The Express.
London, England, 1868-08-15 00:00:00

IS NOBODY TO BE WHIPPED FOR THIS 1

Corm once proposed that there should be
yearly festivals of honour for CAlsaa., BT. PAUL,
and Cmsaisitiorre ; and that there should also be
a solemn annual reprobation of JULIAN and BONA-
rains as enemies of human progress. On re-
consideration, says his editor with some uncon-
scious humour, Corn saw fit to withdraw this
latter proposal.
It certainly does seem as if it would not be quite
easy to carry out decorously festivals of public
execration. At all events, the fact that we now
hang our murderers in private, and that the Oex
FAWMIS rites are left to little boys of fervid pro-
testantprinciples, indicates the tendency of the age.
Yet we have our ways of attempting to bring the
moral sense of the public to bear upon pdblic
offenders. One of the magistrates concerned in a
recent case of rural justice is reported to have
said, " Why, we shall have all the papers in the
country down upon us !"
There was a public man, or a writer, we forget
which, who once had all the papers in the country
down upon him ; but the curious part of the
matter is that it seemed to make no difference to
him. He found his dog behaved just as usual,
and, when he went out the next morning for a
walk, he had no particular adventure. Nobody
chivied him ; nobody said, " There goes the cove
" S 8 is been cut up in all the papers ; " and he
discovered that he was still able to sit under his
own vine and fig-tree, none daring to make him
afraid. Then, one might ask, what is the good of
coming down upon a public offender in all the
papers ?
Everybody, in fact, must have been struck with
what seems the comparative ineffectiveness of
public opinion in dealing with abuses,
or wrongs which do not immediately af-
fect the obvious interests of multitudes. An
effect it has; often a direct, positive effect,
in alleviating the evil consequences of wrongs
that cannot be undone ; and always an effect
(when the public opinion expressed is right) in
raising the tone of general sentiment in the com-
munity. But it is impossible not to wish occa-
sionally that there were some way of consolidating
and making permanently available those outbreaks
of indignantly righteous feeling which, being pro-
voked by preposterous public wrong-doing, so
often die away with no greater result than
that of putting somebody in all the papers.
Within a week we have had ,two or three
cases of unpaid justice which have excited
general disgust. A poor woman has been fined
for a little gleaning ; a boy for falling asleep in
a cart ; and two other boys for bathing, under
circumstances which, it was said, were "invidious."
Now the papers have been down upon the Justices
in these cases, and every month, or thereabouts,
they are down upon other Justices for their
abnormal justice. But what comes of it P The
Justices go on justicing ; they are—not to make a
bad pun—just the same as ever. And what
remedy? Social science does not at present
enable us to predict the occasion upon which
a given Justice, in a given place, will
be more quaintly just than usual ; and
there is no coup d'etat short of abolishing the
Justices that will meet the case. And if you do
away with the Justices, why where are you ?
Especially in times like these, when the Throne,
the Church, and the Constitution totter to their
respective bases or to their common base, which-
ever it is.

Still, we do not like to give up the problem of
consolidating and permanently symbolising the
verdicts from time to time given by public opinion
on Justices' justice. We must try to invent some
execratory measures. In a burlesque of the story
of William Tell, the patriot chalks " Gessler is
" a bass " on the castle door, in order, as he said,
to make the tyrant tr-remble. But this sort of thing
would violate public order, and might, perhaps,
prove ineffective even if continued for a long
series of weeks. Yet we might establish Home
Affairs Committees—like those inscrutable Foreign
Affairs Committees up in the north somewhere—
who would take cognisance of these matters.
Such committees might note the cases, pass
votes of execration, and record them by adver-
tisement and otherwise. They might also have
Chambers of Horror, in which likenesses of the
offending Justices, with reports of the cases, should
be exhibited for the study of the public. We are
not quite clear that there is any act of parliament
which forbids you to " exhibit" a man's carte-do-
visite anywhere whatever, for any purpose what-
ever, if you can only get it. It would, we pre-
sume, be libellous to write under a photograph of
a Justice " JONES is a bass" ; and we are not sure
you could publicly use a photographic likeness
surreptitiously obtained, as many of these portaits
wouldhave to be obtained. However, it is clear that
somebody ought to be whipped in these cases, and
perhaps the difficulty of the subject will excuse
the crudeness of our suggestions.

Lord Napier of )(seals reached Paris this
morning from England, and proceeded at once to the
British Embassy. As his lordship will remain only four.
and-twenty hours in the French capital, the probability
is that he has come over to see the Preach troops under
arms.--0414eisei.