have been, and who has spent a month in prison and had to pay £100, because he was rather unlucky in his counsel and very unlucky in the judge. We cannot wonder that a press habituated to such free-speaking as that of India should fall foul of Sir Mordaunt Wells. But Indian journalists ought to know better than to dream that a judge could be, or ought to be, recalled because he has delivered a foolish charge. We heartily wish that Anglo-Indians would get rid of the pernicious notion—one of the very worst triumphant in America—that an official who displeases popular critics is to be immediately turned out of his office. The independence of judges is of more consequence than the imprisonment or release of a thousand missionaries. No impartial reader can doubt that the charge of Sir Mordaunt Wells is that of a perfectly honest man who did his best, who knows English law as second-rate English lawyers generally do know it by reference to a good stock of precedents, and who only talked nonsense because he wished to put the points that struck him as true in a strong and convincing light. It is impossible to read without a smile the passage in which he represents the reputation of all English women of the middle class at stake because a native dramatist has alleged that the wives of Planters are too intimate with magistrates. There is also an abundance of platitudes, and an attitude of apology for his boldness in having an opinion on so great a subject as freedom of writing, which shows that he is not a very wise or a very able man.—Saturday Review.
A sentence so utterly preposterous cannot, we should hope, be allowed to stand; but if it lead, as we trust it will, to a thorough investigation, on appeal in this country, into the true relation subsisting between the Indigo Planters and the peasantry of India, and (if the report of the trial be correct, as we presume it to be) to a rigorous inquiry into the conduct of the presiding judge, and into the administration of justice in India, it will not have been passed in vain, and Mr. Long's condemnation will have aided the cause of truth and justice.
We may, therefore, expect to hear more of it at some future time and, unless a very different colour be given to the case, it is plain that justice will not be satisfied by a reversal of the decision, without the dismissal of the judge, whose charge to the jury and whose sentence on the defendant show a spirit of partisanship which is never witnessed on the bench in England, and cannot be tolerated in her dependencies.—London Review.
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