Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1927. THE SALE OF SCANDAL

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 30, 5 February 1927, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1927. THE SALE OF SCANDAL

In the second of the two unpleasant cases which have heen engaging the attention of the London Courts during the last two weeks the jury .did its duty in such a way as to earn the gratitude of the nation and the Empire; in the other it conspicuously failed. In the "Whispering Gallery" case Hesketh Pearson had palmed off upon his publishers a tissue of alleged Cabinet secrets and other lies which were represented to be extracts from Sir Rennell Rodd's diary. Having faked the whole thing himself, without the faintest pretence of authentic-material to work upon, Pearson was entirely without either excuse or plausible pretext. The publishers paid him for what was in effect the forgery of his own hands, and the hopelessness of the defence was proved by the almost imbecile absurdity of the plea to which his able counsel was reduced:—

Counsel for the defence admitted that Pearson was a romancer who lied continually, but was not necessarily a defrauder; that he simply believed he had produced something appealing to modern taste which, would bring profit to himself and greater profit to Lanes.

The. theory of a bucolic simplicity which did not realise that getting money by a false pretence was a "fraud seems, however, to have been good enough for the jury. Their verdict was at any rate "Not guilty" on the ground that "Pearson made a false representation without intent to defraud." In a civil proceeding so perverse a verdict would doubtless have been set aside as entirely unsupported by the evidence, but Pearson goes free. At the back of the illogical benevolence which plays such incalculable pranks in the jury-box was probably the idea that the eminent firm of publishers which enabled Pearson to put his fraud upon the market was not so circumspect as it should have been.

But though the jury failed conspicuously in this "Whispering Gallery" case, another pillar of the State did not The vigilance of the Press had already intervened to put as effective a stop to the sale of the book as any verdict or injunction could have done. We owe it to the promptitude and enterprise of the "Daily Mail" that the fraud was so quickly exposed that a book, which was so reeking with scandal that it was apparently selling like. hot cakes, was -withdrawn after 4000 copies had been sold. Commenting on the revelations and the profits of recent diarists which may be supposed to have suggested Hesketh Pearson's frauds, the "Saturday Review" of the 27th November wrote as follows under the title "The Sale of Scandal":—

If this kind, of thing goes on and develops, no one who leads any kind of public life will be able to have any kind of private life. His course will be constantly run before an invisible but all-seeing camera: whatever he does, whatever he says, even among intimates, will be subject to instantaneous exposure. Only last week a well-known public man, who spoke intimately at a private dinner among those whom he had a right to suppose were his friends, awoke next morning to find something like a verbatim report of his remarks in. the gossip columns of a daily newspaper.

That the remedy in this case rather resembled "the hair of the dog that bit you" was at the same time pointed out by the "Saturday Review." The newspapers themselves had encouraged a practice which they had now agreed in condemning:—

The whole of the "Stunt" Press—and particularly the Sunday "Stunt" Press —has itself become one vast whispering gallery. Secret Histories of the Week, Society from the Inside, What the Butler Overheard, Prison Revelations—this is the kind of stuff with which the public has been fed. Big Names are dropped casually like currants into the pie, or, what ia perhaps worse, are withheld and darkly hinted at. The private lives of Tom, Dick, ana. Harry are held up for public exhibition; not even prisoners awaiting the gallows are exempt.

The most loathsome aspect of this scandal-mongery business was denounced in the same article with a refreshing vigour which recalls the best days of the "Saturday Review" and has a special application to the second of the- cases above tioned:—Cowardly libels have been uttered on the dead, great names have been bandied over the net of controversy like shuttlecocks, eminent corpses have been exposed naked to bo torn and devoured by the vultures. And while the dead are unable to answer, the best of the living are unwilling to do so, either out of regard for an old-fashioned reticence^ or for fear of still further advertising the wrongs they seek to redress. And so an undiseriminating public is left to believe what it is told.

Lord Gladstone is entitled to admiration and gratitude for disregarding at the age of 73 deterrents which ninety-nine per cent, of his juniors would have accepted as conclusive and for at once rendering a conspicuous service of filial piety and clearing one of the great names of English history. One of the first

of the eavesdroppers to take the field after the War was Captain Peter Wright, whose confidential position on the staff of the Supreme War Council of the Allies enabled him to make disclosures which, even if they had been absolutely accurate, could not have been made by a man of honour. The book made a mild flutter at the time, but a bookseller who recently assessed it at ninepence in a clearance catalogue was probably taking too sanguine a view of its present value. Captain Wright's "Portraits and Criticisms" might have shared the same fate if its gross libels on the great W. E. Gladstone had not induced his son to put the writer to the proof by branding him as a liar and procuring his expulsion from the Bath Club.

Captain Wright's action, which was in form the trial of Lord Gladstone's libel on him, was in effect the trial of his own libels on the defendant's father. The plaintiff's case had become little better than a farce .before he had concluded his examination in chief. He had first learnt the truth about W. E. Gladstone when he was a seventeen-year-old boy at Harrow and "a friend of the family, since dead, had told him that Lily Langtry had been Gladstone's mistress." His last word was something that he had heard from Lord Milner, also since dead, which "attributed Turkey's changed attitude towards Britain to Gladstone's passion for the other sex." This fantastic absurdity was probably the outcome of the same perversion which found a deadly significance in the same authority's innocent joke about Gladstone's subordination to "the seraglio" till Mr. T. Pi O'Connor had explained it away. About all the gossip and tittle-tattle on which the plaintiff relied the layman, who has learnt from the ruling in "Bardell v. Pickwick" that what the soldier said, or anybody else said, outside the Court is not evidence, is compelled to wonder why it was admitted at all. The one plausible foundation for Captain Wright's vile slanders is a fact which was perfectly well known.in ■Gladstone's lifetime, but was never made the subject of a charge against one who for many years was the best-hated man in England. General Bramwell Booth's description in his "Echoes and Memories" of a chance meeting with Gladstone would have been of inestimable value to Captain Wright if he had not supplied the explanation. The scene was Regent street, and the time was the afternoon:—

. On this occasion he was accompanied by a young woman, and I, probably quickened in my perceptions as a result of Salvation Army experience, instantly saw that she was one of a sorrowful class. Mr. Glaastone was evidently speaking to her in the most kindly and fatherly manner. I did not of course hear what he said, but there was something about his whole attitude, and about the girl's appearance also, which led me to feel that he was appealing to her and bestowing some kind of favour upon her. I did not then know what I afterwarSs found to be the case, that both he and Mrs. Gladstone concerned themselves for many years in work for those unhappy women, but it was certainly a curious thing that I, already much interested in Rescue Work and at that time feeling the admiration which many young men felt for the Grand Old Man, should have had a glimpse of him under such' circumstances.

Nearly thirty years after his death the Grand Old Man has been put on his trial for immorality and hypocrisy of the grossest possible kind, and after the jury's unanimous verdict "that the evidence given has completely vindicated the high moral character of Mr. Gladstone" even the most morbid and the most malignant of ,the scandal-mongers should let him rest.