it.  Yet there was nothing in it beyond a plea to suspend judgment and defer insult till after the trial.  Messrs. Smith and Sons, the great booksellers, who somehow got wind of the matter (through my publisher, I believe), sent to say that they would not sell any paper that attempted to defend Oscar Wilde; it would be better even, they added, not to mention his name.  The English tradesman-censors were determined that this man should have Jedburg justice.  I should have ruined the Saturday Review by the mere attempt to treat the matter fairly.

In this extremity I went to the great leader of public opinion in England.  Mr. Arthur Walter, the manager of The Times, had always been kind to me; he was a man of balanced mind, who had taken high honours at Oxford in his youth, and for twenty years had rubbed shoulders with the leading men in every rank of life.  I went down to stay with him in Berkshire, and I urged upon him what I regarded as the aristocratic view.  In England it was manifest that under the circumstances there was no chance of a fair trial, and it seemed to me the duty of The Times to say plainly that this man should not be condemned beforehand, and that if he were condemned his merits should be taken into consideration in his punishment, as well as his demerits.

While willing to listen to me, Mr. Walter did not share my views.  A man who had written a great poem or a great play did not rank in his esteem with a man who had won a skirmish against a handful of unarmed savages, or one who had stolen a piece of land from some barbarians and annexed it to the Empire.  In his heart he held the view of the English landed aristocracy, that the ordinary successful general or admiral or statesman was infinitely more important than a Shakespeare or a Browning.  He could not be persuaded to believe that the names of Gladstone, Disraeli, Wolseley, Roberts, and Wood, would diminish and fade from day to day till in a hundred years they would scarcely be known, even to the educated; whereas the fame of Browning, Swinburne, Meredith, or even Oscar Wilde, would increase and grow brighter with time, till, in one hundred or five hundred years, no one would dream of comparing pushful politicians like Gladstone or Beaconsfield with men of genius like Swinburne or Wilde.  He simply would not see it and when he perceived that the weight of argument was against him he declared that if it were true, it was so much the worse for humanity.  In his opinion anyone living a clean life was worth more than a writer of love songs or the maker of clever comedies—­Mr. John Smith worth more than Shakespeare!

He was as deaf as only Englishmen can be deaf to the plea for abstract justice.

“You don’t even say Wilde’s innocent,” he threw at me more than once.

“I believe him to be innocent,” I declared truthfully, “but it is better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one man should not have a fair trial.  And how can this man have a fair trial now when the papers for weeks past have been filled with violent diatribes against him and his works?”