Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/781

 W. VEEDER: A CENTURY OF JUDICATURE 767 Since the law is designed to serve the needs of mankind, its efficient administration requires a clear and just appreciation of the facts to which it is to be applied. The successful in- vestigation of facts is therefore an essential preliminary to, and a most important element of, a just determination. And a learned lawyer who is wanting in imagination often mis- apprehends the bearing upon the facts of rules of which he has no full and pregnant, but only a dry and technical, knowledge. Of course, the value of such qualities depends upon the extent to which they coexist with a logical basis in the understanding; but in the perfect coordination of these diverse qualities resides the highest judicial capacity. In Cockburn's equipment imaginative qualities certainly pre- dominated. His mind was perhaps too quick and susceptible to admit of the tenacity essential to the highest excellence in the formal exposition of legal doctrines. Hence he was strongest in dealing with facts. At nisi prius his grace of manner, his knowledge of the world, his refined and eloquent diction, and his lucid and orderly intellect, combined to make him an ideal judge. His most conspicuous effort in this sphere was his charge to the jury in the memorable Tich- borne case, in the course of which he formulated with elo- quence and force the true functions of judges and juries: " In my opinion a judge does not discharge his duty who contents himself with being a mere recipient of evidence, which he is afterwards to reproduce to the jury without pointing out the facts and inferences to which they naturally and legitimately give rise. It is the business of the judge so to adjust the scales of the balance that they shall hang evenly. But it is his duty to see that the facts as they arise are placed in the one scale or the other according as they belong to one or the other. It is his business to take care that the inferences which properly arise from the facts are submitted to the consideration of the jury, with the happy consciousness that if he go wrong there is the judgment of twelve men having experience in the every day concerns of life to set right anything in respect of which he may have erred. ... In the conviction of the innocent, and also in the escape of the guilty, lies, as the old saying Is, the con-