It seems that some of the extraordinary reports of courts-
martial and their results published in the Colonial Standard of Jamaica were actually written, as was suspected in England at the time, by correspondents shocked beyond measure at the brutality of the measures adopted, and only able to convey their horror by throwing an extravagance of cynical emphasis into their approval of the bloody measures adopted which slightly over- leaped the bounds of real sympathy. Thus the correspondent of the Standard, who reported the fifty lashes given to each of a lot of supposed rebels as a mere caution, and the immediate hanging of George Marshall, a brown man, because at the forty-seventh lash he ground his teeth and cast a ferocious look at the provost- marshal,—writes now under his own name, A. W. H. Lake, re- porter to the Colonial Standard, to confess that he loathed the cruelties committed, but dared at best only to indicate them in this manner. Some of those arrested as political prisoners were his most intimate friends, and known to be so. " If I at all merit censure," he says, " it is for possessing a natural dread, a desire to avoid the laceration of my flesh t by way of caution.' Ah and a noose placed around my neck !" " I hesitate not in declaring," he writes, " that the atrocities committed at Morant Bay during martial law by the provost-marshal, under the sanction of the authorities, will cause a blush on many a British cheek when chronicled. I hesitate not to say murder, foul murder, has been perpetrated in the face of day, and I fear not to tell it that Mr. George William Gordon has been cruelly slain by the authorities, not a tittle of legal evidence having been adduced to warrant even his being placed upon his trial." The notes of this trial have come home, and are to be published in a few days. Mr. Lake adds that " some of Her Majesty's justices of the peace were being near tatted by the provost-marshal." That would have been a very dramatic assertion of the perfect impartiality. of the law. Will Mr. Cardwell now repeat his flagrantly untrue assertion that "comparative safety was ,speedily restored to all persons, of whatever race or colour, who desired to live in peace and orderly submission to the law ?" Mr. Lake, who was on the spot, posi- tively affirms the contrary.
