Mr. Parnell and the rest of the accused Land Leaguers
applied on Saturday to the Queen's Bench Division for a postponement of the trial. The arguments were very lengthy, but they all amounted to this,—that if Mr. Yarnell were absent from his place in Parliament on January ,6th, his cause would suffer. The Lord Chief Justice, Sir G. A. May, refused the application, in a speech which assumed too clearly that the traversers were guilty, and drew down a covert rebuke even from the three Judges sitting with him, though they concurred in the decision. The error is most unfortunate—one of those perverse incidents which only occur in Irish affairs—and has led to an outburst of fury against the Judge of the most extravagant kind, one speaker being even supposed to have incited his assassination, though that is, we think, an unfair construction of his words. The Lord Chief Justice is punished by the irreparable injury his want of impartiality has done to his own cause; but it will be well if it be possible to arrange that indisposition should pre- vent his presiding at the trial. We wish the system of appoint- ing partisan lawyers to the Bench were abrogated in Ireland. They are possibly as impartial as any other leading barristers, but nothing will make the local public believe it. It should be noted that the same Judges acceded to an application to restrain the Evening Mail from comments on the case.
