Sir Alexander Cockburn's letter to the Lord Chancellor on the
duties proposed to be conferred on the Judges by the Corrupt Practices Bill has been published, and seems to us, we confess, cavalier in style and weak in substance. It conveys the judges' "strong and unanimous feeling of insuperable repugnance to hav- ing these new and objectionable duties thrust upon them." It ex- presses their unanimous opinion that " the inevitable consequence of putting judges to try election petitions will be to lower and degrade the judicial office." " We are at a loss, to see how Par- liament can, with justice or propriety, impose on us labours wholly beyond the sphere of our constitutional duties, and which no one ever contemplated the possibility of our being called upon to perform." We thought the constitutional duties of the judges were the duties which they are called upon to perform under the Constitution, and that Parliament has the constitutional right of changing the Constitution, and not the judges. Sir A. Cockburn ends by urging that they must necessarily receive special aid for such work, and that it will be much simpler to give this work exclusively to the new men and leave the regular judges unmolested. Much better for the regular judges, no doubt, but not much better for the public, if men utterly unexercised in judicial duties, and without any prestige of impartiality, are set to the most difficult and the most delicate judicial work which any Court ever sifted.
