number of cases in which sentences in Ireland have been
increased on appeal ;—indeed, this has happened much oftener under Mr. Gladstone's 'Government than under the present Government. Mr. Gladstone disavows all responsibility for the practice, on the ground that he and his colleagues knew nothing of it, and that responsibility begins with knowledge. He even treats it as a matter of the utmost insignificance whether it was his own Government which tolerated so iniquitous, though legal, a practice, or the Conservative Government. The only discredit, he seems to say, attaches to defending the practice, now that it is known ; there was no discredit in his colleagues failing to disavow and denounce it when their attention was not called to it. We hold with Mr. Gladstone that criminal appeals would best be regarded solely as revisions of the sentence on behalf of the criminal. because that gives a leniency to our criminal law which is, we think, very desirable. But it seems utterly unreasonable to treat the present state of the law in Ireland, which makes a criminal appeal a real rehearing of the whole case, as in any sense a gross injustice, and monstrously unreasonable to treat it as a deadly sin of the present Government that it is not particularly repentant when it finds that it is only doing what Lord Spencer and Sir G. Trevelyan did year after year without professing any penitence at all.
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