Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/586

582 "All that I desire," he says, "is a perfectly impartial judicial investigation in broad daylight into the accusation which I have brought against a man who at this moment holds the distinguished position of a major-general in the British army, of making an improper use of his former confidential position.

"I brought this accusation plainly and straightforwardly in the very first sentences of my first letter of the 12th January 1870. I have never shrunk from or tried to qualify it, and it is supported by circumstantial evidence so strong as to amount to complete primâ facie proof.

"Against all this evidence the late superintendent has offered nothing but his own unsupported assertion."

The answer of the department is "to decline to continue the correspondence"!

We have taken these cases of Mr Daw and Mr Hope first, and at some length, partly because we shall have to refer again to matters of the same kind, and partly because, beginning as they do shortly after the Crimean war, and extending to the year 1873, when the correspondence finally closes, they cover one long period of the history of the department. They well illustrate, moreover, one of the greatest dangers connected with the mode in which questions of this sort are now settled. They show how the change of parliamentary heads tends to place the whole wealth and authority of the nation in the hands of men who are not theoretically supposed to be the persons who wield that power at all. Moreover, they illustrate how a decision given at one time by a parliamentary chief may, when circumstances have altogether changed, be treated as if it were a final irreversible decision, though no one man could have made himself responsible for the actual position to which, by the whole history of the case, the department was logically committed. Nor is this all. There is one peculiarity in the form of the correspondence to which we must take most serious exception, because it illustrates a defect which we have found everywhere in this Ordnance departmental correspondence. We refer to the "beggar upon horseback" tone of all the communications from the Ordnance Department. We find ourselves absolutely unable to account for it. We can only suppose that the letters have been prepared by some clerk, and signed without sufficiently careful perusal. At all events, letter after letter is virtually a mere statement – "We have the power to do you wrong, and having the power, we choose to exercise it."

We cannot otherwise characterise the brief statements "that Sir H. Storks sees no reason for any further investigation," and the like, with which the clearest statements of the strongest case are again and again met, when there has been no "investigation" whatever, but simply, in the very paper referred to as decisive, the statement that "so and so altogether denies" that which is otherwise clearly demonstrated.

In the earlier part of the correspondence we can easily understand how this should occur, because Mr Hope's own earlier letters have the careless verbosity of a man not specially trained as a lawyer, and who is confident that his case is so strong that he has only to state it in order to obtain redress. In the latter part we are absolutely unable to understand how any department could have ventured, in point of mere form, on such a transparent use of naked power, where their logical dilemma is hopeless. They simply fall back upon that ancient prerogative of