DEAR MADAM: I have been absent on circuit; hence my delay in answering your letter. I beg to assure you that I have never relaxed my efforts where any suitable opportunity offered to urge that your release ought to be granted. I feel as strongly as I have felt from the first that you ought never to have been convicted, and this opinion I have very clearly expressed to Mr. Asquith, but I am sorry to say hitherto without effect. Rest assured that I shall renew my representations to the incoming Home Secretary, whoever he may be, as soon as the Government is formed and the Home Secretary is in a position to deal with such matters. I am, Faithfully, RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN. This also seems to be the opinion of the leading counsel for the prosecution, Mr. Addison, Q.C., M.P. (now Judge Addison, of the Southwark County Courts), who is reported to have said, after the summing up, that “the jury could not, especially in view of the medical evidence, find a verdict of guilty.” This statement will be found in Sir Charles Russell’s protest to Mr. Matthews. EFFORTS FOR RELEASE The public are not probably fully aware how much intensity of feeling and earnest work has been expended on my case during the fourteen and one-half years of my imprisonment. The Home Office knows. Men in high positions in both political parties in England have often united in demanding a new trial. The almost invariable reply has been that the best means to effect my release was to obtain new facts or evidence, and submit these to the Home Secretary for his consideration. Those well-meaning advisers seemed to forget that the half million of petitioners for my reprieve or free pardon in England--not to count those in America--were not moved thereto by new facts or evidence, but by the absence of facts or evidence sufficient to prove that the alleged crime had been committed by any one, or that either guilt or complicity in that crime, if crime it were, attached to me. Surely it is not the business of the public nor of individual citizens to prove the innocence of any unhappy person whom process of law selects for punishment, while it _is_ the business of every citizen to see that the courts incontestably prove the guilt of any person accused of a crime before sentence is passed, in the following manner: 1. It must be proved that a crime has been committed. 2. It must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused person is the one who committed it. EVEN NEW EVIDENCE SUPERFLUOUS Neither condition has yet been fulfilled in my case. The evidence on which a half million petitioners said and say I was unjustly condemned is sufficient in itself. While it is true if a new trial had been granted me I could have produced new evidence that overwhelmingly demonstrated my innocence, it is also true that more facts or new evidence were not requisite to enable justice to be done. THE DOCTORS’ DOUBT