OUR MELBOURNE LETTER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2934, 8 June 1910, Page 65

OUR MELBOURNE LETTER.

(Fboji Our Own Correspondent.) MELBOURNE, May 25. " We have a long, a long way to go before the work is complete," said the Prime Minister a few days ago, referring to the preparation of the Government policy. Among the matters engaging attention are the substitute for the Braddon Clause and the constitutional barriers which stand between the Government and its New Protection measures. Mr Fisher's own remarks on different subjects have already done much to relieve any fear that anything revolutionary would be introduced by the Government. It may or may not be true, as one Government supporter put it yesterday, that the Labour Ministry would "do no more harm than the tail of the comet," for nobody supposes that any harm which comes will be the result of a direct intention. It is not the wisdom of the leaders, but the ardour of the rank and file that has to be guarded against, and only a few weeks ago the member who used the comet illustration told his hearers that the party had to undo the errors of 50 years. It is remarks like these and like those made by Mr Beard, M.H.R., at Heidelberg on Saturday, which sometimes cause unrest. Mr Beard took it upon himself to threaten the High Court if it did not prove the pliant tool of triumphant Labour. The Federal Parliament, he said, would bring forward industrial measures, and should the members of the High Court refuse to pass them, -they would appeal to the people of Australia to give them power over the court. Justices Isaacs and Higgins were with the workers, and should the other members refuse to pass-the measures men would be elected to the bench of the High Court who would carry out the wishes of the people. The shocking impropriety of these remarks was only equalled by their strange ignorance. The court was &poken of as though it were a Second Chamber sitting in review on the acts of the Parliament and passing and rejecting what it pleased. That it merely interprets our Constitution which the people themselves passed never seemed to occur to Mr Beard, who failed also to realise that his ill-timed patronage of " Justices Isaacs and Higgins " amounted to a more serious charge against them than was involved in his criticism of the other members of the bench. Nor does'Mr Beard apparently realise that you cannot have a federation without a high court, and that what he wants is really a system of unification, with an all-powerful Parliament.

Mr Jensen, too, who comes in as the new Labour member from Bass, Tasmania, comes along with an established reputation for party speaking. He publicly accused Sir John Dodds, the Tasmanian Chief Justice, of having practically conspired with Mr Hean, former Minister of Railways, and Mr Fincham, the engineer in chief, to have a line of railway diverted so as to aggrandise the value of certain land held by Sir John Dodds. A high public officer from Victoria was brought over to investigate the matter as a Royal Commissioner, and he has reported that not one of the allegations made by Mr Jensen in the matter has been substantiated. A little more thought before speaking is what more than one of the young Labour members needs to "display. In connection with the daring attempt to rob the bank at Boxhill, the police have received an anonymous letter promising information as to the identity of the burglar- if ; they will conceal the writer's name and pay him for his time lost. They have promised through the press "to do . this, but they have not got the information. or the burglar yet. POISONING THE FOUNTS. A dramatic sequel to a case which has more than once 'been mentioned in these letters—the RphaldrHarper libel action —was worked, .out. on Monday in the Criminal Court. You will remember that when the Rev.J. B. Ronald, ex-Labour mtamber of the ; Commonwealth Parliament and ex-Presbyterian minister, sued Mr Robert Harper, pillar of Presbyterianism, member of Parliament, and great commercial magnate, for slander, Mr Harper put forward the defence of justification. The .'slander consisted . in Mr Harper saying!to a fellow-officer of the Presbyterian Church at Toorak, "I hear his (Ronald's) fellow Labour members" have had to reprove him for telling improper stories." Those words eventually got to the Presbytery meeting, and Mr Ronald claimed £3OOO damages. Now, Mr Harper, to support his plea of justification, had to prove that Mr Ronald did tell improper stories. Well, during the case witness after witness came forward and told how he' had heard Mr Xtonald tell such stories—some in trains, some in trams, and some in the bars of public houses. They were repeated with a circumstantial detail which the closest cross-examination failed to shake. The evidence was given by a nondescript crowd of men, agents, out of employment clerks, and out of business, small goods men, but no flaw could be found in their narratives, and apparently the jury accepted them, for they returned a verdict for Mr Harper. Each one of the witnesses —there were seven in all —was asked whether he knew of had spoken to one "Paddy" Hill. I think they admitted an acquaintance with Hill, hut nothing further. However, one of their number named Harrison swore falsely on a minor point. He said that he had been employed at a certain hotel, and undoubted evidence was forthcoming that he had not been so employed. He was convicted of perjury, and was sentenced to a short term of The arrest of Harrison caused consternation wnbng the crowd of witnesses. Each ■feared that the plot was about to be exposed, and they, each hastened to be first

in rushing to the detectives to explain that they had sworn falsely in the slander case. Their story was that Hill had come to them, had schooled them in the story they were to tell, and in all its details. Some of them had never even seen Ronald. Hill was arrested and placed on his trial. The evidence was that, he had offered them money and guaranteed them permanent billets with Mr Harper as the price of their perjury. When an exorbitant bill was presented to Mr Harper he repudiated it, and the result was that the men got neither the money nor the billets. This may have induced them to go to the police, though each was firm that it was his pricking conscience that caused him to confess. After a hearing lasting over 10 days, Hill was yesterday found guilty before the Chief Justice on seven counts of subornation of perjury and one count of attempted subornation —for one of the witnesses, after being suborned, got frightened, and failed to appear at the. Ronald Haiper trial, though he appeared' at the trial of Hill to give evidence of the attempt. The Chief Justice, after some scathing remarks on the enormity of the offence, sentenced Hill (who is a pensioner of the Post Office) to nine months’ imprisonment on each of the charges of subornation, and to six months for the attempt. He goes to Pentridge, therefore, for the extended term of five years and nine months. A further development of the situation was that the Attorney-general yesterday filed presentments against Mr Robert Harper, his son William Harper, and Messrs Brocket and Kemp, solicitors. They will now stand their trial with Hill, and one John Huxley, on a charge of conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. AN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIR. There is an international aspect about the action Varawa v. The Howard Smith Company, the hearing of which was commenced last week in the Supreme Court in Melbourne, before Mr Justice a’Beckett. The action has arisen indirectly out of the purchase for the Russian Government a f the time of the Russo-Japanese war of the steamer Peregrine. Mr Varawa is a Russian subject, -a former captain in the Imperial Guards. In ISO 4he was the agent at Shanghai for the Manchurian railway, and he was commissioned to secure for the Russian Government steamships able to steam 17 knots an hour. He approached a shipping broker named Moller, at Shanghai, and Moller opened negotiations by telegram with Captain Miles, a former Australian resident, then at Manila. The vessel was purchased for £28,000, subject to a speed trial of 17 knots, and was to be delivered at Singapore. Mr Varawa went on to Singapore to inspect, and thence went to Colombo and Australia.

Meanwhile some negotiations had been proceeding between Captain Miles and Mr Moller, and when Mr Varawa arrived in Australia there was, according to him, no completed contract. Anyhow, the arrangements went off, and the company proceeded against Mr Varawa for breach of contract. He was a Russian subject, and, fearing he would escape beyond the jurisdiction, the company had him arrested on a writ of capias. He was detained for 11 days in the Darling-hurst Gaol, Sydney, in January, 1905, and was only released when, through the instrumentality of the Russian Consul, he was enabled to find security to the amount of £4OIO. Mr Varawa is now suing the company for £20,000' damages for false arrest, malicious prosecution, and abuse of the process of the court. His contention is that the company did not arrest him believing that they had a genuine claim against him, but for the purpose of squeezing from him or the Russian Government the money for the purchase of the ship. He contends that the company knew there could be no contract for the sale of the ship in the first case, because she had never been equal to anything like a 17-knot speed, and in the second' place because the Commonwealth authorities, hearing of the projected sale, had informed the company that it would not be permitted, and that they would seize the ship if necessary to prevent it. The defence is that, no cause of action can be shown until the. original writ of capias on which Mr Varawa was arrested is set aside. The defendants also deny malice, and plead that they had reasonable and probable cause for what they did. Mr Varawa admitted in crossexamination that he was being arrested in the action by the Russian Government. A cable has been published by the Associated Press saying that a Russian official paper has expressed the hope that the " far-famed British justice " will be done in the matter.. Varawa was awarded £SOOO by the jury. PICTURES OF LIFE. On Thursday afternoon last, an the picturesque Alexandra avenue, which runs up the Yarra banks from the city to the Botanical Gardens, some sensational events were witnessed by the few people in the vicinity of the tea-house. A young man, pale and poorly-clad, who had been wandering aimlessly about the river bank, seemed suddenly to take his courage in his hands, and plunged headlong into the river. One man rushed for a lifebuoy which is kept always at the spot, and he threw it into the water towards the struggling man. The would-be suicide pushed it determinedly away. Then two gentlemen manned a ferry-boat and rowed after the youth, who had already sunk twice. He was pulled struggling into the boat, and lay exhausted on the bottom. In a surprisingly short time a St. John Ambulance waggon came galloping on the scene. Three ambulance men jumped down, and applied the treatment for the apparently drowned. Under such skilled attention the patient got rapidly back to consciousness, and he was placed on a stretcher and borne off in the direction of the Melbourne Hospital. As the van disappeared a man, who had stood apart on an elevated position.; behind something suspiciously like a camera, closed up his machine with a snap

and began to pack his baggage. He was the cinematographer of Pathe Freres, for whose sake the whole sensation had been arranged. This firm of French operators —the providers of practically all the cinematograph pictures of the world—has for some time past now been established in Melbourne. Facilities have been afforded them by the Government, the Railway Commissioners, and private persons to enable them to get moving pictures of typical city and country incidents. The Government has, in fact, given them a grant to enable them to produce pictures which would be a good advertisement for the country. The "suicide" item was not one of these. It was got up to illustrate the work of the St. John Ambulance Association, and was done without fee to aid the organisation. In one sense the picture is " faked," but then, like many of the other faked pictures, it represents very accurately incidents which do take place, but take place when there is no operator to cinematograph them.