Truth - Thursday, May 30, 1895

A RIGHTEOUS VERDICT.

Lord Queensberry may not have acted with perfect judgment in the recent proceedings with which his name has been mixed up, but his position was a most difficult one. He brought matters to a head by leaving a card at Oscar Wilde’s club with a strong expression of his opinion of him written on it. Obviously, Wilde had to take action, or he would have been called upon to leave the club. It would, however, have been better had Lord Queensberry sent the card to the committee of the club instead of handing it to a porter. Any father, knowing, in regard to the relationship of a man with his son, what was subsequently proved to be the fact in open court, and finding that the man still insisted upon associating with him, was bound to adopt the strongest measures.

I had a slight acquaintanceship with Lord Queensberry years ago, and he called upon me to ask my advice as to what he ought to do, when Wilde was going to admitted to bail, in the event of the pair coming together. He had, he said, publicly stated that he would shoot Wilde. I strongly urged him to do nothing of the kind, but I said that, if he met them together, I thought there would be no great harm in his giving Wilde a sound horsewhipping, for public opinion would be with him. If Wilde were acquitted, and the pair went abroad together, I advised him to wash his hands of his son, having already done all that was possible to reclaim him.

This Lord Alfred Douglas seems to me to be an exceptional young scoundrel. His letter in which he expresses his regret that he was not privileged, instead of his elder brother, to assault his father, apart from anything else, puts this youth of "slim gilt soul" and "rose-leaf lips," outside the pale of all decent human beings. It would seem that he might have given evidence which, if believed, would have told in regard to one of the indictments for Wilde, but he preferred to put the Channel between himself and British jurisdiction, leaving his associate in the lurch.

The verdict of the jury was amply justified by the evidence set before it. On the first jury there were, I understand, ten for a verdict of guilty and two for an acquittal. One of the two was a gentleman who, having returned a verdict on a court-martial which he subsequently thought wrong, declared that he never would incur this risk again, and he was consequently impervious to all argument. Wilde and Taylor were tried on a clause in the Criminal Law Amendment Act which I had inserted, in order to render it possible for the law to take cognisance of proceedings like theirs. I took the clause mutatis mutandis from the French code. As I had drafted it, the maximum sentence was seven years. The then Home Secretary and Attorney-General, both most experienced men, however, suggested to me that, in such cases, convictions are always difficult, and that it would be better were the maximum to be two years. Hence the insufficiency of the severest sentence that the law allows, which, as Mr. Justice Wills observed, is totally inadequate to the offence.

There is no question that matters had reached a pass in London which rendered it necessary for the law to be put in operation, unless it was to be treated as a dead letter. I hear this name and that name bandied about, as those of persons who were mixed up in these iniquities. Against all this I protest. In such matters no one ought to be defamed by gossip unsupported by any proof. Where there is evidence the law should act, however distasteful the parading of such cases in public may be; but, without the clearest and most convincing evidence, no one should even be suspected. When Lord Arthur Somerset managed to get out of the country before a warrant could be served on him, I protested in Parliament, because it was evident that his escape was due to connivance. Then various names were whispered about. I saw the entire evidence, and there was not one single person against whom there was the slightest evidence of having visited the house in Cleveland-street. That names were hinted at was due to the action of Lord Arthur Somerset himself, who, having fled the country, was mean enough to write home to his friends that he was a mere scapegoat, and that he had been urged to leave the country in order to save others from exposure. There was a shred of evidence to support these statements, and I believe that they were absolutely untrue. It is always difficult to prove a negative, but in regard to one particular name suggested in these letters, the negative could have been proved up to the hilt.

As for Oscar Wilde, the curious thing in the man is that he seems to have been proud of the avowal of doctrines which the most abandoned would, even if they held to them, carefully conceal. In many instances, which of course did not come out at his trial, relatives and men of the world had interfered to prevent youths with whom he was thrown having anything to do with him, and his doings were an open secret. Clever he undoubtedly is, but the basis of all his cleverness is paradox. By some strange perversion of intellect, he seems to consider that whatever may be the received view in regard to art, morals, habits, dress, or anything else, it must be wrong because it is the received view. Whether he really believes this, or whether he professed it in order to attract attention by differentiating himself from others, who can tell? Probably at first it was merely put on for effect, and little by little habit became a second nature. Of this, however, there can be no doubt, that he has not only been gross offender himself, but has exercised a corrupting influence the extent of which can hardly be measured. In view of the mischief that such a man does, the sentence he has received compares but lightly with those almost every day awarded for infinitely less pernicious crimes. The spectacle, however, of his shame and degradation, and of the utter ruin that has overtaken him when at the zenith of his fame and popularity, should at least serve as a wholesome warning to others of the same class who still remain at large. There are those who think that a case like this does more harm than good. That is not my view. I regard it rather as a storm that will clear the moral atmosphere. It should teach a lesson that is badly needed, and, if it does not, another lesson must be administered.