LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
" A PLEA FOR JUSTICE " : THE CASE OF MR. C. A. CAMERON.
[To THE EDITOR OF THR "SFECTATOR."1 SrR,—The Spectator of June 20th, in its carefully balanced precis of " The Cameron Pearl Case," incidentally referred to me, as the writer of an " extraordinarily moving testi- monial," in support of the innocence of my late subaltern, Lieutenant C.A. Cameron, adding that no man nor woman could read what I had written " without being touched by the depths of the tragedy therein set forth." Such an opinion, emanating from the source it did, is necessarily entitled to respect ; but in penning the testimonial I certainly had no such object in view.
And now once more without ulterior motive I write, merely to reiterate the simple truth—my friend is innocent. Were he in the remotest degree not so, surely, by every law of human expediency, he himself would be the very last person to dig up the buried past, thereby deliberately offering again to public view the poor forgotten corpse of his own indelible disgrace! But conscious as he is of innocence—the necessity for a continuance of his attitude of self-imposed silence now no longer existing—every instinct of his nature vehemently impels him to cry the fact aloud, in the pathetic hope of gaining recognition of such fact at the hands of his fellow- men. He does not ask for a remission of his sentence—for that he has already served without complaint. He does not even ask that his conviction should be set aside. He merely asks in all humility that opportunity may be afforded him to appear before some specially constituted tribunal, so as to admit of his being subjected to the severest process of cross- examination that human ingenuity can devise. Considering the suffering he has endured, the shame and disgrace which his conviction has brought upon his family and upon his regiment, whose Colonel-in-Chief is his Majesty the King, considering the depth of his social fall from a position of honourable distinction to that which now is his, surely so reasonable a request on his part must be one imperatively calculated to appeal to all who have the interests of justice at heart. Does there exist in the House of Commons at this moment one single member who would not, in similar circumstances, ask as much—though at the same time so little P And therefore it is that I rely with absolute con- fidence on the collective wisdom of Parliament to devise some method of procedure, no matter what, whereby to put the question to the final test, and so to arrive at a judicial under- standing qualified to proclaim authoritatively the actual truth. We who have worked to this end for the past three years, without either official encouragement or personal misgiving, have no shadow of a doubt as to what the tenor of such pro- clamation must be.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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