Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/326

 216 THE COURTS OF LAW. the law without any legal advice whatever. Being ex- pressly required by the Letters Patent to act "according to the laws of England," some knowledge of those laws was but a jud^e evidently presumed ; but it is not easy to understand how manr ^^ a Court composod exclusively of military and naval officers could be expected to administer such an intricate system of jurisprudence as '^ the laws of England.""^ The ordinary Court-martial was properly composed of such materials, be- cause the offences tried before it were simply breaches of military discipline, the punishment for which was regulated by military law. But here the Court was empowered to deal with the whole range of the criminal law, including both common and statute law; and the trials, moreover. Judge, were conducted by a judge who was required to act as a proaecutor, p^osecutor and a juryman at the same time. Collins was juryman, satisfied that "when the state of the colony and the nature of its inhabitants are considered, it must be agreed that the administration of public justice could not have been placed with so much propriety in any other hands.^'t No doubt it would have been a matter of some difficulty to establish, at the foundation of a colony, a Court of Justice strictly modelled according to English precedent. A jury of twelve men, free from all Crown influence, presided over by a judge learned in the law and equally independent of the Crown, forms the essential feature of an English Court of Justice; but such a jury could not have been got together in the early years of the colony, seeing that there were no free settlers at that period. That was one of the unfortunate results of the system on which the colony was founded. Every person charged with an offence was brought before a The tribunal, the judge of which knew nothing of law, while he Court. was not only a judge but a juryman ; the other members of the Court being officers in the pay of the Crown,- whose notions of justice were derived from their knowledge of Courts-martial. " He is brought before a Court," says Collins, ".composed of a judge and six men of honour, who Digitized by CjOOQIC
 * Post, p. 636. t Account of the Colony, p. 12.