HENRY HOLLAND SENTENCED.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1236, 23 April 1914, Page 3

HENRY HOLLAND SENTENCED.

TWELVE MONTHS’ FOR SEDITION. Wellington, April 22, Henry Holland, who was convicted on two counts of using seditious language in speeches on 26th October and 2nd November, was to-day sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment, to te counted from 2nd February. Holland delivered a long address to the Court. He gave a large number of reasons why sentence should not be pronounced, tie principal ones being the alleged inaccuracy of the speeches on which the charges were based. The papers quoted in court, he declared, invariably took up an attitude against the interests cf workers in connection with the strike, and nothing was too base for them to utter. He characterise d the reports of two speeches as egregious)umbles, and complained that the prosecution had not presented certain vital tacts to the court in connection with the Basin Reserve speech. He had not put a witness in the box, because his sense of manhood would not allow him to clear himself at the risk of jeopardising a comrade. He referred to his having been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for sedition uttered at Broken Hill, and made a lengthy statement as to the circumstances of his trial and release after serving five months, and of the subsequent defeat of the Wade Government, which he attributed in a great part to the way in which it had dealt with him and others. In connection with the incident at the time of the Newtown speech, he said he had known that constables had had forty rounds of ammunition served out, and had orders to shoot straight, and men from the Psyche bad told him they had been instructed, if ordered to fire on the strikers, to shoot to kill. All he (Holland) had done was to urge the men not to fire on men, women and children.

The Chief Justice, in passing sentence, said the law of sedition was not made by the judges, but by legislature, and no objection was raised to it at the time. The reports taken from the Maoriland Worker, which had been read by accused to show the variance between those reports and the dally newspaper reports, would have brought him within the law of sedition. Accused failed to recognise the necessity for peace and order, without which there could be no progress. If he invited other people not to be peaceful and to resort to violence, he was really the enemy of the people. The brotherhood ot man would never be achieved by violent maam. Such a brotherhood ot man did not merely mean the workers, but of all classes. The capitalist had just as much right not to be assaulted as the worker. The law allowed a sentence of four years, but accused would be dealt with leniently, and be sentenced to twelve months’ without hard labour.