ground that the weight of evidence was against it."
Now we ask if this answer does not conclusively establish the point we are endeavouring to make – viz., that an examination by its parliamentary chiefs into the condition of a department, against which there are the strongest primâ facie grounds for suspicion, is the merest farce, because there can be but one possible result from it? Here we have the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance going to ask the very men, – Sir Frederick Campbell, Colonel Alderson, Mr Engleback, whose evidence the jury did not accept, what the reason of the verdict of the jury was. He does not for one moment think of looking at the notes of the trial itself, or even of consulting privately the Attorney-General, who had been counsel at the trial. He has no notion of the kind of expressions used by a judge of Sir Fitzroy Kelly's eminence, either affecting the jury he is thus insulting, or affecting the Crown witnesses whom he consults as to what the decision of the jury ought to have been. He is, as any one who will read the judgment of the Court of Queen's Bench may see, to say the least, inaccurately informed by the department he trusts to, as to the nature of that judgment. On the question of the weight of evidence as to the priority of invention of Mr Thomas, the judgment does not touch at all. Yet the inference which any one would naturally draw from Lord Eustace Cecil's reply, or rather from the reply supplied to him, is, that the Court had decided that the weight of evidence was against Mr Thomas's claim to have been the actual inventor, or part inventor, of the system adopted into the service, as to which the judges say not one word. Indeed, immediately afterwards the Attorney-General stated what amounted to a direct contradiction of what Lord Eustace had said.
But we are bound to say that all such remarks as those which we are sure Mr Brand must inconsiderately have made, that Mr L. Thomas's charges show that "he is in a sad state of mind," are very wrong. The law courts are open. The Surveyor-General's office is a place of darkness, and that only. No one knows better than Mr Brand how impossible it is for him to penetrate that darkness.
For, thanks to the persistent patience and intelligence of a young member of Parliament – Mr French Brewster – Mr Brand has discovered that he was committed to making in the House of Commons a statement which would not bear investigation. We come now to the last case we have to cite.
Four years ago Mr Hope, now Colonel Hope, the inventor of the "Improved Shrapnel- shell," appeared again before the Ordnance Department which had treated him so ill before.
He offered to produce a gun that should cost two-fifths of the cost of our existing guns; that should be laid side by side with the Woolwich gun, which it should beat in every respect, until the Woolwich gun burst, and should then fire a hundred rounds more; and he undertook that his 7-ton gun should beat the service-gun of 38 tons. He undertook within those limits to fulfil any terms that might be imposed by the Ordnance Committee.
He asked for not one penny of money for experiments of any kind until he had proved all that he had said by producing his gun and submitting it to whatever public trials the Ordnance Committee might require. But he asked that, if and
