THE LAST CAUSE CELEBRE.
IT is certainly not from meanness or from want of interest in scenic display that the British people has for two hundred years consistently refused to subsidise the theatre. If it were, the public which is always murmuring about the poor, would certainly raise some objection to the devotion of a large portion of its grants for the administration of justice to trials which are nothing but scenic displays for the amusement of the idle, held at the public expense in judicial Courts. Un- fortunately, we see no sign of such an objection either in Parliament, where much more frivolous matters are discussed every day, or in the Press, though it is full of jeremiads over luxury and the woes of the unemployed, or in the speeches of mob orators, who grow frantic over other forms of extravagance. On the contrary, there is a sort of consensus that a "great case" of any kind is a great and a beneficial amusement for the community, and the appetite for causes célèbre s is growing so fast, that in a year or two, at the present rate, the Courts will have nothing to do but try them, or rather, will be trying them to the exclusion of everything which they right- fully ought to do. The subject of the trial does not seem to matter. If it is rather dirty, or can be made dirty by the admission of extraneous evidence, so much the _better ; but if not, almost anything will do. All that is required is a plaint which interests any one of the many worlds of London, the fashionable, the theatrical, the sporting, the artistic, the finan- cial, or even the professional; that there shall be a prospect of scandal; that there shall be well-known witnesses, and plenty of them; and that evidence shall be likely to be discursive ; and at once Judges, counsel, and reporters set themselves to make of the trial a grand entertainment lasting many days. So eager is everybody, that even money, without which the lessee of an ordinary theatre cannot move, does not appear to be in- dispensable. Several great suits have recently been fought by persons without means ; and in one very celebrated one, the defeated plaintiff actually pleaded in the Bankruptcy Court that he was justified in being bankrupt, because he owed thousands of pounds on account of expenses incurred in a perfectly voluntary suit. Apparently, though that is almost inconceivable, everybody who fought his battle fought on credit. Such cases may be unusual, but there can be no doubt of the eagerness of the legal profession for notorious cases, or we should not have so many great trials. The truth is, the Judges like them, for they concentrate the public gaze upon them, give them many opportunities for displaying qualities more popular than knowledge of law, and sometimes make them public favourites, and so increase their weight in the world. Counsel like them, for though we should imagine they cannot often be fully repaid in cash for their waste of time, popular suits are magnificent advertisements ; and journalists like them, because they increase their sales, and furnish opportunities for readable comment. (We wonder if the public ever realises what daily journalists occasionally suffer from the intolerable dullness of their subjects,--say, some debates which no man not compelled by a sense of duty would ever read.) Whether the jurymen, many of whom are half-ruined by these long trials, like them we do not quite know, for foxes are said to like being hunted, and incredible as it may seem, some jurymen are said to think themselves fully paid in their increased importance in the domestic circle ; but whether they do or not is no matter, the convenience of a juryman or a witness being a subject of which no properly self-respecting tribunal ever thinks. The Judges like them, counsel like them, and the Press likes them, and who is there remaining influential enough to raise a valid objection P There is nobody ; and the most trivial of disputes is " cockered up" into a great case. The Court is opened with great
Judges, leading counsel, and all the world in full view ; all manner of testimony is admitted, or at least submitted ; everybody—except the Prince of Wales—is cross-examined to character; episodes are drawn out into whole acts; counsel make long and sometimes splendid speeches to the audience which applauds just as if it were in a theatre, and for the same reasons ; there are hours of jokes, repartees, savage little assaults and rejoinders that Sheridan might have written ; and at last, when the show begins to grow a little tiresome, the exhausted but interested jury returns some humdrum verdict, which in any other case it would have returned in a day.
Look at this jockey case, for example. There was nothing whatever in the case as a suit, except a most ordinary charge of libel. The plaintiff, though he makes a great income, was only a jockey, and a jockey is, as a rule, an undersized but plucky lad who rides immature horses in useless races for gamblers to bet about—and the defendant was the proprietor of a class journal not notorious in any 'way; but the case in- terested one of the "worlds," the racing world, and for days we had a long procession of Peers and racing notabilities, and betting men and blacklegs, all mounting the stand and giving their evidence, as to plaintiff's character—no, as to his popular repute for character—as to their own racing biographies, as to their private opinions on the morality of the turf, and as to their general theories upon the subject of right and wrong, involving, in one instance, a discourse on the meaning of the word "serious," and in another, some hints which may be of value to the next person who writes an essay on friendship. We suppose all that evidence was legally admissible. A Judge sitting in another Court uttered on Tuesday an obiter dictum, which his hearers understood to mean that if he had been. trying the case, he should have admitted none of the testimony against character ; and cer- tainly we never remember to have read such a mass of evidence, evidence stretching through hours and hours, as to a man's general repute in his rivals' and comrades' eyes ; but still, it must have been all right. The Lord Chief Justice could not have admitted inadmissible or gossipy evidence, and we have nothing to say except this, that if the case had not interested a "world," in this case the racing one—a half- formed world apparently, with mud and reptilia for its most characteristic features—means would have been found to bring it to a close in a day. The witnesses would have been kept to facts, and the counsel to material arguments. As it was, it went on for a week, at an expense we are afraid to guess, to the stoppage of suits of importance, and, so far as we can perceive, without the slightest appreciable benefit to the community. The "facts revealed" are of no consequence whatever even to gambling men. Those who are interested in the turf know perfectly well that jockeys are a mixed lot, that racing men who lose slander racing men who win—that was a grand point in the evidence— and that mortal man never yet arrived at certainty when the charge was "pulling ;" and the remainder of mankind care nothing whatever about those discreditable incidents of one of the methods of gaming. The side-lights which well-known witnesses threw on their own characters, and their adversaries' characters, and their jockeys' characters, had, of course, an interest, sometimes quite a dramatic interest ; but then, Courts of Justice are hardly kept up in England as succursales to the theatres. At least, we venture to con- tend they ought not to be, and regard their gradual conversion to that purpose as distinctly detrimental to the respect in which they ought to be held. They are meant to distribute justice, not to afford materials of comment to the newspapers and of gossip to the community. A jockey is entitled to justice, of course, like another man, and he should have it ; but he should have it just as he would have had if a saddler had sued him for debt, or he had sued an employer for his wages. Courts can settle a plea for damages without evidence not only as to a plaintiff's whole biography, but as to the im- pression which that biography had made upon all that minute section of humanity which is interested in his career. It is not the suits to which we object, but the preposterous importance given to the suits of which "Wood v. Cox" is only a single and by no means the worst recent instance,—an importance which is born of the public appetite for scandalous gossip, which the Courts of Law should not be used to feed.
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