PRISONERS FOUND GUILTY.

Colonist, Volume LV, Issue 13753, 19 June 1913, Page 5

PRISONERS FOUND GUILTY.

SENTENCED TO IMPRISONMENT

MR JUSTICE PHILLIMORE'S COM-

MENTS,

(Received Juno 19, 0.30 a.m.) London, June 18

The trial of six suffragettes, Misses Lake, Lennox, Barrett, Kerr, Sanders, and Kenny, and Clayton, an analyst, on charges of conspiracy to destroy property, has concluded, all the accused being fownd guilty.

The accused Kenny, in addressing the jury, referred to the Ulster discovery of rifles, and added that had the women said "the rifles wore for tho women, -and that they would fight with rifles, the Government would have been justified in prosecuting them. She would be a rebel until she got tho vote, a rebel; against the abominable system, economic, industrial, and political, under which women lived. If, like Miss Davison, she must die to get women the vote, she would do so, whatever the jury's verdict was.

Tho Solicitor-General replied that the defendants were prosecuted not for their opinions, but for flagrant breaches of the criminal law in pursuit of objects perfectly legitimate in themselves.

Mr Justice Phillimore, in summing up, said this was one of the saddest trials, in his experience. It had been urged that great causes had never been won without breaking the law. Possibly that was true in some cases, but it was very untrue in othersj and if every recorded act of anarchy was to be used to justify further acts of anarchy, the human race would soon reach a position of absolute savagery. The case had been treated as a case of one sex against the other." He imagined the " jury would find it was not a case of women against men, but of some women against all other women and children, and of some men against all other men.

The jury, after an absence of fiftyseven minutes, returned a verdict of guilty. Lake and Lennox were" each sentenced to six months' imprisonment, Barrett tq'"nine months, Kerr to twelve months, Sanders to fifteen months, Kenny to eighteen months, and Clayton to twenty-one months. Each accus.ed was ordered to pay one-seventh of the coat of the prosecution.

Mr. Justice Phillimore" in passing sentence, said he believed some of the suffragists were actuated partly by ambition, pride, and love of power. Others, young people, chiefly from a Bpirit oi' mischief, and with others it was" a mattor of pay. Many had a sincere belief that they witc forwarding a good, object.