CASAL
(20)
No such information has ever been filed in this Colony until these four informations, which were filed three on one day and the fourth within less than seven weeks afterwards.
I must remark that the Acting Attorney General was not wanting in energy in the course he took. He meant what was right, but the tendency of filing three informations in one day against one man, for two articles on the same subject, to the same purport, tended unduly to depress the Defendant, and by a sort of mental torture to induce him to make the most abject apology whether what he had said was capable of being proved to be true or not, especially in this Colony where, as I believe, the costs of litigation exceed the like costs elsewhere in the British dominions or in the world, and even success in three such suits may be ruin to a man if he be not rich. Any apology under such circumstances could not have been satisfactory to any party.
These informations were all professedly framed on the precedent which Peltier's case in 1803 furnished. Mr Hayllar very aptly remarked that the decision in Peltier's case and that in Wason v. Walter, decided in Nov. last, with an interval of over 65 years between them, belonged to two different worlds of thought. The difference well illustrates that admirable elasticity, to which Chief Justice Cockburn has referred, with which the Law of England adapts itself to the varying conditions of society.
Beyond question my public conduct has been as severely, as vehemently, of course unjustly, criticised by the press repeatedly, and I may add by this Defendant, as that of any public man anywhere; but I will not allow Mr Pollard's proposition to pass for law without remark.
If a man be libelled in his private character it cannot be for the public good, and it is not protected; but it is different as to what Mr Pollard called this, a public libel. When a public man is libelled in respect of his public conduct it may be justified, for to expose misconduct in public offices is for the public good.
Mr Saint, either not having had an opportunity to explain or declining to explain on such compulsion, appeared on the 20th of May last to all three informations. He was served with rules to plead, and thereupon obtained a rule nisi for a month's time to plead, and for leave to demur and plead a justification, or as he should be advised. The rule was opposed by Mr Pollard (the Acting Attorney General not appearing) on the 5th of June, and Mr Pollard insisted that it was the universal practice not to allow a justification to be pleaded to what he called a public libel, which he said was...
It is true, and happy for us it is true, that every man "has a right to discuss matters of public interest." This is what Bramwell B. said in Kelly v. Sherlock, 1 L. R. Q. B. 689, as Cockburn, C.J., at p. 701 affirmed with the most perfect propriety. The language of Mr Baron Bramwell is more pointed, but in sense it is only a repetition of the language of Mr Justice Coleridge in Gathercole v. Miall, 15 M. & W. 332, who said, "I think it quite right that all matters...
(a)
143
This is inaccurate - The costs of litigation here are less than in Shanghai and I believe less than in any part of India.
(b) The C.J. seems to confuse the question of dry legal right of the Attorney General with that of the Policy of Government.
(c) There is no record of any such admission.
Pollard
072
the both by the judges' notes and by the Crown Solicitor - his way to England.
Mr Ball is now on...