Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/196

Rh having twice contested Cardiff unsuccessfully in the Conservative interest, Lord Halsbury, then Sir Hardinge Giffard, Solicitor-General, was elected member of Parliament for Launceston in 1877, and continued to represent that constituency till his promotion to the woolsack.

The traditions of the Temple declare the attainment at once of strictly professional and of political or administrative eminence to be well-nigh impossible. There are lawyers and there are politicians in the High Court of Justice; but the politicians are not lawyers, and the lawyers, for the most part, are not politicians. Sir William Harcourt, for in stance, is a powerful parliamentary debater and an astute party leader, but his ignorance of law is a standing joke in the House of Commons. Sir Horace Davey, again, has forgotten more law than Sir William Harcourt ever knew, and will take his place in legal history with Benjamin and Selborne and Cairns, but many third-rate politicians are greater than he. Sir [Henry James alone among living advocates has taken a double first, in politics and in law. His defence of Mr. Justice Keogh in the famous Galway Election Petition debate; his apostrophe on the same occasion to the Archbishop of Tuam [sic],—"I tell thee, proud prelate of the West," etc.; his management of the Judicature and the Corrupt Practices Acts; his reply to Mr. Goschen on the second reading of the Franchise Bill of 1884, and his speech in the course of the Home Rule debates in 1886,—render intelligible the doubt which Sir Henry James's friends have all along entertained whether his proper place was the Cabinet or the Bench, and explain the ready credence accorded in 1880 to the rumor that he was going to the Home Office as Secretary of State.

Now, Lord Halsbury's reputation is not parliamentary. He has engineered several important measures, but so in their day did Baron Huddleston and Sir John Coleridge. Perhaps the incident best known in the Chancellor's political career is the delay in his admission to the House of Commons in 1877, caused by the writ certifying his election having been misplaced! Neither is Lord Halsbury an eminent lawyer in the strict sense of the term. No conscientious biographer would put him on the same plane with Sir Richard Webster or Mr. Henry Matthews, not to speak of even greater names than theirs. He has never done, and could not do, such splendid judicial work as Sir James Hannen has quietly achieved in his dingy and ill-ventilated court. Lord Halsbury, his official position notwithstanding, must ever be third best in a tribunal to which the Earl of Selborne and Lord Bramwell belong.

Again, the Lord Chancellor's reputation is not derived from any triumphant victory over early difficulties. He was neither a Scotsman nor a poor clergyman's son. He was not called upon to write paragraphs for the newspapers, or to haunt the theatres as a dramatic critic, or to "coach" idiots for a profession which they will only bring into contempt. We must seek elsewhere for the sources of his eminence. Lord Halsbury has risen to the woolsack from the Old Bailey. He has never been Attorney-General; and he was engaged in nearly every cause célèbre tried in the English Courts from 1864 to 1885.

It may be interesting to run rapidly over the chief incidents in the Chancellor's forensic career. In 1864 Franz Miiller was tried for the murder of an English gentleman, Mr. Briggs, on the North London Railway. The excitement to which the case gave rise can still be faintly traced in the pages of the "Annual Register," where the best account of it is to be found. Müller escaped to New York, was promptly arrested on his arrival, brought back to England, tried, condemned, and duly executed, in spite of the foolish efforts of a German Protection Society and of the King of Prussia (who telegraphed to Queen Victoria, requesting her personal in tervention) to procure a reprieve. Now, in this case Mr. Hardinge Giffard, along with