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 to
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
authinity 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. 'fake, 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
number 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 are
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 Prius 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 trial of
cases the construction of which shall not fall exclu-
sively on particular localities. Our law seems to
consider that any case relating to the land can only
be properly tried in the district to which the land
lies, subject to a power in the Court to alter the
place of trial if injustice is apprehended from 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 (15/wept 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 caroliva whiobl