THE WHITAKER WRIGHT SCANDAL

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1626, 29 April 1903, Page 59

THE WHITAKER WRIGHT SCANDAL

SCATHING CONDEMNATION OP THE GOVERNMENT. (From Our Special Correspondent.) EON DON. March 6. “1 accuse !-” With, these words which, the late Emile Zola made so familiar in his great plea for justice in the Dreyfus ease, Mr Arnold White began an open letter to Mr Balfour, the Premier, in the last “Sunday Sun.” The letter is a fierce attack on the Government for their refusal to even attempt to bring Mr Whitaker Wright and his colleagues to book for their scandalous “window dressing” and crooked financial methods in connection with the London and Globe Company. Nothing the Government has failed to do has given rise to* so much adverse comment among the people at large as their failure to put the law in motion against Whitaker Wright and his abettors or dupes (we scarce as yet “know t’other from which”) for tlieir misdoings. ■Widely indeed is the notion held that Wright has been left alone simply because his prosecution would have involved much unpleasantness to people in high places. Mr Arnold White does not hesitate to infer that Mr Balfour’s refusal to prosecute the London and Globe gang is an attempt to shield misdoing among tile wealthy and powerful. He does not mince matters. He strikes first at the law officers of the Crown for making statements for party purposes with intent to mislead the House and the public, and for practising upon the ‘Academic ignorance” of the Premier and his indifference to practical affairs. Mr White maintains that the law of the land needed no amendment. It was strong enough to convict Birt, of the Millwall Company, and other middle-class criminals, and when the law officers pretended that the law required amendment “they said what was untrue, and what every lawyer and layman in the House of Commons knew to be untrue.” Then Mr White turns upon Mr Balfour, and accuses him of “stating what is inexact” when he declared in the House that “the faultlies in the law.” He accuses the Premier of evading liis duty to the King and' to the people of England in allowing the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-Gen-eral to override his power of initiative and thus prevent the Government from prosecuting the directors of the London and Globe Company. He next spits scornfully at the barristers in the House for not daring to rise and challenge the erroneous advice given by the AttorneyGeneral. “I am informed,” he says, “and believe that, many of the legal members of Parliament have been retained by Whitaker Wright. If this is so.” he adds, “the silence of these men is intelligible.” He accuses the non-legal members of “erross cowardice.” with the exception of Mr William McArthur and “a few more who spoke the truth,” and accuses the House of Commons as a whole- of being afraid to bring him rto the bar of the Honse. “If they dare to do so I will justify and repeat the words I have written. . . . . Never until 1903 has there been a time in the history of England when corruption was so gross, and the desire for the acquisition of unearned wealth was so strong as to lead to the-Complicity of Government departments in the fraudulent ambitions of financial adventurers.” And he adds': “The Dreyfus affair and the Panama scandals in France had no element more sordid and no feature more ugly than the complicity of English Ministers in the T ondcn and Globe scandals”

Mr Arnold White is “only a private citizen,” but he pleads that when the House of Commons has “silently concurred in the murder of justice” it is time even for a private citizen to speak. The indictment is, at all events, significant, and undoubtedly expresses what, a great many other private citizens are feeling. Even Mr Balfour with his generous contempt ior the opinions of the world at large (he boasts that he never reads the newspapers) can hardly afford to ignore Mr Arnold White’s philippic in silence for rightly or wrongly, the man-in-the-the-street is firmly convinced that it is something else than a weakness m rhe law that lias kept the London and Globe directors out of the Old Bailey dock.