Official frank. As to the laboured endeavour to prove that no one could put an evil construction on certain passages of the book, the answer is complete in the fact that the expose was brought about by the instant construction put on it by one of the few to whom the book was sent in India; and that the same construction has been put on it by the Jury, and the Court before whom Mr. Long stood to receive through them the all but universal condemnation in this respect—at least of the public at large whose representatives they were. But for mere quibblings we have now neither time nor space but it is strange that one who could write so able a statement of a hopelessly bad case should commit such a blunder as the following—respecting the infamous slander on English ladies in India:—"I did not think there were any passages capable of any such construction, and a close inspection of a work consisting of 102 pages has not discovered to me more than two or at most three passages in which English ladies are mentioned at all." Not noticing the obvious deduction, that in all those passages in which they are mentioned, the hideous innuendo is the same without variation or qualification. Equally faulty is the plea urged for not sending the book to the general press, or the representatives of the planters for whose behoof the great moral lessons complained in it were intended. We are told:—"No copies were sent to any newspaper or public body in Calcutta, because it was considered that to make selections would be invidious; and that, on the whole, those who had taken one side or the other in the indigo crisis, were hardly in the position to form a fair estimate of any such popular representation of Native feeling."
We note it as curious then, to say the least of it, that of the four papers honoured with a copy, the Bombay Times, the most virulent and unscrupulous assailant of the indigo interest, and the most rabid partizan journal on all collateral subjects, should have been one of the chosen few. Certainly he left no doubt about which side he took, of the "heat" with which he espoused it. Excepting in the ample apology tendered, this statement is a most obvious piece of special pleading, and a failure all through. Even in matters of fact it fails. Mr. Seton-Karr alludes to his interview with Mr. Brett on the 25th May, an interview which the latter recognised the importance of so strongly, that he made full notes of what passed
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