ARTHUR ORTON—­WHO CLAIMED TO BE SIR ROGER CHARLES DOUGHTY TICHBORNE, BART.

The case of Arthur Orton is too recent to need many words of introduction.  We have hardly yet cooled down to a sober realization of the facts which, as they stand, mark the latest and most bulky of the claimants, as not only the greatest impostor of modern or perhaps of any days, the base calumniator who endeavoured to rob a woman of her fair fame to gratify his own selfish ends, but as a living proof of the height to which the blind credulity of the public will now and again elevate itself.  Arthur Orton is in prison undergoing what all thinking men must admit to be a very lenient sentence—­a sentence which in no way meets the justice of the case; for the advent of this huge carcase lumbering the earth with lies was nothing less than a misfortune to the people of England.  And the word misfortune, if used even in its highest and widest sense, will in no way imply that which has happened to a peaceful family, who have been associated with their lands and titles as long as our history goes back, and who have had their privacy violated, and the sanctity of their homes invaded; who have been pilloried before a ruthless and unsympathising mob, who have had their women’s names banded from one coarse mouth to another, and who—­least misfortune of all—­have had to expend large sums of money, and great amounts of time and trouble, to free themselves from a persecution as unparalleled as it was vicious and cruel.  Those who, having neither fame nor fortune to lose, speak lightly and think not at all of the sorrows which were launched avalanche-like upon the devoted heads of the Tichbornes and their connections, would do well to ponder over what such personation as that of Arthur Orton means to its immediate victims.  It means a sudden derangement of all the ties and sympathies by which life is made dear, a sudden shock which never in life will be recovered.  There is no member of the community, no matter how well and how carefully he has chosen his path in life, who would not fear to have his every action published and criticised, his every motive analysed unfairly, and the most mischievous construction placed upon each deed or thought found capable of perversion.  How much more terrible would it be, then, for any man to know that his wife or mother was to be subjected to such ordeal; that for no fault committed, for nothing but the delectation of an unscrupulous scoundrel and his admirers, a tender and sensitive lady was to be put to torture far worse than any physical punishment could ever have been, even in ages and countries whose only refinement was that of cruelty?