CHARGE OF CONSPIRACY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16483, 8 March 1917, Page 7

CHARGE OF CONSPIRACY.

PLOT AGAINST PREMIER. OPENING OF THE TRIAL. A. and N.Z. Cable. LONDON, March 6. The trial of the man and women alleged to be concerned in a plot to kill the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, was opened at the Old Bailey to-day before Mr. Justice Low, and will probably last several clays. All accused pleaded not guilty. Sir Frederick Smith, AttorneyGeneral, submitted that the prisoners were a desperate body of people, bitterly hostile to their country. They sheltered fugitives from the army, and had done their best to injure Britain in the war crisis. Discussing the motive leading people of middle-class and of good education to such moral degeneracy, Sir Frederick Smith said that the jury would probably infer, first, that the prisoners had an intense and unreasoning hatred against their country, which was shocking; second, that they hated measures necessitated by the war, and had a profound dislike of compulsion; third, that they had a hatred of the statesman whose duty it was to recommend such measures. The names of the accused who are charge'd with conspiracy to murder Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Arthur Henderson, the Labour member of the War Cabinet, are as follow Mrs. Alice Wheldon, her daughter Harriet, and another daughter, Mrs. Winifred Mason, together with her husband, Alfred Mason. The women are all suffragettes, while Mason is a conscientious, objector.