On Tuesday this trial came on, and was quickly concluded.
Mr. Stead, Mr. Jacques, and Rebecca Jarrett were found guilty of aiding and abetting, and Madame Mourey was found guilty of committing an indecent assault. After the verdict, Mr. Justice Lopes passed sentence in a brief and weighty speech, in which, while he did full justice to Mr. Stead's good motives from his point of view, he reflected very severely on the inaccurate, as well as contaminating, publications in the Pall Mall, which, said the Judge, "have been, and ever will be, a disgrace to journalism." An "irreparable injury" had, he said, been done to the parents of Eliza Armstrong. "They have been subjected to the unutterable scandal and ignominy of the charge of having sold their child." Mr. Stead, he said, should, as an educated man, have known "that the law cannot be broken to promote any good or supposed good, and that the sanctity of private life cannot be invaded for thefurtherance of the views of an individual who, I am inclined to think, believes that the end sanctifies the means." The sentence on Mr. Stead, as mitigated by the Jury's recommenda- tion, in which the Judge concurred, was a sentence of imprison- ment without hard labour for three months. Jarrett, who bad, as Mr. Justice Lopes said, been "pressed into the service," but who had misled her employer as to what occurred, received a sentence of six months' imprisonment "without hard labour ;" while Jacques was sentenced to a single month's imprisonment. Madame Mourey was sentenced to six months' imprisonment with hard labour ; and so this painful case waegtt length closed.
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