TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume XLI, Issue 293, 10 December 1910, Page 9

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

(From Our Special Correspondent.)

' COSTLIEST LAWSUIT ENDED. LOXDOX, October 28. The most expensive lawsuit on record cane to an end this week, when the House of Lord-; di-mis'sed the appeal in the ease of "Wylcr and others v. Lev is and other?." The action was brought by Mr. Isi-dor flfrlcr and the Ibo and Xynssa Corporation; the defendants included Messrs. Lewis and .Marks, financiers; and the property in dispute consisted of immense concessions in Portuguese South Africa. liic dispute commenced twenty years ago, and twenty lawsuits were fought in this country and Portugal before the present case came into the courts in JBOS. A Divisional Court jury awarded .Mr. Wylcr £07,472 damages—a record sum. This verdict was reversed by the Court of appeal, and the House of Lords also decided against Mr. Wylcr yesterday. The time occupied by the case has been t£ follows: — Days. Divisional Court 33 Court of Appeal 18 House of Lords 0 Total 57 The cost of the case is even more rejnnrkable than iv length. Xwirly {2|0,000 ha? hei-n spent on the affair from' the beginning, and the costs of the suit j"-i ended' are estimated to total not'].-- than £110.000. of which counsel engaged in the case have received about hall. The •■particulars" of the case filled eleven large printed volumes, the correspondence read covered 11,000 foolscap pages, over two million words were spoken in conn.'t ion with the passages of the case thruiigh the Divisional Court, counsel's opening speech running to 285,000 word-. Sir K. Carson speaking for nearly eight days. Mr. Up-john's speech in' the liou-e- of Lords covered 3 dnys, and Mr. Justice rhilliuiore in the Divisional Court made a three-days' speech also. Mr. Wyler spent eleven days m the witness-box, and four days -were occupied in reading the correspondence. There has only been one longer case learn in England, to wit, the Tiehborne civil case, which lasted 103 days, but there has never .been such a costly case ac Wyler v. Lowis. The nearest approach to it was the Parnell Commission, which cost about £40,000. Other lengthy and costly cases which come to mind are the Belt v. Lawes libel case, which lasted 4H days and cost nearly £20,00, t ,u " Langford case, which oecu- ' pifid 23 days, the Hooley rase, which ran 21 days, Dr. Jamieson's trial, which cost between fourteen and fifteen thousand pounds; and Jabez Balfour's trial, upon tfhkh a similar amount was expended. CHANGED NAVAL OTTTI.OOK. Between them our naval scaremongers and naval optimists are rapidly addling the brains of the British tax-payer. One party, headed by Lord Charles Bereftfurd, da Screaming in one ear "Wake I p! Tour Navy's rotten,' , and demanding a tool hundred mLUions to put things straight; whilst in the other ear Mr. AMvenna and bis henchmen are droning assurances that all is well with our first Jine of defence; that in fact we have got a Navy fully adequate to the requirements of tfio Empire. "Everything's all wrong," cries Beresiford; all right," coos McEenna. And each produced convincing facts and figures in proof of his assertion. It i 3 all beautifully confusing, it is hard to believe that the Government would for the sake of c-ateh-vote economies deliberately risk Britain's Naval supre, mttcy, and at the same time it seems beyond belifef that for mere party- purposes Lord Charles Beresford, Mr. Balfour and other men of mark of the Opposition, should stump the country ■ "sciremongering" without weighty reasons.

According to Lord Charles Beresford we shall ibe undone in 1914, unless ive immediately proceed to build more "Dreadnoughts" than the Government's programme provides for, but according - to the latest information provided by the other side, we shall in that year possess a Navy far in advance of any twoPower standard yet set up without accelerating our current programme, and irithout having recourse to even a small loan. It is now stated that the German naval programme has received a sudden cheek, and that the whole naval outlook has been changed .by reason of a radical alteration in the 'big guns to bo ' mounted in the British "Dreadnoughts" of the newest type. The "Dreadnought" carries 12in.-wca'pons, with an SoOlb.-shell, and it was assumed .that this gun Would be mounted on the British vessels. Tho Admiralty kept their secret well, and it was not until the early days of 'August that it became known that last year the Admiralty placed orders for a number of 13.5in.-guiL3, which have _ ; Th_s new development had a surprising result in Germany. The ships ordered in April were to have carried a 12.01 in.-gun, whereas the earlier German Dreadnoughts had 'been supplied fall an llin. weapon. Directly news Was received of the action of the' British Admiralty the preparations for the construction °f these four ships were suspended, with a view to a reconsideration of their armament. The result is that, TOreas they were originally ordered in A Pril, not one of them lias 'been begun, and instead of Cermany having seventeen Mips 'built or in an advanced stage of construction, she has only thirteen. •_o big a change in the size of s;uns nuist necessarily have an important effect on displacement, armour disposition, and speed, as will be seen from the fact W'tt each of tiie 13.in.-guns weighs 80 tons, whereas the German 12.01in.-aun pfrhs only 5/ tons. In short, according S tlle "Daily Telegraph" correspondent, m i whole of the preparatory work, which Had been practically completed on the T" German ships last April, "will now ' vf 8 . '° he done afresh. and " probable that a good deal ;9 material in process of manusacture wi]l hnvc fo ljp st . rfM7ped » rarely new plans must now be drawn. WW, in P fi- oct] noi Ulo phi . ps orfWpd last SP™. hut vessels of an absolutely new Ijljf 1 eventually he laid down. Ihe en-pet nf t)li , r ptardation on the IT 3 0f possessed l.v Oerpanv f, n ,i Oront R.-i.-iin i.s that the respective numbers of these ships in the ■wonedinte future will, according to tho papers, be as under: — . ,f '. Britain. Germany. pm ion ] 6 n • %l], 1012 ' of) 13 ■%h, mis ..;;;;;;;; _- } { 3 ~IV British total is exclusive of the ; ™° Colonial Dreadnoughts, and does not 11-™'« de any slpus that may be authorized lifclMl 19 laili down in tixa " financial year

A WOMAN'S CRIME. At Bodmin, Oornwal], last Monday, there came to an end a criminal trial which, had it not .been for the intervention of the notorious Crippen ease, would have attracted a great deal of public attention. The prisoner in the dock was Mrs. Olive Willyams, sometime tenant with her husband, Capt. Hugh Willyams, of Tregorland-street, Justin-the-Rose, and she pleaded guilty to four indictments charging her with forging the name o* her -husband's uncle, Mr. Brydgea, Wo 11 yams, an ex-high sherill' of Cornwall, and formerly M.P. for the Truro division. Mrs. Willyams' crime was a particularly wicked one. This tenderly nurtured, highly educated lady, not only stooped to wholesale forgeries of promissory notes, deeds and letters, but deliberately set up the story that the promissory notes were the wages of her own shame, leaving it to be inferred that she was the mistress of her husband's uncle, and that her husband was cognisant of the fact. Moreover, she contrived her forgeries in such a way as to implicate her husband, who found himself charged with tittering one for £2,000. He, however, was able to prove to the satisfaction of judge and jury, that he was the innocent dupe 01 his wife, and was discharged amidst loud cheers. Altogether, Mrs. WillyaTns' forgeries in promissory notes amounted to over £11.000, and in addition she had forged a mortgage deed for £1,000 in her husband's name, and had forged his name so often that the Captain admitted tnat lie had now grave difficulty in swearing to any signature purporting to be his. The plea made on behalf of Mrs. Willyams amounted to asking the jury to treat her as a -woman rendered Irresponsible for her actions through overindulgence in morphia. Her counsel declared that she took the almost un-heard-oE quantity of between 45 and 00 grains a day, and stated that all the parts of her .body which could be reached by the hands were covered with the pricks of the hypodermic syringe. He maintained that although not insane. Mrs. Willyams and other victims of the morphia habit are not quite on the same plane as the person who sits down in cold Wood to plan a crime, and that one of the first 'things that happens to them is tliat they lose all sense of truth. They seem to live in a complete dream of their own, and in time, come to believe what is simply the product of their own imagination. Mrs. Willyams' plots, said he, were of the kind which -would 'be woven by a person who had fancies in her mind which in time she cum to 'believe were (acts. She invented a story which, if true, -would 'bring upon her infinitely more condemnation from her own people than if she had confessed 'to the forgeries. And counsef was fain to confess that, haA'ing carefully investigated those stories, her lawyers had found them entire fiction from .beginning to end. ■Mr. Justice Eldon Bankes —our newest judge—did not pay much heed to Mrs.' Willyams' counsel's morphia plea. A-ddressing the woman, who sat cowering, shivering, sobbing, and half-fainting in the dock, ho said sternly: "I do not desrre to add by my -words to the misery and degradation yon must feel. You know as well as I do what a wicked ■woman you have been. Yours was a carefully* thought-out plan not only for robbing' your husband's relative, but for "blafltiag' 'his reputation in the most wicked manner one can conceive.

"I have 'been told that you are a victim o£ the morphia haibit, but 1 do not T>elievc that you could lliave carried out these elaborate forgeries and have ki-pt it up as you have done with such ingenuity and daring if your Serves had been worried in the way your counsel has suggested as some extenuation of your guilt. "The sentence I must now pass on you is that of three years' penal servitude." Mrs. Willyams made an effort to rise as the Judge passed sentence. Her face was clay-coloured, and her moutli twitched "painfully. Her lips moved, but no sound came, and in a faint she was carried from the Court, as Captain 'Willyani3 was called up to hear from the jury of his acquittal. PEARY AND THE ESQUIMAUX. The world is just a little tired of hearing about the conquest of the North Pole, but Captain .Scott's forthcoming Polar dash from New Zealand may excite a sympathetic interest in Peary's narrative of his Arctic triumph, published this week in a handsome and substantial volume. Unfortunately it has all been told before, iirst in the newspapers, then in the magazines. Everyone has read Peary's description of his sensation on reaching the North Pole, and the words he wrote in his diary: — ■'The Pole at last! The prize of three centuries! My dream and goal for twenty years. .Mine at last! i cannot bring myself to realise it; it seems all so simple find commonplace." Newer, and therefore more interesting, are his notes on the Esquimaux, who played so important a part in the concjutst of the Pole. "With th<?ir help the world shall discover the North Pole," wrote Peary many years agV> of the Esquimaux. Ami for eighteen years, he tells us, he has been training them in his methods. "I know every man, woman, and child in the tribe," he says, "from f'ape York to Utah," and to a large circle of his readers Commander Peary's declineation of the character and habits Of the interesting possessors of these everlasting snows will form a most engaging part of the story. "The Esquimaux are not brutes," he declares with emphasis, "they are just as human as CaucassiariS." They served the explorer well. And they are a curious and knowing people. One woman travelled 100 miles in the hope of seeing a white woman in the party. Without any idea of religion, they will share their last meal with anyone who is hungry. They are healthy and pure-blooded, they have no vices, use no intoxicants, and are without bad habits. They subsist mainly on meat, blood, and blubber. The women are short and plump. Like children, they are easily elated and discouraged. In winter the Esquimaux reside in ifloos or huts; in summer in skin tents. Oil from the seal and other Polar fauna supply their needs in the. way of light, heat, and fuel. Commander Peary tells' us what seems a paradox after this glowintr description of their virtues, that there is no disguising the fact that they are very dirty. In their social customs they believe in a trial 7iiarriage. If two men want to marry the same girl they settle the question by a trial of strength, and the better man has his way! If a man grows tired of his wife he simply tells her that there is no room for her in the igloo; she is as much part of the man's property as his dog or sledge. In the opinion "of Peary "it would be worse than useless to engraft our marriage customs upon these native children of Nature. I They must be ranked as Jnunanej)eo])le£_