TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19664, 26 August 1935, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

“ Secrets ” of 1815 Many dubious uses have been made of the Official Secrets Act, which was passed in 1911 and amended so as to give it much wider scope in 1920. Mr Lansbury’s soil fell foul of it last year for including in a book Cabinet memoranda which his father had received. Mr Compton Mackenzie was fined in 1932 for making use in a book of memoirs of information he had got as member of tl;*> Intelligence Service in Greece in the war years.

But if it is true that the sale at Sotheby’s of letters from Wellington and Nelson to the British Ambassador in Paris between 1815 and 1830 lias been stopped on the ground that these are “official secrets” of the sort the Act is designed to safeguard, an entirely new use is. being made of the Act’s provisions. Over every line of value, official and unofficial, that Wellington and Nelson wrote the historians have already pored. Lord Abingdon’s collection, of which Hie sale lias been held up, is said to contain sonic hitherto unpublished Nelson letters. They will doubtless be of interest to the collector and perhaps to the historian, hut by no stretch of the imagination can they he conceived as secrets of the sort Parliament had in mind when the Act was passed. Reliance is perhaps put on the clause which says that “Anyone having in his possession a . . . document . . . which lie has obtained owing to his position as a person who holds or has held office under His Majesty and who communicates . . . or retains the documents in his possession „r control when he has no right to . . . shall he guilty of a misdemeanour. ’

But how far can Ibis clause he deemed ref respective and who decide the point of “right” to retain? If the Cecil archives revealed some' unsuspected exchanges between Lord Burleigh and Ouecn Elizabeth, could an Act of 1920 he invoked to prevent tho sale of them? —Manchester Guardian.