[Adjourned till Tuesday next, 26th June, at 4.30 p.m.

The Rt. Hon. Sir HENRY E. DUKE, President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, was examined.

The Committee deliberated.

[Adjourned till Thursday next, 28th June, at 4.30 p.m.

Sir ARCHIBALD BODKIN, Director of Public Prosecutions, and Mr. R. F. GRAHAM-CAMPBELL, Metropolitan Magistrate, Bow Street Police Court, were examined.

[Adjourned till Tuesday next, 3rd July, at 4.30 p.m.

The Rev. JOHN SCOTT LIDGETT, D.D., the Rt. Rev. Mgr. MANUEL JOHN BIDWELL, C.B.E., D.D., Bishop Auxiliary to the Archbishop of Westminster, and the Rt. Hon. and Rt. Rev. the LORD BISHOP OF LONDON, K.C.V.O., D.D. (attending by leave at the House of Lords), were examined. [Adjourned till Thursday next, 5th July, at 4.30 p.m.

Sir JOHN P. MELLOR, K.C.B., H.M. Procurator-General (King's Proctor) and Sir ELLIS W. HUME-WILLIAMS, K.B.E., K.C., a Member of the House, were examined.

[Adjourned till Tuesday next, 10th July, at 4.30 p.m.

A letter from the Clerk to the Committee, to the Secretary, The Newspaper Proprietors' Association, dated the 22nd June, 1923, and a reply thereto, dated the 28th June, 1923, were read. (See Appendix.)

Mr. FREDERICK PEAKER, President of the Institute of Journalists, was examined.

[Adjourned till Thursday next, 12th July, at 4.30 p.m.

Mr. VALENTINE KNAPP, Honorary Treasurer of the Newspaper Society, was examined.

[Adjourned till Tuesday next, 17th July, at 4.30 p.m.

Mr. FRANK FLETCHER, Headmaster of Charterhouse School, and Chairman of Committee of Headmasters' Conference, was examined.

The Committee deliberated.

[Adjourned till Tuesday next, 24th July, at 4.30 p.m.

DRAFT SPECIAL REPORT, proposed by the Chairman, brought up and read the first time as follows:

1. Your Committee have held sittings, and heard eleven witnesses, specially qualified to represent the legal, general, religious, Press and educational standpoints. The enquiry entrusted to Your Committee divides itself into three parts: firstly, whether any such Bill as the present is required; if so, secondly, whether the present Bill is drawn on the right lines, or should be extended, limited or varied in its scope; and thirdly, what legal procedure is most suitable to be effective.

2. On the first question, accepting with regret the evidence given to us that owing to competition the Press cannot come to any agreement among themselves for eliminating objectionable and unnecessary details from divorce and similar reports, we think legislation is needed. Sir Henry Duke, as President of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division, expressed the opinion that it is very desirable in the interests of morality that something should be done to curtail the unscrupulous publication of indecent matter for purposes of gain, and expressed his very great doubt whether it is in the public interest that nullity proceedings should be reportable in the manner they are. Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions, considered the existing law is inadequate to deal with reports which unnecessarily encourage familiarity with what ought to be avoided, and in consequence take away half the horror of it. It probably did more harm than good, he stated, to institute a prosecution and fail to obtain a verdict, because in that case the thing which was the subject of the prosecution got the imprimatur of the jury, and rather than risk this mischief he refrained from instituting proceedings. The Bishop of London, and other eminent witnesses representing religious communities and public societies, were strong advocates of restriction, and called attention to the excessive amount of space devoted by some newspapers to nauseating divorce details and to the apparent powerlessness of the present law to prevent them. The President of the Institute of Journalists also laid great stress upon the volume of space allotted in some newspapers to these matters, worked up as a serial story, and its degrading influence upon the young and impressionable. The King's Proctor, Sir John Mellor, thought the Bill went too far, but wished a distinction made between the general reports of matrimonial causes and the publication of indecent details, though he agreed it was a difficult task. Sir Ellis Hume-Williams, with many years' experience of practice in the divorce court, advocated no change, and doubted whether these reports under consideration had any very active influence on public morality. Your Committee, as above stated, have come to the conclusion that legislation is required. The recent Russell case, and others not always in the divorce court, are standing proofs, in their opinion, that the existing law is insufficient.

3. In answering the second question, whether the present Bill is on the right lines or should be extended, limited or varied in its scope, several complex problems arise. It has sometimes been suggested that a simple solution can be found by empowering judges, at their discretion, to forbid publication of any evidence or other part of the proceedings which they held to be injurious to public morals, under penalty of contempt of court; but apart from the likelihood of different judges taking different views, Your Committee are satisfied from personal knowledge that this course is not in fact practicable, and that even if the power were granted, its exercise would prove precarious and spasmodic.

4. Before going further two outstanding essentials should be emphasized. One is the importance of publicity, which is a tradition and principle of British justice, and was broadly favoured by all the witnesses, though they were not entirely agreed that it is a deterrent. Often it may be so; but with some human natures the tendency may be quite the reverse when

offenders are written up into "heroes to be snapshotted " (as Sir A. Bodkin phrased it), and are placed on a kind of national pedestal. Sufficient publication, on the other hand, should be secured to act as a deterrent wherever it can, and also, which is a point to be remembered, to enable an injured party to free himself or herself from alleged blame. The other outstanding essential is the freedom of the Press. But just as the freedom of the citizen is not wrongfully encroached upon by requiring the compulsory removal of a sanitary nuisance or by restricting the sale of poison, so the freedom of the Press is not unjustly infringed by compulsory suppression of polluting details elaborated for purposes of profit.

5. The Director of Public Prosecutions considered that this Bill was quite in the right direction, adding that when once it is laid down that such things shall not be published, then all newspapers are put upon a similar level. The Newspaper Proprietors' Association in a letter to Your Committee wrote that they saw no difficulty in giving effect to the provisions of the Bill as drawn, and that their Council could suggest no alternative method which would be an improvement on that proposed. From this and other evidence Your Committee have formed the opinion that the Bill is framed on the right lines, and they believe that a large portion of the Press would welcome it as such.

6. We desire next to examine its terms more precisely, with a view to its extension, limitation or variation. It is simplest perhaps to begin with clause 1, subsection (1) (b) of the original Bill, referring to physiological details, etc., which may be roughly described as a general definition of indecency, slightly broader than the hitherto generally accepted test laid down by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in Reg. v. Hicklin in 1868. Sir Henry Duke approved of its wording as getting to the root of the matter. Sir A. Bodkin indicated one or two small and useful amendments. There was very general unanimity in favour of extending this subsection to cover the publication of reports of all judicial proceedings, and that it ought not to be confined (as it is by the next three lines of the Bill) to proceedings for divorce, nullity and judicial separation only. By this means, incidentally a possible omission in the Bill would be rectified, inasmuch as proceedings on the prosecution of a person for publishing indecent matter would themselves become subject to restriction. It was affirmed to us that to enact this subsection and apply it to all judicial proceedings is merely declaratory of the present law, and the witness representing the Newspaper Society (Provincial Press) contended that the existing law was sufficient. Your Committee are of opinion that though the subsection may contain little more than what is law to-day, it is material and effective, especially in conjunction with an alteration in relation to summary procedure to be mentioned later (paragraph 10), and it has the advantage of giving more or less specific instructions to a news editor what is to be blue-pencilled out. It would more conveniently stand first-in front of (a) in the original Bill. We have passed it in the following form, and have amended the title of the Bill accordingly :

"It shall not be lawful to include in the report of any judicial proceedings any indecent matter or medical, surgical or physiological details, being matter or details the publication of which would be calculated to injure public morals or otherwise be to the public mischief."

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7. This subsection, however, does not by itself completely grapple with the wide publication of a mass of details, more suggestive than actually indecent," which was gravely commented on by the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1912. Parenthetically we desire to record that it is within the knowledge of Your Committee that eminent foreigners have expressed surprise that such latitude is granted to the Press in Great Britain on this subject, and that some publications have come down to a level which is not permitted on the Continent. We have, therefore, given anxious con