department will have no selfish bias in favour of Government establish- ments as opposed to private pro- ducers. I hope the Chambers of Com- merce will take up the subject. – And I remain, yours sincerely,
"R. COBDEN. "Lynall Thomas, Esq."
The case of Mr Lynall Thomas is this.
More than twenty years ago Mr Thomas communicated to the Ordnance Department certain new ideas and discoveries respecting the explosive action of gunpowder, upon which he founded a new principle in the construction of heavy guns. Not being a manufacturer, he had great difficulty in getting a gun made without flaws, which would adequately represent his principle. Ultimately the department manufactured one for him, he paying the whole cost of it before it was even tried. This gun burst. But as any number of guns made by Sir W. Armstrong had burst without any discredit being thrown on the principle of their construction, it certainly did not lie in the mouths of either the department or the Elswick firm to say that this settled the question against Mr Thomas. To say so was to raise a false issue altogether. Mr Thomas's contention was that the trials of his gun were at any rate so far successful as to establish his principle, and that they actually resulted, as a matter of fact, in its adoption thenceforward in the manufacture of guns both by the Elswick firm and at Woolwich. This the department denied, and they refused to reimburse him for any part of the expense – considerably over £10,000 – to which he had been put. According to their usual practice, they had declined to enter into any formal agreement before making the gun and going through the trials; consequently Mr Thomas could rest his claim to compensation only on the correspondence which had passed, the effect of which was to hold out somewhat vaguely a prospect of reimbursement provided the trials were satisfactory. After repeatedly offering to submit the case to arbitration, he was reluctantly compelled, under the advice of counsel, to bring an action.
The contention really lay between Mr Thomas and the Elswick firm, as to which was the inventor of the principle of the new gun. The question ought in fairness to have been litigated on equal terms between the two. Unfortunately this could not be. Mr Thomas's actual claim was against the Government. Not only had he the purse and the whole power of the War Office, in combination with the Elswick firm, to contend against, but the action being against the Crown, necessarily took the form of a Petition of Right. In a "Petition of Right" the plaintiff, or "suppliant" as he is called, is subjected to many technical disadvantages and difficulties. Amongst others he is debarred from the ordinary right of a litigant to obtain access to documents in the possession of the other side. An unsparing use was made of these advantages by the Crown, and so much delay caused by the technical points which it raised, that though proceedings were taken in June 1873, it was not till February 1877 that Mr Thomas succeeded in getting his case laid before a jury. The trial took place before the late Chief Baron Kelly and a special jury, composed of merchants, shipowners, and other men of standing (whom the Chief Baron towards the close of the proceedings took occasion to compliment for their intelligence and attention to the case), and
