The Press.
London, England, 1856-02-23 00:00:00

THE JUDICIAL BENCH AT HOME AND

IN INDIA.
THE straining at gnats and swallowing camels
is an old practice which is just now being
exemplified by the dealings of the Ministry
with the Judicial Bench at home and in India.
Here, by their own account, they are suddenly
smitten with an intense desire to establish
the greatest possible judicial efficiency. In
England, the High Court of Appeal, the
House of Lords, they would have remodelled;
while all judges who have arrived at the age
of the Premier are to be removed from the
Bench in Ireland. The names of LYNDHURST,
and BROUGHAM, and St. LEONARDS, and CAMP-
BELL, in addition to the Government's own
Chancellor, Lord CRANWORTH, are no longer to
be held as guarantees of appellate efficiency ;
and such men as PENNEFATHER, and LEFROY,
and TORRENS, are held up as equally unfit to
hold seats in the courts below. The remedy
proposed for one of the alleged evils is, to be
sure, rather inconsistent with what is said of
the other; for, while age is the objection made
to the Irish Judges, even though it be unac-
companied by auy physical inability to per-
form the duties of their office, the alleged defect
in the House of Lords is to be cured by the
introduction of a gouty old gentleman between
seventy and eighty, whose infirmities have
some time since induced his retirement from
the Bench, and, for the present at least, pre-
vent his taking his seat, even if no other ob-
stacle existed.

But while the Ministry are thus straining at
gnats in respect of the Bench at home, let us
see what they are doing in respect to the
Bench of India. There they have a Bench to
deal with which is not merely of doubtful
efficiency from the age of its members, but
the gross incompetence of which is patent
and known to all the world. There they have
to do, not with a Bench who, whatever their
infirmities, have vast legal learning, and long
jud'xial experience, and great stores of wis-
dom to aid them in their judgments, but, on
tho contrary, they have to deal with judges
who never read a page of law in their lives,
who know nothing whatever of the principles of
jurisprudence, and who have nothing on earth
to guide them in their decisions but the common
sense with which Nature may have blessed
them, unless, as is the case in most instances,
they are content to rely on the interested
advice of their highly-bribed native clerks.
If this be thought language too strong to use
in respect of them, let us turn to that used by
Lord CAMPBELL on the very same subject in
the House of Lords. After strongly praising
the Supreme Court Judges in India, and par-
ticularly the Chief Justice of Bengal, Sir
LAWRENCE PEEL, he said that—

Whenever the proceedings of the inferior courts had
come before the Committee of the Privy Council, he had
been compelled to feel that the gentlemen who occupied
the Bench in those courts were wholly uninformed of the
principles on which justice should be administered.
And again :

They possessed none of the qualifications of judges, and
the consequence was that their decisions were entirely op.
posed to every principle of justice.

And again :
The Duke of Argyll had, he thought, been somewhat
prudish in his criticism of the phrases which had been
used by the natives of India in describing theirgrievances;
it was not reasonable to expect them to he very mealy-
mouthed; and for himself, as regarded the administration
of justice in the inferior courts, he thought no language
could be too extravagant in describing its enormities.

Such is the language used by the Chief
Justice of England in describing the courts of
the Company which the same Ministry that
affects such a regard for the administration of
justice in England allows to trifle with the
properties and lives of a hundred and fifty
millions of British subjects in India. For,
be it remembered that the Supreme Courts
have only jurisdiction over the Presidency
capitals, and that the courts for all the rest of
the natives are the shamelessly incompetent
courts which Lord CAMPBELL thus depicts.
With such judges on the Bench, it must ob-
viously be a mere toss up whether every
decision in a civil case do not entail a judicial
robbery, and every decision in a criminal case

171

a judicial murder. Yet in this instance the
camel is swallowed; these incompetent judges
are allowed to continue their course un-
checked ; the mass of misery they entail upon
the natives is unthought of; the quantity of
blood unjustly shed by them is unheeded;
and any one more conscientious than the rest
who thinks fit to expose them is met by the
cry of wishing to impede the spread of civilisa-
tion and enlightenment in the East.

To suppose that the present Adminstration
are acting in ignorance in allowing this fright-
ful state of things to continue, is a thing, in
our opinion, utterly impossible. They must
know as well as we do what the Company's
courts really are, and how fatally injurious are
their results. Indeed, if they had ever had any
doubts on the subject, the appeal case of the
Kurruckboor Rajah, in which judgment was
delivered lately by Mr PEMBERTON LEIGH, and
the case of Mrs. DYCE SOMBRE, in which Sir
JOHN DODSON pronounced the award the other
day, and the ease of the Coorg Rajah, in which
Sir John RositrAY delivered an interlocutory
judgment in the present week, would be quite
sufficient effectually to open their eyes to the
fact that the Directors, like their judges in
India, " are wholly uninformed of the princi-
" ples on which justice should be adminis-
" tered." This, indeed, is a fact which they
appear to be painfully reminded of whenever
their writs are carried out of their own juris-
diction into her Majesty's courts oflaw. In truth,
however, it is not a blindness of the judgment,
but the blindness of supposed self-interests,
that closes our Ministers' eyes to the state of
the Bench in India. There are some politi-
cians who would perpetuate any amount of
wrong rather than sacrifice a supporter's vote.
And the only three of the Directors that have
seats in the House of Commons are to be
found uniformly voting with Ministers in
every division that takes place. This is the
mess of pottage for which the birthright of a
hundred and fifty millions of our subjects is
deliberately sold ; this is the reason why
Ministers are deaf to their cries, and blind to
the enormities which the Chief .Justice has
described as being habitually perpetrated by
the Company's courts in India..

THE GERMAN PRESS ON THE
ATTITUDE OF PRUSSIA.

WE can only briefly allude to the comments
made by the Journal de Frankfort, upon the
article which appeared in THE PRESS of the
9th insc. on the admission of Prussia to the
Conferences at Paris. Our German contem-
porary, in quoting the declaration from THE
PRESS—" We desire the Peace in prospect to
" rest upon the broadest and most solii foun-
" dations, and to be assured by the only
" guarantee which from the nature of the
" case it can have—the collective might and
" opinion of Europe "—says that it would
adhere to the truth of that principle, and
argue from it for the admission of Prussia,
even though the neutrality of Prussia had
been as complete as THE PRESS represented
it. But our German contemporary contends
that Prussia has not been neutral. It says :
On the 13th January, 18.54, Austria, Prussia, England,
and France, signed, through the mediation of their repre-
sentatives at the Conference of Vienna, a protocol in
which they declared themselves for the maintenance of
the sovereignty and independence of the Ottoman Porte,
for the protectorate of the Christians of the East, exercised
collectively by the five great Powers, and for ulterior con-
cessions to be accorded to the Eastern Christians by the
sovereign will of the Sultan.
On the oth April, 1t 4, Austria, Prussia, England, and
France, signed, by their representatives at the Vienna
Conference, another protocol, in which they declared the
continuance of their union, with the view of maintaining
the temtorial independence of Turkey, for which end the
evacuation of the Danubian Principalities by the Russian
troops became a sine qua nun.
On the 23rd May, in the same year, Austria, Prussia,
England, and France, signed at Vienna another protocol,
by which they recognised that the convention concluded
on the '4 0t h April, between Austria and Prussia, was based
entirely on the principles established by the protocol of
the 9th of April.
On the 3rd June Austria summoned Russia to evacuate
the Danubian Principalities, and on the 19th June Prussia
became a party to the Austrian summons. _

'1

172

On the oth and 17th July Austria saw the necessity of
repeating to Russia the summons to evacuate the Princi-
palities, and Prussia did not hesitate to participate in the
summons.

On the 24th November, in the same year, Austria and
Prussia signed an additional article to the protocol of the
20th April, by which Prussia took upon herself the re•
sponsibility of the four points, and guaranteed to Austria
the occupation of the Principalities.

We had not overlooked these facts. They
prove incontestably that Prussia has not been
indifferent to the Eastern Question, but that,
on the contrary, she has constantly endea-
voured to bring about a pacific settlement of
ic. In alluding to her neutrality, we referred,
not to her diplomatic, but to her armed atti-
tude ; and we spoke of her as a neutral Poa er
in the sense that she took no part with the belli-
gerents on either side. That Prussia sincerely
loined herself to Austria, France, and Eng
and, with the view of accommodating the
difference with Russia, before the War com-
menced, is an e•-idence of the sincerity of her
pacific disposition, and adds to the strength
of the argument for admitting her to the Con-
ferences now opened to establish terms of
peace