1865. Criminal Law Reform. But while we are thus in favour of the examination of the prisoner within narrowly-defined limits, we are entirely averse to those processes by which on the Continent, and especially in France, it is sought to arrive at the truth. No doubt the true conception of a criminal trial is not that of a lawsuit between the prosecutor and the prisoner, but rather of an inquisition into a crime in which the public is primarily and the prosecutor only secondarily interested; but it does not follow, as seems to be assumed, that because a criminal trial is in its nature an inquisition, the process by which it is conducted should necessarily be inquisitorial. It may be, and we believe it is true, that the form of a lawsuit between the prosecutor and the culprit, into which every English trial is cast, is the very best form of inquisition in important cases; at any rate, the facts in England are brought out with a clearness and a fulness which may very fairly challenge comparison with any trials recorded on the Continent, embodying, as they do, results of months of painful investigation, conducted by the highest judicial authorities with a severity and an urgency which amounts to moral and someWhen a crime is committed in times to physical torture. France, the highest judicial authorities of the district place themselves in communication with the lesser authorities of the locality; these latter designate the person on whom their suspicions fall; that person is immediately arrested, subjected to close imprisonment, and kept in ignorance of the evidence which is obtained against him; he is frequently interrogated by the judge, and every one who has influence over him is employed to induce him to confess. Sometimes, as in the case of Rose Doise, such imprisonment is inflicted as to amount to absolute torture; the same process of imprisonment and interrogation is resorted to with suspicious or unwilling witnesses. It is no unfair criticism on French trials to say that their object seems rather to be to obtain a confession than to sift the As soon as the arrest has been made facts to the uttermost. and the instruction of the cause has fairly begun, the prisoner is really under the ban of the local authorities; people believe that they will get favour with the Government by giving evidence against him, and lose favour by giving evidence for him. His whole life, and that of the witnesses for him, is ripped up and ransacked by a vigilant and ever-present police; and, where this process has continued long enough, its results are resumed in an act of accusation, which is really the speech of a counsel for the prosecution, only taking much more latitude than is usual with us on such occasions. The case is then ready for trial, and with every wish to be impartial, it can hardly be said that the presiding judges, who have been perhaps for months conducting this investigation, can be free from that bias which an hostile attitude to the prisoner so long maintained can hardly fail to create. The prisoner is examined in the presence of the jury by the judge with severity, and, we should say, with a want of candour, which would not be tolerated in England. It is a scene which has been often rehearsed before, and which is got up rather to influence the jury than to instruct or inform the court. We may add that the counsel for the prisoner is not allowed to cross-examine the witnesses. We confess that we infinitely prefer to the system above described the rough expedient of our ancestors, who believed, and assuredly not without sufficient reason, that there can be only one right way of inquiring into the truth; that, as far as proof goes, there is no distinction between the ascertainment of facts involving civil rights or criminal liabilities; and that the form of a contested suit which was found sufficient in one case would be equally satisfactory in the other. While we have felt it our duty to comment thus strongly on the discreditable state of our criminal law, and the hopeless confusion in which it is left, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by those gross and palpable faults of detail to the merits of a system the most just, the most humane, and upon the whole the most honourable to the country that invented it, which has ever existed in the world. It is only just also to an institution which has suffered much from being overpraised, and often for merits it does not possess, to say that we believe the distinctive merits of our criminal law may be almost entirely traced to the institution of trial by jury. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the severity of the punishments which were imposed by the judges and the extreme mildness and fairness of the rules by which the investigations leading to those punishments were regulated. The law of evidence requiring the best proof, the exclusion of hearsay, the confining of the proof to the issue raised, and excluding irrelevant matters, is a humane contrivance obviously meant to protect the prisoner from oppression, and to prevent the jury from being led away by irrelevant topics thrown in to prejudice their minds. The limit up to which the arbitrary interpretation of statutes or the straining of the law against the prisoner could be carried, has always been determined, even in the worst times, by the point at which juries could not be prevailed upon to convict. The necessity of carrying with the court the opinion of twelve ordinary men chosen from the people, and, uninfluenced by professional prejudice, has mitigated the severity 1865. Criminal Law Reform. of judge-made law and kept our courts of justice in some degree in harmony with the public opinion of the day. If the judges have constructed this goodly fabric, they have been, in so doing, in no small degree, though unconsciously to themselves, the agents and exponents of the opinion of the jury, whom they assume to direct, so that the principles of our law may fairly be said to be the result of popular good sense formularised and elaborated by the highest legal skill and acumen. It is not wonderful that such a system created, as occasion required, with reference to particular cases, should be wanting in symmetry, cohesion, and intelligibility. The rough results of popular good sense, however skilfully and however carefully recorded, will ever be so; but it is truly wonderful, and but for the abundant evidence that exists of the fact, would be absolutely incredible, that an enlightened and civilised age should be so careless of the valuable legacy thus bequeathed to it by the recorded and accumulated wisdom of the generations that have gone before it, as to neglect that slight amount of intellectual labour which would be required to bring order into this mass of confusion, and to make our law not only a reasonable and merciful, but a simple, rational, and intelligible system. The worst of it is, that while very considerable efforts have been made, and great expense has been incurred, to reform the criminal law, they have been mostly in a wrong direction; and while the leading fault of our law has been the want of a comprehensive and graduated scale of crime, the labours of our legislators have been directed to create and consolidate anomalies instead of removing them by getting rid of the cause which has created them-a logical classification and clear definition of offences. ART. V. The Iliad of Homer. Rendered into English Blank Verse. By EDWARD Earl of DERBY. London: 1864. THE HE Chancellor of the University of Oxford not long ago established a peculiar claim to the highest academical dignity of the country by addressing the Heir Apparent in an oration of the purest Latinity; and he has now crowned a career of daring if not successful statesmanship, of splendid eloquence, and of the highest social distinction, by no mean conquest for English literature. So little were Lord Derby's literary powers known till very recently, beyond the circle of his immediate friends, that the world read with surprise, in Lord Ravensworth's translations of Horace, an Ode rendered with remarkable grace and spirit by the head of the Conservative party. Soon afterwards a volume privately printed revealed to a somewhat larger circle the elegant uses of Lord Derby's leisure hours; and as he has now himself alluded to this collection in the Preface to the work before us, we conceive that we may, without indiscretion, lay before our readers an exquisite version of the Ode of Catullus to the Sirmian promontory, which has certainly nothing to risk if it be transplanted from the parterre of society into the wider domain of criticism. 'Sirmio, fair eye of all the laughing isles And jutting capes that rise from either main, By cares abroad and foreign toil, we find Once more upon our own, long-lost, long-wished-for bed! Hail! loveliest Sirmio! hail! with joy like mine It will not, we trust, be taken as the disingenuous compliment of a political opponent if we express the pride and pleasure we feel in these productions from a statesman of Lord Derby's eminent position. It is honourable to letters, it is honourable to English education, that notwithstanding the incessant calls of a great station, a great fortune, and a lofty ambition, time remains to him to complete such a task as the translation of the Iliad; and that (as we have seen in other instances) a life of uncommon activity in the arena of modern politics may be allied with an abiding devotion to the serene grandeur of antiquity. Lord Derby appears from his Preface to fear that in this country the taste for classical studies is on the decline. Classical studies can certainly no longer boast of the monopoly they once enjoyed, when they were the only canon of liberal education. But as long as the very first men in the country, such as the late Sir George C. Lewis, Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Derby are also reckoned among its first scholars as long as their example and success reflect back a light upon the ancient sources of thought and eloquence, we cannot admit that the study of the classics in England has lost anything of its lustre. It would be out of place on this occasion to revive the endless controversies which have raged for centuries on the authorship and the structure of the Homeric poems. Even the art of translating Homer is a subject which has been discussed to satiety in endless disquisitions and numerous volumes. The peculiar charm of the two great epics of the Greek heroic age-a fountain of beauty and delight which no man can 'ever drain dry'-lives on in spite of the critics and their rules. The great poems of Dante, Tasso, Spenser, Milton, exhibit that unity of plan and purpose which the strength of a single mighty mind cannot fail to impart. There is no such coherence in the Iliad. The poem which is to tell us of the wrath of Achilles and its inevitable train of overwhelming disasters, is interrupted by a narrative crowded with the successful exploits of chieftains who have lost all remembrance of the great hero of Phthia. There is, indeed, a marvellous climax; but the action of the drama is not uniformly sustained from the beginning to the end. The Father of gods and men, who had sworn with an oath to Thetis that he would straightway avenge the wrongs of her son, is found for a long season weighing down the balance in favour of his enemies. The dream, which is sent to strike dismay into the Achæan leaders, inspires them only with more resolute courage yet these chieftains, in the full tide of success, shelter themselves on a sudden behind a rampart and a trench, merely, it would seem, because a way must be prepared for causeless : |