The trial of Lieutenant Douglas Malcolm on the charge of
murder. ing Anton Baumberg, a profligate alien who had attempted to seduce his wife, ended on Tuesday with the acquittal of the accused. The case excited great interest, even in the !Add of a war where thousands fall daily, because it was concerned with the primitive human instincts, and because it boomed to involve the application of the " unwritten law," familiar in France and America. Sir John Simon, who defended the prisoner with coneummate skill, called no witnesam, and urged that, on the evidence for the prosecu- tion, Lieutenant Malcolm, who had gone to Baumberg'n room to horsewhip him as he lay in bed, had shot and killed him in self- defence as the man was trying to get his pistol from a drawer. Sir John Simon strongly deprecated any desire to induce the jury to " allow its sympathy or its pas ;ion, to get the hotter of its reason and its duty." But he ingeniously argued that the English law of murder, built up as part of the common law, was in the true sense an " unwritten law," and to this he appealed with success on behalf of his client.
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