, and it is rightly drawn at death. If a man chooses to consider himself insulted in the person of his ancestors, he must. The Courts are not large enough, and the time of the Judges not long enough, to deal with every fancied wrong. There are quite enough solid wrongs re- maining unredressed, without the public time being con- sumed in discussing sentimental grievances. We have, happily, got beyond the days when it was held to he a crime to say of a Knight of the Bath just dead that he bad earned his red ribbon by "changing his principles and voting for that pernicious project, the Excise," and it is just as well that people should be forcibly reminded that we have. It is also satisfactory to find the Judges trampling on another fallacy, which dictated a decision given only last sittings in another case, that because a man is a lord he is entitled to a different remedy to other people. A criminal information was granted to Lord Lonsdale simply because he is an Earl. For that there was not, according to Lord Coleridge, the shadow of a precedent ; and there being no precedent, it can hardly, in these days, be contended that there is the shadow of a reason. A lord is no more than any other Englishman entitled to the special intervention of the law.
The Criminal Law exists for the purpose of abating in- juries done to all individuals which are at the same time an injury to the public, either directly by the magnitude of the offence, or indirectly by the danger that would arise from its repetition. In most cases, when a crime has been committed, a man may not seek redress by the civil law before he has avenged or attempted to avenge the public by resorting to the criminal law. The case of libel is an exception. The man who thinks himself libelled has his choice whether he will proceed civilly or criminally against the man who he asserts has libelled him. More, there is a special mode of criminal procedure which lies open to him, by what is called " the high-prerogative remedy " of criminal information. When this method is adopted, instead of the person injured bringing his opponent first before a magistrate, then before a grand jury, and finally before a petty jury, he brings him straight away before the Judges of the Queen's Bench Division in the High Court of Justice. But this special method has been usually reserved for cases in which the person libelled is a public personage, holding a public office, and libelled for misbehaviour in that office. It was settled on Saturday that it will not be given to a private person in any case which is not of such a nature, either by the grossness of the outrage or other circumstances, as to call em- phatically for State interference. A Peer, therefore, if libelled for his conduct as a Peer of Parliament, may be allowed the special remedy as a matter of course ; but if he is merely libelled for his private conduct, he is left to the same remedy as any other citizen. This decision is more important than it looks. A man will think once, twice, and thrice before going through the lengthy process needed for an indictment, who would think nothing of proceeding by way of information. Whether hereafter a further step may not advantageously be taken, and the way of indictment stopped up altogether or in great part, is at least open to question. The sensitiveness of people to things said in the newspapers, even in newspapers which no one reads or regards, and to things which cannot possibly do any real harm, tends to become a public nuisance. The papers which live on libel would find their trade a poor one, if there were fewer prosecutions for libel. The acme of absurdity in the abuse of criminal process is reached when, as lately happened, a news company proceeds criminally against a newspaper proprietor for scoffing at the authenticity of its telegrams.
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