cs if you prefer to put it that way)."

The second set charged that Godfrey Isaacs had had transactions with
various companies which, had the Attorney-General not been his
brother, would have got him prosecuted. There is the same violence
here: "This is not the first time in the Marconi affair that we find
these two gentlemen [Godfrey and Rufus] swindling": and again: "the
files at Somerset House of the Isaacs companies cry out for vengeance
on the man who created them, who manipulated them, who filled them
with his own creatures, who worked them solely for his own ends, and
who sought to get rid of some of them when they had served his
purpose by casting the expense of burial on to the public purse."

There is no need to describe the case in detail. On the charges
concerned with the contract and ministerial corruption, the same
witnesses (with the notable exception of Lloyd George) gave much the
same evidence as before the Parliamentary Committee. Very little that
was new emerged. The contract looked worse than ever after Cecil
Chesterton's Counsel, Ernest Wild, had examined witnesses, but Mr.
Justice Phillimore insisted that it had nothing to do with the case
"whether the contract was badly drawn or improvident."

But indeed all this discussion of the contract was given an air of
unreality by the extraordinary line the Chesterton Defence took. It
distinguished between the two sets of charges, offering to justify
the second (concerning Godfrey Isaacs' business record) but claiming
that the first set brought accusation of corruption not against
Godfrey but against Rufus and Herbert Samuel--who were not the
prosecutors. It was an impossible position to say that Ministers were
fraudulently giving a fraudulent contract to Godfrey Isaacs but that
this did not mean that he was in the fraud. Cecil showed up unhappily
under cross-examination on this matter, but from the point of view of
his whole campaign worse was to follow: for Cecil withdrew the
charges of corruption he had levelled at the Ministers!

Here are extracts from the relevant sections of the cross-examination
by Sir Edward Carson:

Carson: And do you now accuse him [Godfrey Isaacs] of any
abominable business--I mean in relation to obtaining the contract?

Cecil Chesterton: Yes, certainly; I now accuse Mr. Isaacs of very
abominable conduct between March 7 and July 19.

Carson: Do you accuse the Postmaster General of dishonesty or
corrupti