LIBELLED TOWNS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 160, 10 July 1933, Page 6

LIBELLED TOWNS.

A defamation case of an unprecedented character has, according to a story from Brussells, been adjudicated upon by the Civil Court in that city. The Belgian towns of Dinant and Aerschot sued the German guide book publishers Baedeker, of Leipzig, for defamatory statements contained in their English and German editions of a book on Belgium. The guide stated that Aerschot was partly destroyed by the Germans in 1914 because a German colonel had been killed by the inhabitants and that Dinant was burned because the people had shot German soldiers. The court held that these statements were entirely false and damaging to the cities and have forbidden the sale of the books in Belgium unless the incriminating passages aro altered according to liistorieaf proof, and the Baedeker firm was ordered to pay the costs.

This is probably the first time a city or town has prosecuted its slanderers. It opens up a vast range of possibilities, disconcerting to publishers the° world over. If every town about which defamatory statements have been printed took action against the offenders and blocked their publications" how many bookmen would escape a summons to court? The nasty things we have all heard and read (and written—some of us) about cities and countries other than our own!

We are not without examples of such slanderous allegations even in this country. The biting libels one ha* read about Taihape, for instance. And Wang&nui has not yet forgotten or forgiven the authors of a printed statement, following on some official figures—and figures can prove or disprove anything—that most of the feebleminded people in the- colony came from the Wanganui district. One remembers the time when some despicable newspaper person in Auckland coined the epigram that "P" atood for Parnell, the Place of Pride, Poverty and Pianos. (But that was long ago; they haven't nearly so many pianos in Parnell now.) And even the Empire City has not escaped calumny. Its gentlest winds have been described as Antarctic howlers, _ its bracinir climate as atrocious, its people as artistically without a soul. There are those who still affirm that all of this is true. All that need be said in reply is that the greater the truth the greater the libel. 4s for Auckland—the sneering remarks T have heard in Invereargill about Auckland. Tf they would only confine it to speech, it would not matter, but the most respectable of papers, the Dnnedin dailies, have in the exuberance of their jealousy printed criticisms of Auckland which rightly should have been hurled back in their te'eth,' with costs. But there—let the community that is without fault throw the first brick. -— I WAT.