The conference held in St. James's Hall yesterday week to
consider the best mode of enforcing the Criminal Law Amend- ment Act was not, strictly speaking, a conference at all. It was too numerous and miscellaneous for real deliberation of the kind needed, which should always be in private. But it was con- ducted throughout the morning and afternoon sittings with great gravity and earnestness, with one or two exceptions. The evening meeting, like the demonstration on Saturday, was a, mistake, though it was at the evening meeting that Canon Scott Holland delivered a speech remarkable for its pure and noble eloquence. The ovation given to the Pall Mall Gazette all through the series of meetings was their worst feature, considering the fatally immoral papers—which could have had no purpose except to excite sensation, and to show the audacity of worldly profligacy—by which the "revelations" of that journal have been succeeded and illustrated. If the course taken were right at all—which is, no doubt, the view of some of the best people in the world, though more and more deeply every day we see how profound was the error of judgment—it should have been hedged in with every conceivable effort to embody the higher conscience which had engendered so hazardous and pain- ful a resolve. How some of the men and women who joined in the demonstration could have done so when they saw evidence of the light and reckless spirit in which the whole terribly tragic melodrama had been conceived, in the profligate avowals circulated in the same journal, we are wholly unable to conceive. Certain it is that a considerable portion of the evening meeting was spent in magnifying the courage of that journal. And especially the declaration of its editor that revelations were to follow revelations as long as there was auy evil thing left to reveal, was received with a rapture which seems to us wholly discreditable.
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