is unacquainted with the fact that anciently, in numberless instances, juries served as the servile instruments of regal supremacy or ministerial influence; or that during the contagious mania of the fictitious Catholic conspiracy in the reign of Charles II.; they were the mere tools of legal murder in the hands of the execrable Titus Oates. In some cases, they have effected good by directly contravening the express letter of the law.

According to our sanguinary codes, before sentence of death might be mitigated into transportation to New South Wales, human life was held seventy-five times cheaper than in the age of Athelstan, who, in the tenth century, ordained that any theft to the amount of twelve pence should be punishable with death; and though the value of the coin has since that date diminished to a seventy-fifth part, the verbal rigour of the enactment was retained as late as the present century. It is true, the more a judge was constrained to disproportionate severity by the cruelty of the law, the more were the jury inclined to nullify its inhumanity by the lenity of their verdicts.

But as the true efficacy of criminal laws must be looked for in the prevention of crime; if that object is to be obtained by the dread of punishment, it is surely necessary that a positive and unequivocal penalty should await the offender. In short, as any institution possessing the power to arrest or turn aside the arm of Justice at pleasure, may virtually abrogate any act of the Legislature, the practical benefits undoubtedly resulting from our darling trial by Jury, cannot be considered as elemental and inseparable parts of its first formation.

The political influence of the judicial power on the past destinies of England is so strongly delineated in the pages of her annals throughout an uninterrupted series of centuries, that to its exercise we may frequently trace the causes of many apparently strange phenomena in the course of her historical progress. In these more enlightened days of freedom we look back with equal surprise and pain on the readiness displayed by the Judges of former ages to meet, on all occasions, every arrogant wish of their sovereigns, however unjust and unconstitutional. From the first of the Norman princes to the last of the Stuarts there was scarcely a single request of arbitrary royalty which the Judges did not receive and sanctify into an actual law. All the demands of despotism were readily interpreted by them as legal assumptions; and as such, conceded and confirmed. In vain might the Parliament strenuously endeavour to awaken in them a feeling of patriotic conscientiousness, or the proper pride of independence. Their moral courage sank before a full conviction of the consequences of a refusal, and the temptations of a compliance to the will of the monarch. On the one hand they were exposed to persecutions from which not even the power of Parliament could shield them; on the other, rewards and pompous distinctions awaited their submission. Thus the lower they prostrated themselves before the Crown, the higher their gaudy elevation among the people; the less they fulfilled the duties entrusted to them by the constitution, the more splendid the trappings of slavery bestowed on them by their lords. Under Edward II. the Judges were enjoined to conform in their proceedings and decisions strictly to the laws, without paying any regard whatever to any contrary orders, though given under the seal of the state; and a second statute, in the

reign of Richard II., even prohibited the issue of any such mandates. And yet, so unstable and anomalous were the principles and practices of that turbulent period, that bribery and intimidation prevailed to an unprecedented extent among the Judges, who were not ashamed to denounce as acts of high treason all participation in maintaining the validity of a legislative edict, though recently established with the royal consent, when the king subsequently chose to revoke his solemn affirmation. A similar sentence was pronounced against all transactions of the Parliament preceding the settlement of matters specially pertaining to the Crown; as also on any accusation brought before the House touching the ministers of the Cabinet, without the authority and sanction of the Sovereign.

It is interesting to contrast the indications of the growing spirit of liberty displayed by the Commons in this reign with the subserviency to despotism shewn by their legal protectors. "It was agreed by Parliament," says Cotton, "that the subsidy of wools, wood fells, and skins, granted to the king until the time of Midsummer then ensuing, should cease from the same time unto the Feast of St. Peter ad vincula; for that thereby the king should be interrupted from claiming such grant as due." On another occasion, the Commons went so far as to vote a petition to Richard, recommending frugality in the royal establishment; and in order to promote it, desired that the Court should not be frequented so much as formerly by Bishops and ladies. This so seriously offended his Majesty, that the mover of the petition was given up, and condemned to die as a traitor. The Archbishop of Canterbury, however, and the other prelates, returned good for evil, and obtained the early reformer's pardon.

In the year 1591, the whole of the assembled Judges solemnly declared that England was an absolute empire, of which the monarch was the absolute head. This judicial testimony remained from that time the leading article of political belief with their successors; and all the exertions of the Senate to establish as a fundamental principle the independence of the administrators of justice proved fruitless, until the Long Parliament, in 1641, passed a statute, ordaining that thenceforward a Judge should be entitled to hold his office as long as he was morally and physically capable of exercising its functions; thus releasing him from his previous dependence on the will and pleasure of the Sovereign. But notwithstanding that enactment, the dispensing power of the Crown was regarded as a State law, down to the revolution of 1688. It was still later that the olden usage of opposing the opinion of the majority of the Judges, on important points of public rights, to the constitutional resolutions of Parliament, gradually fell into desuetude, as the power of the latter acquired strength.

Burke, who, as all know, was an enthusiastic patriot and warm admirer of the institutions of his country, nevertheless, did not hesitate, on one occasion, to declare that in the whole frame of the constitution there was not a single guarantee sufficiently strong for the people to rely on in safety, if the Judges were permitted to expound, dictatorially, the laws of that constitution; for more licentiously despotic dogmas can scarcely be imagined than have been laid down by certain Judges of England.

Mill, also, in his History of British India, observes that the submissiveness of Judges to the arbitrary commands of kings and cabinets is

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sufficiently attested by one of the most conspicuous component parts of the British constitution: namely, the existence of the Jury, which viewed in any other light would appear not only unnecessary, but even injurious; and that there is not a second article in the whole system, the correctness and necessity of which has been more confirmed by a consecutive series of numerous facts.

The illimitable royal prerogatives, chiefly derived from the ancient exercise of club law, by which the Norman princes domineered over their native vassals and conquered subjects, resisted for many centuries the feeble attacks of the British Parliament. At no period, perhaps, were the avowed pretensions of the throne more lofty than in the reign of Elizabeth. It is a noticeable fact, that in one of the last parliaments summoned by her (1601), we find even Francis Bacon thus worshipping the Queen's prerogative, in a spirited debate concerning the crying grievance of monopolies. "As to the prerogative royal of the prince, for my own part I ever allowed of it; and it is such as I hope will never be discussed. The Queen, as she is our sovereign, hath both an enlarging and restraining power. For by her prerogative she may set at liberty things restrained by statute law or otherwise, and secondly, by her prerogative she may restrain things which be at liberty. I say, and I say it again, that we ought not to deal, to judge, or to meddle with her Majesty's prerogative!" A petition to the throne was then the only allowed mode of interfering with the exercise, however inordinate, of any royal privilege; but "the right divine of kings to govern wrong," gradually became subject to bolder questioning. True devotees in the cause of "kingcraft," the Stuarts, though they possessed neither fixed revenues, nor standing armies to support their inherited claims, only grew more self-willed in asserting them, till the fate of the first Charles awfully shewed that the altered spirit of the times would no longer submit to the impositions of prerogative in its native garb of irresponsible aristocracy.

The final overthrow of still struggling absolutism in the person of James II., decidedly and definitively warned his successors, that the acts of open tyranny by which our monarchs were wont to enforce their dictates in the iron ages, must be carefully avoided in future. If, therefore, any similar advantages, so desirable to sovereignty, were yet to be obtained, the object could only be effected under a modified and very different semblance. Time, the true sorcerer, gradually wrought this political metempsychosis, and burly Prerogative, in the smiling form of Influence of the Crown, drew plenteous resources, not from the fears but the foibles of the senate. In plain words; court-cunning and covert corruption were employed, instead of barefaced force, and equally palpable subornation, in bringing over the members of parliament to an obsequious concurrence with the royal pleasure. At a far earlier period, to the disgrace of England, her nobles and legislators were accessible to foreign bribery. In 1554, the emperor Charles V, remitted no less than 400,000 crowns to purchase partisans in the parliament, and promote the ulterior views involved in the proposed marriage of his son Philip with Queen Mary. "A pernicious practice," says Hume, "of which there had not hitherto been any instance in England." But though no precedent strictly parliamentary, perhaps, existed, yet in the reign of Edward IV.

that monarch's Lord Chamberlain, his Lord Chancellor, the High Admiral, Master of the Horse, and several other great lords, all received regular pensions from the Eleventh Louis of France; and Philip de Comines records, as an extraordinary trait of independence on the part of the chamberlain (the Lord Hastings, of dramatic celebrity) that when the special messenger of Louis waited on him with the first payment of the offered annual 2000 golden crowns, and pressed hard for a receipt, Hastings answered, "Monsieur Cleret, what you desire is not unreasonable, but this present proceeds from your master's generosity, not any request of mine. If you have a mind I should receive it you may put it into my sleeve, but neither letter nor acquittance you are like to have of me; for to be free with you, Monsieur Peter, it shall never be said for me, that the High Chamberlain of England was pensioner to the king of France, nor shall my hand be ever produced in his chamber of accounts." Cleret left the crowns, and the wily Louis not only commended the conduct of Hastings, but continued his annuity without ever again requiring a receipt. That Charles the Second was himself a pensioner of France, is as notorious as that his ministers employed similar means to forward their designs in parliament: still a total resignation of all intimidatory measures did not take place until after the constrained abdication of James the Second had taught, in terms not to be forgotten, the imperative necessity of consigning the rights and privileges of the strong hand to the sepulchres of their feudal founders. From that epoch, as we have before observed, the monarchy and the parliament began to compromise their unprofitable disputes. Instead of contesting encroachments on the debateable grounds of their respective powers, they came, step by step, to a mutual good understanding; and thenceforth, rewarded by the crown in proportion to their services, the representatives of the people, so purchased, shared the contributions exacted from their constituents at large.

The first appearances of this new order of things were discoverable as early as 1690, when William III. indignant at the prudent reserve evinced by the whigs in their proceedings, threw himself into the arms of the tories, and Sir John Trevor, the speaker of the House of Commons, undertook to secure for him a preponderance of votes in that assembly. Political intrigues of this delicate nature, however, require not only peculiar finesse and secresy in arrangement, but a provident skill in carrying on, perhaps only to be obtained from practice; and some careless mismanagement of the official novices concerned, led in 1693, to very awkward questioning in the House of Commons relative to the exact meaning of the compound phrase, "secret expence and payments to members of parliament," which had strangely found its way into the accounts of expenditure laid before the House. Suspicion fairly avowed, temporary opiates lost their power; and in the following year a formal public enquiry was instituted, which finally brought to light an amazing mass of most unprincipled venality. It was found that the speaker and various members of the House of Commons were the bought, servile tools of the ministers, who also, in turn, had followed the foul example, and sold their services to the East India Company: that body having spent upwards of 90,0007. in "special service money," at the period of renewing their charter, which took place about that time.

Under the auspices of the goddess Pecunia, the governor of the

Honourable Company, Sir Thomas Cooke, a member also of the Honourable House of Commons, had gained the good offices of the Duke of Leeds, divers lords, and courtly courtesans; nay, even the private purse of Majesty itself, opened to receive propitiatory offering!! A bill of pains and penalties against Cooke passed the Commons, but was violently opposed in the Peers by the Duke of Leeds: and Cooke petitioned for an act of indemnity. At last, the king in person, pressed the house to turn all its attention to the more urgent affairs of state. Compliance was deemed expedient. Both Pro and Con were quietly dropped, and future attacks on the Duke of Leeds guarded against by sending the material witnesses abroad. Of the other illustrious, noble, and patriotic personages implicated, no further notice was taken, and the whole exposure sank into oblivion without producing even the slightest attempt at reform. The art and mystery of ministerial persuasion, of course, improves with its progress. Walpole, who could boast of knowing the exact price of every marketable vote in the house, and who hardly ever found any that could not be purchased for a proper "consi-de-ra-ti-on" was admirably fitted, by the unscrupulous but dexterous line of policy pursued by him throughout his long parliamentary career, to extend the influence of the crown over the entire range of public business. This spreading ascendancy, so adverse to the spirit of the constitution, received from him the title of "management of the House of Commons ;" and its operations were committed to the guidance of one of the secretaries of state, through whom the offices under government, prebends, sinecures, pensions, posts in public buildings, lottery contracts, and places in the Treasury, might be obtained. By a judicious distribution of these "loaves and fishes," the minister constantly commanded a majority in the house, and this conventional corruption, which infected all who came in contact with the cabinet, was the more irresistible in its advance and dangerous in its effects, the less it had the appearance of assailing the constitution, and the less those thus virtually bought were likely to be losers either in public opinion or parliamentary importance. Burke observed in one of his writings (Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 1770) that since the revolution of 1688, nothing had been planned against the existence of parliament!-Certainly not; Parliament had become part and parcel of royalty. It was no less advantageous to the court to avail itself of the House of Commons, as an intermediate power between the ministry and the people, than profitable to the mercenary representatives, who thus screened the creatures of the crown from public obloquy, by tacitly betraying the trust reposed in them. However ready they were to let the usufruct of their votes, they never would sell the property itself—the right of voting. Looking to their own interests, the most obedient agents of the crown were, also, the most strenuous advocates for the rights of the House. The greater the private profit derived from the hire of their constitutional privileges, the more anxious they were to establish and extend them. Thus it was argued that the liberties of the people were by no means affected through the arbitrary powers exercised by the House over the subject's person and property.

(To be continued.)