Table Talk - 1.7.1871

Note: original spelling has been maintained.

THE word jury denotes, in short, an institution so commonly known and so sacredly regarded as a sort of palladium of British liberty—namely, Trial by Jury —that we shall say a word or two concerning what is known of its origin among us. Perhaps we should rather say that our remarks would take the form of a speculation about the origin and growth of trial by jury; for of the early history of this method of deciding disputed questions of fact, very little is known accurately. In our research, we soon get into the far-back ages of fog and mist, where history gropes her way with faltering and uncertain step. There is, in fact, no means of discovering when trial by jury began in England. Juries sat to try cases in Henry II.’s time. Now, what were Henry II.’s juries like? It is a matter of the purest conjecture. We cannot say, and we cannot find out. The growth of trial by jury has probably been a gradual process. Its origin was, with little room for doubt, as follows:—In the early times of our own history, a small number of men lived together: they constituted a tithing, or a larger number a hundred. Now, these names have no sensible meaning, if we regard their ancient meaning: they denote merely the limits of topographical boundaries, the space within those limits. Then, they really meant an association of ten families in a tithing, or a hundred families in a hundred. A man committed a crime in a hundred, say. He wishes to purge himself of his imputed guilt. His jury, by whom he was tried, were the men of his own hundred: they knew every act of his life—his incoming, his out-going, his innocence, or his guilt; they constituted the jury by which he was tried; and the peculiarity of their case was that they tried the cause, having a complete previous knowledge of all the facts. Herein lies one chief difference between our ancient and our modern jury. While the jurors of early times possessed a full knowledge of all the facts of the case, the modern twelve—“good men and true” —are men caught haphazard in the streets; we may say, men who are supposed to be perfectly innocent of any knowledge of the facts of the case they are to try until they hear the evidence. After hearing that evidence, they tell the judge what they think about it. It has not been for so very long a period that the fear of a packed jury has ceased in England; and in the last century a celebrated judge said it was one of the highest feats of constitutional government to get twelve honest men into a jury box. It is thus established that a modern juror is the very opposite of the old jury man: for the one entered upon a trial, in all cases, with a knowledge of the facts of the case; the other, as a rule, knows no thing of them until they are disclosed in evidence. And this knowledge possessed by the old jurors was a matter of necessity. Take the case, for example, of a small village nowadays. Everybody knows everybody else’s business; and, if the men of the village tried the criminal themselves, ignorance of facts and freedom from prejudice would be alike impossible.

But how far these ancient trials proceeded before all parties got tired of the affair, and threw the game up to rush off to settle the case by trial by ordeal, or trial by wager of battle, it is of course impossible to determine. What their form of procedure was we do not know; but, as far as the juries are concerned, we may safely infer their origin as dated above; and we see their gradual extension from the men of the tithings and hundred to those of the vicinctum or vicinage—in fact, drawing the jurymen from a larger area. Their proceedings, in fact, seem to have been with the object of “purging” the man—that is, coming forward to swear to his character. Their criminal trial proceeded, apparently, something like a modern preliminary police inquiry—learning all they could of a man's character from his neighbours. There was, in the early feudal times, a system of guarantee. The tithing man was to a certain extent answerable for the men of his tithing, and so on. A. B. guaranteed the good conduct of C. D. People living together were answerable for one another; and when one was charged with a crime, the others came forward to swear to his character. The criminal had to purge himself of his guilt among the set he lived in. As to the evidence given at these trials, a complication arises from our ignorance of the value of that evidence. Every man's oath had a value, differing according to his status in society. In fact, they had a line, and all above it were white, and all below, black sheep. Thus, the king's oath was above all question—he could not be wrong; the lord’s was—to speak within the mark—at least forty times as trustworthy as the vassal’s; the freeman’s evidence was taken and believed, or not, according to circumstances; but the serf was such an indifferently honest rascal that he could not be believed at all, and so his evidence was not allowed to be taken.

While entertaining for the memory of Dr. Johnson as great a regard as is compatible with seeing his faults, and while I am inclined to estimate his great genius at what is at least its proper value, I should be one of the last to attempt to endow him with any gift of prophecy. But it is, perhaps, worthy of remark at the present time, when balloons have so suddenly and unexpectedly been put to a practical use, and our letters from Paris constantly arrive par ballon monté, that Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, talking of science with the Artist in that Happy Valley which Dr. Johnson described with such unrivalled power, curiously enough, discussed this subject. Wings for flying, however, rather than balloons for sailing, occupied the Artist’s attention in the Happy Valley. “ How must it amuse the pendent spectator,” he says, “to see the moving scene of land and ocean, cities and deserts! —to survey with equal security the marts of trade and the fields of battle, mountains infested by barbarians and fruitful regions gladdened by plenty and lulled by peace!” But there is a danger in this art. What would be the security of the good, if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army falling through the clouds, neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas could afford any security. A flight of northern savages might hover in the wind, and light upon the capital of a fruitful region that was rolling under them.” As it is, the people of the capital, and not the northern savages, have made the most use of their knowledge of the art of mounting into the air. The only prophetic part of the account is probably to be found in the fate of the flier. Appearing duly equipped for his aerial journey, one fine morning, on the top of a little promontory, “ he waved his pinions a while to gather air, then leaped from his stand, and in an instant dropped into the lake: ” whence the Prince Rasselas pulled him out, “half dead with terror and vexation.” We shall never have wings we can fly with, nor balloons that we can guide through the ocean of air; therefore, we must content ourselves as best we may without them.

Hanging War Correspondents was suggested, half in earnest and half in grim jest, by the once very great military “ swell” —though since so bursting like a brilliant bubble—Marshal Le Boeuf. Now, we do not wish to be revengeful, and still less bloodthirsty, from esprit de corps; but in these particular days, when human life is regarded as of less account than in almost any previous period of history in the prodigality of its waste, one really might be pardoned for the passing thought that if any man ever deserved to be tried by a drum-head court martial, with the usual foregone conclusion as to hanging or shooting, one of the very first ought to be this same ex-Marshal Le Boeuf; to be immediately followed by the Duke de Gramont and the Chief of the Commissariat Department. But on the other hand, and apart from the question of hanging, several of our friends among the War Correspondents have certainly run very great risks by their imprudence of pen, and utter want of reticence and self-control, on many important occasions. In the excitement of the scenes that surround them, they often seem totally to forget, in their anxiety to send the news of important coming events, that they are betraying war secrets.

The preservation of comestibles in a fresh, and therefore palatable, state is a question of the first importance. In some parts of the world, the bounty of nature provides, and the paucity of inhabitants maintains, such a glut of animal food that it is comparatively valueless; while in others, chiefly old and highly civilized communities, the price of the most approved animal food is such as to put it practically out of the everyday reach of the poorer classes of the population. We have had to thank the Australian Government on many previous occasions for transmitting to us many useful books relative to that important colony, its social state and material prosperity—books of statistics, carefully compiled, and printed and circulated at the public cost. Of a packet of such works, recently received, we propose to make a few notes from a volume containing abstracts of English and colonial patents relating to the preservation of food, compiled by Mr. Archer, the Registrar-General of Victoria. Hundreds of patents have been taken out, during a period extending from 1691 to the present day, for methods or processes by which articles of food may be preserved in an eatable condition for a considerable length of time. All these methods may be reduced and placed under five general heads:—Reduction of temperature by cooling in various ways, Deprivation of moisture, Salting, Exclusion of moisture, and by the employment of Antiseptic agents. Of these various processes, the third is, and has been for ages, in common use; while the first is most successful in cases in which the meats or other provisions are to be kept and sent to a distant market in a comparatively fresh state. The first patent granted in relation to the artificial preservation of food was for “Preserving fish, flesh, &c.: Porter, T., and White, J.: 1691, October 7 (No. 278);” the next on the books of the Patent Office is for “Curing salmon, &c., with spices: Cockbum, A.: 1763, June 29 (No. 793).” In 1780, a patent was granted to J. Groeffer for a method of preserving vegetables; in 1791, to W. Jayne, for preserving eggs; and after the year 1800 similar grants became very numerous. The following figures, relating to this subject, are of interest: In the United Kingdom, up to June 8, 1869, no less than 460 patents had been granted to different persons for methods of preserving, or otherwise economizing, articles of food. In addition to these, a large number of patents have been granted to inventors of new processes, having the same objects, in New South Wales and Victoria; in which districts, of course, the matter is one of very great interest, as the colony has all to gain by the discovery of any cheap and effective mode of landing in Great Britain its own vast surplus supply of animal food. It is to be regretted that—although, as our figures show, so much attention and the labour of so many minds has been turned to this subject—no very satisfactory result has yet been obtained. Possibly, complete success is not very far in the future; at least, let us hope so.

A country parson writes: Let me add, yet another example, to those already adduced in “Table Talk,” concerning the strange and incoherent replies frequently given by children in our country schools to the questions that are put to them impromptu. The other day, I went into a little village school, where a class of boys and girls were reading from one of Murby's  “ Excelsior” series of books. It was a little story how a poor boy went to school, and how the richer boys “shunned him.” It occurred to me to inquire, “What did they do when they shunned him?” Not a soul could tell me. At length a gleam of intelligence passed over the face of a little boy; so I expectantly asked, “And what did they do when they shunned him?” Then the boy made answer, “If you please, sir, they took his boots off.” I may remark that there was nothing of the sort in the story, so that the explanation was evolved out of the little boy's internal consciousness.

“Get out of that, and let me in!” is an interpellation I can never hear without a disposition to assist the one in possession against the invader. What has our good old servant, letter Z, done, that he should be pushed from his time-honoured place in the English language, to make room for the usurping S, which had already a quite sufficiently important position therein? The new-fangled way of spelling is to oust Z and substitute S, in such words as organise, centralise, &c. Now, S has two sounds, a hard and a soft, undistinguishable in writing. No one, for instance, could know by sight that the verb to close and the adjective close were pronounced differently; whereas Z invariably sounds the same. Yet, perversely enough, this capricious and perfectly uncalled-for attempt to eliminate the last letter of our present alphabet is made at the very time when philologists are seeking to enlarge it by new signs—distinguishing the th in thee from th in thunder, and representing other diverse sounds, so as to assist the learning of English pronunciation by the eye. How is a stranger to know that the S in civilisation, organisation, and such like words, is not to be pronounced as in isolation, idiosyncracy, &c.? I call upon all Englishmen who respect vested rights which have never been abused to uphold those of the threatened Z; and, regardless of fashion, continue to employ him as before, where he has always given satisfaction.

Why does not some enterprising stationer make pads of foolscap, lineal and otherwise, as the blotting-paper pads are made? In the first place, they would give a pleasant soft surface to write on; and, in the second, enable people who, like myself, suffer from lumbago, and don't like stooping—(I always write at a reading-desk, and it is very irksome after three or four hours)—to take their ease, their pad, and their pipe, in their armchair.

A Birmingham tobacconist, in advertising a new smoking mixture, says that “the borough analyst has certified that there is no foreign substance in it.” This is, certainly, a candid statement; though it is but a questionable recommendation for the so-called tobacco, which, from the terms of the advertisement, may possibly have been manufactured from the leaves grown in the nearest cabbage garden.

Genuine courtship should have the true ring. Of course, that ring is the wedding-ring.

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