Evening Post. SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1918. MORBID HYSTERIA

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 42, 17 August 1918, Page 6

Evening Post. SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1918. MORBID HYSTERIA

The cabled reports of the Billing libel case told us a good deal, and in the opinion of many people more than enough, of an unsavoury and ridiculous business. It certainly seemed strange that so much space should be devoted to witnesses whose evidence, "as the Daily News said, suggested a. madhouse or comic opera, to' the antics of the defendant himself, and to the unavailing efforts of the Judge to restrain a degrading travesty on both the forms and the substance of justice at the very time when the fate of the world was once more in issue on the Marne. But a perusal of the English newspapers which are now to hand shows that, deplorable as the proceedings may have been, the Cable Association was not exaggerating their importance in the reports which it supplied. The second battle of the Marne had no place in The Times editorials on the day after the conclusion of the trial, and the place of honour was given to a leader of exceptional length entitled "A Scandalous Trial." Still more significant was the fact that, after waiting till the following week, the Spectator repeated the performance of The Times, honouring a trial which it declared to have been distinguished by "orgies of mental disorderliness, indecency, and reckless mud-sling-ing," with treatment at double the normal length .in the firat of its editorials under the heading "The Road to Demoralisation." A trial which abounded in the elements of farce had clearly also its tragic aspects, or two such authorities as The Times and the Spectator could not possibly have treated it in this fashion. "It is safe to say," said The Times in its opening sentence, "that no lawsuit of modem times has attracted such universal and painful interest as the deplorable libel action which terminated yesterday at the Central Criminal Court. Not only in London, but even more in provincial towns and countryside, the daily reports have been read and discussed with almost as deep anxiety as the news of the. war itself." Though prurience and the love of scandal necessarily played some part in the widespread interest excited by the case, concern of the kind to which The Times refers had of course deeper and more creditable foundations. The public was certainly very little concerned with the only matter which was supposed to be in issue, and almost as much might be said of the Court itself. The question was whether or not Miss Maud Allan had been guilty- of abominable and unmentionable immorality. Unfortunately, however, the libel also referred to "members of Maud Allan's private performance in Oscar Wilde's 'Salome,' " and suggested that among their names were those of some of the "First 47,000." The reference, as another of the defendant's publications showed, was to a mysterious "Black Book," said, to be in the possession of a German prince and containing the-names of. 47,000 English men and women, with records of their alleged moral and-sexual weaknesses and other information considered likely to make them easily accessible to German intrigue. The character of Miss Maud Allan, against which Mr. Billing appeared to have no direct evidence of any kind, became in the course which the trial was allowed to take of secondary and even remote interest. The character of Oscar Wilde, the meaning of the text of his play and of the innuendoes that might be read into it, the- mysteries of the "German Black Book," and the ,slanders on the public men alleged to be mentioned in if^-these points, and especially the last of them, became the real focus of interest.

Mr. Justice Darling has been much censured for opening the door to wholesale slanders on some of the most honoured, men in British public life while shutting it against their defence? On the last point the ruling was clearly correct, for to allow the whole 47,000, or as many of them as the spook-fed imagination of Mr. Billing and his witnesses could name, to give evidence in reply would clearly have been out of the question. To two at least the privilege would have been unavailing, for Major Neil Primrose and Major Evelyn Rothschild, who were said to be in the Black Book, had, after honourable service fn civil life, laid down their lives on the battlefield. Such names might well be on a German black list, though not for the reasons supposed by Mr. Billing but this by the way. If, however, the survivors of the 47,000 could not be allowed to troop into Court to clear their characters, they were surely entitled to have had their characters protected by the exclusion of evidence which was absolutely irrelevant to the issue before the Court. The Times is severe in its criticism of the Judge on this ground and others. "The real count against him is," it says, "that his course was inconsistent. He sometimes relaxed the rules of evidence, and sometimes enforced them strictly. He permitted names to be mentioned without admitting tho right of reply. Above all, it was emphatically not an occasion for flippancies and joking of the kind which Mr. Justice Darling has made bis own, and we are bound to say-wo deeply .regvet-that tho cape.--was.

not in <any other hands than his." The Times here touches Mr. Justice Darling on a very tender point. He had a high reputation as a humorist before he left the Bar, and he has perhaps been too careful to maintain it on the Bench. If Bacon declared that "an over-speaking Judge is no well-tuned cymbal," what would he have said of an over-joking Judge? When to Mr. Justice Darling's remark that the occupants of the gallery had cheered when Mr. Billing behaved outrageously the latter retorted, "the gallery also laughed at your jokes, my Lord," the sympathy of the Bar was probably with the defendant for once.

That the Courts have power to "check irrelevant slanders is proved by a correspondent of the Spectator, who quotes a criminal libel case of about a hundred year 3 ago in which the defendant was fined £20 for insulting the Judge, £40 for a blasphemous remark, and £40 for saying "The Bishops are generally sceptics." Offensive observations made in Court "derogatory to the character of persons not present to defend themselves" was held to have been properly punished in this way. It seems therefor© clear that Mr. Asquith, Lord Grey of Pallodon, and others might have been protected from the insinuation of vile immorality and pro-Germanism. But the charges have been made and published, and the fact that such journals as the Spectator and The Times, and such public men as Messrs. Clynes and J. H. Thomas, the Labour M.P.'s, can regard them as calculated to do serious harm shows that they cannot be treated lightly. Mr. Clynes expresses a belief which is shared throughout the Empire that the lives of Britain's public men are as honourable and clean as those of any political community in the world, and, looking ahead, he asks what kind of political atmosphere a Labour Government would have to breathe and to struggle against if orgies of vilification are allowed without protest to poison public life. Looking backward instead of forward, the Spectator recalls the potency of hare-brained suspicion as revealed during the great Revolution in France and associated with the time of Titus Oates in England. Such comments as these suggest that at the time of the Billing trial the Mother Country was suffering from an attack of "nerves" of which her resolute action on the battlefield betrayed

no trace.