LIBEL ON THE KING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 265, 18 March 1911, Page 5

LIBEL ON THE KING.

PROSECUTION OF MYLIUS. The following comments of the London Times on the trial of E. F. Mylius for publishing a libel on King George will be read with interest:—

After sentence had been pronounced, the trial came to a dramatic conclusion, the Attorney-General reading from a document, signed by the King himself, the statement that the King "was never married except to the Queen, and never went through the ceremony of marriage, except with the Queen." His Majesty added that he would have attended to give evidence, had he not been advised by the law officers of the Crown that it would be unconstitutional for him to do so. We trust that these plain words, with the total collapse of the defendant's case, will hare their proper effect, first on the people who recklessly swallow this kind of malicious gossip, and secondly upon the organs of opinion—chiefly, we are happy to think, foreign—which circulate them. This charge has utterly broken down, anfl it would be the same with others, such as the preposterous suggestion that the King, one of the most temperate of men, is too fond of wine. It is a false charge, and a silly one. His Majesty is one of the finest shots in his dominions, and nobody could be that except a man whose nerves were in perfect order, and not shaken by indulgence. The gossip, however, is a sample of the wicked scandals circulated about great personages by malicious, or sometimes merely reckless, people. Let it be silenced once for all, together with the graver insult formulated by the creature who skulks in Paris, and spread by his who was on Wednesday sent to prison. Of one thing all who know anything of their Majesties are certain—that a mora blameless pair, or a pair more happily mated, never occupied the position of King and Queen of the realm.