The Sun.
London, England, 1861-01-21 00:00:00

THE GREAT SLIEDDEN CASE.

The following letter on this extraordinary case
appears in the Atlas of Saturday last :
The remarkable and interesting legal case of
" Shedden v. Patrick" has been so much of late be-
fore the public, that Ido not doubt the greater
number of your readers are acquainted with the
features which distinguish it, and with the cireum-
stances, speaking generally, with which it is con-
nected. I shall not therefore enter on the details
of the story; but as I have been much struck with
one or two essential points relating to it, I desire to
call the attention of the public to what appears to
me to be the exceeding hardship of the case. I have
particularly noted, on looking through the most
material papers, tha:, with the sole exception of
the Supreme Court of New York State, which came
to a decision in the plaintiff's favour on the testi-
mony of 15 witnesses whose testimony was read to
a jury in open court, all the other legal bodies be-
fore whom the case was brought appear to have
decided it on isms quite irrelevant and unsound.
There seems to mo to have been much cunning
management—riuch pernicious legal acumen at
work against t'ie plaintiff and his claim, so muoh
so as to give rise to strong suspicion of colluson. I
state my own impressions, as derived from a careful
study of the intrinsic features of the case, as well
as from the public reports of the matter at issue ;
but it would appear, from all that has transpired,
that in point of fact the Sheddens do really rest,
and have rested all along, the equity and justice
of their case upon the allegations they have made
of clear and undoubted fraud, founded upon bona
fide evidence, which has recently come to light.
Indeed, these allegations would appear to have
made a strong impression upon some of our leading
men; for not only was Lord Harrowby so impressed,
and also the Earl Grey, who brought the casa be-
fore the House of Lords four years ago, but the
venerable Lord Lyndhurst and the aoate and learned
Brougham apparently adopted them, as justified
by the circumstances of the case. However, it is
not my purpose, at the present time, to enter on
the merits of this interesting cause celebre ; but it
is indispensable to call attention to one flagrant
instance of injustice, of which, so far, the plaintiff
1 has been the victim.

It is known to all the world that we English
pride ourselves, and justly pride ourselves, upon
our trial by jury. We consider it the great palla-
dium of our liberties, and the true conservator of
each and every individual right that we possess. It
is chiefly in this respect that our jurisprudence is
considered so much superior to that of other nations
and the knowledge that the main facts of a case
will be decided by the dicta of 12 honest and im-
partial men, and not permitted to be tampered with
and garbled by the turns and twistings of the law,
confers a trust and confidence on the decisions of
our courts, which are not enjoyed in like degree by
any tribunals in the world. Your readers are aware
however, that there have long been courts in Eng-
land to whom juries were unknown, and who rest-
ing on the principles of the Roman civil law decided
by written evidence, and dispensed entirely with
that wholesome public test to which the evidence of
oral witnesses is subject, to the manifest disadvan-
tage of the justice of the case. The Court of Chan-
cery, however, has long abandoned the pernicious
system of the civil law, and in our day will always
look to juries to enlighten it when the facts before
it arc obscure.

The very serious disrepute into which oar civil
courts have fallen was the occasion of the somewhat
recent, though long-looked for establishment of the
present Court of Probate and Divorce; a court
which, being charged with judging causes of the
deepest import to our feelings and our happiness,
to our social order and our moral state, is more
especially bound than any other to be most scru-
pulous in its dealings with the suitors who appear
before it. Now this court has special power, con-
ferred by a recent Act of Parliament, to summon
juries in all cases where the merits rest on facts,
and it does appear to me a manifest injustice that
this proceeding was not resorted to in the cause
which is now before us. The presiding judge,
in fact, to the great surprise of the by-
standers, went the length of saying that
he and the other judges were the jury, and were
competent to decide as to the facts, no less than
upon the law. But this is quite unconstitutional.
It is the undoubted privilege of Englishmen to
have the benefit of an impartial jury, and this great
safeguard of our rights should never be withheld
when required by the suitor to be used, or even
when the facts are of sufficient complication to
render a very strict investigation needful. That
the absence of a jury in the Shedden casewas most
injurious to the plaintiff's cause, is manifest from
the fact that there resulted from it a very great
suppressio veri, for a mass of evidence of grea
importance to the plaintiff was rejected and ex-
cluded by the judge upon his own responsibility,
which a jury would most certainly have sifted to
the bottom when made aware of its existence by
the counsel, and would not by any means have suf-
fered it to be refused ; while, upon the other hand,
the only evidence adduced by the other side came
from the accomplices in the frauds alleged, but yet
was wholly and entirely permitted and received.
As respects the present case, however, it would
seem that further proceedings will be taken, so that
probably this injustice will be rescinded, and set
aside, and sure I am that till that is done no deci-
sion on the case will be accepted by the public as
resting upon a just and impartial basis, Moreover,
it is a well-known maxim of the English common
law that the heir at law to an estate cannot be pre-
vented from resorting to a jury to settle the right
and title he may be able to put forth to it. And it
is equally well known that questions of descent are
questions of fact, involving the most sacred inte-
rests of society, and affecting from generation to
generation the succession of British subjects to
every species of right known to our jurisprudence.
But there is something more. I will not undertake
to say how far the absence of a jury in the Shedden
case may be attributed to a traditionary feeling
which the Court of Probate may have imbibed
from the obnoxious predecessors it was established
to replace, but I cannot help reminding your read-
ers and the public that the learned and illustrious
Judge Blackstone, in his most able " Commentaries
on the Laws of England," lays a very peculiar and
emphatic stress upon the fact that, when, upon the
discovery of the Pandects of Justinian, and their
adoption in the European courts of justice gene-
rally, those of England took them also as their
guide in much of their jurisprudence, the studeNtg
of the Inns of Court of Common Law adhered with
resolution to that famous Lex non seripta, which
for so many hundred years had been the safeguard
of the liberties and rights of the English people;

and they necessarily resisted all the efforts, both
open and insidious, which were made by the
civilians to acquire for the newly imported code
of jurisprudence that supremacy—that unhealthy
and unjust supremacy, I will say—which has
ever since rendered the continental courts of justice
with the exception of those of France, a byword
for legal trick and office malversation, when com-
pared with the honest, straightforward action of
our own.

I trust that, for the public good, and for the be-
nefit of all heirs at law, and of the suitors whose
domestic troubles drive them to the newly•estab.
fished court, that not only in the Shedden case, but
in every other which may rest chiefly upon facts,
the technicalities of law will be avoided, and the
right to obtain the honest and impartial verdict of
a jury deciding upon truth and justice, will hence-
forward never be withheld.

It is among the singular features of this cele•
brated case that, besides occasioning the suicide of
two persons implicated in the frauds alleged, it was
made by our great novelist the groundwork of one
of his most stirring tales. In the novel of " Guy
Mannering," the characters of Hatterick, Glossin,
Vanbeest, Brown, and others, no less than the cir-
cumstances of the story, and even the localities
pointed out, have the directest possible reference to
the progress of and the actors in this exciting and
real drama of private life.