TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BREACH OF PRIVILEGE DEBATE.
THROUGH the rapidly growing passion of party strife, there are, we think, two or three features of the case concerning the breach of Privilege committed by the Times, on which it is hardly possible for a reasonable man to entertain a doubt. The first is, that Sir Charles Lewis did a very silly thing when he trailed this herring across the more serious business of Parliament. It was not his business. If Mr. Dillon and his friends took no notice of the Times' attacks, it was very far from wise for an enemy to take a kind of notice of them which could only waste time, and place the Government in a most em- barrassing position by compelling them to choose between asking for an inquiry which would not be efficient, and asking for an inquiry which would not be accepted. The next point that seems clear to us, and which we do not think that any reasonable man on either side can deny, is that the language of the Times, though it certainly did not assert the " wilful " falsehood imputed to it by Mr. Gladstone and many of the debaters, did impute to Mr. Dillon an utter recklessness as to truth or falsehood, which must be a breach of Privilege, if there ie such a thing as a breach of Privilege at all. Nor, indeed, did the Government deny this. They only denied that it should be "treated" as a breach of Privilege,—in other words, that it would be the right course to summon the printer and publisher of the Times to the bar, on the ground of a breach of Privilege. Mr. Gladstone, who drew the dis- tinction very clearly between the question whether the Times' article on Mr. Dillon was or was not a breach of Privilege, and the question whether it should be treated as a breach of Privi- lege, proceeded to confound the two questions in his argument instead of keeping them, as it would have been well to do, utterly distinct. We do not see why the House should not have affirmed the breach of Privilege,—which in effect every one admits,—and yet have passed the resolution which it did pass refusing to treat it as a breach of Privilege, for which the Government had a great deal to say for themselves, though they may or may not have been wrong in not giving the Irish Members an option between the inquiry by a Select Committee, and the far better and more efficient method of a judicial investigation. The third point which seems to us perfectly clear and quite beyond question to any candid mind, is that the Government did not offer a " collusive " prosecution in any sense of the term. The Government offered in the most explicit way to let the Irish Members conduct the case through their own counsel and their own solicitors. As the Attorney-General put it, there was nothing in the world• to prevent them from having entrusted Sir Charles Russell with the conduct of the prosecution. And to affirm that just because there must have been a formal associa- tion of the Attorney-General's name with Sir Charles Russell's or that of any other counsel selected, in the prosecution,—the Attorney-General not taking the smallest part in the matter,— such a prosecution would be "collusive," is as nncandid and un- reasonable as the choice of a thoroughly misleading term can possibly be. We could hardly believe our eyes when we saw that Mr. Gladstone had pronounced the proposed prosecution to be a " collusion of the grossest character ;" and though we have read his sentence over and over again, we are utterly unable to conceive his real meaning. Here is the sentence :— " Either you believe in the justice of the prosecution you have ordered to be instituted,—and if you believe in it, well, so far you are prejudging the case,—or you do not believe in it. If you go into Court pretending to ask from that Court a sentence that a libel has been com- mitted, and while you pretend to ask it, you carefully avoid pronouncing that opinion which our predecessors always have pronounced, why, Sir, what is that but collusion of the grossest character, unworthy of those who, I think, in error, though I have no doubt with upright intentions, advise it; unworthy of those who seem disposed to receive the advice, and to be, in my opinion, condemned to the adverse judgment of both the public and posterity f" Whoever can get a clear impression out of that, we are utterly unable to do so. The Government take up a very plain position. They say that the Times has either published a most atrocious series of criminal libels, or has published a most important series of true accusations, or has published a remarkable mixture of truth and falsehood. They have no means of deciding to which of the three categories the Times' articles belong. But they do think that such articles should not be published at all unless they can be justified,. and that the only machinery adequate to the proper sifting of such statements is a Court of Law, They therefore authorise a deliberate prosecution of the Times for libel by the persons concerned, in the hope of either clearing them completely, or of clearing them partially and partially justifying the Times, or completely justifying the Times, whichever of the three results may follow. Now, is that collusion at all, much less "of the grossest character," in any conceivable sense of the term f We really are completely at a loss to understand what Mr. Glad- stone means. It is a perfectly legitimate position for the Govern- ment to assume, to say that charges such as those published by the Times ought either to be justified or to be punished, and that the Government propose that the proper tribunal should take it in hand to declare whether or how far they can be justified, and if they cannot be justified, how they should be punished. Prima facie no one doubts that they are very serious libels, and justification is the only excuse for such libeler. But how is the Government to decide beforehand what the result of a judicial investigation will be These are the points which seem to us perfectly clear in the matter. The point on which we entertain some doubt is. whether the Government were wise in refusing altogether to countenance a very much less adequate investigation before a Committee of the House, conducted, of course, upon oath, and with counsel on both sides, in case the Irish Members should repudiate, as they have repudiated, the far more thorough and far more satisfactory method of a judicial investigation. We do not condemn the Government for refusing to sanction such an investigation, for we cannot conceal from ourselves that there is something almost ludicrous in men who declare that. the Treasury Bench have covered themselves with dishonour, that the First Lord of the Treasury especially ought to. stand in the dock instead of directing the prosecution, profess- ing to accept the judgment of any Committee appointed by the House of Commons, though, of course, this " degraded " Govern- ment must be very largely concerned in nominating it. It is hardly credible that a man who could speak of the Government. as Mr. T. P. O'Connor spoke of it immediately after Mr. W. H. Smith's offer, would scruple at denouncing any Committee that should have reported against the Irishmen, as a pack of dishonourable and unjust judges. Hence, we cannot blame the. Government for refusing an inquiry which would in any case be very slow, superficial, and unsatisfactory,—for without a Judge and a non-political Judge, such trials as these cannot be eficient,—and which would to a certainty only be accepted by the Irish Party if it ended in completely acquitting them and condemning the Times. Still, we cannot pretend to be at all clear that, whatever the effect of such an imperfect inquiry by the House of Commons on the persons chiefly con- cerned might be, the effect on the public mind might not have been good. The public are confounded by the great conflict. of testimony, and want something to guide their judgment. Imperfect as the inquiry of the House of Commons must be, compared with the inquiry of a judicial tribunal, we are not sure that it would be without a very useful effect on the public mind. There would be at least some results from it which would stand out as landmarks to guide the public judgment for the future. Hence, though we heartily approve the preference of the Government for a regular judicial inquiry,— the only kind of inquiry which would really yield satisfactory results,—we do not feel clear that it would not be better, as we cannot compel the Pamela° Party to accept such an inquiry, to accede to the kind of investigation which they do at. last accept, though they certainly did not seem at all eager to court it for themselves.
As for the imputations against the British tribunals which Mr. Dillon and his friends bring, we do not doubt the sincerity of those imputations, because we are well aware that when passion has risen to the fiery heat of the present situation, there is no imputation of this kind which is not brought with the utmost sincerity. But really, when it comes to distrusting a British jury on the ground that all the members of the jury are readers of the Times, it is hardly possible to keep a grave face. Are not all the members of any conceivable Committee of the House of Commons readers of the Times? You might as well say that in an action against Renter for a libellous telegram, a jury would be sure to give the verdict in favour of Renter, because all the jury read Renter's telegrams. A reader of a journal is no more disposed to accept slavishly that journal's view, when he has the means of examining for himself into the grounds of that view, than en habitual traveller by a railway is
to accept slavishly the view taken of their duties by the Directors of that railway, when he has independent means of examining for himself the grounds on which the Directors acted. Mr. Dillon's allegation that the verdict in the Brenon case was due to the known fact that Mr. Brenon had quar- relled with the Land League, is almost as wild as the notion that the habit of reading a journal prepossesses ordinary men against any view which that journal disapproves. We doubt whether one juryman in a hundred would appreciate the difference between Mr. Brenon and any other Land Leaguer. What the jury saw was that no attempt was made to prove Mr. Brenon's share in the various conspiracies to which he had been accused of being a party, and so, like men of business, they at once gave heavy damages for the false accusation. So it would be with Mr. Parnell, or Mr. Dillon, or any other Irishman who should stand in Mr. Brenon's position. Are not Gladstonians supposed to be much more numerous than Unionists ? And if Gladetonians have a prepossession, is it not now for the Irish Party I—though we are quite sure that on a jury they would be as honest in convicting a Parnellite criminal, as the Unionists would be in acquitting a Parnellite falsely accused.
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