The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-03 00:00:00

ccAting their way out, and beating a hasty re-
treat, as best they could, under the circumstances.

The transposition of things bet- mem the main
forces of the confronting belligerents,—the Confede-
rates being placed, as we have intimated, in the
Upper Potomac, and the Federals, on the contrary,
rather perillously, to the south-east, of the Blue
Ridge Mountains—this total transporition of things
there between the principal belligerents, serves to
explain, or at any rate to render c omprehensible,
what were otherwise quite inexplicable, if examined
merely by the light of earlier tidings, namely, first
of all, the proffered resignation of his command by
General MEADE, and, directly after the announce-
ment of that most surprising step on the part
of a reputed victor, the formidable threatening by
General LEE of the immediate return of the Con-
federate main army into Maryland! The truth, in
point of fact, comes out thus rather oddly, to the
ffect—that the successes about which there has been
lately so much bounce and vapouring among the
Federals, from the PRESIDENT downwards,
turn out to be very little if anything of successes,
at any rate to be very equivocal successes after
all. The Federal advances have been all of a
sudden interrupted. The pas de charge is no
longer beaten upon the Federal drums. On the
contrary, the sounds coming to us, across the At-
lantic, from the Federal camp, opening and closing
these latest scenes, shall we say in the Fifth Act of
this direful tragedy of the American War,
are like the sounds indicated by the old stage direc-
tions in the opening and closing of the latest scenes
of the fifth acts of some of the historic plays of
SilmisPEßE—" Flourish of trumpets," those were
especially audible, it may be remembered, in the
late Serenade of Mr. President LINCOLN! And
" Alarms," exceedingly audible these latter in the
resignation proffered by the Federal Commander-
in-Chief, and in the threatened recrossing of the
Potomac, back again into Maryland, by the Con-
federate Commander-in-Chief. One consideration--
perhaps the most startling of all—must press just
now heavily upon the Federal authorities, both
military and governmental—namely, that unless
the main army under MEADE retreats soon in its
turn, or, at the very least, acts there with the utmost
possible caution, west of the Potomac, south of the
Blue Ridge, its flank may be assailed by the Con-
federates and Washington itself uncovered !

Of all remediable evils one of the most striking
and urgent in its demand upon public attention is
the mortality at present existing among our troops
in India. The State is in a measure answerable
for the lives of all its subjects ; it is bound to see
that they are protected from violence and from de-
leterious influences which can be removed by its
authority. But it assumes an especial responsibi-
lity with regard to those whom it takes into its
own service, after ascertaining that they are in good
health and free from disease, transporting them
suddenly into a foreign country where the climate,
the ways of life, and risks to health and life, are
altogether different. When we are told that men
in India die at the rate of sixty in a thousand per
annum, that every three years the Indian army is
comparatively renewed, it is certainly high time
to inquire into the causes of such a rate of mortality.
The requisite information has recently been given
to the public in the shape of the report of the
commission appointed to inquire into this matter,
and it leads us, while lamenting over the many
valuable lives needlessly sacrificed hitherto, to hope
that for the future the risks to life in England and
India may be put more upon a level. The situa-
tion and construction of the barracks is, of course,
one prominent feature in the changes recommended.
The sites of those at present in use are often most
unfortunate, while they are ill-drained, ill-ventilated,
and ill supplied with water. We have heard of the
barracks at Madras which stood positively on the
shores yrt were surrounded by a wall so high that
the rate of sickness and mortality inside was
alarming. Sir CHARLES had the wall lowered, and
increased the number of doors and windows, to the
immediate benefit of the inmates. Such in-
stances, while showing that the climate of
India is not answerable for all the sins
laid to its charge, proves in the
most melancholy and convincing manner how
greatly we have slighted the common laws of phy-
siology in a land where certainly men cannot afford
to truffle with their health. Men might languish
and die for want of fresh air in our own country,
as unhappily they too often do in our crowded
factories and workshops. If a dead wall is built
round a large establishment apparently for the very
purpose of keeping out the sea breezes, we need nor
wonder at the baneful effects. Madras is, at the
best, an unhealthy place, and there is no reason
why the most salubrious spots possible should not
be selected for our troops. Thanks to the improved
means of communication we need no longer fear
to station them upon the hills, from whence the
electric telegraph and the train could bring them
at short notice when the lines are in working order,
The regiments could be removed from one spot to
another so as not to expose the men continuously
to the bad effects of an insalubrious locality. The
evidence proves that 58 out of the 67 per 1,000
who die yearly in India, die from the fatal zymotic
diseases which are engendered by the combination
of three evil influences—heat, moisture, and decay-
ing vegetation. The only cure for the first is to
select the most favourable spots possible for the
construction of barracks, the fullest and freest ven-
tilation, and the selection of the dress, food, and
customs most adapted for the climate, The mois-
ture is of course to be cured by drainage, and the
removal of the soldiers from the low marshy ground
where they are now too often located. The effects
of decaying
vegetation should surely be espe-
cially guarded against in a climate which
the most thoughtless and ignorant must
pereeive renders the evil so great, The
supply of a sufficient quantity of good water is an-
other indispensable reform which will be more easily
carried out when the canal and irrigation works are
extended. The plentiful use of cold water should
be encouraged among the men, instead of hindered,
as at present, by all sorts of obstacles. Then again,
it is a question whether the rations given the sol-
dier are altogether suited to the climate, and it has
been wisely suggested that the young recruits going
out to India should not be supplied with spirits on
shipboard, as spirit drinking is one of those habits
which India renders dangerous. It would be well
if a little more pains were taken to show the 111
whet they must do and what they mast avoid if
they would retain their health. They are mostly
entirely ignorant--how should they be otherwise I'
—of
the plan of life they should follow, and the
young recruit will
probably buy his experience
dearly enough in an
attacks
timacpkleorfali el lsn
foress t thhea
gt
ui
indj
auns
es
him for life. if a few
of the soldiers were freely
circulated among them
they would be able to understandb the reason of any
of their customary indulgene slt
icing forbidden or
fresh regulations enforced.
while for trouble and expense to be taken.
worth
Every
life lost in India is a costly loss to the seern:ee
above this is the moral obligation. England has
no right to send her men to another sa untry to
die
of preventible causes—she must no longer send
them into known and open danger without taking
the smallest precaution against it. It is in truth ,

rather in ignorance than in wilfulness that our
authorities have erred, but this can no longer be
our excuse, and we trust before many months have
passed away (he aspect of affairs in our Indian
army will be altogether altered.

Closely connected with the bill of the Lord Chan-
cellor for a certification of our statute law is the
subject of legal education. When once we have
succeeded, as we trust we shall ultimately succeed,
in reducing the pleadings and practice of our courts
to a single intelligible and practical code, embrac-
ing common law, equitable and ecclesiastical juris-
diction, and having for its object the solution in its
most genera' terms of the general problem how to
separate le.w from fact, and to state the questions of
either which arise for the decision of the court, it is
obvious that the substantive law of the land will
receive a consideration and attract a study which has
hitherto been denied to it. Heretofore so compli-
cated have been, and still are, the rules and princi-
pres which direct the conduct of a suit, and the
manner of stating the case of either party, that they
have occupied the attention of the practitioner, if not
to the exclusion, yet in some degree to the neglect, of
the systematic study of the law itself. Now, during
the last 30 years much has been done to sweep away
those abominations which in the course of centuries
had crept into our courts both of law and equity.
But still very much more yet remains to be done,

and it is not to be denied that when these

distracting and disturbing causes shall have been
removed the spirit of inquiry and improvement
which is now monopolised in the consideration of
the procedure of the Courts will find its natural
field in the amelioration of the law itself. We shall
then no longer be content with a law founded on
obsolete principles, whose very origin is founded on
curious antiquarian r-search, and whose absurdities,
when applied to the views and transactions of
modern times, are remedied by arbitrary exceptions,
alterations, and qualifications, introduced to meet
the expediency of the moment without the slightest
reference to symmetry or coherence. The law will
have to be recast into a science resting not on his.
torical but on ethical principles; not on dark feudal
maxims, but on the dictates of an enlightened
jurisprudence. It therefore becomes extremely im-
portant to ask, where is the machinery in this
country for carrying out a legal education which
shad qualify our rising lawyers for the noble but
laborious field of enterprise which undoubtedly
awaits them ? We may put the question more
broadly and ask what machinery does there exist in
this country fur imparting any legal education at all.
We have learned societies possessing the monopoly
of the bar, and able to annex what conditions they
please to the attainment of the rank of barrister-at-
law. Any one who should peruse the names of the
grave and learned persons who preside over these
societies, or who wander through their spacious
halls, their noble libraries, and their quiet gardens,
will of course suppose that not only is the character
of advocate reserved to crown the labours of the
successful, but that it is the pride and delight of
the benchers of the inns of court to organise and
superintend a system by which the thorny paths of
the law may be made accessible, and industry and
talent conducted at a moderate expense, and with
speed and certainty, through every stage of legal
proficiency. Alas ! such an observer would little
appreciate the functions which claim the exclusive
attention of these learned bodies. To receive the
rent of a certain number of chambers, to receive the
fees of a certain number of calls to the bar, and
to eat excellent dinners, are vocations so engrossing
that they have no time for legal education.
In the year 1852, eleven years ago, the year
after our first International Exhibition, when all
the world was wild with progress and advance-
ment, the Inns of Court made it compulsory en and
after Trinity Term in the above-named year to all
students who should not then have kept more than
four terms, either to undergo an examination, or else
to attend a year's lectures during four consecutive
terms. But even this small and niggardly instal-
ment of that legal education for which the Inns of
Court are debtors to the public has been regarded
by those who gave it in no friendly spirit, and has
not as yet been folio wed up by any attempt to found
a school in which law may be thoroughly and sys-
tematically taught in all its branches and under all
ita aspects, practical, antiquarian, and ethical. We
fear that the power which is destined to supply this
mighty void in our educational system is to be
sought elsewhere. The business of toe Inns of
Court is to give the degree of barrister, leaving the
person who seeks it to judge of his own fitness, or
to assume it if he choose with the consciousness of it.
Thus the legal profession is choked with useless mem-
bers, who seek access to it without the slighest inten-
tion of practising, but merely to give their friends an
excuse for placing them in situations requiring a
knowledge of the law which they have never learned,
but to the knowledge of which, by the gross neglect
of their trust, the Inns of Court have permitted
them to make pretension. Those students, on the
other hand, who wish to become not only barristers
but lawyers, have only the melancholy choice of
either embarking without chart or compass oa the
vast ocean of law on which the keels of their pre-
decessors leave no track, and possibly losing a year
or two in misdirected studies, or of placing them-
selves at a heavy expense in the chambers of a
pleader or conveyancer to begin at the wrong end,
by applying to the emergencies of practice the prin-
ciples of a science they have never learnt. This
proceeding is about as reasonable as if we should
call on a student in divinity to preach a sermon be-
fore he has read the Bible, or in medicine to perform
an operation before he has learnt the use of the in-
struments and the position of the arteries. Yet this
is positively the only legal education we possess (as
far as the four Inns of Court are concerned), and it
is only wonderful that with no better assistance the
standard of legal acquirements is preserved. It is
not the etiquette of the profession to teach or learn
law in any other way. And though:the Inns of Court
are full of young men both able and willing to teach,
any attempt to form classes and to facilitate and to
cheapen the introduction into rudiments of law, has
been discountenanced by professional etiquette, and
would be opposed by the xis inertia of the Inns of
Court. Not only do these learned bodies do next to
nothing themselves for legal education, but as every
attempt to supply their deficiencies is an implied
and very forcible censure of their scandalous re-
missness and inertness, their conduct and example
operate as a strong discouragement to efforts to
organise legal education in any other quarter.
The day will assuredly come when an account of
their stewardship will be demanded from those
learned societies, when it will be asked what use
they have made of their splendid position, as keep-
ing the key of an enlightened and honourable pre-
f essn
of ,towardswho carrying
out the object for the pur-
pose was entrusted to them, the
o la
pw er
diffusion of legal knowledge, and the ascertainment
of fitness for the trust which every advocate takes
upon himself. It will be found that they have done
nothing beyond keeping enormous taverns and
bartering the degrees, with the distribution of
which they -were intrusted, in exchange:for fees and
compulsory dinners. They have been rigid about
eating but careless about learning, strict about
money but negligent about knowledge, lavish to
the stomach but niggards to the mind. If the degree