An Open Letter to Lord Beaverbook

individual obtain for his defence anything like the same order of publicity as the attack makes for itself. It may even happen, as the present case shows, that if the liar chooses his opportunity with care, and is not hampered with a sense of decency or fair play, his victim may be cut off from any chance at making a public reply at all, or even allowing it to be known that his silence is enforced and not voluntary. 6. When the issue of the Sunday Express for November 26 reached Mr. Crowley in Sicily, he at once wrote to you himself. He pointed out that he was materially defenceless, at the time, against attacks in London, however false. He urged you, in your own interest no less than his, to insist on that measure of fair play which it was clearly in your power to give, and asked for an independent inquiry into the charges. The letter was forwarded to you by his pu- blishers, but neither acknowledgment nor reply was ever received by them or him. Instead on February 25 and March 4, the Sunday Express printed a grotesquely stupid narrative defaming his life at Cefalù, accompanied by insulting taunts to fill his purse by means of a libel suit. These new lies were reprinted, in part, by various Italian newspapers, though not by the Sicilian journals ; and at the end of April Mr. — 8 —