Plain Language.

Pahiatua Star and Eketahuna Advertiser, Volume 2, Issue 169, 3 February 1888, Page 2

Plain Language.

The Wairarapa Star has devoted a leader to the sly-grog selling cases against Mrs Riddle, in which it states that perjury of the grosset kind has Wen committed by some of the witnesses. Although duty at times demands that a newspaper speak plainly, yet often other influences are brought to bear to prevent this being done; and offending ones are allowed to escape notice. Such, however, is not the case in the present instance; the witnesses who figured iu the Riddle case havo made themselves notorious, and the manner in which they achieved that distinction has been set out in unnikstakeable language by our contemporary. The following are a few extracts from the article :

Hard swearing is no name for the kind of evidence that engaged the attention of our worthy Resident Magistrate on Monday. W e have heard oaths profane and solemn ; we havo seen the oath administered in various ways, from the twinkling of a spiritglass to the kissing of the book and the blowing out of a lucifer ; we havo seen w itnesses prevaricate, equivocate, grow suddenly dumb, become hysterical mid even faint away with tho glow of health on their cheeks when tlio questions became inconvenient; hut for real, Unity, indexible swearing, the evidence in tho' sly-grog prosecution cases of the police against Mrs Riddle beats anything that we have ever heard in a court of justice or anywhere else. The singular fact is that the witnesses, one uml all, neither hesitated nor faltered. They spoke decisively—emphatically. Negative philosophy they knew not —they were positive batteries. The curious part of it is that although the witnesses were all witnesses for the prosecution—for the police—one set of witnesses totally demolished the evidence of the other set.

This case is notone of ordinary false swearing. There was a brazen facedness about some of the witnesses that was positively awful. They looked the awe-inspiring machinery of tho law-, the sergeant of police and Resident Magistrate straight in the face, and with all the appearance of candor, asked them in the coolest manner imaginable to Wlieve statements against which the most common sense reWlled. As the Magistrate very mildly put it ” the witnesses were not friendly to the prosecution.”

The prosecution broke down under the hydraulic pressure of hard swearing. Wc are not going to attempt to indicate where, in our opinion, tho truth or the falsehood rested. We have simply done our duty in stating tho facts and recording the irresistible conviction that for hours together on Monday the atmosphere of the Resident Magistrate's Court was filled with perjury of the foulest and grossest description. This is not the first occasion on which a similar exhibition under very similar circumstances has been made, and all we can say is that it is deplorable and lamentable in the extreme, that in the interests of morality and public safety the crime of the perjurer cannot be sheeted home, and punishment of an exemplary character administered for this most dangerous of offences. We repeat again—we have heard of a inan who could swear a horse's hind leg off ; of another who could swear as hard as a horse could gallop; we havo read of celebrated Americans who could tell tall yarrs ; we have perused the tales of and Raron Munchausen ; we have been told of the exploits of Tom Pepper; but sncli swearing as took place over the Tatieru sly-grog prosecutions on Monday we have never seen approached even in the realms of fiction.