Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/256

 try criminal cases, as they have done since the fourteenth century. There are also small courts called ‘county courts’, for small lawsuits, in some sixty different districts In England. Scotland has kept, since the Union of 1707, her own system of law and law courts entirely different from ours, but from them also you can appeal to the House of Lords. Ireland has the same system of law as ours, but has her own law courts with appeal to the House of Lords. Each colony in the Empire has its own law courts and judges, and appeals from them and from the Indian law courts come not to the House of Lords, but to a few great judges in the Privy Council.

The one really great law reform has been that of the a criminal law. In 1815 over one hundred and sixty crimes were still supposed to be punished with death. There are now only two, high treason and wilful murder, and, unfortunately, people who commit high treason are now too often let off. In 1815 a thief might be hanged if he stole five shillings’ worth of goods from a shop! He hardly ever was hanged, because he was tried by a Jury and a Judge, and juries preferred to declare him ‘not guilty’ rather than allow him to be hanged; so, as a rule, he got off altogether. Even of those who were convicted and condemned to be hanged, not one-tenth were hanged. And this was because public opinion was more merciful than the law. From 1788 onwards criminals who had just escaped hanging used to be ‘transported’ to Australia, and this went on till 1840. The other settlers in that continent naturally objected very much to this; and we now send our criminals to ‘penal servitude’ in large prisons at Dartmoor and Portland instead. No words can be too hard to use against the Tory ministers like Lord Eldon,