The New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 1878.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5307, 29 March 1878, Page 4

The New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 1878.

The prosecution for libel ordered by the House of Representatives in this case has failed ; thus Mr. George Jones, besides the honor of being hero and martyr, has probably made a good thing, pecuniarily, by his libellous onslaught on her Majesty’s Attorney-General in this colony. Reports unusually voluminous of the proceedings in this cause celehre have been furnished by the Dunedin papers, so that it is possible from their perusal to get a clear view of all the steps in the process. Mr. George Jones is the registered proprietor and publisher of a newspaper called the Oamaru Mail, and in the month of August last he published therein a leading article in which, in the grossest language, the basest personal motives were attributed to Mr. Whitaker for having, in his capacity as Attorney-General and as a responsible Minister of the Crown, introduced the Native Lands ■ Courts Bill in the House of Representatives last session. In proof of this charge, and as tho only apparont reason for its being made, Mr. Jones, upon the authority of an unnamed informant, was able to adduce a certain specified transaction alleged to have been had by Mr. Whitaker with a Mr. Moon for the acquisition of a large tract of land in the Waikato District, for the completion of which transaction Mr. Jones was of opinion that the alteration in the law proposed to be effected by the Bill in question was only required. With this transaction it is well known that Mr. Whitaker had no connection except as a solicitor directed by and acting for the Colonial Government in the protection of the public interest. For this publication Mr. George Jones, as our readers will no doubt remember, was summoned to the bar of the House of Representatives, and after a discussion, the record of which is preserved in Hansard, the decision of the House was communicated to the delinquent by Mr. Speaker in the following terms. The Sergeant-at-Arms, by direction of Mr. Speaker, brought Mr. Jones to the bar of the House:— Mr. Speaker : Mr. George Jones, it is my duty to inform you of the decision the House has arrived at in your case. It is as follows ;—“That the Attorney-Gen-eralbe instructed to prosecute Mr. George Jones according to law for a libel on a member of this House in his place in Parliament ; and, in the event of the verdict upon the trial being for the defendant, or should the jury disagree, all costs incurred on behalf of the defendant should he defrayed by the Government as between attorney and client.” You are released from further attendance, Mr. George Jones.”

In accordance with this direction of the House of Representatives, the necessary steps were at once taken by the Law Officer of the Crown; Mr. Jones was brought before the Resident Magistrate at Wellington, and after the usual preliminary investigation, was committed for trial to the Supreme Court. For causes into which we need not now enter, the trial was postponed from time to time until the present month, when, as the offence was committed in the Provincial District of Otago, it took place in the city of Dunedin before a special jury. Mr. Jones appears to have been advised to plead ‘ ‘ not guilty ” as to some portions of the indictment, and justification as to other portions. The first written plea put in being objected to by the Grown Prosecutor, Mr. Hagitt, was at once withdrawn, and a second plea, which counsel had ready “ cut and dried,” was substituted by consent. To this second plea the Crown Prosecutor demurred, and upon argument the demurrer was sustained and the plea rejected by the Court on the ground, as Mr. Justice Williams said, “that it did not specify with sufficient particularity the charges which the defendant is prepared to justify, and therefore does not comply with the statute under which it was pleaded.” Mr. Rees, defendant’s counsel, then obtained permission to make a third attempt to produce a plea which would “hold water,” and by this plea he announced his determination “to stand or fall.” This supreme effort, from the legal and technical point of view, was as great a failure as the others, and met the same deserved fate at the hands of the Court —it was not accepted. It is, however, a very remarkable document, which we propose on a future occasion to present in extenso for the information of our readers; it may suffice for the present to say that it repeated calumnious charges, the utter falseness of which has been publicly demonstrated over and over again before committees of the Assembly and elsewhere ; indeed, the plea might have been drawn up by Sir George Grey himself, who, by the way, happened, “quite promiscuous,” to be in Dunedin at the time, as it contained all the favorite charges which he loves to make against Mr. Whitaker, from the time of the purchase of the copper mine at Kawau some thirty years ago, and including the Piako Swamp and the coalfield, down to the Waitoa exchange, not yet apparently accomplished. This plea was a piece of declamation, and not a formal and sober legal document; its windy peroration was happily characterised by Mr. Justice JohnstOk as being more like a fervid address of counsel to a jury than a formal plea to be presented to a Judge of tho Supreme Court. It was, as we have said, rejected by the Court as insufficient; but as it was published in tho newspapers, its author scored the point of being able to throw dirt, to repeat tho calumnious statements which we have mentioned, with a land of legal sanction in a cowardly fashion, with the certainty that the persons affected thereby could not then have the opportunity of answering them where they were made. The attempt to plead justification of the libel having thus failed, and the libellous character of the article incriminated being thus admitted, there remained for the jury to determine, it would appear, only the question of the publication of the same, to which Mr. Jones’ plea of “ hot guilty” could apply ; and it must have been upon this issue strictly that the verdict was given for the defendant. Having failed to frame a plea of justification which the Court could receive, the verdict says practically that there was no publication. There was once a celebrated Irish plea in an action about a broken punch bowl, which set out that “the howl was broken when we received it, it was whole when we returned it, and we never had it at all;” upon this it is recorded that a verdict

was obtained for the defendant. We have not the report of the case at hand, unfortunately, as it might throw some light upon the process ■ by. which the decision in the present action was arrived at. If the Dunedin special jury in Jones’s case made a true deliverance, according to the evidence, Jones is a myth : there can be no such journal as the Oamaru Mail, and the House of Representatives has been beating the air. As it is probable, we think, that there may be general incredulity on these points, we shall have occasion to return to this subject.