As the Pall Mall Gazette is in a pet at
criticisms of ours which it perfectly well knows to be strictly just, we will recite in the -driest way the line of conduct on its part, which we have, -with great surprise and regret, observed, and of course condemned. Mr. Odger, in addressing his supporters at Chelsea, urged upon them the necessity of a comprehensive measure of national education, and supported this by illustrating the hardship of the existing absence of all provision for helpless children, from his own case,—mentioning that his father, who was a miner, died -when he was four years old, and that his mother was driven out of her mind by family misfortunes shortly afterwards, so that he was left without any education except what he could pick up under great difficulties for himself. On this incident hinged the first very ungentlemanly comment in the Pall Mall, which scoffed at
Odger for having friends who called him " Hodger," asked "that evil Chelsea had ever done that it should be selected by him as -the unfortunate object of his choice, and spoke of his claim as consisting, "by his own confession" (we quote here from our own note of a fortnight ago, as the Pall Mall has quite gratuitously charged us with suppressing the fact that the statemeut referred
to had its origin in Mr. Odger himself), in the fact that (here we quote from the Pall Mall) "as he never had had any education, he knows the value of it ; and that his father was a miner, and his mother mad." (2.) When Professor Fawcett wrote to the Pall Mall a temperate statement of Mr. Odger's real claims to politi- cal confidence, it suppressed that letter. (3.) Having done so, it spoke as if any other political claims of Mr. Odger's, except his connection with the Reform League and the Hyde-Park Riots, were unknown to it. (4.) It inserted on Tuesday week (29th September) a sort of elaborate parody on Mr. Odger's next speech at Chelsea, by way of report, which we have the authority of one of those who heard it,—the chairman of the meeting,— for characterizing as a misrepresentation of its whole effect with the evident intention of bringing it into ridicule. (5.) Last Wednesday it went back to its first libel on Mr. Odger, and repre- sented his mention of his early misfortunes as a coarse attempt to excite public sympathy, resembling Mr. Gradgrind's perpetual assurances that he was "dragged up in the gutter." If the Pall Mall thinks such a dead set as this at a thoughtful and able man,—who has won respect wherever he is really known,—and belonging to a class under unquestionable social disadvantages, honourable, we regret to be obliged to change our estimate of its standard of honour.
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