The Press. — London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

F IIMI I III. IIII II II I II IMMIIMIIIIMMIIIM 1250 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 25, 1858. but we would remind him that even if the Isthmus were an arm of the sea, America would not have those rights which he is prepared to assume by violence, if by negotiation he falls short of his mark. The entrance to the Black Sea, for instance, is not common property, and Turkey is acknowledged to have over It peculiar rights as the owner of the territory on both banks. However, as Mr. BUCHANAN, unless Europe prevents him, is determined to seize and manage the route by main force—so determined in fact, that he proposes to introduce an Act exempting the President for this purpose trom the con stitutional contest of Congress—it is useless at present to argue the question of national law. In matters of political economy there certainly does not appear to be the slightest disposition to "follow our example." On the contrary, America, having taken all we had to give, is determined to keep all She has got. Like all nations whose relations are enlarging, and whose expenditure is growing, America finds that tax ation within her own boundaries cannot be made sufficiently productive to bring both ends even, without seriously overweighting the springs of industry, and She recurs naturally and wisely to those Customs duties which, by experience, She knows are in large part paid by the foreign trader and the foreign producer. We have given America freedom of trade ; we wish we had sold it to her, or had it to sell now, or that our navigation system had the qualities of the Bottle Imp, and would come back, if it were only for the purposes of sale, into our pockets. Simple, sanguine Mr. LABOII CMERE ! MOSESS swop of Blackberry and the colt for the gross of green spectacles was an astute deal compared to your bargain about the coasting trade, the result of which has been to send our ships half round the world with swept holds, and to keep the American perpetually full from New York by way of California and China to London and back. We fear there is little prospect of Mr. BUCHANAN foregoing the advan tages of such a state of things, and the screw which Mr. LAnoucnEttifs Act provided will be found, we doubt, rather rusty. loves you so dearly, and admires you so greatly, that he is naturally anxious to see you perfect; and any little move he can hit upon, under the rose, to make you so, he undertakes in a spirit of the most thoroughgoing kindness. It may annoy you, perhaps ; but he knows it won't hurt you ; on the contrary, you will be so much the better for it, if not in your own, at least in his opinion. So it is in the present case. " No judge ever " sat upon the bench with a greater respect for " juries than Lord CAMPBELL has "—this is no bald assertion or bold guess of ours; it is the Noble and Learned Lord himself that assures us of the fact,—" and the more he has assisted in " the administration of justice in conjunction " with juries, the more has he admired the admi " rable tribunal which they form." In spite of all this " respect " and " admiration" however, — rather, it would seem, by reason of it,—Lord CAMPBELL is so thoroughly dissatisfied with the working of that " admirable tribunal," that he has actually made up his mind to introduce a bill into Parliament next session, the object of which will be to convert that most imposing, that all but oracular decision—the verdict of a jury— into that weskest and most contemptible of con clusions, the opinion of a majority of the twelve men in the jury-box. Was there ever thought or intent more murderous ? If you cut a man in halves, or into slices of two-thirds and one third respectively, the spirit of the man takes its flight, not unnaturally. It is idle to say that the severed pieces are still there, and you may call the biggest of them " the man,"—by way of synecdoche, as the rhetoricians say : the man's soul has fled ; he is gone for ever ; and what remains of him is not the man, but his mangled carcase. Even so, if you take that wonderful creation of British law, the jury, and cut it up into pieces—eight and four, nine and three, ten and two—whatever may be the Noble and Learned Lord's divisor—you destroy the mystic unit, made up of the perfect number twelve ; the genius of the institution evaporates ; the opinion of the eight, or nine, or ten fractional jurymen is no more the verdict of a jury than a heap of shattered planks and timbers is the noble ship of whose dismantled existence they are the sorry remnants. We are rather surprised, we confess, that so obvious a fact should have escaped the attention of so acute a mind as Lord CAMPBELL'S ; of one, too, who possesses as familiar a knowledge of the nature and constitution of a jury as that Learned Judge cannot have failed to acquire during his many years of loving intercourse with that " admirable tribunal." The only excuse we can make for him is, that the object of his " respect " and "admiration " must have given him some dire provocation, aggravated enough to offuscate his clear judgment. And that, we admit, is but too true. The most infatuated partiality for that pet child of British jurisprudence, the jury, could not blind any one—except the spoiled child itself—to the utter absurdity of the verdict which elicited from the Lord Chief Justice the declara tion that, rather than allow juries to conduct themselves in this nonsensical way, he will,—ay, and that this very next session,—serve them as his venerable predecessor SAMUEL served poor AG/al—hew them in pieces. The points at issue in the cause " Smith T. Great Northern Railway Company," are, indeed, so simple and so distinct that it is inconceivable how any twelve men in a jury-box could have managed to confound them. No twelve men out of a jury -box, we may be sure, could be got to agree in misapprehending them as egregiously as the Jury which made the Lord Chief Justice forgetful of his heart's deepest and long-cherished affections. The plaintiff, who rejoices in the catholic patronymic which stands for Mr. Any body, travelled by one of the Great Northern Company's trains on a hot summer's afternoon, when the sky was dark and louring. His doing so may not unreasonably be taken to indicate a determination on his part to take his chance of the weather. That chance, however, unfortu nately for him, turned out a much worse chance than he had bargained for. The heavy clouds burst, and, deluging the country over which the lire runs, caused a flood which swept off the `permanent way." The result was that a lug gage train stuck fast in the liquid mud; the passenger train which carried Mr. Swim as part of its freight, ran into the miry obstruction at full speed, and Mr. SMITH, or Mr. Anybody— for he does not seem to have been the only sufferer—had his head bumped, his nose flattened, his face scratched, a couple of teeth knocked out, his shin grazed, and his elb ow contused, to say ' nothing of his toilette being abimee, as our French neighbours have it, and of his losing his well stocked purse, and a valuable parcel which was travelling in his company. For these disasters Mr. Smartt requires that the Great Northern shall indemnify him. " Yon ran me," he says, " into that impassable quagmire, and you shall " pay for it." "Nav," says the Great Northern, " we ran you straight along our line, as we had " covenanted to do. It was the storm, not we, "that put the impassable quagmire across our " line." On this issue is joined, and a jury is impanelled to decide whether it was the storm or the railway company that caused the accident. If the company did it, well and good ; let the company pay the damage : if the storm did it, let Mr. SMITH sue the storm for damages, if he can find a court in which the winds and clouds of heaven can be made defendants and compelled to put in bail. " Well, gentlemen of the jury, " after hearing the whole of the evidence, what "is your verdict ? " "We think the company " caused the accident." " You do ? And what " damages de you award to Mr. Swint? " "One " farthing." " What ! for all that complication "of injuries to his person, and loss of property, " one farthing ?" "Yes, my Lord, because we " think the storm was in fault, and the company " could not help it." No wonder that Lord CAMPBELL'S "respect and " admiration " were not proof against such an exhibition ; and if his Lordship had, then and there, sent for a metropolitan dust-contractors cart, ordered the Jury to be shovelled into it, the usher of the court mounting at the tail, and his Lordship, wig, ermine, and all, taking his seat on the shafts,—if thus he had driven them straight to the Fleet-ditch, and "shot" them into that unclean receptacle of metropolitan filth and rubbish (in accordance with the ancient law of England, as expounded by the Noble and Learned Lord to the twelve incomprehensible occupants of the jury -box),—who would have ventured to say that his Lordship had done wrong ? But to suffer his wrath to be kindled into a resolve to commit wholesale juricide, to deal a deathblow to the glorious institutionit self; is scarcely consistent with the calm dignity that should ever keep the judicial mind from ebullition. But it is not only the proposal of a remedy worse than the disease, because it kills under pretence of curing , that seems to indicate that the mind of the Lord Chief Justice was just then a trifle off its balance ; he has stultified his own proposal by limiting it to only one branch of that administration of justice in which he is so proud of having the assistance of juries. The bisection of juries into a judicial majority, whose opinion is to stand as the verdict of the whole, and an injudicious minority, whose opinion is to go for nothing, is a process which the Noble and Learned Lord intends to apply only to civil causes. We wonder if he means to include among these the matrimonial jousts in the Divorce Court. If so, his Lordship had better consider by what sort of contrivance he may secure at starting in the jury-box a strict equality of domestic conditions and sympathies—say half-a dozen henpecked husbands to half a dozen " lions at home" ;—or else what chance will there be — there is little enough as it is—of fair play in such cases of cat-and-dog matrimony as " Cherry v• Cherry," and " Marchmont v. Marchmont ' sorry specimens, respectively, of the clerical conjugalities of Church and Dissent ? Leaving, however, this kiwtty point, as to untying or re tying the tangled knot of marriages not made in heaven, out of view for the present, there is an entire and important class of cases to which Lord CAMPBELL declares that nothing shall induce him to apply the bisectional process. While he argues that to require a unanimous verdict, in other words the verdict of the jury, for the redress of private wrongs, entails an intolerable failure of justice which he proposes to remedy by the summary process of bisection, he professes to consider the requirement of unanimity perfectly consistent with justice, nay indispensable to it, when the redress sought is redress of public wrongs. We are at a loss to understand by what logic the Noble Lord arrives at the conclusion that society has not the same right to demand TRIAL BY JURY. JUST as we are about pleasantly and jovially to bid farewell to the old year, and to welcome the new in a kind of blind good-natured confidence, hoping we shall become better acquainted by and by, and like each other well enough, we are startled by the information that the stranger who is approaching as fast as minute-hands will carry him is not unlikely to deal somewhat roughly with one of our old and most cherished favourites. That time-honoured institution which has long been the envy of our neighbours and our own boast, the bulwark of our liberties, the pride and glory of our land, trial by jury, is —who would have thought it ?—about to be it self put upon its trial. It is to be weighed in the balance, under a strong preconception that it will be found wanting, and with a purpose prepense that it shall be mended —or, it may be, tinkered—accordingly. Who can hear of the fate thus preparing for the great safeguard of all that we hold dear, and remain unmoved ? From what quarter hails the meditated attack ? Years, or, as they are called in the Westminster dialect, sessions, though they appear to the gaping crowd mighty arbiters of the affairs of men, achieving many and wonderful feats, are, as the initiated know full well, mere automata, acting, not upon any plan or device of their own, but simply according to the intent and contri vance of other parties, who hold and pull the wires by which their wheelwork is set in motion. Who, then, it is natural to ask, is the prime mover of the threatened aggression ? Whence proceeds the menace that trial by jury is to be —monstrous thought !—in its own turn put upon its trial ? On inquiry it appears that the assailant is a firm advocate, a warm admirer of the imperilled institution. It is always so. If y ou find your character maligned, and your pro ceedings called in question, with a sly hint that you really ought to be looked after, it is ten to one you will find that some very particular friend of yours is at the bottom of the mischiet. He