no person individually alluded to; neither Mr. Brett, nor the Journal of which he is the editor was named; the planters were touched only in their corporate character just as Mrs. Stowe assailed the planters of South America and as every public Journal in this kingdom assails every day in the week every public body to which they happened to be opposed, from the House of Lords down to the parish vestry; and throughout the whole of the extremely lugubrious and clumsy production there was not a solitary passage from which the prosecution attempted to extract a personal application. That the planters should have adopted so odious a means of vindicating themselves from aspersions is quite astonishing, seeing that, whatever the legal result might be, the trial would infallibly attract universal attention and lay bare the system, it is their object to maintain, and which certainly cannot be maintained by actions of this description. In England no man of ordinary experience in public life would ever dream of instituting a prosecution for libel even if the provocation had been a hundred times more direct and injurious. We have long outlived the practice of seeking reparation for wounded character in courts of law; and that case must indeed be special in which public opinion sustains the prosecutor who cannot set his reputation right with the world by other means than an action for defamation. But if censure is to fall on the planters for putting such a case in motion, what is to be thought of the judge who delivered a charge upon the merits such as might be transferred without any violation of consistency to the lips of Jeffreys? If the exposition of the law, and the description of the alleged libel, as laid down by Sir Mordaunt Wells were to be accepted as fair exemplars of the manner in which justice is administered in the tribunals of India, the world would be justified in concluding that, while we are making gigantic strides at home in the way of law improvement, we are rapidly retrograding in the East towards that halcyon system under which suits were decided by other influences than those of equity and common sense. As to the jury in this particular case, their verdict, however, deeply to be regretted, does not excite half the surprise and wonder which the charge of the judge has created amongst all classes in this country.
But the story of this libel is not worked out yet. The catastrophe cannot be said to be accomplished by the fine and
203
