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some time serve the purpose of protection against the governing power. But this morbid, sentimental public opin ion, issuing its bulls against the administra tion of criminal justice, in the omnipotence of its self-constituted infallibility, does not rest solely on a superficial view of the result in a single instance and a positive ignorance of the evils intended to be reached and rem edied by a given technicality; it rests also on ignorance of the facts in the very case which frees its indignation. A man is killed, and a local reporter, anx ious to excel and pamper to a depraved pub lic taste, with a debauched rhetoric suited to the palate which he serves, heads his report with " MURDER " in large capitals. The man who did the killing, advised by counsel, holds his tongue. The reporter gathers "all" the facts from all parties saving such as are interested in the accused. The public read, this imaginative description, filled with old women's conjectures as to incidents, stated with the direct assertion of acknowledged facts, and launches its verdict in strict ac cord with the alliterative head-lines of the local journal's report of the killing. The case is tried. The excitement has died out, and the dear public are only inter ested in the verdict. Public interest in the facts is dead. They know them from the report of the paper at the time of the killing. The local journal itself sometimes apologizes to its readers for lack of full reports of the testimony, because "we gave them at the time of the killing." The meagre state ments in the daily press of the testimony of the witnesses during the trial are not read. The verdict of the jury, based on the actual facts, is opposed to the verdict of public opinion, based on the assumed facts or

the energetic reporter's conjectures stated as facts. A tirade of abuse is now heaped on law, lawyers, judges, and juries, when not one of the eloquent abusers would have rendered a different verdict had he been in the jurybox. The public should understand not only the necessity of criminal law, but also its potency in bad hands for evil; they should consider the possibility of a Jeffreys; they should re member that in constructing such a sys tem a free people should guard and have guarded their rights. Better by far to per mit all criminals to escape, and each man stand for himself and protect his own life and property against the murderer and thief, than that any man or set of men should have, by pursuing the forms of law, the right and power to steal and kill legally. Let them re member how often tyranny has prostituted the law to its purposes; let them remember the judge who established the precedent that the jury could only find the fact of publica tion, and that the judge should say whether the matter published was libellous or not; let them remember the outcry of Erskine against this abuse and the amendatory act of Par liament, and they will not be so ready to demand the eradication of the forms and technicalities which they now so much abuse. It would be a wide and profitable field for some abler pen to track the provisions of our constitutions guaranteeing certain rights, of which we are now so proud, to the causes which gave rise to them as written law. It would be not unlikely that they would be found to be nothing but the reverse princi ple of some crown-paid and bribed judge acting in the interest of the government and against the people.