On Friday week the action brought by Mr. John Murray,
the well-known publisher, against the Times for alleged libel in a letter printed in the Times commenting on the price of " The Letters of Queen Victoria " was concluded. It was shown in the evidence that the letter signed " Artifex" was written at the suggestion of Mr. Hooper, the manager of the Times Book Club, and was not, as readers of the Times might haVe supposed, an expression of opinion volunteered by an independent person. The letter gave figures which professed to show that Mr. Murray made an unjustifiable profit out of the book, and added : " These figures in any case spell simple extortion." The letter further said of Mr. Murray : "He has exploited the great personality of Queen Victoria for his own ends and coined the national interest in her doings for his own enrichment into thirty-two pieces of silver, to be precise." The jury returned a verdict in Mr. Murray's favour and assessed the damages at £7,500. We discuss the question of "letters to the editor" elsewhere, and will only say here that we think that Mr. Murray thoroughly deserved his verdict, and we hope that the case will be a warning to newspapers against abandoning the sound principle that "letters to the editor" shall be what they appear to be,—free and independent expressions of opinion.
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