DR. ACHILLI AND DR. NEWMAN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 101, 11 December 1852, Page 8

DR. ACHILLI AND DR. NEWMAN.

(From the Times.) It is a great thing, no doubt, that in Protestant England the principle embodied in the national faith should triumph over its Roman Catholic adversaries; but it is a still greater thing that justice should be administered with purity and impartiality—that the landmarks of the law should not be transgressed—and that no feelings but those of the calmest and highest morality should sway the decisions or intrude into the proceedings of our courts. We cannot afford to buy controversial success at the price of our reputation for a calm and immaculate administration of justice, or to subvert the rules upon which testimony is received and estimated to satisfy a predilection or to appease an antipathy. Time was when, amid the cheers of a brutal multitude, on the faith of the impossible and self-contradictory evidence of Oates, Bedloe, and Dangerfield, English juries consigned innocent men to death, and received from the judge the shameful commendation that they had acted like good Protestants. Has the lapse of 170 years removed us from those narrow prejudices and cruel partialities which in the days of the Popish plot poisoned the pure fountains of justice, and affixed an indelible stigma on the .character of a nation not habitually unfair or inhuman ? Will the opinion of the educated classes in this country, and of the great European community, ratify the verdict of a jury which absolved Dr. Achilli from every taint and stain, and seemed to aim at placing him on a higher pinnacle of moral purity than even he arrogated to himself?

We do not propose to follow the example of one of our most Protestant contemporaries, who has commenced with a criticism on the evidence of the first witness, and bids fair to reproduce in the case of religious truth all the loathsome details which have crowded the columns of the press. But thus much we say, that Dr. Newman undertook to prove certain acts of incontinence, and produced persons from a vast number of different places to speak to acts ranging over a long period of time, of which, if their statement was believed, they had the most complete knowledge. These witnesses did not break down, were not involved in any material contradiction, and stated nothing in which there was any strong antecedent improbability. Many of them made contemporary statements of the injuries they had received, and those statements and their consequent investigation were followed on more than one occasion by a change of residence on the part of Dr. Achilli. In one instance, that of the wife of Coriboui, two respectable witnesses proved that Dr. Achilli was seen in circumstances denoting undue familiarity with a person whom he chose to retain in his service after having been warned that she was a common prostitute, testimony which the Attorney-Gene-ral could find no other way of neutralizing than by suggesting that tbey had mistaken him for her husband in the broad daylight. Wherever he bent his steps, scandal, either justly or unjustly, seems to have followed him. The police at Naples, and the Inquisition at Rome, the Bishops' Court at Viterbo, and the courts of Corfu—all seems* to have had more or less to do with him, and all for the same alleged propensity, and after a short residence in England we find a number of women ready to bring the same charges against him. Now stopped in a procession at Naples by a clamorous mother, now dogged at Corfu by a jealous tailor, now solemnly remonstrated with by members of bis congregation on account of his maidservant, he is the most unfortunate of men if all these charges have been trumped up without substantial foundation. The charges can neither be ascribed to Roman Catholic nor Protestant malignity, for they began when he was of the one religion, and continued when he was of the other. Roman Catholics accused him while he was a Roman Catholic, and Protestants while he was a Protestant, and always of tbe same thing. He himself declines to attest his chastity by an oath, and thus seems to admit that if the prosecution succeeds it is because Dr.

Newman has selected the wrong instances, not because he has charged an untrue offence. The sentence of the Inquisition, moreover, solemnly recites under respectable attestation his own confession and submission in Italian, and his conversation with Dr. Bono via clearly shows how lightly he held the offence of which he was accused. Against these positive statements, these accumulative and corroborative probabilities, and these dangerous admissions, there is nothing to be set except the denial of Dr. Achilli, adhered to with steadiness and pertinacity under a long but not very skilful crossexamination—a denial which amounts to little more than a repetition of the affidavit upon which the criminal information was granted. If no amount of evidence could outweigh Dr. Achilli's denial on oath, the solemn proceedings of the trial were a hollow mockery ; and if it could, it is difficult to conceive what testimony the jury could have expected. Many of the witnesses were poor, but it is among the poor that the profligate seek their victims. They could not be corroborated as to the fact, for that is a matter of secresy ; they were not discredited, they were not broken clown, they were simply put aside and disbelieved. The principle upon which this case was decided would put an end to all proof by human testimony. If .we are to require publicity in matters whose very essence is secresy, virtue in witnesses the very nature of whose confession degrades them, and confessions by the accused of what every worldly interest binds them to deny, we may shut up our courts of justice, proclaim impunity for crime, or use ordeals and divinations as a substitute for the investigation we have rejected.

If there is to be no presumption in favour of assertions attested by oath, no public writer can venture, should the public interest—as was admitted in the case of Dr. Newman by the prosecuting counsel—ever so imperiously require it to make statements, however well founded, criminatory of the character of another. Who can hope to be believed when such a mass of evidence has been flung aside as worthless ? We consider that a great blow has been given to the administration of justice in this country, and that Roman Catholics will have henceforth only too good reason for asserting that there is no justice for them in cases tending to arouse the Protestant feeling of judges and juries.

We wish we could conclude our observations on this case without saying anything calculated to imply a censure on the jury or the judge, under whose auspices they have, it seems to us, so signally miscarried. From the time when one of them objected to the exclusion of Dr. Achilli from the court, and another to the searching and reasonable question as to his general chastity, which he did not find it expedient to answer, till the faltering announcement, preceded and followed by unchecked applause, that the justification was not proved to their satisfaction, there is every reason to think that the case was not viewed by the jury with complete impartiality and absence of sectarian feeling. Perhaps this was hardly to be expected ; but when we are told that Catholic and Protestant have nothing to do with the decision we should like to ask who believes that if Dr. Achilli had continued a member of the church or Rome to the present time, and the charge against him had been contained in a speech of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the verdict would have been the same— minus, of course, the cheers and the popularity ?

We have every respect for the high judicial character and attainments of Lord Campbell, and it is therefore with great regret we find him, in a case of so much delicacy and excitement, drawing attention to the Ecclesiastical Titles Act. " thanking God" that " we have no Inquisition in this country," and after he had been sufficiently applauded, renewing the remark that it might be applauded again, and assuring the audience with grotesque solemnity that by admitting this document he did so without the slightest degree of clanger to the Protestant religion of this country—a discovery which was received by the enthusiastic audience with a third round of cheers. We now take our leave of this painful subject, trusting we may not soon again be called upon to comment on proceedings so indecorous in their nature, so unsatisfactory in their result, so little calculated to increase the respect of the people for the administration of justice, or the estimation by foreign nations of the English name and character.