The Sun.
London, England, 1856-07-14 00:00:00

THE SUN, _LONDON MONDAY EVE t 4

THE SADLER? FRAUDS.

the Carlton Club, connected as that mysterious
locality has been by the Liberal press with a two
years' persecution, worthy of the Inquisition, car-
ried on against one of the highest-hearted men in
England, on charges which the persecutors
themselves were obli:ged to confess in a court of
justice had not a shadow of foundation.

(From the Te:mes of this day.)
72Iae past week has been diversified by the ex-
pl osiou in Parliament of a real genuine Irish row,
of the fine old Irish cast, such as may remind some
of us of the glorious days of Daniell O'Connell and
Serjeaut Jackson, of Mr. Shaw and Baron Smith.
The visitation has come upon us suddenly, but with
all its ordinary concomitants. There are charges
and counter-charges ; "gross misstatements" and
equivocal explanations ; challenges to do this and
defiances to do that; each party challenging the
other to come on, and each, in the very height of
his fury, displaying no inconsiderable amount of in-
stinct. Tire rareness of such an occurrence—for
we have not had a really good specimen for at least
a year and a half--the hig rank of the disputauts,
both lawyers, both Privy Councillors—the one the
Attorney-GerAral, and the other the Master of the
Rolls for Ireland—lead additional raciness to the
discussion ; and we may fairly hope, from such
auspicious beginnings, that the twelfth book of
this modern epic will be as active and spirited as
the first. We will endeavour, with as much cool-
ness as the heat of the disputants permits to the
impartial narrator, to state the case in a manner to
give the public seine idea of that which both sides
1-. ave hitherto rather kept out of sight—its whole
I bearings and merits.
Early in the month of February of this year
the Tipperary Bank, under the immediate guid-
ance of Mr. James Sadleir, issued a prosperity re-
port, declared a dividend of six per cent., and
allotted a bonus to the shareholders of three per
cent. more. Then followed the suicide of John
Sadleir and the consequent stoppage of the bank,
the declaration of insolvency being filed by the
same James Sadleir—him, we mean, of the divi-
dend and. bonus—only three weeks after that de-
claration. The case was heard before Mr. Murphy,
ono of the Masters of the Irish Court of Chancery,
and he, strange enough, absolved all the managers
of this most fraudulent concern from any imputa-
tion of fraud. The Master of the Rolls reversed
this decision on the sth of March, stating circum-
stances highly criminatory of James Sadleir. In
the latter end of May the Master of the Rolls ex-
pressed in court his unbounded astonishment that
the Irish Government had not taken up the case.
On the 14th of June Mr. John Sadleir's celebrated
letter was made known. About the 17th of June
Mr. James Sadleir absconded, and on the 20th of
June the Master of the Rolls gave judgment in
the case of the English shareholders, inveighing in
the most unmeasured terms against the Irish Go-
vernment and the Irish law officers.
These are the grounds of the quarrel. We are
now in a condition to turn to the quarrel itself.
On the sth of July Mr. Fitzgerald was asked in
the House of Commons why the Government had
been so remiss in prosecutine. James Sadleir, and
in answer to this question he said that the reason
James Sadleir was not in custody was the alarm
created in his mind by the expressions in the judg-
ment of the Master of the Rolls. He further pro-
ceeded to say that the proper course would have
been for the Master of the Rolls to send the evi-
dence on which he relied to the law officers, or, in
his capacity of a Privy Councillor, to inform the
Lord-Lieutenant that a crime had been committed,
and point out the necessity for an investigation.
Since then the Master of the Rolls has twice taken
the opportunity afforded by his position as a judge
to attack the Attorney-General and defend himself;
and on Friday last Mr. Napier brought the case
before the House, coming forward, as he said, to
defend the Master of the Rolls from the charge of
disregard of his duty as a Privy Councillor. Mr.
Napier had been furnished by the Master of
the Rolls with a copy of the charges preferred
against Mr. Fitzgerald by that judge in open
court, and they appeared in a second edition of
the Standard on the very day they were deli-
vered in Dublin ; but Mr. Fitzgerald had no
opportunity of seeing them, and Mr. Napier in-
sisted on forcing on the discussion, thus securing
a move in advance by printing in the same news-
paper with the debate an elaborate charge of
negligence against the Irish Attorney-General, to
which it was impossible he could give any answer.
Later in the evening, after time had been given to
read the statement in the Standard, an attempt
was made to induce Mr. Napier to bring forward
his charges in a specific shape—an attempt which
appears to have been entirely unsuccessful. So
stands the matter at present.
As regards the Attorney-General for Ireland,
we confess that the statement of the Master of the
Rolls is calculated to make an impression un-
favourable to that officer. Mr. James Sadleir
was a supporter of the present Government,
and Mr. John Sadleir had actually held office
under Lord Aberdeen's Government. These cir-
cumstances seem to have required from the law
officers more than ordinary vigilance. On the
other hand, we must not forget that a fraud is
not an indictable offence, and that the Attorney-
General may be able to show that he did
not possess sufficient evidence of conspiracy to
justify him in putting the law in motion.
Whether James Sadleir's flight was actually
occasioned by the denunciations of the Master
of the Rolls we shall probably never know,
hut it was the result naturally to be looked
for, and the ird•iscretion is the same whe•
tiler it did or did not produce the result that
was reasonably to be expected. But what shall
we say of a judge who states publicly from the
bench that he did net give any private information
to the Government of the crime of James Sadleir,
because he believed it would receive no attention
from them, for causes publicly known,—that is, of
a judge who uses his position as a dispenser of jus-
tice to charge upon a Government to which he is
politically opposed the stifling and hushing up of
crimes from the basest motives of partisanship, or
who, amid the cheers of an admiring audience, de-
livers a philippic against a law officer of the Crown
on a matter arising, indeed, out of a cause tried be-
fore him, but utterly irrelevant to the discharge of
his judicial duties, and transmits that philippic as a
brief to his friends in the House of Commons ? A
court of justice is no arena for political conflicts, and
the judge who makes it such disgraces alike his offi-
cial and private character. We write this on the
supposition that the charges made by the Master
of the Rolls are true, a supposition we have no right
to make, and the truth or falsehood of which ought,
without the unnecessary delay of a single hour, to
be tested by full discussion in the face of Parliament
and the country.

At the period when the romance of elections in
question was forged there did really sit a conclave
within the walls of that club for the purpose of
undermining its foundations ; the members of that
conclave were Sohn Sadlcir and Edmund O'Fla,-
herty 5 the object of that conclave was the manage-
ment of Irish elections—in a Conservative sense.

-What sums, we should like to know, were ex-
pended in the creditable transactions of those days,
known as the Carlow election, the Sligo election,
and the Sligo election petition, including the con-
venient break-down of the electric telegraph, which
was to have conveyed the names of witnesses and
sureties—necessary to render that petition avail-
able ?

We have heard also that Mr. Maguire—an
honest and clever, although a mistaken, man—did
assert that a sum of 2,0001.—" say, two thousand"
—was offered him in the name of a nobleman after-
wards fatally notorious as a member of the
Coalition Government, in order to induce him to
give up his intention to stand for the borough of
Dungarvan ; but this allegation was set aside by a
committee of the House of Commons, which, with
characteristic sagacity, gave credit to the counter-
assertions of Mr. Edmund O'Fla.herty, the voucher
general for Peelite officials. Did any member of
the conclave ever ask Mr. Sadleir where all this
mon-y came from ? How also were the expenses
of Cork and Tipperary elections, &c., paid fur?
Would the declaration of Mr. James Sadleir be-
fore Master Murphy throw any light on these mys-
terious circumstances ? Have we said enough to
show that all parties connected with the Coalition
Government—of which the present Premier was a
distinguished member—would naturally wish to
cast a veil over transactions of so dubious a charac-
ter ? We think we have ; but, in confirmation of
our view, we find that a well-known baronet of
Peelite celebrity is now most anxious—in thein-
terest of justice, of course—to get into his own
management ' the case of the deeply-aggrieved
Master of the Rolls ; and in his skilful hands we
have no doubt that _the whole dispute might be
toned down so as to appear to be a simple squabble
between a judge and an attorney-general, so that
the inquiry into the real case at issue—what be-
came of John Sadleir's money ?—might be burked.
" Barked" is an ugly word, but we cannot but
think that a desperate effort will be made in the
present instance to carry out the process which it
designates.
Every agent of the Government is put in action
for the purpose, even that Deus ex machina, the
" great artist from the back benches"—the noto-
rious jackal of the Government—has been put for-
ward to entrap Mr. Napier into giving up his van-
tage ground as a defendant, to come forward as an
accuser, instead of standing on his right of throw-
ing the onus probandi on the Attorney-General,
who orginally charged the Master of the Rolls
with the breach of his Privy Councillor's oath, and
forcing the right honourable calumniator to prove
the truth of his words. We hope Mr. Napier will
continue firm, and not fall into the trap so inge-
niously laid for him by the very useful member for
Sheffield.

In conclusion, we assert that Parliament will
not do its duty unless it appoint a committee of
the house to inquire into these hidden mysteries ;
and then, if a searching investigation be made into
the proceedings of the late Lord of the Treasury
and his employers, we may at length find that the
words of the poet have really some foundation in
truth—
" Raro antecedeutem scelestum deseruit puma pede claudo."
We are assured that the moral sense of the coun-

try will not allow these matters to continue any
longer uninvestigated, and in their present unsatis-
factory condition. Such a neglect on their part
would absolutely make the nation accessories after
the fact and sharers in the connivance of the At-
torney-General, as charged against him and the
Government which he represents by the high-
spirited member for Mayo.