"I have acted thus," he goes on to say, "because I have always regarded the appropriation of another man's ideas with special contempt; and secondly, because I have been fully alive to the fact that an inventor, in the position I occupied for so many years, was peculiarly liable to such unjustifiable attacks as those made on me by Mr Hope in his letter, by would-be and unsuccessful inventors."
This letter, forwarded by the then Director-General of Ordnance, whose late official head, one month later,[1] publicly announced in the House of Commons that he could not have believed that this very man could have practised on him a "gross deception," as he asserted that he had done – is actually accepted as final and conclusive evidence in his own defence. Nor is that all; for it is held to be evidence so conclusive, that the Ordnance Department declines altogether to listen to Mr Hope's offer, if any investigation be made, to produce before it the evidence of those who saw his shell taken to pieces, carefully examined, and placed in charge of the Superintendent of the Royal Arsenal.
Not only is this the answer of the superintendent, and relied upon once (page 8); but on every subsequent occasion (pages 10, 12 bis, 13, 15, 18) down to the 12th April 1871, a year after Sir J. Pakington's speech, this letter is gravely appealed to as having absolutely settled the matter.[2]
But how did this arise? Was it the same Secretary of State who said a "gross deception" had been practised on him, who afterwards accepted the evidence of the person charged with it in his own case as a final answer, closing all necessity for further inquiry? By no means. The Secretary of State who had been deceived was Sir John Pakington. He passed out of office. Mr Cardwell succeeded him. Mr Cardwell doubtless had not personally become acquainted with the details of the case of Mr Daw, though he had himself finally dismissed the superintendent; and, as appears from the papers, he left the matter in dispute respecting the shell in the hands of the officials of the Ordnance Department.
But then comes the grievous part of the whole story. Why was it that Mr Hope had not patented the invention of his shrapnel-shell in 1856? When we are speaking of motives, only one man can give evidence, – the man who acts upon them; and we are bound to say that we ourselves distinctly believe, and believe also that any intelligent person would believe, the story which Mr Hope tells in these papers on this subject.
Mr Hope says that when, in 1856, he communicated to the superintendent the nature of his proposed improvement, he was convinced that, if rifled guns were
- ↑ Nearly all the facts must have been known in the office for many months, but it will be seen that the same defence is relied on long after Sir J. Pakington's speech.
- ↑ "Boxer Shrapnel" Shell. Return to an Address of the House of Lords, dated 25th July 1873, for "Copies of correspondence in 1870-71 between the authorities at the War Office and Mr Hope, V.C., late of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, relative to the shell adopted into the service, and officially known as the Boxer Shrapnel, which Mr Hope claims to be his invention, and substantially identical with a shell deposited by himself in charge of the late Superintendent of the Royal Laboratory, Woolwich Arsenal, in December 1856."
