OUR LONDON LETTER.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1096, 3 January 1878, Page 2

OUR LONDON LETTER.

[written specially for the globe.]

London, November 15.

Since last I wrote, but especially during the current month, the affairs of New Zealand have occupied a considerable share of public attention at heme. To begin with, we have had a long speech from Sir Julius Vogel on the past history, present condition, and future prospects of the colony, but as a full report of this speech will reach you by this mail, I need not here dwell upon it, except to remark that it would have had a much wider circulation than it has obtained if the managers of the meeting at which it was delivered had had any business notions and taken care that it should be widely reported. They negligently threw away a golden opportunity. Well, I find that somebody in New Zealand has been doing “ good by stealth,” and I hope that should he read this paragraph he will not “blush to find it fame,” for I can. only say he deserves the heartiest thanks for his generous gift of a lifeboat, which has been named the Peep o’ Pay, and launched at Port Erroll, Cruden, on the coast of Aberdeenshire. The inaugural ceremony was attended by several members of the Scotch nobility, including Lord Erroll, the president of the local committee of the National Lifeboat Institution, who accepted the gift, and Lady Kilmarnock, who chris ! tened the boat. After their first practipe ip the bay with the new craft, the crew pro? ceeded to Slains Castle, where Lord Erroll kindly entertained them. One of the ships whose arrival in New Zealand will speedily follow the delivery of this letter will convey to your shores a singular piece of freight—viz., the remains of Miss Annie Josephine V. Smith, a young lady who died in London some months ago, while she was on a visit here with her father and mother. Before her death she asked her mother to have her corpse buried in the Church of St. Barnabas, at Dunedin, towards the building of which several members of her family had contributed. Her father, however, had her buried in Green Cemetery, but after his return to New Zealand the mother caused an application to bp made to the ecclesiastical authorities, who have allowed her to remove the body and carry out the wishes of the deceased. The teetotal New Jerusalem scheme, projected by Messrs Wm. Fox and J. Broomhall, does not appear to have realised the success which its promoters expected. An advertisement appeared in the London morning journals at the beginning of this mouth, announcing a proposal to bring out a limited liability company to be called the “ New Zealand Land and Agency Company, Limited,” with a capital ot one million, in £lO shares, for the business of “buying large tracts of land to resell in smaller lots.” In commenting upon this project the “Times” city article writer remarked:— 1 ‘ This pray or may not be a good speculation for those \vho enter upon it, but in the present debt-laden state of New Zealand, no one can doubt its boldness. Until met'e is known of it, however, the public is not likely' to supply half million of money for any such venture,” One of your Christchurch visitors here, Mr C. A, Pritchard, endorses the above view, and in a letter of his in the “ Times ” city article next day, he writes: “I think it would he as well for English investors to know that for undertakings of this kind, plenty of capital can always be found within the colony when fair prospects of success are shown,” and he strengthens his argument by citing an instance of a local insurance company recently started in Christchurch, which received subscribed applications for its cne million of capital to the enormous extent of eight times oyer. In the “Times” of flap following diiy, in ah article on the colony,' criticising thp Agept-General’s speech at the dinner given by the Directors of the Colonial ir> "k di New Zealamf—tho iecipient com* - ..

pany’s bankers—the writer says: -“There is, as a correspondent informed ns yesterday, no want of capital in New Zealand itself, and it is subscribed readily enough for all legitimate local purposes. Wc cannot help believing that those who are on the spot and who have accordingly the find choice, will pick out the most promising investments. Those that remain may be very good and very sound, but we may be pretty sure that they are not the best and soundest,’ If the writer had had the advantage of a knowledge of its New Zealand promoters, the Hon. W. Fox, Sir Julias Vogel, and a Mr William Isaac, lately merchant (?) of Dunedin, he might have more strongly depre cated the sinking of savings in a scheme under the management of men who have not been trained to habits of business, and who are quite unfit for the duties expected of directors in so large an undertaking. The session of the Central Criminal Court, that has been held since last I wrote, has been by far the most important that fav taken place for a great many vears, and many cases have been disposed of that v ill long be remembered by the public in this j country. It began with the trial of two j young men from Portsmouth who had taken to imitating Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. They caused much consternation around our south-eastern suburbs last winter by the mad pranks they played on Blackheath, where they succeeded in stopping several carriages and robbing the people in them. On one occasion, amongst the money they obtained were two £5 bank notes, and some months afterwards they were found passing them at Portsmouth, whither they had returned to work when the evenings became lighter. It is almost superfluous to say that the police could not catch them on the spot,, and but for their dealing with the unlucky notes they would have escaped detection As it is, they are sentenced to penal servitude for seven years. The next case in order of importance was one preferred against Dr. Baxter Langley, the chairman of the Artisans and Laborers Dwellings Company, Mr Swindlehurst--ominous name—the secretary of the company, and an auctioneer named Saffery, for defrauding the company of many thousands of pounds. All these men -were of good position. Langley was first known in London as the manager of Mr John Bright’s newspaper, the “Morning Star.” When that stopped he embarked in a number of semiphilanthropise schemes, amongst others the one which has brought him to grief. He lived near Greenwich, has teen for years the chairman of Mr Gladstone’s election committee, and has even aspired to be the colleague of the right hon. gentleman in the representation of that large borough. Swindlehurst was paid a large salary as the secretary of the company, which was for years under the patronage of several noblemen of the most undoubted integrity, and has, in spite of all the black mail that has been levied upon it, accomplished a really useful work, and built hundreds, if not thousands, of admirable houses for clerks and artisans. The great fraud was in the purchase of the land. Saffery was employed to buy the estates. He them resold them to the company at an enormous advance, and the three men named above shared the plunder. They did not attempt a denial of what they had done, and the jury found them guilty. Their counsel, however, raised various points of law on behalf of the defendants, but the prosecution declined to ask for judgment on those counts of the indictment which were disputed. For the uncontested part of the crime Langley and Swindlehurst were sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour, and Saffery, who had been recommended by the jury to mercy, to one year of the same punishment. But by far the most important trial was that of the three chief detectives of London, Meiklejohn, Druscovich, and Clarke, and a solicitor named Froggatt, for conspiring to defeat the ends of justice by giving information of the action t hat was being taken against a notorious gang of swindlers, and conniving at their escape. All the forces of the Government were brought to bear on this prosecution. Both their principal law officers appeared in the case, as well as three of the ordinary counsel for the Treasury. The case against the defendants was stated to the jury by the Attorney-General, who spoke for six hours with great force and clearness, and this address has considerably added to his great reputation at the bar. His wife sat on the bench by the side of Mr Baron Pollock and the T ord Mayor, and as this was the first great public occasion on which she had been seen, there was considerable curiosity to have a peep at her. The lady had been married before she espoused Sir John (then Mr) Holker, but her first marriage did not prove to be a happy one, and she petitioned fora divorce. Mr Holker, who has always jieep a favourite counsel with female clients. Was retailed to conduct her case, which he won, and subsequently he won the lady, and married her. Opinions differ: some think she is a pretty woman ; others take exception to her profile, but anyhow Sir John and Lady Holker, seen together, look a very comfortable and happy couple. But to return to the story of the trial, which has been a protracted one, though not so tedious as was the investigation before the police magistrate, because the judge and jury go straight on with the case, and there is no harking back to clear up unfinished points. Almost at the very beginning of the trial the judge made it clear that he was not going to bring on his hoad. such a storm as descended on Mr Justice Hawkins for hurrying on the last stage of the Staunton ease, and on the second day of the trial Mr Biron Pollock announced hi.s intention of only sitting five days a week, from ten to four o’clock. The reason for making Saturday a whole holiday was that of the twelve jurymen three (it not four) were Jews, and partly on account of business and partly *rom religious motives they did not desire to be at the Old Bailey op their Sabbath. The case for the prosecution scarcely revealed any new fact, but what was already known against the defendants We had the whole gang of convict swindlers again publicly examined to reveal the enormous depth of vjlliany to which even educated men can descend when once they have crossed the Rubicon of honesty. Apart from curiosity to a- e the prinoipal actors in a long series of frauds, a curiosity that was widlj r spread, though only a few could gratify it, the principal Criminal Court in London, being a very small and ill-contrived place, there was very little public excitepipnt about the matter until this week, when poqnsel for tbc defendants have begun to address the jury for the defence, a step which is not yet finished, so that although this trial has now occupied more than three weeks I shall not be able in this letter to tell ' v

you the result, which will not be arrived at for some days to come. Well, I, like most of the public, waited ’o hear what the long array of clover counsel had to say for their clients at the bar What was their defence ?

■niemed up in two words it was this : more talk. First rose Mr Montagu Williams, nio-t bombastic of all the Old Bailey bar. He had to defend Meiklejohn, -who was said to have had the ehief profit out of the swindlers Even Mr Williams could not deny that money had passed between his client and the greatest of the convicts, but this he sought to convince the jury was only the payment of certain betting transactions in which, by the way, it was odd that the sharper, whom you would have expected to win, always lost. Next came Mr Douglas straight, who has made himself an unequalled position as a criminal counsel by his calm audacity. He once sat in the House of Commons for a short time, but there the same demeanour did nob tell so forcibly, for like all second-rate art it palled by repetition. Well, Mr Straight followed Mr Williams with the argument that the bulk of the case bad been concocted by the convicts nut of revenge ; but he. too. had a money matter to account for, and he put it to the jury that his client, Druscovich, had innocently borrowed money from a man who was introduced to him by a brother officer By far the best speech of the lot was that of Mr Clarke for the defendant of that name, Mr Clarke has not had an extensive practice at the criminal bar, but he has held briefs in many of the most important trials, for he is a clear headed counsel, skilled in sifting evidence, and has a calm cogent way of talking to a jury. This afternoon, as lam writing these lines the last of the speeches for the defence is being made and it is expected that for the next two days the AttorneyGeneral will have the whole field to himself for his reply. Incidentally I have mentioned the Staunton case, and this will, I hope, be the last time I shall have to mention such a disgusting crime. The result of the conferences at the Home Secretary’s office has been that the sentence of death passed on the three Stauntons has been commuted into penal servitude for life, while the fourth prisoner, the girl Alice Rhodes, who lived with the husband of the deceased woman, has been pardoned and set at liberty. I hear that she has been engaged as a barmaid at a city wine vaults, but I have not personally verified the fact, and don’t mean to, for I, like a good many other persons, regard her liberation as a mistaken concession to a little knot of noisy agitators. They have been stopped in their hubbub by the fact of the lives of their interesting proteges having been spared, but they declare that they will not rest until they have demonstrated the entire innocence of the Stauntons. I hope, however, that they will bo otherwise—and I am sure much better—employed. Poor Dr. Kenealy, he of the “lion’s mane,” the whilom advocate of the Tichborne claimant is once more in hot water. When difficulties were beginning to surround him, after his removal from the bar, he received an extremely sympathising letter from one Cootc, a solicitor, who had not much business, but hoped to get some more through taking up the founder of the Magna Charta Association. In this it seems, from one of his letters to an intimate friend, he was not altogether disappointed, But meantime he was acting as Keuealy’s solicitor through all the successive waves of legal trouble that broke over the exbarrister’s wigless head, and at length he wanted payment for his services. This, the Doctor declined, and thereupon an action was tried before his old opponent, Lord Coleridge, who at the outset offered to send the ease before another judge if either side wished it; a handsome offer, which even the defendant felt bound to decline. To-day, however, I should think lie regrets not haying accepted it, for yesterday afternoon he received a most severe dressing from the Bench, The jury appear to have been thoroughly disgusted with the shullling style of defence. They only took ten minutes to find their verdict for the plaintiff, and execution on the doctor’s effects will speedily follow.