* . * - * * The air, however, has
been cleared. It has been made perfectly manifest that there was no ground for any strictures on Lord Hanworth ; nor for any on what Lord Hewart referred to impersonally as the Lord Chancellor's Department (or as Lord Sankey himself preferred to put it, Sir Claud Schuster, the permanent head of that department) ; nor for the belief that the creation of a Ministry of Justice was under consideration ; nor for the allegation that the appointment of a vice-president of the Court of Appeal was intended as a device to prevent a particular Lord Justice from presiding in the ordinary course of seniority. Lord Hewart now accepts, subject to an important amendment suggested by Lord Reading, which secures to existing (but not to future) Lords Justices their rights of seniority, a Bill to which originally he had threatened relentless opposition ; and an episode not altogether auspicious for the prestige of English justice can now be well forgotten.
Previous page
