The cause celebre

THE most sensational Indian case that has ever come up before an English court has ended exactly as all previous cases of the same general category ended. The Englishman who was a party to the suit has won all along the line and the Indian has gone to the wall. Sir Sankaran Nair, as defendant, has had exactly the experience that Mr Tilak had in an equally famous case as plaintiff. There is really nothing new or surprising in this. Englishmen who try cases as judges or jurors are, after all, ordinary human beings with a full measure of the frailties of their race. In any matter that excites racial or political passion in an unusual degree, it is as difficult for a judge or a juror to keep his mind free from bias as for other men of the same intellectual and moral calibre. In such cases, the judicial training of the judge too often only enables him to find plausible reasons for conclusions arrived at on independent grounds; and the only difference between the judge and the jury is that, not being under any obligation to state their reasons in detail, the latter can afford to do without that self-deception which the former has so frequently to resort to. It was his consciousness of this fact that prevented Mr Parnell from bringing those who accused him of the horrible crime of complicity in the Phoenix Park murders before a court of law. “The case,” as a high authority in daily and hourly touch with Parnell has told us, “would naturally have been tried in London,” and “not only the plaintiff’s own character, but the whole movement that he represented would have been submitted to a Middlesex jury, with all the national and political prejudices inevitable in such a body.”