The Sun.
London, England, 1830-04-23 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

Our contemporary of the Globe, in noticing the
observations we onWednesday offered with respect to
one branch of the Scotch Judicial Reforms, forcibly
remarks that " some better reason should be showi,
than they (the Scotch Reformers) have yet given
for transferring a large class of important causes from
a Court where proceedings are simple, cheap, and
expeditious, to one where they are complicated, ex-
pensive, and ludicrously tedious and dila'ory. The
Reform seems a plan to deny justice to the poor.
The denial, where they have been used to do with-
out the thing denied, may be not felt as a great
grievance; but where justice has been habitually
within their reach, it is scarcely allowable to deprive
them of it by way of an experiment." The reasons
do not seem very convincing to our contemporary ;
but the Lord Advocate addressed them to an in-
fluential body which he wished to conciliate, and to
which they will be most 'convincing. We scarcely
ever heard the a2gumentani ad crumenam more
directly urged than it was by his Lordship, who
seemed to think that if he only put a little more money
into the pockets of the Barristers, he might, by brib-
ing them to silence, be enabled to do what he pleased
Nv it h the people. Fees are most conriecing arguments.
Bur our contemporary makes rather too much, we
think, of a passage in our observations. Alluding
to the grossly defective state of the Law of Eng-
land with regard to Divorce, as admitted by the
very Judges who administer it, and to the pal-
pable injustice of assimilating indirectly the Law of
Scotland to that of England in that respect, at a
time when the defects of the latter were made so
evident, we had observed—" If the English mem-
bers (printed by mistake writers) have not the
courage or the honesty to place the people of Eng-
land on the footing with regard to this class of ac-
tions of the people of Scotland ; let them not, on
the principle of the fox, who had lost his ta:l, seek
to lower the Scotch to the level of the people of
England. The Institutions of Scotland are not in
general so perverted from their ends as the Insti-
tutions of EnOand ; principally, we firmly believe,
from their having hitherto escaped English inter-
ference." On this passage our contemporary re-
marks :

" The Chronicle throws out an unjust suspicion that
the plan is one of English maliguants, acting on the
principle of the fox who has lost his tail, to lower the
Scotch to the level of the people of England.' This we
do not believe, and it is at varience with the motive for
the scheme which he adopts fram the author of the
pamphlet. Of the two conjectures we prefer the latter—
that it is a plan for lengthening the tails of the foxes of
the Court of Session to an equality with those of the
kindred animele on this side of the Tweed, whose fur and
feeding naturally excite the envy of the northern rods,
who, though more numerous, have a smaller poultry-yard
subject to their jurisdiction."
Our observations hardly bear the construction put
on them by our contemporary. We did not mean
to insinuate that the plan to deprive the body of
the people of Scotland of redress is an English one,
het knowing that the head of an English Aristocrat
is a receptacle for all sorts of absurd prejudices,
among which that of excluding the poor from Courts
of Law, by niultingjustice expensive under the pre-
text of checking litigation, is notoriously one, we
thought it by no means an unnatural supposition
that, under the influence of such prejudices, they
might lend themselves to the corrupt views of the
Scotch jobbers, and really imagine that in making
the class of actions hitherto conducted before the
Commissary Court very expensive, they were actu-
ally conferring a benefit on the Scotch. We have
the lowest opinion of the capabilities for Legislation
of the British Parliament, and dread the application
of the notions current in Parliament to a country to
which they are so little adapted. There is one case
in point which exemplifies the danger of allowing
men actuated by English prejudices to interfere
with Scotland. We allude to a late decision of
Lord Wynford in the House of Lords, which, if
we may judge from the language in which it is
spoken of in all the periodical papers of Scotland,
has led to much discontent. In EnglanCt, an unpaid
Magistrate is the god of the idolatry of the Aris-
tocracy, and the aim and object of all the recent de-
cisions of the Judges, and all the recent Statutes, is
to place this personage utterly beyond all contrail].
Lord Wynford, judging in a Scotch case, applied to
it the notions current on the English Bench, that
unless malice can be proved against a Magistrate, it
5s in no ease to be inferred ; so that, except a man
be a downright fool as well as a knave, he may
actually commit the greatest oppression with per-
fect. impunity, The Scotch, however, resent this
attempt to innoculate their system with notions
hitherto foreign to it. A spirited writer in
the Edinburgh Evening Post, of Saturday last,
observes :
" Perhaps the most ridiculous arrangement of which
the Union was the consequence, was that of making an
English lawyer the ultimate Judge and supreme authority
in Scotch law. The Chancellor of England, as our readers
are aware, constitutes in himself the Court of last resort,
in till eases, from this country. It is no imperative part
of his duty to make himself acquainted with the principles
of our law ; and with regard to its practice, Le confessedly
knows nothing. It is literally by a fundamental method
of instruetion that he is expected to render himself in the
remotest degree competent to the task. Intuition, and
tie woolsack, are his only instructors. The thousand
difficulties which the collision of theory and practice must
naturally suggest to every native lawyer, his thorough in-
expesienee cannot even imagine; and his mind involun •
tsrily teeeys for relief from any dilemma into which his
ienoranee only have placed Litn, to that law to whose
study Me whole life has been devoted. And yet this is
the person whose single opinion is to outweigh that of
fifteen of the most erainent lawyers of Scotland ; and who,
from his being held by the Constitution as the supreme
authority in all cases relating to our jurisprudence, has,
from the natural and inevitable tendency of his mind, cor-
rupted the whole pure principles of our law, by engrafting
upon it the abominations of the jurisprudence of England.
The country has for a considerable period viewed with iu-
creasing suspicion the inroads which the legislative mea-
sures of those English Judges, who are merely entitled to
interpret, have mode upon the liberty of the subject ill re-
ference to the Law of Libel. Scotland had too early con-
gratulated herself upon her exemption from the conse-
quences of thes, unwarrantable measures. If it had been
proposed to have made Serjeant Spankie, or Serjeant
`sould or our friend Sir Charles Wetherell, President of
7 rise Co; 7t of Session, the idea, would have been scouted as
.
and yet i is neither considered
t by
utterly prepemiterous ;
the Le be injurious nor inexpedient to consti-
gislature tei'
tute pet feern
p. bi. whole habits, is equally in-
o•additional duties, is more unfit
.esampetent to „1,
and, from hie
for, the
,accomplishment of the .!7ask, so much a superior
authority in the law of Scotland to 'his officer, that his
opinion is sufficient to outweigh the unanimous voice of
tie whole Court of Session."
After a detail of the particulars of the decision in
Boswell and Allardice against Robertson, the writer
goes on lo observe—
.' It is neither founded in law, nor justice, nor expedie
ency. It is seentrary. to every legal, as well as every
rational principle. The very facts which it assumes are
contradicted by tie ineaziable principles of judicial- inter-
pretation, and, above all, it is perfectly contrary to every
doctrine of that jurisprudence whieh he was bound to ap-
ply to the interpretation and decision of the case.
" The first principle involved in the deeisioo of the
greatest authority recognised by the Constitution in Seoteli
law, is, that a Jwlge is entitled to declare iu open Court,
that which our jurisprudence unequivocally declares to be
a positive falsehood, and which, at the same time, may be
entirely ruinous of the character of tile most respectable,
nay, the best born individual in the kingdom, without
being in the slightest degce amenable for such au action.
)t dues not matter that his averment is afterwarde
established to be utterly without foundation, or that he
himself sloes not make the slightest egort to prove it ; it
is a circumstance of no consideration that the effects of
this sharneleeir falsehood are to destroy the whole peace of
tabu:Land temporal fortunes of entire families. A Judge
curl an idiot are placed by Lord Wvnford upon exactly
the same footing; neither of them ie to he liable or ac-
countable for their actions. In,one respect, indeed, they
are different. The madman is secured to prevent him
from doing mischief; the Judge is continued in hie s'tna-
tion in order to enable hint to do more. It is impossible
to prescribe limits to the operation of so monstrous a prin-
ciple. Itt the case before us, indeed, its extremity is 800.
ficiently apparent. In the course of a trial for an insig•
niticant and venial malpractice, the defendant is made
A thousand times worse than he could be by the infliction

of the utmost penalty of the offence of which he was ac-
cused ; be is charged with a crime, which is all hu:-
capital one, without the remotest corroboration of the
accuser's assertion. If such conduct as this is for our
moment to be tolerated, a litigant can never be safe, even
in the Court of ,S,!ssion itself. He may gain his cause,
and, upon moving for costs, his judge may give for answer
that he does not deserve them, for he has been informed by
one scoundrel, who crag told by another villain who was
hanged last Wednesday, that he, the litigant, was a high::
wayman and a murderer. This is unquestionably an ex-
treme case; but it is strictly within the principle of the

while at the same time the averment of the
Judge would be entitled to exactly the same degree of credit,
according to the law of Scotland, as the evidence upon
which Mr. Boswell declared Robertson to be a thief.

Every lawyer, except Lord Wynford, is perfectly aware
that, in the decision or consideration of any case, he is only
entitled to judge of it by the evidence before him. Ile
cannot employ his private information in considering of
his verdict. Nay, he cannot even supply a legal principle
which the litigants have failed to bring before him. This
is not the course that has been pursued, however, by
Messrs. Allardice and, Boswell. They think it no sin to
wander out of the record ; they feel no compunction at ap-
plying some private gossip to a case which appears in a
perfectly opposite light, according to the evidence regularly
and legitimately placed before the Court. They feel them-
selves, as Judges (who ought merely to have decided be-
tween the statements of parties), fully entitled, of their own
accord, to introduce graver matter into the case than the
accuser himself, and to punish with a far heavier penalty
than the utmost extent which the law admitted of, the
crime of which the culprit was accused. We do not
know what may be the interpretation of legal terms in
England. In this country, it is certain that a Judge who
travelled out of the record, or diverged into something
which was not in the proof laid before him by the Fades,
would be considered as having spoken upon subjects
which were foreign to the case. Of the pertinence of Mr.
Boswell's observation, however, the Chancellor appears to
have been abundantly satisfied."

Lord Wynford repeated the usual cant, respect-
ing the obligation under which the country was to
gentlemen who consented to administer justice
gratuitously, and the necessity of coaxing them by
impunity. Our Scotch contemporary observes on

" But it it absurd to contend that a Judge, whose
statements are received with the greatest weight, and who,
ex-officio, should be above all others the most cautious in
tampering with the character of those persons among whom
he has imposed upon him the sacred office of dispens-
ing justice, ought to be the only individual exempted
from the laws which he himself administers. The duties
of a Judge are completely defined by prescriptive ex-
ample. Upon this subject a sort of customary law seems to
have been instituted. It is the most important office, in
regard to the prosperity of the country, which any sub-
ject can be called upon to discharge; and he who has the
presumption to undertake it without being aware of its
solemn duties, ought, unquistionably, to suffer the con-
sequences of his presumption. The country has been too
long persecuted by the evils consequent upon an unpaid
Magistracy. Justices of the peace are notoriously the
must ignorant, stupid, passionate, and prejudiced Judges
that ever persecuted and too tured the poor of any country.
That their office ought to be abolished has long been the
opinion of the reflecting and enlightened. But while the
nation continues to suffer under their incompetency, it
ought certainly to have the miserable satisfaction of some
slight protection against their rashness and stupidity. To
say that they are to he let loose upon a community, to destroy
the character of the most amiable, the most respected,
nay, it may be the most eminent, individuals, by the
;tosse•t calumny and the most unfounded aspersions, is
what the subjects of the realm will never submit to on
account of the mere dictum of Lord Wyncord, when op-
posed to the verdict of two Juries, and the opinions of the
most eminent Judges of that law upon which it is pre-
tended that his decision is founded."

Another Paper,the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle,
reprobates the decision of Lord Wynford in equally
strong terms :—" We will venture to say that an
lawyer of common sagacity will concur with his
Lordship in holding that a Judge is entitled to
wander out of the record, and to found his state-
ment and his judgment upon facts which are not
contained in the evidence before him." Speaking of
this favoured class, the writer in the Weekly Chro-
nicle observes—
" They are not required to le even decently educated.
They may he as ignorant as dirt,' and as ' dull as a ser-
mon,' without the slightest objection. They are riot re-
quired to possess the most remote knowledge of the very
laws they are appointed to administer. There is no pro-
vision against their bring bribed and corrupted. They re •
ceive no such judicial education as removes other Judges
from prejudice, passion, or partiality in their decisions.
They are permitted to take the most active pat t in all po-
litical contentions or provincial disputes, and the people
whom they are appointed to judge are those with whom in
a peculiar manner they constantly and naturally come in
collision. Their conduct has brought them into sovereign
contempt among the enlightened and rational portion of
the population."
It was pretty clear that the Lord Advocate, in
making his observation as to the benefit that would
result from making divorce cases expensive, was ad-
dressing himself to English prejudices, and we think
that our warning, therefore, was not out of place.—
Morning Chronicle.

Having frequently raised our voice against the
disgraceful policy which permitted, or at least con-
nived, at the b•irbarous practice of burning widows
alive in India, it gave us great pleasure to be
enabled to publish, the other day, the order of the
Governor-General in Council, abolishing that most
revolting rite of the darkest and most depraved
superstition that ever afflicted human nature. But,
while we have pleasure in acknowledging the
triumph which humanity has at last obtained by the
influence and power of public opinion, we cannot
but express our regret that the history of British
dominion in India should so long have been stained
by the toleration of a custom so detestable and
sanguinary ! But not only was the practice tolerated
by an English and Christian Power, exercising a
despotic Government over our eastern dependencies,
but there were apologists found for that policy in
England, who attempted to defend it on the ground
that the East India Compauy had no right to inter-
fere with the religioniof the people of Hindostan, and
that it would be dangerous to make the attempt.
That the attempt has been made with perfect safety,
at last, disproves the latter assertion ; arid the
former was a falsehood. There is no authority for
the immolation of widows to he found in those books
which are the source of the Hindoo doctrines. Cor-
rupt and superstitious as those doctrines are, they
inculcate no such violation of the laws of nteure
and humanity. It is the cruel—or, if we would use
a more appropriate epithet, the diabolical invention
of more recent fanaticism, or sordid priestcraft,
working, for its own temporal advantage, upon the
excitable imagination of an , ardent people, sunk in
the lowest state of religious ignorance. Indeed the
introductory part of the Governor-General's order
is as strong a condemnation of the previous policy
of the Indian Government in this respect as can
well be expressed, We are aware that,•for some
time past, the British authorities had placed this in-
human practice under certain regulations, which,
while they were intended to dir,nish the number of
sacrifices, by restricting them, we her eve, to those
which were purely voluntary, had the effect of iv-
coguising the legality of the custom. This was the
natural consequence of putting such a practice undo'
regulation. of police, instead of abolishing it alto-
gether. Now, what does the Governor-General say
upon this subje!,l? The following are his words
—and we request the apologists for the tolera-
tion of this system of superstitious bathe.
rism to mark them, and discover, if they can,
whether we ever expressed ourselves upon this
questiop in terms of stronger reprobation :-lle
says, " The practiee of Suttee, or of burning alive
the widows of Ilindoos, is revolting to the feelings
of human nature. It is no where enjoined by the
religion of the Ilindoos as an imperative duty. On
the contrary,' a life of purity and retirement on the
part of the widow is more especially and preferably
inculcated ; and, by a vast majority of that people
throughout India, the practice is not kept up nqr
Observed. In some extensive districts it does not
exist ; in those in which it has been most frequent
it is notorious that, in many instances, acts of atro-
city have been perpetrated which have been shock=
rug to the Thaws themselves, and, hi their eyes,
nult4`Niut and wicked. The measures hitherto

Adopted to discourage and prevent such acts have
failed of succese, and the Governor-General in
Council is deeply impressed with the conviction
that the abuses in question cannot effectually be put
an end to without abolishing the practice altogether."
If these enlightened sentiments had been acted
upon years ago, as they ought to have been—
for this view of the subject is by no means new—
what a quantity of human suffering, what a multitude
of human sacrifices, what a repetition of tragedies
disgraceful to British power, and criminally respon-
sible in the sight of man and Heaven, would have
been averted—and averted, too, not in defiance of
the religious prejudices of the people, but in con-
formity with the feelings of the vast majority of the
Hindoos But though the Suttee is thus denounced,
the no-less dreadful and sanguinary rites of Jugger-
naut remain. It is necessary also to interpose here,
and vindicate insulted humanity, before the Govern-
ment of India can receive much credit for adopting
a more enlightened policy. Do they aot derive re-
venue from this horrible superstition ? Is that to be
balanced against the crimes which it encourages ?
The priests of our Pagan ancestors, the Druids,
made burnt-offerings of human beings to their in-
fernal gods. The Romans, who did not enjoy, like
us, the lights of Christianity, on making a conquest
of Britain, forcibly put down those revolting practices,
as abhorrent to nature and humanity ; they disdained
to make such sanguinary fanaticism an instrument
for either raising a revenue or extending their domi-
nion. They were not a people accustomed to perse-
cute for difference of religious opinions ; and their
intolerance of Druidism arose, not from its being a
different form of Paganism from their own, but from
its unnatural and inveterate barbarity. They emi-
nently observed the maxim, before the degeneracy
of the empire, that " all classes of people be secure,
in the observance of their religious usages, so long as
their system could be adhered to without violation
of the paramount dictates of justice and humanity,"
.as it is well expressed by the Governor-General in
the order in question. But Druidism did violate
both justice and humanity ; and, therefore, the no- I
mans were so far from wishing to conciliate the de-
grading system, that they extirpated it by force of
arms; nor did they thereby alienate the affections of
the people who had been its dupes and victims ; on
the contrary, they- facilitated their conversion to
habits of civilisation, and by so doing strengthened
their own dominion. They would have acted in the
same way towards the Juggernaut of the Hindoos
which they did towards the Moloch of the Druids.
Would that the Christian rulers of India would imi-
tate their Pagan example Morning Herald.
An outcry having been raised in Ireland against
the plan of Ministers for assimilating the Irish stamp
duties to those of Great Britain, and for increasing
the tax on Irish spirits, while that on rum was left
untouched, we took occasion to throw out a remark
last week on the comparative lightness of the taxes
levied on Ireland as compared with this and other
countries, and judging by the amount of revenue
raised from each. We do not blame the Irish news-
papers for their zeal as anti-taxationists ; and having
helped, however innocently, to provoke the war
now raging in Dublin against even the smallest addi-
tion to the taxes, we feel it but honest to let the
people of Ireland have the benefit of what their own
champions allege the opinion we promulgated
(From the Dublin Morning Post, April 20.)