THE END OF THE TICHBORNE CASE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume V, Issue 226, 30 May 1872, Page 3

THE END OF THE TICHBORNE CASE.

In all this gigantic Tichborne case, with, its long array of counsel on each side, its endless lists of witnesses, and revelation of model jurymen, who almost justify Mr: Bright' s dictum that we might get a House of Commons by taking the first six hundred men who pass under Temple -Bar, no single figure is so interesting as that of the Claimant himself. Take what view we like of him, accept any h-ypotheds we may of his career, and he must be a personage nearly unique in the annals either of misfortune or of crime. On the former theory, he has lost much more than his position, or estates, or eyen his liberty ; he has lost his own identity. There is no hypothesis on which it is possible to assume even for a moment that he is Sir Roger Tiehborne except this, — that a man thrown into new circumstances, oppressed by unaccustomed labour, and debauched by dissolute living, may in twelve years so deteriorate in body, mind, and habit of thought as to be virtually a hew and lower man, may forget utterly three-fourths of all he has ever known, including that kind of knowledge which once acquired becomes instinctive, such as the knowledge frequently retained by fatuous persons of the moves at chess ; may become utterly- reckless in statement — that does happen to a large proportion of opium eaters — may lose all those habits, ways, and instincts of caste which, if once evident in any human being, are supposed to be indelible, and which certainly often so enter into the fibre of the nature as to be transmitted like physical qualities. There musf be possibilities in all human, beings of lesions of brain co existing with great mental acuteness, of defects of memory . side by side with great retentiveness, such as physiologists have never recorded among their marvellous tales, of changes, indeed, such as are hardly consistent with continuous identity. We do not even ye* reject that hypothesis as a- possibility, though we should have done so bad we been jurymen, for we do not yet know the limits of the possible, and a speculative thinker is free where a juryman is bound, but there is no other on which the theory of the suit can even as an intellectual argument be sustained. Sir Roger Tichborne, supposing tlfat he appeared in that box and made those answers, must be a man as isolated in his mind as his misfortunes, the subject of some unknown mental disease, the victim of some form of aphasia which affects much more than the memory, which spreads over the whole mind, instead of its mechanical instrument the memory, and fearfully injures the whole morale. "VVe need scarcely say this is no more our view than it was that of the jury or the judge, yet it is difficult absolutely to exclude it, impossible not to consider for a moment what the inner Sir Roger — imprisoned in that huge form, conscious of an identity he has lost the faculties to prove, conscious ot unbearable injustice, yet with the untouched shrewd side of his mind aware that the injustice is not wilful, but is one of the thousand results of his misfortune — must now be feeling, or if feeling, has been dimmed by some lethargy of spirit, corresponding to the growth of fat upon his body, must be feeling as he felt.

And if we accept the other hypithesis that the man is no member of the Tich>borne family, a mere impostor who has pulled the credulous, wasted months of legal time, and sworn not to one but to a thousand perjuries what a unique figure he remains, how widely different from the one any foreigner would previously have imagined! The strongest point in his favor is his extrame unlikeness to the sort of man a clever rogue would have picked out to be agent in such a fraud. He, if decently competent would have* hunted the world for a great actor,' a wicked G-arrick, the precise character which is certainly not that of this claimant. He has strong qualities rather than tygh capacity. That he is a determined man is clear from his whole bearing in the witness-box under the AttorneyGeneral's fire of denunciation, and at the time of his arrest;. that he is a remorseless one is sufficiently proved by the attack on Mrs. Radclifte — an attack the wickedness of which does not .depend on his identity ; and that he is an able one is the first of Sir J. Coleridge's many points. But what a strange, imperfect, shot-silk kind of ability it must be! Grant for a raomentSir J. Coleridge's apparent theory of the origin of the affair, that .a man named Orton or Castro, breda butcher, had thought or had been persuaded that if accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son he would without trouble be admitted heir, to the family estates, and had gradually conceived a more elaborate scheme, still the fact remains that he must be either the man he claims fo be, or have got up his case slowly, piecemeal, and -amidst enormous difficulties, as acutely as Sir .T. Coleridge himself, who, indeed, in the earlier pari of the long trial, wanted to "change brains with him," and hinted that he was cross-examining his questioner.

extracting safe answers from the very questions themselves. This uncultivated, fat, hard-drinking butcher, must have had twice 'the legal though latent capacity of the sharp little ferret who created such amusement in the witnessbox; must have had a nearly cloudless memory j must have divined whole classes of questions to which he would be subjected; must have had a mind sensitive as that of an artist, to enable him to evade so many pitfalls without ever showing his fear. And he must have possessed that mind in spite of the temperament so rarely found associated with it, a'teinparameut ess- v h~ tially lethargic, apathetic, slow of impulse, and habituated to lazy enjoyment. The claimant remained for years as cool and impassive as the Emperor Napoleon. No doubt he may have been greatly helped, but personation is the most difficult of tasks, and he must have picked up and retained many thousands of isolated facts and circumstances almost as difficult to learn as isolated words in a language you never heard. A nd, yet, as we said, on the theory of the defence, how incomplete his mind was, how very little it became educated in the five years for which the claim has been maintained I He could ani did learn enough to convince men of all ranks, positions, and degrees of culture, aud induce them to lend him money, to take in the majority of the populace, and to leave after his examination-111-chiei: 1 an impression of doubt even on experienced counsel ; but be never, supposing him not to be a deteriorated. Sir Roger, caught the whole of any lesson, — never, for instance, learned French — an unsolved puzzle, for ho had plenty of time, and been able during his life time to acquire some Spanish — never learnt how English gentlemen write letters, never realised fully to himself as a great actor might have done what Roger Tichborne must have beeu, never to all appearance rose to the conception that his life-work was to carry the deception through, never even got hold of a clear conception as to the kind of knowledge in which he would be likely to be wanting. His case was no doubt a hopeless one, for the grand obstacle to personation, the impossibility of knowing all that the double must have known, existed to a much fuller extent than the public at first suspected., G-arrick playing the parfc would have been saved by instinctive morale from the frightful artistic blunder about Mrs. Radcliffe, but G-arrick could not have providi d for the tattooing evidence. We have only, however to think of the impression, as say Mr. Alfred "Wigan, would have created with his French, arid his readiness in acquiring knowledge, and with the plaintiff's materials, to see how greatly this claimant fell short in the powers necessary for his part. The result must have been the same, but if Mr. Wigan had been the pretender half England would have believed him in his dying day. It undoubtedly wished to believe him. Whether the case enlisted the sympathies of the poor against the rich, whether this fat, impassive, bad man realised the popular ideal of a barouet — as we half fancy he did — or whether the story awoke that capacity for wonder always so great in uneducated 1 mankind, it is an undoubted fact that, : until the Attorney- General rose, a majority of the lower classes were on the Claimant's sj^e, and that the speech, with its long-drawn length, and artistic repetitions, and with bursts of artificial but effective indignation, did what no amount of evidence given piecemeal would have done. Indeed, not the least astonishing fact in the character of the Claimant, as revealed to himself and without reference to his identity, is the interest and, so to speak, sympathy it excited in men who, nevertheless, were perfectly aware that it was, on his own showing, radically bad. Out of his position he would not have attracted them, but in it they felt towards him "as they would to a horse in .1 race or a dog in a fi^hfe, and pardoned the 1 viciousness for the pluck, the cleverness, and above all, the temper he displayed. Is it because Englishmen are so bad tempered that in any conspicuous person, bo it the Emperor Napoleon, or Mr. Disraeli, or the Claimant in the Tichborne Case, impassiveness seems, to them so marvellous a quality?

lam writing this history for sensible people. It is my own story during the calamitious war we have just gone through. I write to show those who shall come after us how many evil minded people there are in the world, and how little we ought to trust fair words ; for we have been deceived in this village of ours after a most abominable fashion ; we have been deceived by all sorts of people, by the sous- presets, by the prefet, and by the ministers ; by the eire, by the official gazettes ; in a word, by each and all. , Jn the end jvc have had to pay dearly. We have given up our hay, our straw, our .corn, our flour, our cattle ; and that was not enough. Finally, they gave up us, our own selves-. They said to us. ' You are no longer Frenchmen ; you are Prussians ! We have taken your young men to fight in the war ; they are dead, they are prisoners ; now settle with Bismark any way you like ; your business is rone of ours}!" — "Story of the plebrsicite ." By M. M-. Erckmanu-Chatrian.-

The Bendi<;o correspondent of the

j "Cromwell Avgiui" reports tlmt tlie* [ Cromwell Company finished a crushing

of 240 tous from the Golden Link a few days ago, the yield of gold from the quantity mentioned being 3 £5 ozs. The Colclough reef is looking very well.