De Mortuis

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum.

Many good people who have all their lives been governed by the polity of this resonant sentiment were amazed at the impotent efforts of that angry septuagenarian, Viscount Gladstone, and his elder brother, Henry N. Gladstone, to refute the slurs cast upon the name of the celebrated statesman, their late father, by "an insolent varlet, a professional mud-spatterer, a cowardly bootlicker" named Captain Peter Wright in his recent book, Portraits and Criticisms (TIME, Aug. 3, COMMONWEALTH). "Why don't they sue the stinking reptile?" such people have exclaimed in the vehemence of their sympathy. "Why don't they put their foot on him in court and crunch him into a smear? Why don't they ..."

These people are ignorant of the law. It is true that the Romans observed the law that their language so nobly expresses ; true that the Code Napoleon is strict in its provisions protecting the dead from defamation; true that in Italy a man can protect in court the good name of his dead. But anywhere in the U. S. except in the State of Louisiana, anywhere in the British Empire except in the Province of Quebec, a dead man can be defamed without hindrance of the law.

Quebec, once a French province, preserves the statute that was afterward incorporated in the Code Napoleon. Louisiana, a state which, as everyone knows, was part of the great stretch of territory west of the Mississippi sold by Napoleon to President Jefferson in 1803, retains the very provision of the Code.