Paost Our Own Tokyo, Oct. 7.
'At his trial, the young man Daisuke Namba, accused of attempting to assassinate the' Crown Prince in December, explained that the motives which prompted him to make an attempt on the life of the Heir to the Throne, was that he was tired of the manner in which the liberties of the people were restricted.
While millions were ill-clothed and badly-housed, those in authority' and the privileged classes were, said the prisoner, "wallowing in sensual enoyments" and w of the land, aristocracy were cru: common people and, in a peroration, demanded a drastic reform of the privileged classes, freedom of Press and speech, limitation of encroachments on the rights of the individual and nationalization of the land.
The accused, who is on trial for his life, spoke in a calm and collected voice, even when he painted a gloomy] picture of the manner in which delioved the "bureaucracy and the plutocracy" to be "heartlessly grinding down the common peopl Namba spoke for over an hour, and Is reported to have never once raised his vole unduly, as is the manner of the champions of the proletariat, He was found not to belong to "any radical association, and it was also discovered that he planned the atrocious deed himself.
This is all the more significant showing that radicalism of the worst sort has sunk deep into the nnd, and that the repercussions are liable to be gloomily dramatic.
Namba's attempt was perpetrated on December 27 last year. It was three months after the earthquake smote Tokyo and Yokohama, The catastrophe had also shaken the thoughts of the people, bringing to the surface the extreme radical elements who believe in sword, pistol and bomb. The murders of Socialists during the confusion that followed the earthquake had only tend ed to harden the radically-inclined.
Winter was on when the attempt. to kill the Prince Regent took place. 'Misery and privation were then rife Jand tens of thousandg were homeless. The spectre of murder had already' stalked abroad; conditions were just such as might induce the mentally ill-balanced to hail murder and asassination as a panacea for the ills they believed themselves and the people to be subject.
Asked how he expected that the: assassination of the Heir to the Throne could promote the reforms for which he said in court he was prepared to yield his life, Namba replied that he afterwards thought he acted too hastily in his diabolical attempt, but that he hit upon this scheme in order to focus in a manner unheard-of before, public attention fon the wrongs the people were ig from, expecting that there-and proper attention would be paid to what he called the acute physical and mental sufferings of the millions of the Popular The Public Prosecutor has demanded that the Court pronounce sentence of death, und there doubt that this will be the verdict of the tribunal. The feeling of the people against anything like clemoney is growing. It is said that to extend merey to a would-be regicide would only strengthen assassinism, and would result in a dangerous' precedent in law being established.
Many foreignes that Namba's atte isolated case of 'They see in it a sign that the old spirit of unswerving loyalty, of implicit obedience to those whom Providence has placed over them, has ceased to have the hold it had' over the Japanese people, and that the bonds between the privileged and the non-privileged classes are breaking. The radical elements are becoming bolder and more brazen than before, a fact that the Government has fully recognized and is yet, in more or less of a quandary, how to tackle.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.