22 JULY 1871, Page 2

This, however, it did not do. The popular feeling at

Green- wich, as we have remarked elsewhere, is extremely violent and definite against the accused, and on Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday great crowds assembled before his father's house, and paraded Greenwich with the view of expressing the detestation of the mob for the acquitted. On Monday, effigies of Mr. Pools, grasping a plasterer's hammer and in the act of murdering a woman, were carried down the street in which his father lives, —the young man himself having been compelled to leave the place. This is really disgraceful conduct, for which, if it were fre- quently repeated, the proper remedy would be a special local fine, such as the police-rate which is inflicted in Ireland on districts where murderers are screened from justice. it matters not whether the law is set at defiance by too little or toe great zeal for a conviction, if it is sot aside. If a verdict, given after a ease has been patiently and properly tried before a judgo and jury, is to be reversed by vulgar popular opinion, and the • acquitted condemned by lynch law, we 'night just as well have no regular Courts of justice at all. The verdict of a jury in a

• man's favour should be held to be final, —at all events, unless new and quite independent evidence, not produced at the trial, has been discovered. And in this Eltham ease there is not even a pretence that any such evidence exists.