THE CASE OF MR. ARNOLD.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Your readers may have noticed in Truth of Novem- ber 20th or elsewhere that Mr. Arnold, a Rangoon editor, was convicted of libelling a magistrate and sentenced to a year's imprisonment in October last. Without anticipating the argument of Mr. Hamlyn, his counsel, and the Registrar of the Diocese, reported to be on the way to London, I beg room to explain some of the undisputed exceptional circum- stances of this case, which should lead the Secretary of State, who has more elbow-room for action, so to speak, than the Privy Council, to release Mr. Arnold without delay, and be prepared to compensate him or take further action after the appeal. Mr. Arnold is a completely upright and loyal editor. There is no suspicion of malice or sedition, and he has been deprived of an opportunity of a review of the case in Burma or India by the action of an executive officer, the Government Advocate, who refused the certificate requisite for an appeal. The sentence is unprecedented in the circumstances, and Mr. Arnold is treated like a common felon in a tropical gaol. The mass of the people, natives of all kinds, are excited, and their confidence in European justice is shaken.
The best of our civil servants there can hardly hope for more success than to be considered " beasts, but just beasts." The salt of the Indian Empire is in the few sympathetic men, a Nicholson or Lawrence uncelebrated but useful, an "old missionary," or kind doctor, or merchant, or some other. These are the men who make the West seem amiable and intelligible to the East; and it is plain that Mr. Arnold was a man of that kind. There is surely heroism in his behaviour, incurring prison and the risk of ruin, and the certainty of loss and social taboo, in trying to get justice for a stranger, a poor Moslem woman whose daughter had been filthily defiled. I think the natives are right in esteeming him their martyr; and I beg to warn the Secretary of State that the blood of martyrs may be the seed of the Church, but it is the blight of authority. Napoleon court-martialled and punished unjustly in 1806 a Nuremberg bookseller, Palm ; and history tells that no French atrocity did more than that to unite all Germany against Napoleon.—I am, Sir, &o.,
DAVID ALEC WILSON.
[We cannot pronounce any opinion on the merits of this case, for of the details we are ignorant, and, save in exceptional circumstances, we greatly dislike retrial by newspaper. We agree, however, so strongly with the general proposition that the utmost care must be taken to do justice between white men and natives that we do not like to exclude our corre- spondent's plea in case his view is true. The Secretary of State should, we think, hold a careful investigation into the allegations made by Mr. Wilson.—En. Spectator.]
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