A LIBEL CASE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 222, 7 February 1913, Page 5

A LIBEL CASE.

.. INTERESTING EVIDENCE. (Per Press' Association). Auckland, Thursday. The Supreme Court was occupied with an action by Thomas Walsh, of Auckland,, against the New Zealand Federation of Labor and Alexander Grigg, claiming £450 damages for al-, leged libel, contained in the Maoriland Worker of October 4. Plaintiff was proprietor of the newspaper Voice of Labor, published in Auckland, and secretary of the Auckland Council of the United Labor Party. The libel complained of charged plaintiff with travelling to Waikino to organise scabs, the' words used in part being: "We say that in the Australasian Labor Party there is not on record an incident so traitorous or so dastardly. This Walsh, fool and knave, both, has been associated with an official organ rotten to the core, and time and again has wantonly and wickedly spoked as a eredentialled Labor representative in a way that in the Russian movement would see him hanged, and in the mpvement anywhere else than New Zealand would see him drummed out as worse than Judas, contemptible as all known rats and agents' provocateurs." '.Mr. Newton appears for the prosecution, and Sir John Findlay and Mr. P. J. O'Regan for defendants. Tin' statement of the defence sets up jlisti fication, and pleads that the paragraph in question is fair comment in a discussion of an industrial question in which Walsh aitacked the Federation in violent language.