The Express.
London, England, 1867-10-15 00:00:00

ghe erprelso.

TO CORIUMPONDENTS.
olverlbsotento Intended for "The Crimea." Lawton Eventeg
sad be et the °Zoe. 10, BOUTSIIO-11,11/01, by Two
1:1= on the day of public:m*lton.

DBURY-LASE.
Tilts EVENING Mal:8E111. Messrs, Barry Sullivan,
Ryder, M'lntyrv, Barrett, J. Johnstone, Ileidanne Her-
man Verin, R. Isaacs, and A. Cook.—Aud TIIE MILLER AND
Illy MEN, Mr. E. Phelps; MIAs Edith Stuart.

HAYMARKET.
THIS aviNll4, AN UN KW:AL Umers. Ruckstone,
Chippendale. Rosen, Kendal, Clark. Comptnn, Ac.: Mes
lanieitmegAririck. B. While, Eitzwilßans. &a.—TH 6 WINNING
CALL. Mr. I.:nmittou.—And PERT4s.TION. ihaa Burke.

PRINOZWIL
Me EVENING, POOR PILLICODDY.—After which ARRAH
NA POGIAL Menet Bondman, Vining, IL Murray, J. O. shore,
G. F. Neville, He.. Mee Huebe• and Sire How:keellt.—Asel
ONE, RULND Tilt (XI/LIMB.

;YCICVNI,

TRH Ecztorto, THE misrams OF THE MILL—THE
LADY Olt LYONS. Mr, Feaster, Mears. Jordan, Emery,
(Vernon, Mellon, Dalton, :Stuart, and Frances;
Worth) and Carlotta Lnlereq, Mrs. Marston.

TIM LIMNING, OURnomwsrics.STßAN. Mesas. Fusels, Thorne,
and James MOSJAIDISJohnaton. And Weathcreby.—After which
WILLIAM TELL WITH A VENGEANCE Mews. James and
Thorne : Min Ada Smanborougn. de.—And DEAF AS A YOU.

HOLBORN.
THIS Emayo, DANDELioN 8 'MOOR:4.—AM FOR LOVE.
Messrs. H. J. Montague, Price, Garden, Westland, and H. Wid-
dicomb; Mesdames Stephens, Remade. Jenny WtHtuore, and C.
Saunders.—To conclude with A.S.S. Mr. J. W. Kay.

sarrAinna.
TRH &Vilna°. BREAK BUT NOT BVID. Mrs. 4. Lane
American Minstrels; Japanese Tommy; and Stump-orator
We.t sad Miss B. West, Nigger Delinentora—Wlin LION
LIMB, KING OF 1118 SOUTU SEA InLANLM.

NIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
TEM DAT —Worming, Dx. M. 11...
‘O4IOIIOW-1101nbir. 3b. 31a_ O. 60m.

LONDON, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15.

THE inquiry which Dr. LAN/LESTER is conduct-
ing into the circumstances of the Bloomsbury
murder is not in the stage in which public com-
ment upon the evidence is either fair or becoming.
What is advanced is entirely cx parte. The ver-
dict of the Coroner's Jury, and even the finding
of a true bill by the Grand Jury, should the
matter reach them, will still leave the legal pre-
sumption of innocence with tho prisoner. He will
simply be sent for trial before men bound to
know nothing of what has gone before, and to
give their decision upon the case only as it is sub-
mitted to them within the walls of the court in
which they may be assembled. Public opinion,
however, and its hasty conclusions from one-sided
or entirely unsifted evidence form the moral
and social atmosphere which the men who
are to be jurors breathe; and they can
scarcely avoid being affected by it. It is
the duty of those who talk and think about crimes
waiting judicial determination, and about the
probable guilt or innocence of prisoners uncon-
victed, to keep their minds as clear as may be of a
tendency to a precipitate conclusion. They may
otherwise help to form a diffused and pene-
trating opinion which, unconsciously swaying
the minds of men to a foregone conclu-
sion, dooms the accused even before they are
arraigned. At present there is a general prone-
ness, which can be too easily accounted for, to see
in every Fenian a potential murderer, an assassin
waiting only his opportunity and his victim ; and
a disposition to consider the secret of every
mysterious crime solved if suspicion can be
brought at all near to a real or pre-
sumed Fenian. This temper of mind militates
to some degree against the probability
of an equitable administration of justice in the case
of men deemed capable of revery evil, and there-
fore of the particular crime laid to their charge.
It establishes in the minds of that part of the
public whence the arbiters of their fate will be
drawn, a false moral presumption, which, without
their knowledge, colours, it may be, and distorts
the evidence, and inclines them to give greater
weight to the interpretation of the facts which
assumes the guilt of the accused than to that which
accords with the hypothesis of their innocence.
It is an unfortunate but a necessary incident of
our system of criminal procedure that its preli-
minary investigations bring before the public
mind, chiefly if not exclusively, the facts, and
the mode of grouping them, which tell against the
prisoner; that they thus obtain a long start of
the counter-theory and the counter-evidence, and
that the latter are almost unavoidably addressed
to understandings which have already taken a side
and formed a conclusion. The legal presumption
of an unconvicted prisoner's innocence may some-
times contend ineffectually against the moral per-
suasion or suspicion of his guilt which, under the
influence of the evidence taken at an inquest, and
the talk of society, a juror carries with him into
the box.

A clear statement of facts is sometimes the
most effectual mode of obviating premature infe-
rences, either for oragainst the accused. If it be ever
necessary, it is especially when the natural horror
of all men at a great crime is intensified, ou the one
part, by the social antipathy felt towards a mis-
chievous faction with which the suspected offender
is presumed to be associated ; or is diminished, on
the other, by a sympathy with the "cause" which
palliates the presumed crime.

McDoNNEL, the victim of the Bloomsbury out-
rage, was a bandsman in the 2nd Life Guards.
The prisoner, Jour; Gitoves, is, or was, a
sergeant in the London Irish Volunteers.
His arrest, curiously enough, was not brought
about by any suspicion of his complicity in
the crime now imputed to him, but took
place on a charge of assault preferred against
him by a man called BUZZER, and com-
mitted on the day of the murder, but subse-
quently to it. The prisoner in asking to be bailed
named two persons suspected by the police of
being engaged in the Fenian conspiracy. This led
to his chambers being searched, and there was
discovered a pistol, which, however, did not cor-
respond with the bullet which dropped from the
body of McDoNsett, and could not, according to
the testimony of a gunsmith and by the admission
of the prosecution, have been loaded with it. The
murdered man, after fulfilling a musical engage-
ment at the Holborn Amphitheatre, had visited the
Bull and Anchor in Holborn, where he met two
of his fellow-bandsmen, who afterwards accompa-
nied him to the Turk's Head in Southampton-
row. This was a little after midnight on Satur-
day morning ; and they were refused drink
there, because of the lateness of the hour.
They thereupon left the house, and turned
round Vernon-place. One of them, named
PURSER, was rudely shoved aside by a man
behind him, and his hat knocked off into
the road. As he stooped to pick it up, he
heard the discharge of a pistol ; and McDoN-
NFLL crying " I am shot," ran across towards
Bloomsbury square, and there fell. The land-
lady of the Turk's Head deposed that GROVii

was in the habit of frequenting her house ; that
he was there on the night of the murder, but left
it four or five hours before it took place. He
was there again four or five hours subsequently
to it. MCDONNEL himself, on being confronted
with GROVES, declared that, though like, he was
smaller than the person who fired the shot ; and
the same testimony was given by his fellow-
bandsmen. Grieves, according to their recol-
lection, is neither so tall nor so stout as
the murderer. So far as these witnesses are con-
cerned, the evidence as regards personal identity is,
to say the least, very inconclusive ; nor is the pri-
soner's possession of any weapon capable of being
used for the purpose of the crime established. But
yesterday, on the adjourned inquest, a witness
was brought forward whose testimony is most
remarkable. It comes before the public in an
extraordinary and somewhat tortuous way. A week
ago this woman, ANNA MARIA JARNAN, the wife of
a butcher living near Grosvenor-square, wrote to
FCRBER, under the false name of HARRIET NM-
Liens, declaring that "She was the young woman
" that could swear to the man that committed the
" murder," and appointing a day to see him and
tell him all about it. Her silence and secrecy she
explains by the statement that her husband had
forbidden her to disclose what she knew. Accord-
ing to her account she was near the Bull and
Anchor a little after midnight on Fr4day, the 27th
of September, when two young men came out
of it. Her attention was attracted to them by
seeing one of them put on a false beard and
moustache. She heard the words " Come on,
" GROVES ; it's time we were gone." She fol-
lowed them, and overheard one of them saying,
" He would shoot the b--- before he got home
" that night." They proceeded to Southampton-
row, and went into the Turk's Head. Three young
men followed them, who, however, did not
stay in the house. They were followed out of it
by the two who had first entered. About two
minutes afterwards the witness was alarmed by
the report of fire-arms, and ran up New Oxford-
street. There she sew the two young men whom
she had first encountered at the Bull and Anchor
running away. The one with the beard said that
he had shot one b—, and was sorry he had not
fired the second time in order to shoot the right
one. She deposes to having met in the street on
Tuesday last the murderer's comrade, and to have
heard him say to a companion tha:. no
one could swear to " poor JAI_ s " but him-
self, as he was with him on the night of the mur-
der, and that he would shoot any one who entered
the witness box against him. On being taken to
the prison the woman pointed out Geoves, distin-
guishing him from others who were shown to her
as the man who fired the shot. His admitted
resemblance to the murderer might account
for her success in doing this. The curious maneer
in which her story comes to light, the addi-
tions made to it on cross-examination of the wit-
ness, and its implied inconsistency with the evi-
dence of the landlady and the barmaid of
the Turk's Head, who did nut see the murderer
and his comrade in the house, which this new
witness declares them to have entered immediately
before the bandsmen, if they do not negative be-
lief, yet invite suspicious scrutiny. Her evi-
derce is direct, and direct evidence is more easily
concocted than circumstantial. At present it is
unconfirmed. One thing is clear : the woman's
statements are either a tissue of apparently mo-
tiveless lies or inexplicable delusions, or they are
conclusive and damnatory. The cane is shut re
in these alternatives ; and to determine between
them is the chief business of future inquiry. A
tale so strange, and so strangely told, needs corro-
borative testimony.