The Sun.
London, England, 1868-08-11 00:00:00

ARBITRATIONS AND THEIR COST.

The Pall Mall Gazette calls attention to the great cost of
arbitrations at law. An arbitration suggests to ono conci-
liation, and has a smack of cheapness. In actual practice
an arbitration is nothing but a lawsuit of the
most lengthy kind in which everything is paid
for by the litigants at the very highest price,
nothing being supplied by the public. If A and B quar-
rel about a comparatively simple question—the war-
ranty say of a horse—the public finds them a court, a judge,
and a jury, before whom they may if they please toll their
own story in their own persons as long as they please, and
practically at no expense except that of their own
time and labour, and the time of their witnesses. If
the dispute is very complicated—if, for instance, it
involves the examination of complicated mercantile affairs
in which all sorts of questions, both of law and of fact, aro
involved—they must first of all hiro a room for the hearing
at so much a day, they must then biro a judge at so much a
day, twenty guineas, ten guineas, six guineas, three
guineas, according to his position, the nature of
the case, and the length of tho sitting. Their judge
will have other business, and will often go off in
the middle of the day, for a longer or shorter time, to
attend to it. There will be no fixed rule as to
the time when the court is to sit, and they will have to
bargain and higgle with the other side and to dunce attend-
ance from adjournment to adjournment till the matter
is settled, and it may and often does drag on for many
months, possibly for several years. At last the judge
gives his decision, but his fees must be paid before
any ono knows what it is, and those fees not only re-
ward him for the labour of hearing the cause, but include a
stamp duty on the judgment and the law stationer's
charges for copying it out. Surely this is not only
selling justice but selling it uncommonly dear, and to a man
who has already paid taxes for which ho ought to get it
gratuitously. It may be asked, what is the remedy?
The Pall Mall Gazette does not profess to bo able to sug-
gest one complete in a) its details, but the rough outline
of one is not, it thinks, very hard to draw. It certainly is
impossible, in many instances, that a case should be
tried out before a judge and jury. It would
be a mere mockery of justice and waste of the
public time to attempt to do so. A trial before an arbi-
trator is thus a necessity ; but why should not the arbitrator
be a public officer, appointed by the judge and paid by the
public, and put under regulations which might bo devised
without very great difficulty as to the times and places
of his sittings ? The arbitrators might be the very same
men as sit at present, but they would sit in a different cha-
racter and with a different authority. ,

ATTACK OF A BRITISH GUNBOAT ON
SUPPOSED CHINESE PIRATES.

The last mail from China brought an account of an
attack by the British screw gunboat Algerine on some
Chinese junks, which were supposed to be pirate vessels.
In reference to this account the Straits Times of the 4th
July makes the following extraordinary statement :
"A very painful discovery has been made in connection
with the engagement the Algerinc lately had, as described
'.n the last report, with a fleet of Chinese junks, supposed
•to be pirates, down the west coast. One of these, it will
remembered, was captured, and brought into Hong Kong.
It was here ascertained, after a while, that the fleet had
not been a pirate fleet after all, but had simply been
composed of Canton trading junks, on theirway to Hainan,
which had been sailing in company for their own protec-
tion. It must be understood that the trading junks are
almost as much in fear of the Chinese Government gun-
boats as of the pirates. Latterly in particular these revenue
cruisers have been levying black mail at sea over and
above the regular duty which the Chinese merchants
have paid on their goods. Of course such proceedings
were utterly illegal, but the victims had no remedy
at their disposal. To resist the cruisers, they had, it
seems, determined to sail on this voyage strongly armed,
and in company. Of course it is very painful to think
that a British gunboat attacked them with round shot
and grape, and slaughtered immense numbers of innocent
persons. That the junks brought their misfortunes on their
own head by pertinaciously refusing to shew their papers
is but au imperfect consolation. The Algerine had a Chinese
mandarin on board, by whose authority she attacked the
junks, and whether he was misled as to their character, or
deliberately made use of the English gunboat as a tool
with which to wreak vengeance on the native merchants
who had succeeded in escaping from the Government
' squeeze,' is a question not easy to answer."
The same journal gives an account of an attack by
pirates on the North German barque Lesmona, while on a
voyage from Singapore to Saigon :
" While becalmed in the Gulf of Tonquin she was taken
—actually captured, looted, and then scuttled—by Chinese
pirates. The vessel seems to have had eight double-
barrelled breech-loading muskets on board, and a large
quantity of ammunition, but the crew refused to fight,
and allowed themselves to be taken by one pirate junk,
and boarded by only 20 or 30 natives. This is the first
instance in which a European vessel has been attacked
for considerably more than a year."

PRIZEFIGHTERS ON RAILWAYS.—There is a • sec-
tion in the New Regulation of Railways Act, published
on Monday, that a railway company " knowingly " letting
for hire a train for prizefighters, shall be liable to a fine
of £5OO, one-half to be given to the informer, and the
other in aid of the county rate.

Mr. Thomas Clapham has again been charged be-
fore the Leeds magistrates with permitting the performance
of music at the Royal Park without a license. Mr. Clapham
made a long address, disputing the action of the bench in
"this" and the many former cases in which he bad been
fined ; but ho was again fined £lO for tho offence on Satur-
day and Sunday, August Ist and 2d, .£5 for each day.
The wheat importations of the first half of the pre-
sent year have been 23 per cent. in excess of those of the
corresponding period of last year, and 54 in excess of those
of 1866. Russia contributed 25 per cent. of the total;
the United States, 22 per cent. ; Germany, 16} per
cent.; Egypt, from whence last year the quantity was insig-
nificant, 13 per cent. ; Turkey and the Danubian Principali-
ties, 11 per cent. ; 111yria, Croatia, and Dalmatia, 3} por
cent. ; Chili, 2} per cent. ; Denmark, 1} per cent. ; British
North America, 1 per cent., and other countries 4 per cont.
A MußnunEn.'s IMPULSE. —Gunner Benjamin
Sheldon, who was hanged at Lucknow for having shot
and killed Bombardier Wall, made a strange confession.
On the day of the murder he had been led " by the
kindness of his friends," to drink to excess. "In the
evening," he says, " I must have been at roll-call,
although I do not recollect it ; and the first thing
I do recollect, and after leaving the canteen when it was
closed, was finding myself at the cot of Corporal Wail
with a carbine in my hand. I cannot tell whether
Corporal Wall was asleep or awake. It was then, as in
a moment, I felt impelled by some uncontrollable impulse
to shoot him. I tried not to do it, but I had no power—
it was as if I could not leave the spot. It seems to
me as if I had been under a strong and irrisistible
temptation of the devil. Ido not remember discharging
the carbine, or speaking to anyone ; but my next conscious
moment was when I was being handcuffed in the guard-
room, as one of the handcuffs nipped me. In was not until
the next morning, when I was told of what had happened,
that the circumstance of having been at Corporal Wall's
cot flashed upon pae." •