Show GUILTY OF NEGLECT HOW BRITISH PUBLIC REGARD THE WAR OFFICE J Expose of Horrors and Abuses Following Fol-lowing British Victories in South Africa Results in Two Verdicts I London June Copyrighted 1000 by the Associated PrC8srhe SPeC I taclc of a man of American birth WIl Ham I Ashmead Bartlett Burdett Coutts ConflervatlAe member for Westminster manding In the House of Commons amid a storm of Jeers and cries and exposing to the wOlf the horrors and abuses that followed In the wake of British victories proved as dramatic as it was unprecedented For over an Jiour Coutts once known ag the young husband of time millionaire million-aire ISaronneas but now growing gray Alth his fifty years his face bronzed by i the sun of South Africa and his hands clenched nervously behind him I commanded lie attention the hostile majority of the House and drew a succession suc-cession of ghastly pictures that In gruosomcneas of detail eclipsed the horror of the Crimean war The task was terribly tlltllcult Mr i I DtirdcttCoutts has seldom spoken in I Parliament and never before at such I length or with the whole nation AvailIng Avail-Ing to hear what he had to say He Is I nothing of an orator and was obliged to present a muss of detail that now and again grew tedious He nevertheless never-theless held his audience by the strength and gravity of his statements His declaration that every statement that I have made Is true was made with an earnestness that atoned for all his rhetorical defects y This terrible arraignment of Great r 1 I Britains care of her woimlcd sick I and dying mado Friday night Is bar b-ar the most notable occasion of theses the-ses lon Thc speech oC the Parliamentary Secretary of the Foreign ofllce George I Wyndhnm which vas presented by 1 Mr BurdettCoutts and that of the I Government leaders and the Lord of I tho Treasury W J Balfour that followed fol-lowed It were both efforts that neither man has equalled this year at any rate j I The Government was aAvake to the I i seriousness of the crisis and with surpassing S sur-passing oratory Mr Wyndhum took Its critics behind the scenes of the great I campaign In graphic language he described de-scribed Ihe enormous difficulties of the communications and exposed for the first time the daring conception of Lord Robertss plans and the risks he ran In short without tiring his hearers with too many statistics the UnderSecretary Under-Secretary for War gave such a fascinating fascin-ating panorama interjecting facts to prove that the War office took all precautions pre-cautions reiterating that war must I always b i fearful that his hearers Avcllnlgli forgot the sick and wounded In their admiration of the success of 1111 the great General But this the Times points out today all crumbled away before the damning damn-Ing details presented by Mr Burdett Coutts who spoke with the advantage of having seen whereof he spoke Mr Balfour for once lost hls self control Flushed and trembling wIth passion he denounced the attacks whIch he declared merely amounted to ungenerous criticisms of Lord Roberto This the opposltlor denied and In point of facr the whole tenor of Mr Burdett Couttss speech was an attack on the methods of Lord Kitchener Instead of Lord Roberts though this was not openly stated As a result of the dramatic debate public opinion seems fairly evenly divided di-vided between two verdicts First that i the War office Is gullly of criminal neg lect second they reserve all judgments till the Parliamentary committee reports re-ports Mr BurdcttCoutts has suddenly sudden-ly I become one of the most prominent men of the hour and the Government has still to face thc agitation which has stirred the country almost to a greater extent than did the declaration of war Itself |