On Thursday, December 13th, Lord Alfred Douglas was sentenced to
six months' imprisonment in the Second Division for a criminal libel on Mr. Winston Churchill, whom he had charged with concocting a false report about the Battle of Jutland for the purpose of making money. The sentence was certainly lenient, for a more infamous and unsupported calumny it would be difficult to imagine. It was proved that Mr. Churchill was not even at the Admiralty at the time that the false report was said to have been issued. But there is another matter to which we must refer. Counsel for the defence attempted to save his client by covering Mr. Churchill with mud in the hope that a certain amount of it would stick and would make an impression upon the jury. We quite understand that when a counsel has a hopeless case he naturally turns to aspersion because he can do little with the evidence. Decency has a code nevertheless, and in our opinion Lord Alfred Douglas's counsel went far beyond the mark.
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