A FAMILY COMPACT.
A case is proceeding in the Court of Arches which is extraor- dinary not only for the depravity involved in the facts, but for the_pasition in which Justice is placed by the family connexions : of theZeurt itsalE. Every "court" has somefamily connexions; but the Court of Arches is **limited, and the connexion in it is so wide, that at length we have an instance in which a party to the suit, the lawyers, counsel, and judge, are all connected, not only by marriage but by personal intimacy ; insomuch that it really looks as if the opposite party were appealing not to the public law of the land but to a family council. The leading facts of the case in question are these. In 1838, Mr. John Edward Geils, then a cavalry officer, married a Miss Dickenson, a girl of eighteen, who was heiress to a fortune of four or five thousand a year; and he took her to live with his re- lations at Dumbuck in Scotland. According to her own account, she lived most wretchedly : Mr. Geils enjoyed her money, treated her with humiliation and neglect, bestowed his favours on ser- vant-gir/s, used rough and violent language,. threatened personal cruelty, and himself invaded the conjugal couch at times and in ways the most nefarious. There are counter-charges,—mainly, that Mrs. Dickenson, the mother, had made advances to Mr. Geils before his marriage with her daughter, and had been repulsed by him like another Joseph ; and that the present accusation was the result of a conspiracy against him by mother and daughter. The case is such that there must be the most revolting depravity on one side or the other • for either the charges are true or they are invented, and on either supposition the depravity is shocking. It is possible also that a defenceless, perhaps a weak woman, has undergone the most flagrant wrongs. She it is who appeals for protection to the law.
But the law is administered by the family connexions of the husband. The ramifications of the alliance which connects Mr. Geils of Dumbuck in the Scotch county of Dumbarton with the Court of Arches in London are complicated. Mr. Geils has a brother-in-law, Mr. Nepean, whose wife is implicated in the case as a witness : the father of Mr. Nepean is the Reverend Evan Nepean : the proctors for Mr. Geils are Messrs. Jenner and Dyke ; his leading counsel is Dr. Jenner: the judge before whom the case is brought for trial fulfils these patriarchal relations—he is father to Mr. Jenner, uncle and father-in-law to Mr. Dyke, father to Dr. Jenner, father-in-law to the Reverend Evan Nepean. In the formal interrogatories, Dr. Addams, the counsel for Mrs. Geils, fetches out the fact, that when Mr. Jenner went to Duna- buck to take the evidence of witnesses, he was a guest of Mr. Nepean from the Saturday to the Monday ; and his younger brother, Mr. Arthur Jenner, another son of the judge, who " wished to see the country," stopped for two or three weeks as a guest. The facts are thus stated by another relative, a "Mrs. Colonel Geils "-
"Mr. Jenner, the proctor, did attend the execution of the requisition for the examination of witnesses on the ministrant's allegations at Glasgow in the months of March and April last year. He spent one Seuday here. He came late on the Saturday, and left early on the Monday: this visit, I should say, was to Mr. Nepean. His younger brother, Mr. Arthur Jenner, was a guest also at Dumbuck at that same time. He came with his brother, and staid a few, I don't exactly recollect how many days, after his brother bad left. He remained to shoot ducks with Mr. Nepean on the river. He also is a son of the judge of the court in which this suit was and is depending."
Dr. Addams was challenged by the judge to avow or disclaim the composition of the interrogatories which drew forth these awk- ward statements : Dr. Addams avowed that every word had been drawn by himself—
"I had not only reason to believe, but to know, that Mr. Gas had expectations of success in this cause from his conuxiou with the judge: I knew that the cause was conducted in the office of Messrs. Jenner and Dyke, one being the son and the other a relation of the judge; that one of his advocates, Dr. Jenner, was another son of the judge; that Mr. Nepean was a family connexion of the jucigt; and that two other sous of the judge had been guests of Mr. Geils at Dumbuck, and one of them a visitor there for several weeks."
Sir Herbert Jenner Fust complained of the insinuations con- veyed in the interrogatories, and put forth a defensive remark: Dr. Addams, in his answer, utters a further complaint—
Sir H. Jenner Fust—" The public should know the situation in which the Court is placed. In the Judicial Committee or the Courts of Law, one judge may withdraw; but could I refuse to accept the letters of request in this ease, or de- cline to sit and hear the cause?"
Dr. Addams--" All I can say is, that it is an unfortunate state of things, even if it occurred only once; but it is of perpetual recurrence: I see a phalanx against me which quite oppresses me. I have borne it a long time."
Dr. Addams may be wrong in his inferences, but it is un- fortunate indeed that he should have it in his power to assert such facts; or that he should be able to institute comparisons like the following between the practice of his own court and that of °triers- " It [a jealousy of personal bias in the judge]. is so much the constitutional doctrine of the law in this country, that formerly a judge of assize could.not hold a court of as size in his native county, on a supposition that the connexion might bias his feelings, though he was not a single judge, determining questions upon written evidence, hat upon evidence taken vim vale and with the inter- position of a jury. in the Courts of Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, and Ex- chequer, when a case comes before the Court in which one of the judges had been counsel, he declines to sit. On the appeal in the case of Mr. Wood s will before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Sir Frederick Pollock challenged Dr. Lushington as a member of the Committee, merely because he had been counsel in an early stage of that case; and the exception was allowed: and I happen to know that if the exception had not been allowed, Sir Frederick Pollack and Sir Thomas Wilde, the other counsel, would have thrown their briefs upon the table and refused to argue the case." In the Arches Court, the evidence is written ; there is no open- ness, excepting in the argument and judgment; there is no op- portunity, as there is in other courts, to note the signs of undue communication. Sir Herbert Jenner Fust speaks as if he re- gretted a position which he cannot help : it may be so ; but that fact only proves how necessary it must be to revise the whole
constitution and practice of the court, in which the administra- tion of the law is made to wear the aspect of a family business, and the judge is forced to occupy a position so unseemly.
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