The Express.
London, England, 1853-01-11 00:00:00

LONDON. WESDAY, JANUARY 11.

THE Proctors of Doctors' Commons had, we hear, a
meeting last week, to organise and prepare resistance
to the cleansing out of their Augean stable. Hut it
won't do. The Court of Chancery has giveu way
before the march of human improvement—before the
national revolution to have speedy and cheap justice,
as well as good and substantial law ; the Common
Law Courts have jielded up their monopoly to local
tribunals; and the wind and storm before which
Westrnicster-hali bent its royal head, will be power-
ful euough to penetrate and sweep through the epis-
copal purlieus of Doctors' Commons, old and strong
though that Court may be.
Some few years ago, the Sons of Zernialt, as
Caustwe.u. described the lawyers of his day, were
in our Cathedral Cities too strut% for common sense,
and defeated a moderate measure of improvement
introduced during Sir ROBERT PEEL'S administra-
tion, by the present Loan CHIEF BARON, then
Attorney-General. Bat times have changed since
then, and we, happily, have changed with them. The
Proctors now may organise the profession as best
they can,—may struggle and resist as they choose,
—may try to alarm uud frighten us to the best of
their power—fur that is their present line of de-
ence—but, wo repeat, it will not do. Reform of this
sj stein of law and its administration there must be ;
and the only reform worth accepting is, the consplete
and utter destruction ,f the exists* jurisdiction.
"Thorough and thorough—leas than thorough will
not do it.

The very title of these Courts tells the whole story
of their unfitness for the present times, of their
defective organisation, of their cumbrous machinery,
and of their frightful cost. They are Ecclesiastical,
or rather, Bishop.," Courts. They are part and par-
cel of that ecclesiastical system which the Reforms-
teen in this country did not sweep away, and which
no succeeding generation has yet had the courage to
destroy. It is the duty of the State, not of the
Church, to provide justice for all the people of this
realm : and to that fundamental point, above all
others, law reformers must adhere in sub-
stituting a new for the present systemless system.
Bishops Imo no more to do, on any sound
principle of human government, with our
wills or our effects left attests.° after
our departure from this world, than they have with
our banker's accounts or our daily bread while we arc
living. They are just as little entitled to interfere
with our domestic differences as with our family
happiness;—to divorce men a ,nensa et Moro from their
wives as to marry them against their wills;—or to
collect our petty debts, as to enforce payment of
Church-rates. The whole theory on which they once
justified their power to do all these and a hundred
other incongruous, anomalous, and monstrous
things, has now no reality or force in
human affairs. It stalks about, indeed, in
Puseyite imagination the shadow of a shade ; but by
the rest of the world, it is renounced, abandoned, and
almost forgotten. Yet we continue to suffer from and
to endure the ill effects in these Courts of a Theory
Indefensible, that no rational being can defend.
And if we desire fairly and completely to get rid of
the frightful evil, we must make up our minds to
have no Bishops' Courts in England, and to recognise
none but tribunals of the Crown. So said Mr. Soli-
citor-General BETIIELL in his admirable speech at
Aylesbury ; and so say we.
The Bishops, it is true, derive for their families no
little gain and advantage from these courts. Look
to their officers; they are Bishops sons, Bishops'
nephew., and Bishops' grandsons, not doing the work
there is to do, but taking the fees that widows and
orphans are robbed of, and leaving the work to
others. But this is a consideration that ought to
hasten rather than retard their destruction. For to
allow episcopacy to be longer mixed up with such
a system, is not only to cortupt it, but also to degrade
it; and that we cannot afford ;—for so long as we
have an Established Church, we must at least take
care to have it pure and honest, and of good reptee.
Courts, it may be urged, the bishops must
have, for purposes purely spiritual and eccle-
siastical, such as induction to benefices, or-
dinations, and registries of livings and parishes. And
these—if they choose to call them Courts—may be still
loft the bishops, if only we can get away from their
jurisdiction over our goods and chattels after death,
our wives whilst living, and our persons when liable
to Church-rates. The forms of Courts they may re-
tain, but the substance they must be deprived of.
What the Proctors, as we understand their policy
and plans, are going to say is—" Reform our courts,
by all means, but do not destroy them. You must
have tribunals to award probates of wills,
or grant letters of administration of intes-
tate effects ; you must have courts to ad-
judicate on conjugal disputes and wrongs ;
you must (have Church-rata controversies decided—
alter, re-model, change our courts for these purposes
as much as you please ; but don't, please don t, sweep
them away. Now, we must entreat the public not
to be deluded by this very penitent proctorial whim-
pering ; it simply means sham, not real, reform. For
what recent improvements have demonstrated is, that
we have too much and too various law,—too many
courts—too many judges—too much conflicting autho-
rity. In the administration of English justice there
is no harmony and no unity of action, no simplicity
and identity of form and practice, no security for
a common result in common cases. We have one
legal profession at Westminster Hall, another legal
profession in Lincoln's Inn, a third legal profession
in our County Courts, and now the Proctors ask us to
perpetuate a fourth in Doctors' Commons. The re-
quest is just as modest as if the Bankruptcy Courts
in Basinghall-street, or the Insolvent Court in Por-
tugal-street, were to claim independence for them-
selves.

No—what is wanted, and what is indispensable, is
the absorption of Doctors' Commons, and of all other
Ecclesiastical Courts, in one general system of legal
jurisdiction. Wo admit we must have tribunals to
award probate, to grant administrations, to decide on
divorce, to capture us for non-payment of Church-
rates,—so long as Church-rates last. All this we
admit the learned Proctors, who met on Saturday, we
believe. But all these, we concur with Mr. Solicitor-
General HETDELL in thinking, we could have much
better from royal than episcopal judges,end in West-
minster Hall than in Doctors' Commons. And therein
lies the gist of the dispute. It is lay against ecclesi-
astical justice; Queen's Courts against Bishops'
Courts ; the law of England against the law of Rome ;
juries against judges ; tribunals as bright as mid-
day against tribunal as dark as midnight.
Theoretically the profession of the law in Bishops'
Courts is as open to the public as the legal profession
I. the Quxxx's Courts ; but practically there is no
such close monopoly in England as Bishops'
Courts. Bishops' sons and relatives monopolise
the higher offices, Bishops' butlers and stewards
the inferior berths.' And as for the advocates
and proctors, their businesses are quite as
hereditary as those of French notaries. Their
very names betray their monopoliPs. There
they STS—JEZINERS, BATFORDS, CLARKSONS, DOD-
SOSIS,SWARETS, PECKLES, ADDAMSES, DYKES, HARTS,
IBEETSONS, and IOOULDENS, from " time whereof the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary." And
there, too, they will remain until not a wreck of
the "Commons" be left;--all excellent, learned,
sad trustworthy, though costly and chargeable Ad-
vocates and Proctors, no doubt ; but the closest of all
dose monopolists, notwithstanding; breeding, if they
will allow us to say so, in and in; rearing their eldest
sons to be Doctors of Civil Law, their younger eons
to be Proctors, and living occasionally to see some of
their children Queen's Advocates and Judges of their
own courts.To speak the plain truth, there is no advan-
tage to the nation in thus setting apart a race of
i Proctors, as f we were living under tho Mosaic Dis-
pensation, and required a tribe of Levites to keep
as right tad straight ecclesiastically. Attorney-at-
Law and Counsel Learned in the I.aw are necessary,
bat Proctors and Advocates are unnecessary evils.

The one set of inflictions human weakness will not
allow us to slake off; and the pressing quest ion is
whether we are men enough to fling away the other.,
The present session of Parliament win' probably
decide the question.

IT is stated in the Piedmontese journals that death
has terminated the sufferings of kRANCISCO MADIAI,
—that after many months of rigorous captivity,
he has at length perished in prison. Previous.ac-
counts of his declining state had in some degree
prepared us for the announcement. A 1 peals, founded
on considerations of public justice, having failed to
move the inexorable tyranny and stupid bigotry of
the Tuscan Government, remonstrances had more
recently been offered, on no other grounds
than those of policy and humanity. The Grand
Duke and his advisers were expostulated with
by the representatives of England, Prussia, and
Holland,on the imprudence of keeping alive a source
of so much scandal and odium throughout all Pro-
testant Europe, as the protracted incarceration of a
man confessedly charged with no other crime than
that of reading the sacred Scriptures in his own
tongue; and every method was exhausted, whereby
the persecutors of this most deeply injured man
might, it was hoped, have been tardily brought to a
sense of remorse, for the fatal cruelty of which their
victim was likely to become the subject. No im-
pression, however, seemed to have been made.
l'he afilicoed husband and wife, convicted of the
same offence against absolutism in matters
of conscience, continued to be immured in separate
cells, without any mitigation of the barbarous sen-
tence that had doomed them to remain there for the
period of four years. If the account given in the
Turin papers be correct, death has come to rescue one
of them from his misery, and has thus baffled his in-
human tormentors in a portion of their purpose.
How soon the believing wife may be carried to the
grave which contains her uufaltenng husband, none
can tell. •

But wherever there remains in Europe, or through-
out Christendom, free speech or a free press, a loud and
bitter cry of execration will be raised against
the actors in this detestable drama. The day is
gone by when educated men will pause to argue
whether, among the prerogatives of despotism, is to
be reckoned the right to inquire into matters of
religious belief, and to inflict punishment in the de-
secrated name of law, for nonconformity to the
established creed. Time was when, in almost every
land now calling itself civilised, heresy was treated
as sedition, and in its more active form as
treason. A century ago Calvinism was pun-
ishable with banishment in France, Catho-
licism visited with confiscation in Ireland,
and the belief of possessing supernatural powers wu
actually punished with death in the United States.
Intolerance has been, unhappily, the sin and shame
of nearly all sects and churches where they formerly
possessed unbridled sway. But we had hoped that
Ithe days of despotism in matters of belief had
passed away in all regions as completely as amongst
ourselves and our neighbours of Western Europe
and our kinsmen in the New World ; nor should we
have believed the tale of the indictment, convic-
tion, sentence, and doom of the MADIAI had it
been told as a narrative of facts seven years
ago. It would seem, however, as if the absolute
powers had lost in the panic of 1848 all the little
sense of justice they had been slowly learning pre-
vious to that memorable epoch. The cold sweat of
fear is upon them still; and in their blindness they
are daily and hourly aggravating the dangers whose
returning shadows are already outspread over them.
If ever governments were busied with the fatuous
work of digging their own graves, those of Italy are
so. With a population almost unanimously attached
to the Roman Catholic ritual, and, for the greater
part, too illiterate to be reached through the medium
of printed works of a controversial character,
with French and Austrian garrisons to repress revolt,
and an irresponsible police to watch and thwart all
propagandism of dissent, which with them is ac-
counted sedition—there never was a country where
severities ter conscience sake were so unmeaningly
wanton, cruel, or insane in a political point of view.
No object of commensurate importance is to be
gained even for the hour by a system which outrages
the feelings of all enlightened communities, and makes
even the more sagacious despots of other countries
ashamed. Louts NAPOLEON loves to display his
power over the Church by sequestrating the revenues
of Bourbonist bishops, and by imperiously requiring
from the Vatican as many Cardinals' hats as he
chooses to bestow on his partisans among the Gal-
lium prelates. But he is too shrewd to add to the
number of his difficulties and dangers those which
spring from interference with matters of faith, or
questions of speculative opinion. The rigours of his
system of repression, great and oppressive though
they be, are essentially limited to practical
objects. With the dream of the enthusiast,
the consolations of the devout, or the hope
of the heretical after death—NAPOLEON
gives himself no concern. He wants to reign in
security if he can, and to die in kis bed, if it be
possible, "EMPEROR of FRANCE:" and he knows
that his chances of arriving at such a consummation
would be infinitely lessened if, to all the enemies be
has already made on political grounds, he were to add
those which religious persecution, like that carried
on in Italy, would infallibly raise up against him.
Will the bereaved survivor of her husband's fate
be still detained by her ruthless persecutors in her
present solitary dungeon? Can nothing be done to
rescue the widowed wife of the murdered 111kDIAI
from her present lamentable position ? Is there any
popular or intelligible use in diplomacy? When
Lord MALMESBUIVE was Foreign Secretary he was
reproached that he bad failed to exert himself on the
behalf of these humble, but not unhonoured objects
of national sympathy. The seals of the Foreign
Office are now in much better hands. What will
Load Joii Itussua. do?

MMit