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

No. 295.—V0L. VI. LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1858. Icf,As.larA,Vilin:SAPEEp7la.

lt VrtAs.

LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1658.

Heaven gives our years of fading strength
Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth a seeming length,
Proportioned to their sweetness.
Next to the sanctuary, home rises up amid the
light and shadows of Christmas as the most
beautiful and blessed association. The French
have no word for our English home ; and many
of that interesting nation have nothing corre-
sponding to the thing. " Home," says a French
traveller, "is the centre of the entire existence
"of the English. It is the stronghold of their
"fortune, their family, and their liberty." Home
at Christmas time is the reunion and gathering
together of the far-spreading branches that to-
gether form the Christmas tree. It is the spring of
those living streams that freshen the waste
places alike of the individual heart and the col-
lective community. It forms the retreat of
troubled hearts, the scene of forgiven and for-
gotten wrongs—the quiet and sheltered bay into
which the surf and spray of this world's contro-
versies and perplexities are not suffered to roll.
It is the Englishman's refuge. Touching this
holiest spot of mother earth, he renews his
strength and rekindles at its hearth cold hopes
and joys that help him manfully to enter on the
arena and fight nobly, if not always with success,
life's hard battles. Yrom the very heart we wish
our readers a merry Christmas. May its sun
rise on many glad households, and set on none
that are not wiser and better and happier for
Christmas-day. May it be in many a manly
soul the Lethe of all that is painful, and the
pledge and earnest and prophecy of that blessed
home whose hearth-stone shall never grow cold,
and the roof-tree of which shall never be shaken
down.

TRANSATLANTIC REVELATIONS.
A CAT IS a very pleasant and amiable plaything
when she purrs and makes a velvet paw ; but it is
well for him who disregards the motto of the Clan
Chattan, and touches her without the glove, to
remember that sheathed within that velvet paw
are strong and sharp claws that too much excite-
ment ever has a tendency to develop in a very
disagreeable manner. This feline recollection is
irresistibly brought to our mind by the tone and
the substance of the Message of the President
of the United States. The tone is purring,
and the paw is velvet; but it is not difficult to
see that it would not take very much to turn the
purr into a growl, and that there is behind,
covered with that soft fur which makes the foot-
fall so inaudible, a set of very sharp claws,
which the owner will be in no wise scrupulous
about using. At any rate, Spain seems in a fair
way of at no distant day trying the experiment.
Do what she may, say what she will, Spain
.gives,
under all circumstances, and in every conceivable
position, as many and as just causes of offence as
the lamb did to the wolf in the fable. Spain
es Cuba, and Cuba, we are assured by
possesses Cuba,
" is in its present colonial con-
" dition a constant source of injury and an-
" noyance to the American people." It encou-
rages slavery ; and, " from its geographical
" position, Cuba commands the mouth of the
" Mississippi, and its immense and annually in-
" creasing trade, foreign and coastwise, from the
" valley of that noble river, embracing half the
" sovereign States of the Union. With that

" island under the dominion of a distant foreign
" Power, this trade, of vital importance to the
" States, is exposed to the danger of being
" destroyed in time of war, and it has hitherto
" been subjected to perpetual injury and
annoyance in time of peace." Under all
these circumstances, Mr. BtxuANAH looks
at rich and impeding Cuba in pretty much
the same frame of mind that a bear does at
a honeycomb; and if the Spaniard won't
throw it down to him, it is tolerably clear
that Mr. BUCHANAN means to go up the tree
after it. "Its value to Spain is comparatively
unimportant." There is a theory that events
always reproduce themselves, and we do remem-
ber that there was a Sovereign under the Jewish
Dispensation who reasoned and acted very like
the President of the United States. There
was a NABOTH who had a Cuba for which an
AHAB S soul was sick. AHAB wanted to buy ;
NABOTH refused to sell; and AHAB thereupon took
the same course that the bear does with the
honeycomb, that Mr. BUCHANAN contemplates
doing with this injurious but desirable colonial
possession of the distant foreign Power. Cer-
tainly somebody will have to find a pair of gloves
for poor Spain, and America will not do amiss to
remember the sequel of AHAB'S killing and
taking possession.
We suppose it is inevitable that a strong, vi-
gorous, and ambitious people, with weak, divided,
corrupt, and idle neighbours all round them,
should by degrees absorb them, as AARON'S rod
swallowed up all the others. It was by alterna-
tions of annexation and conquest that the little knot
of our own commercial adventurers in India ex-
panded into the dimensions of the possessors of
an empire; but, in their case, aggression was, in
truth, the only mode of self-defence, and, in the
instance of Great Britain herself, her territorial
increase has been the result of a prolific and
enterprising race expanding within a limited
mother country in a manner beyond their own
control. It is otherwise with America. She
has already in possession thousands upon thou-
sands of acres of unsettled and uncultivated
land, and she cannot complain that her population
have want of elbow room. It is the pure
lust of territory which Mr. BRIGHT says is only
to be found in monarchs and aristocrats that
spurs America on to war and conquests, and it is
the blood of the old Norse pirates that runs in
Mr. BUCHANANS viens, as it does in ours, which
is sending him up the tree after the Cuban
honeycomb.

We confess we do not feel quite so comfortable
as some of our contemporaries at the policy which
all this exhibits, and the tendencies which it
reveals. The language is moderate, but under
its moderation the purposes it barely veils are
wild, unjustifiable, and predatory. There is
hardly a single piece of advice in the large pro-
portion of •he Message devoted to foreign rela-
tions that does not contain in it the seed of some
future international quarrel,
a greediness of gain that is
Message altogether, indeed,
mind of the Suliote's song
begins :

dives
Tainhourici,
.411Clives hopes to the valiant
The paragraphs about
Isthmus of Central America
satisfactory, and are full
future difficulties. Mr.
care for such co”-' '

[WITH A S 1

GRATIS.

4, and does not betray
quite alarming. liplio
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Lit and promise .. _ii ,• ) s
the transit •... ''' fr'
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rica are sea
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-ull of pr • .i' "117,4r:4;i4: ti:
BUCUAN ' .-"fik- iffr
itions, we dare

FIIMIIIII.IIIIIIIIIIIIMMIIMIIIIMMIIIM
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 elbow 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