PORTUGUESE MOCKERY OF JUSTICE.
[To THE EDITOR Or TRY .137ECTATOR."1
Sin,—In an editorial footnote to a letter under the above title which appeared in the Spectator of June 20th you remark that the writer "is alone responsible for the accuracy of the facts" stated in the letter, and this would seem to suggest that they did not rest on any other authority. Will you allow me to point out that the facts there mentioned are matters of common knowledge and are beyond dispute ? The letter dealt with the treatment of Dona Julia de Brito e Cunha by the Portuguese Government, and all the facts relating to the two unjustifiable imprisonments of this unfortunate lady have already been made known to the British public on the unimpeachable authority of Adeline Duchess of Bedford, Mr. Philip Gibbs, and Mr. Aubrey Bell. The account of her recent trial by Court-Martial since the Amnesty Law was plumed was quoted from the Lisbon newspaper Republica, and she sow awaits the decision of the Government as to her fate. All the circumstances relating to the treatment of Dona Julia de Brito in your correspondent's letter are incontrovertible, and- rest upon other authority besides that of the writer. I hope, therefore, that you will allow me to correct an erroneous impression which might have been :treated by your editorial comment.
The only other statements of more general application which you may have felt required jnatifivation appear in the last sentence of your correspondent's letter, where the Portu- guese Government is spoken of as "notorious for having failed to keep the promises and guarantees contained in its own Consti- tutional charter, and for having disfranchised seventy-five per oent, of the electorate." The explanation and justification of those statements will be found in a pamphlet dealing with the new Amnesty Law in Portugal, which was recently issued • by the British Protest Committee, and of which fear thousand copies are now in circulation. An amnesty is usually under- stood to be an act of oblivion, and if the Portuguese Govern. insist had wished to silence British criticism the amnesty' should have been extended without qualification to the untried as well as to the condemned political prisoners. It should also have been followed by the cessation of the Courts- Martial, which, besides being a grotesque anomaly in time of peace, are contrary to the Constitution of the Republic, which guarantees trial by jury for political offenders.—I am, Chairman of the British Protest Committee, 22 Baton Place, S. W.
[Our editorial note was not intended in the very, least to throw doubt upon Miss Tenison's accuracy. All who care for the cry of the prisoner must acknowledge her splendid and self-sacrificing services. Further, we have always found her statements well authenticated. We merely wished to record the fact that they were not within our personal knowledge. After the doable testimony of Miss Tenison and Lord Lytton they may be accepted as unlikely to be proved incorrect even in the smallest particular.—En. Spectator.]
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