to the minds of all earnest legal reformers: LEGAL EDUCATION must be advanced, and the enlightenment of jurisprudential lore be made ancillary to the amendment of the law. Without this all hope of any lasting advantage from legal reform will be vain. Such reform must necessarily be the mere groundwork of that which the well instructed and scientific mind alone can quicken into a great system; and without therefore some better provision for the training of the legal intellect than the Inns of Court have hitherto been able to put within the reach of candidates for the Bar, all legislative attempts must fail. The condition of the English Bar in this respect is most extraordinary, most unaccountable. That a man, before the eyes of the world and with the deliberate sanction of his country, should be solemnly invested with the office of a jurisconsult, and be allowed to assume the garb of the most learned and subtle of all professions, without a knowledge of the simplest elements of jurisprudence, nay without possibly having ever opened a law book, does seem a most indefensible anomaly. It is indeed an anomaly that should make the English barrister a more humble man than he is sometimes found to be. Both in its cause and its personal and professional effect it is a scandal to the law. In 1846 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into the subject, and in due time they presented a Report, which, among much trash and absurdity (with, we may add, statements grossly unjust to the Scotch Bar), contains some valuable information. Professor Empson's evidence is deserving of especial notice. He says,

"With an improved education and enlarged reading our law books would be improved too; our lawyers would become more disposed and more competent to reform the law. The best American books on law seem to me to have more range and substance in them, which I partly attribute to the more extensive reading of the American lawyers from French and German books. If you look at the translations by the Americans from foreign jurists they are much more numerous than the English. The civil law is more studied. The consequence is such men as KENT and STORY. I think, unless something is done more quickly than has been done in England hitherto, that the great advance in improvement of the English law will be effected in America rather than in England.'

The whole of Mr. Empson's evidence is most interesting and valuable.

Mr. Bethel, Q.C. is also examined by the Committee, and thus speaks,

"I think I may venture without presumption to say, that any individual taking up a volume of our modern Reports, and observing the manner in which cases are argued, will not detect in them any

evidence of any great extent of reading, of any large acquaintance with the principles of the science of law, any familiarity with the works of foreign and ancient jurists, which are deemed in all other countries to constitute the basis, and the primordia of legal education; he will observe in argument a mere habit of calling upon the memory for the citation of what are more or less apt instances of adjudication of similar points found in the Reports; and in truth the argument is most frequently a mere task of memory, rather than the enumeration and application of legal principles.'

The Committee accordingly reported, that while so many volumes of Reports issue from the press annually, "there is a remarkable deficiency in that higher class of scientific works, in those systematic developments of the history and philosophy of the law (a phrase Mr. Bethel says he dislikes but which he employs for want of a better), which, arising from broader and deeper studies, also tend to render still broader and deeper its practice and administration, and of which we see so many distinguished evidences from the press not only of the Continent but of America."

We must now bring our observations to a close. We have declared our opinions fearlessly and sincerely. Our purpose is the single one to do good; and we may be permitted to hope that we have adduced considerations which will weigh with those who may be charged with the mission of reform. There are prejudiced persons who may regard us as unreasonable legal critics, and some may think us mere utilitarians who would ruthlessly remove ancient landmarks. We would feel the reproach. A "landmark" touches the associations of the mind, and a regretful romance may come over us when contemplating its disturbance. But what after all are we in quest of? That which justice says should be ours. Yet we must not hope for too much. There are expressions and words which convey in themselves more simply and significantly than paraphrase can their own magnificent meaning; which rise up in the mind at once with all the truth and power of language in its greatest elevation,-and when we speak of JUSTICE, we conceive something which is above all material arrangement, something beyond the limits of human organization, of a principle that it is not within the capacity of man to satisfy. We can then only hope for a measure of its grace in our institutions, and so to mould their form as most largely to attract its supreme influence.

R. S.

[We have inserted this article because we are anxious to do even too much "justice to Scotland;" feeling that she has had but a scanty measure heretofore. We need hardly add, that we do not assent to all our Contributor has said on the subject.-EDITOR.]

ART. III.-A MURDER TRIAL IN AMERICA.

Report of the Case of John White Webster, for the Murder of George Parkman. By George Bemis, Esq., one of the Counsel in the Case. Little and Brown, Boston, U.S.

1850.

F the Civil Code and the practice in the United States be worthy of respectful consideration, its criminal proceedings seem to afford us both positive and negative examples no less deserving of our attention.

It has always appeared to us that, in most countries, a very undue standard of importance, as regards criminal cases, obtains in the public mind; determined far less by the difficulty of the cases themselves, and the manner in which they affect public interests, than by the attraction they present to a morbid appetite for excitement in the depraved and idle portion of the community, who are accustomed to batten on the grosser details of dramatic horrors. This standard of excitement is always heightened by the rank of the parties who figure in the case. Until a higher taste be cultivated among us, and the masses of the people become less vulgar minded than they are, it is perhaps hopeless to expect an improvement on the part of the public in this matter. But we demur very strongly to the manner in which the courts minister to it. It is totally inconsistent with the spirit of our jurisprudence to magnify and prolong trials in proportion or indeed with the slightest reference to the rank of the parties who figure in them, or even to the horror of the incidents. We should have imagined a year ago that such a standard of importance was still more alien to American jurisprudence than to our own; and that the stern simplicity of republican judgment would have been mirrored in its courts of justice, and have animated and moulded the conduct of its bar. The recent trial of Dr. Webster for murder in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, is a signal proof that the Americans err more widely than ourselves in the same evil direction.

We made a promise to notice the book in which this trial is very ably reported1 in our last number, and we now redeem it. The book contains the whole trial, which, as we stated before, occupied twelve days, and the report of it, printed in the same sized type as this article, occupies 593 much larger pages!

1

By George Bemis, Esq. Little and Brown, Boston.

The mode of proceeding, or rather the order of proceedings, and latitude for speeches, differ from ours, and give far greater scope for prolixity and needless amplification. This is the programme: First comes the indictment, not unlike our own forms, containing four counts, of which the three first particularise the mode of death, and the fourth, rendering the others wholly superfluous, stating it generally, and describing it to have been effected by "some means, &c., to the jurors unknown." The arraignment takes place before a single judge, and plea recorded. The trial is then appointed to take place more than a month later, when the court consists of three or more of the justices of the supreme judicial court: as is requisite in all capital trials, according to the statutes of Massachusetts. In this case C. J. Shaw and Justices Wilde, Davey and Metcalfe presided. The counsel for the commonwealth were the Hon. John H. Clifford, Attorney-General, and John Bemis, Esq., and for the prisoner the Hon. Pliny Merrick and Edward D. Sohier, Esq.

The attorney-general then rises, and in a little speech informs the court that the grand jury (an incumbrance the Americans have not had sense to rid themselves of yet) have found an indictment against the prisoner, John Webster, for the murder of George Parkman; that the prisoner and his counsel are now in court, with other information equally valuable; and concluding with a formal motion that "a jury be empanelled to try the issue."

Next comes another little speech from one of the judges to the prisoner, informing him of his right of challenging twenty jurors peremptorily, and as many more as he has good cause for challenging. After more of this child's play, we find a peculiarity which is well worth our respectful consideration in England; namely, an inquiry of each juror, first, whether he had expressed such an opinion, or was sensible of any bias in the cause which would interfere with a candid judgment on it, and thus affect his impartiality. The second juror in this trial was set aside because he had. Secondly, according to the 6th sect. 137th ch. of the revised Statutes, "No person whose opinions are such as to preclude him from finding any defendant guilty of an offence punishable with death, shall be allowed or compelled to serve as a juror, on the trial of any indictment for such an offence." On this ground the ninth juror demurred to be After the disgraceful acquittals for plainly-proved murders so frequent of late in this country, owing to the same morbid feeling, it would be very expedient to test our own jurymen similarly. A good deal of time now lost, and justice de

sworn.

feated, might be averted were our jury-boxes equally well weeded.

it.

The jury being at length completed, the attorney-general moves the court, in another little speech, that Mr. Bemis may be permitted to aid him as associate counsel. Now, seeing that there were 116 witnesses examined and cross-examined in the trial, it might have been supposed that the "Commonwealth" would have afforded its attorney-general the assistance of a junior, without the necessity of his applying to the court for We should presume this is scarcely an instance of the administrative economy so highly lauded by the panegyrists of American institutions. These preliminaries over, the attorneygeneral opened the case in a speech which occupies twenty-one pages, and which it must be admitted contains a very full, dispassionate, and lucid statement of the case against the prisoner. A case much more divested of doubt, difficulty or intricacy we have seldom read or heard of; or one which less justified the enormous redundance of matter with which it was belaboured.

We will recapitulate the facts, and endeavour to include every point which had any legitimate weight in determining the guilt or innocence of the prisoner; in other words, all that was anywise relevant to the issue.

Dr. Webster, the prisoner, a professor of note at the Medical College of Boston, had borrowed sundry sums of Dr. Parkman, the murdered man, for which he held mortgage notes from Webster for two thousand odd dollars, secured likewise on his furniture and minerals. Dr. Parkman pressed for payment, and finding that Dr. Webster had deceived him, having pledged his minerals to one creditor, and given lecture fees which he had promised Dr. Parkman to another, he became indignant, accused Dr. Webster of dishonesty, and insisted on the discharge of his debt, and threatened him with a trustee process and legal proceedings, and on the Monday before the murder, which took place on Friday the 23rd of November, he declared to him that "to-morrow something must be done." On this Dr. Webster made very minute inquiries of the janitor respecting the vaults below, and the disposition of the walls and their accessibility. Further demands were made during that week, and on the morning of the murder Dr. Webster called on Dr. Parkman, and made an appointment with him to call on Dr. Webster that day at the Medical College, at half-past one o'clock, to receive payment. The same morning Dr. Webster received ninety dollars from the clerk who held his ticket fees, and he then told the clerk that "he had settled with Dr. Parkman." He then paid this money