The Sun.
London, England, 1865-08-03 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TimES.—When Voltaire was ordered by the Se-
nate of Geneva to quit the dominions of the Re-
public in twenty-four hours, the incorrigible scoffer
at all things venerable and sacred replied, " Mag-
nificent Sirs, it requires only three minutes." It
was the first protest of philosophy against the plan,
so much in favour among our ancestors, of cutting
up a great country into little jurisdictions ; of pro-
viding not only that justice should be brought to
every man's door, but that it should be almost
limited to every man's yard. It is astonishing how
much trouble we put up with annually in order to
conform to the time-honoured superstition which
insists on governing England in the time of Victoria
on the same territorial principles as sufficed for her
in the time of Alfred. When there were no roads,
when England was one great forest, when travel-
ling was beset with all manner of dangers and diffi-
culties, it might not be very unreasonable to require
that causes pertaining to a county should be tried
in the county itself ; and this regulation was made
even more reasonable by the consideration of the
different offices performed by the jury of those days
and the jury of the present time. As in so many
other things, we have retained the name, but done
away with the substance, of the institution. In
those times there ,was no such thing as evidence.
Proof was a thing with which a court of justice had
nothing to do. It was assumed that all matters of
fact must be matters of notoriety in the neighbour-
hood, and so a jury was called from the neighbour-
hood to tell the court of justice whatever it might
import it to know. The notion of calling witnesses
to inform the jury
.is quite a later idea. The
theory on which juries were summoned, was that
they knew the fact which it imported the public to
know, and it would therefore have been absurd t 0
call any one to inform them; it would have been
like calling a witness to inform a witness. The place
of such a person was on the jury, and not in the
witness box. These and other similar reasons made
it quite natural to limit the jurisdiction of the Assize
Court to the county in which it was held. Civil
actions naturally followed the same rule, and the
commissions of Justices of the Peace have been framed
on the same principle. When any striking incon-
venience results, the principle admits of modification,
but as a general rule it is strictly enforced. The
judges who sit in our courts do not sit there in their
capacity of judges, but by a special commission di-
rected to them to hear and try causes unless a higher
authority shall before come to try them. The notion
of a Common Law Judge having, by virtue of his
office, jurisdiction over the whole country, which has
been adopted and acted upon in India and our Colo-
nies, has not yet penetrated into the mother country
itself. This administration of justice in compara-
tively small local divisions has many inconveniences
and disadvantages. There is the endless collision be-
tween the jurisdiction of county and borough magis-
trates ; there is the case of scraps of one county in-
cluded within the body of the other; there is the case
of a justice not being able to commit a prisoner on
his own confession, but being obliged to send him
often to a great distance to be committed by another
magistrate. Still it must be admitted the system has
its advantages. It is often convenient to witnesses,
and as between county and county it provides, or
rather would provide if it were strictly adhered to,
, that each county shall bear the burden of its own
crime and its own litigation, and that the time of its
inhabitants shall not be taken up in doing the busi-
ness that fairly belongs to others. Metropolitan
counties have a very considerable grievance in this
respect. Take, for example, what is just now hap-
pening at Croydon. The county of Surrey has, no
doubt, a very considerable amount of business of its
own to transact. Though not possessing many large
towns, except the suburbs of the metropolis, it is
thickly inhabited, and supplies a very considerable
amount of litigation to be worked off from its own
resources. It is, however, saddled with a much
heavier burden ; it has to bear not only its own
duties, but those which are thrown upon it by its
neighbourhood to the great metropolis. It would
seem that the sittings for metropolitan business are
not so arranged as to suit the convenience of liti-
gants ; they ,terminate too soon, and the consequence
is that the ingenuity of their legal advisers is taxed
to find means of trying cases too late for the Lon-
don sittings, which would otherwise be hung up till
after the Long Vacation. The desire is a reason-
able and a praiseworthy one, since it takes the
direction—which the legal profession are not always
supposed to be most eager for—of shortening the
prolixity of proceedings. At this Assize, the anti-
cipations as to the extent of the civil business at
Croydon have been very largely verified. The
lumber of causes entered for trial was enormous—

considerably larger than the number two years ago.
Then the number was 160 ; now it is 186. It seems,
however, that" people deSpaired of trying such a
number of actions, and
.so some causes have been

withdrawn. But the number is still much larger
than has been known for some years past, and 50
of them are special jury cases. Now, it is perfectly
notorious that the greater number of these arc
metropolitan cases, and have been set down at
Croydon for the convenience of parties, because
there are no more sittings for the trial of causes in
London before the Long Vacation. This is a great
hardship to the persons forming the jury panel of
the county of Surrey. It is hard enough to be called
upon to perform the thankless and wearisome duty
of juror in cases arising in one's own county, but the
hardship is very greatly increased when actions not
arising within that county, and of which it is not
for a moment suggested that they cannot fairly be
tried within it, are removed to a neighbouring county.
Why should the county of Surrey be called upon to
find jurors, courts, and all the outfit of justice for
cases in which her inhabitants have no interest, and
which of right belong to other places? The people
of Croydon may, doubtless, be well pleased at
the harvest which such a protracted session of the
Court of Nisi Prins brings to them ; but, whatever
they may feel on the subject, the proceeding is not
the less unfair to the panel of both special and
common jurors. If we are to retain the principle of
local division in the administration of justice, we
ought to retain it in its integrity. If we are to give
it up, we ought to provide tribunals for the triqj of
cases the construction of which shall not fall exau-
sively on particular localities. Our law seems to
consider that any case relating to the land can only
be properly tried in tho district to which the land
lies, subject to a power in the Court to alter the
place of trial if injustice is apprehended fronr hold-
ing it in a particular place. As to cases which have
nothing to do with the land, it seems to be thought
that people may try them wherever they please, and
that nobody is concerned in the matter except the
litigants themselves. This, we submit, is a great
mistake. It'is upon the jurors that the weight of
our judicial system mainly falls; they are amateurs,
while everybody else is acting professionally. The
Judge receives an ample salary and a position of
much dignity and distinction, and, as he must be at
work somewhere, it matters comparatively little to
him where. The counsel are engaged in the exercise
of their profession. To be employed contents their
moderate desire. Give them a brief, a fee, a jury,
and an antagonist.. A witness is, at any rate; paid
his expenses, and, with the. present rapid means of
communication, it matters to him very little whe-
ther his time is consumed in travelling from place
to place, or in dawdling about the court till his case
is called on. But a juror has none of these conso-
lations—he is summoned to perform a public duty,
to bear a burden for the sake of the community,
and the community does not take the least care to
see that this duty is fairly distributed. Jurors sel-
dOm get their wrongs redressed, 'because, being
summoned out of the public, and falling back into
its ranks when their duty is performed, they have
no cohesion or rallying point. But they are, of all
Englishmen, those entitled to the most considera-
tion, and it is the bounden duty of the public, which
throws upon them this labour, to see that it befairly
apportioned among them.
POST.—However different may have been the
opinions which were entertained respecting the pro-
bable issue of the American war, whilst the contest
still raged, there was at least one point on which all
seemed to be agreed. It was supposed that if the
fortune of war proved adverse to the Confederates
active hostilities would simply give place to a con-
dition of chronic revolt, and that although the
armies of the North might overrun the Southern
States they would prove insufficient to hold their
population in subjection. This was the general im-
pression, and even those who were most confident
of the military success of the North admitted that
they despaired of ever seeing the Southern people
once more enter the Union. Nor were the grounds
for arriving at this conclusion unsubstantial. In-
dependently of those political differences which in
the first instance induced the Southern States to
secede, the events of the war were of such a nature
as to excite in the breasts of the Confederates a feel-
ing of animosity towards their former fellow-citizens
which might well appear inextinguishable. The
South furnished the battle-field, and its population
alone realised in all their fearful intensity the
horrors of the war which they had provoked. How-
ever the contest might terminate, it was confidently
declared by every Southerner thit an amalgamation
of oil and water was just as probable as the junction
of North and South again into one people. The
war is now at an end, and although the great work
of reconstruction has scarcely been commenced,
much less accomplished, we have a fair opportunity
of judging how far the predictions of which we have
spoken are likely to be realised. The South has
been overrun; is it probable that notwithstanding all
that has passed the Federals and Confederates
will once more constitute a united nation ? A
speech has just been made by the provisionally-
. appointed Governor of South Carolina which,

taken in connection with the attitude assumed by
the Southern population, may furnish us with the
means of judging of the policy which the conquered
people probably mean to pursue. Governor Perry,
as the nominee of the Government at Washington,
cannot, although a Southerner, be fairly pointed to
as the representative of his countrymen ; but there
is every reason to believe that in the speech to which
we refer, and which was delivered a few days pre-
vious to his appointment, he expressed the feelings
of a large portion of the Southern population.
Speaking of the war, he said no one regretted more
than himself the secession of the States in the first
instance, or felt more bitterly the degradation and
humiliation of now being compelled to re-enter the
Union. It has always been, even amongst the Con-
federates, a moot point whether, notwithstanding
the known hostility of Mr. Lincoln to slavery,
secession from the Union was necessary to secure
the protection of their rights, and it is one which, in
the necessity of things, can never be solved. What
a Republican Government would have done if the
Democrats had yielded peaceful submission to its
authority no one can tell, and it is now idle to
attempt to conjecture. But there can be no doubt
that it cost the South a severe pang to separate
itself from a Republic of which it formed no incon-
siderable part, and which, with much apparent
justice, boasted itself to be the most powerful and
the most prosperous on the face of the globe. Now
there is great reason to think that, notwithstanding
the history of the past four years, the South is not
insensible of the advantages which would accrue
from accepting with resignation the lot which is
forced upon it, and, by bowing to the irresistible
logic of facts, enter with some appearance of wil-
lingness into the partnership which it is impotent to
dissolve. However humiliating and degrading it
may be to re-enter the Union, there are many in
the South who, as Governor Perry expressed it,
"feel that they will be more prosperous and happy
in the Union than out of it," and who are conse-
quently content to co-operate with the Government
at Washington. Up to the present the conquered
people havemanifested that spirit of passive acquies-
cence which might naturally have been looked for in a
nation deprived of the power of even making the
show of resistance ; but when it is recollected that
the majority were of opinion that even this passive
acquiescence could never be extorted from the
Southern people, the probabilities of their once
more putting their shoulders to the wheel with
their hated fellow-countrymen in the North can
scarcely be regarded as so remote as they have been
hitherto considered. Mr. Johnson, though hardly
entitled to the confidence of the Southern people,
on the grounds advanced by Governor Perry—
namely, that he was originally a Democrat and slave-
owner, and voted against Mr. Lincoln on the occa-
sion of his first election, is probably inclined to
make large concessions in order to hasten the accom-
plishment of the work of reconstruction. The re-
establishment of the several State constitutions has
been undertaken, and the late " rebels" are cordially
invited to assist in the restoration of the local legis-
latures. In Richmond some elections have taken
place, and the paroled soldiers of General Lee have
exercised their suffrages as citizens to some purpose
by returning representatives whose hostility to the
Government has earned for them the name of Seces-
sionists. It is, of course, no longer a question of
secession ; bUt if constitutional usages are to be re-
stored in the United States, there is a wide field
for the evolutions of a well-organised opposition.
The South has been conquered, but it is still an
open question how it is henceforth to be ruled.
The combat between Federals and Confederates
and Democrats is about to be recommenced. Under
those circumstances it is impossible to avoid feeling
that the Southern people are exercising a sound
discretion in accepting the consequences of the
military success of their late opponents, and once
more undertaking the duties of loyal citizens to
the established Government. In many respects
the South is much better placed than such nations
as the Polish or the Hungarian, which have endea-
voured in vain to free themselves from an oppres-
sive yoke. The Government in the United States
is constantly changing, and although in the mino-
rity at present, the Democrats may once more
secure the ascendant. What may be the future of
the South it is impossible to say, but it could never
be such as to bear even the faintest resemblance to
that of Poland or Hungary. Nor is it impossible,
or even improbable, that public opinion may change
in America in respect to the expediency of retaining
the Northern and Southern States in the same
Confederation ; and, although unsuccessful in its
recent attempt to establish its independence, the
South may at no distant period obtain, as the result
of an amicable arrangement, that separate political
existence to which thousands of human lives have
been sacrificed in vain. in any event, however, the
people of the Southern States do well to accept their
present lot with resignation, and are wise in endea-
vouring, by such constitutionalmeans as are afforded
to them, to secure respect and consideration at the
hands of their former foes.