Mr. Howorth, in an admirable letter to Tuesday's Times, sum-
marises the arguments of the worshippers at Mr. O'Brien's shrine, and shows how ludicrously wide of the honours of martyrdom Mr. O'Brien has shown himself to be. Mr. O'Brien has told us that his prison treatment has been in every respect what that of an ordinary prisoner should be ; that there was no excess of violence in trying to enforce his con- formity to the prison rules ; and that his only ground for complaint is that, being a political prisoner, he should be treated like an ordinary law-breaker. To that Mr. Howorth replies that, if prisoners are to be the' judges of the political character of their own crime, we should soon have thieves and burglars declaring that they had stolen or broken into houses on political grounds ; and that if the criminals themselves are not to be the judges, sensible Englishmen will be much more disposed to regard persons condemned under the Corrupt Practices Act to imprisonment with hard labour for bribing or intimidating voters, as political prisoners, than they will be to regard as political prisoners men like Mr. O'Brien.
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