POLITICAL ASSASSINATION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20400, 5 May 1928, Page 9

POLITICAL ASSASSINATION.

THE ZINOVIEFF LETTER. AN INGENIOUS ARGUMENT. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, April 21. Referring to the Zinovietf letter in a speech at Middlesbrough, Mr J. Ramsay MacDonald said: “I am the most humane and forgiving of people, but I must admit that when justice and fair play are at stake I stand for them, and I say that the _ Labour Government in the last days of its existence did not get a straight and honourable deal. ■ “ The Labour Government was assassinated by mass conspirators.” The letter, he said, had gone into tho Foreign Office. “ I had not seen it. I had not known of its existence until somewhere towards the middle of the fight. We were working on it, handling it, but the conspirators never said, ‘ What is the Foreign Office doing with that document ? ’ No, they did not want to know. “ The thing that the patriotic editor of the Daily Mail wanted least to know about was what I was doing with the document. He knew I was handling it all right, and if it had been told to him formally that I w'as handling it all right that would have ‘ bust up ’ the conspiracy, and he worked for the conspiracy, and not for his nation. So he kept clear. Ho went and published the whole thing, and so thousands of votes were cast for the Tory Government coming into this estate which it v iw enjoys, and I say we ought to have i legal inquiry into the whole matter. “ One thing appeared on Sunday perfectly clearly. The editor says that the person who had been suspected- - he says by me, which is not true—at the Foreign Office was innocent. But then he says, ‘ Knowing that the letter was in the Foreign Office, in the War Office, the Admiralty, and in the Home Office I knew I could get it.’ “ That is au accusation against the honour and the honesty and the reliability of our civil service that has never been made before my lifetime, and it is the duty of the Government to protect the civil service, even if it does not consider that it has got a moral duty to’ protect its opponents against fraud being perpetrated upon the public intelligence.”