life as veridical on Sir Charles Trevelyan, Lord Stanley, and the Earl of Ellenborough. The mere enumeration of the persons selected as recipients of this translated drama shows that the copies were sent in good faith to acquaint those who in this country pay most attention to Indian subjects with a particular tendency and working of the native mind. This habit of consulting in the first place and by direct means the satisfaction and tranquillity of the people of India, "the native community," as the counsel for the planters called them, should not be offensive to anybody of English settlers in the East, and the Landowners' Association know full well that they will not be allowed to interrupt the flow to England of any information which concerns the good government of that great possession. We believe they will discover before Parliament meets that in instituting this trial they have made a serious mistake.—Daily News.
The Planters, however, instead of attacking the Government fell upon the nearest victim at hand—the unlucky translator. The law of libel stands in India as it stood in England before Lord Campbell's Act, and, with a virulence which men in a large community could not have displayed, they availed themselves of this circumstance to place Mr. Long in the dock on a criminal charge. There was, it will be remembered, no individual libel. The journalists of Calcutta were accused of taking bribes, and the planters of all crimes under the sun except hypocrisy, but no individual was attacked.
The presiding judge, however, delivered an oration against the Nil Durpan, which was just enough, but which the jury and the planters took for a charge against the prisoner, and Mr. Long was found guilty.
It is scarcely necessary to point out in England how completely the planters have destroyed their own safeguard for free speech. The Press in India has constantly to assail the mischiefs and errors inflicted on the community. Civilians, Zemindars, Brahmins, soldiers, have all been assailed—and must be assailed if any good is to be done—in language which may now be twisted into a criminal offence.—Spectator.
Had Mr. Long been tried before a judge who could have looked at the whole circumstances, instead of confining himself to the minutes of English law, the result of trial would, we should think, have been very different.
Mr. Long appears to us to be a very worthy and very unfortunate man who has tried to do a very useful thing without perhaps being as prudent as he should
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