31 MAY 1873, Page 7

THE CHIPPING NORTON MAGISTRATES.

IT is certainly to be regretted that a succession of delays, for which the Home Office has probably a right to disclaim responsibility, but which none the less will do the Government no service with the working-classes in the country, has pre- vented Mr. Bruce from using his Ministerial authority to miti- gate the outrageous severity of the too famous Chipping Norton sentence. The Home Secretary indignantly repudiated the suggestion which he presumed to be implied in Mr. Cobbett's question on Tuesday night, that he was in the habit of waiting until he had been questioned in the House of Commons before using his powers to correct a miscarriage of justice. He pointed out that on the previous day, without needing the spur of Mr. Cobbett's interrogation, he had written officially to the Chipping Norton magistrates to demand an explanation of their conduct, but on Tuesday night no reply had been received at Whitehall, and Mr. Bruce could not take any further steps, as he main- tained, without further and more official information. We do not know how this may be. Inasmuch, however, as the case was tried before the Chipping Norton bench on last Wednesday week, and got into the London daily papers of the following Friday, it is not quite clear why three or four days, in which the poor women who had provoked the Dra- conian decree of the clerical magistrates were enduring the pain and disgrace of imprisonment, hive been allowed to pass by without inquiry being even made. It should have been remembered that the sentence passed upon the women was seven days' imprisonment in the case of nine of them, and ten days in the case of the remaining seven. During the investi- gation set on foot in, we fear, too leisurely a way by the Home Secretary, the nine women who had been most lightly punished had "served their time out," and were released on Wednes- day morning from Oxford Gaol. The rest will be quit of their sentence this morning, so that there is little chance for the exercise of the prerogative of mercy by the Home Office. We repeat, the delay may have been unavoid- able, but it was all the same a misfortune. The agricultural labourers cannot be expected to understand the refinements of

Ministerial duty ; they felt that a wrong had been done , to a few friendless women, and done in a violently partisan spirit, by the representatives of the law ; they knew that some one in London, disposing of the Queen's prerogative, had power to remit the whole or a part of a sentence generally regarded as unjust, and allowed to be excessive even by those who maintained its justice. What must be the feeling of the immense numbers of ignorant and in- dignant men who learn that the sentence of the Chipping Norton magistrates was allowed to take effect, and the Govern- ment, having the power, took no steps to prevent the injustice being thoroughly worked out ? The inference will be drawn— wrongly, of course, but with some show of reason—that those who dispense the Queen's mercy are anxious rather to avoid hurting the susceptibilities of the wrong-doers than to miti- gate the hardships of the wronged. How disastrous such an impression is likely to prove to the Government and the Liberal party it is unnecessary to urge. But the misfortune of such an alienation between the Liberals and the agricultural labourers, now beginning to feel their strength and seek their rights, is less to be deplored than the conviction, which men like the clerical magistrates of Chipping Norton do their best to encourage in the rustic mind, that "law" does not mean "justice."

The facts of the case have been fully stated in the news- papers during the week, and we have more than one version of the details of the affair. The broad outlines of the story, however, have not been affected in the course of the contro- versy. In condemning the conduct of the Chipping Norton Bench, we are even willing to accept all the allegations of the prosecution, and to admit, what the women themselves deny, that so far as language went there was a kind of intimidation employed. A farmer in the neighbourhood of Ascott, an Oxfordshire village, some weeks ago quarrelled with his labourers, who had the audacity to demand the rise of wages as regulated by the Labourers' Union. A strike, as one side assert, or a lock-out, as the other side say, was the result ; and the farmer in due course brought two young men from another parish to fill the places of the men put out of work. The men so supplanted did not, to their credit be it said, make any demonstration of impatience ; but their wives and female relatives were less tolerant, and proceeded to give the interlopers a piece of their mind. It was stated by the two imported labourers who were the witnesses for the prosecution, that the women administered their wordy castigation with sufficient vigour, mingling taunts with threats and tempting bribes of beer with rude sarcasm, in a manner which those familiar with the conversa- tional ornaments of English rustic speech will have no diffi- culty in realising. The interlopers, according to their evidence in Court, were so far alarmed or otherwise influenced by the denunciations of the women that they left the field without attempting to go to work, but returned when the farmer's wife procured them the escort of a rural policeman. No violence is charged against the women, beyond the strong language that might be anticipated in such a case. Such is the story told by the prosecutor and his witnesses. The women, on the other hand, deny that any harsh words were used at all ; they insist that the whole negotiation was carried out in an amicable spirit, and that it was not until the farmer had had an opportunity of influencing the two young labourers who had been turned back from their work, that the evidence was moulded into the shape it took before the magistrates. With this, however, in pronouncing an opinion on the conduct of the Chipping Norton Bench, we have nothing to do. The farmer took out summonses against the women under the first clause of the Criminal Law Amend- ment Act, which allows the magistrates either to bind over a person convicted of intimidation or threats to keep the peace, or to send him or her to prison, "with or without hard labour, for a period not exceeding three months." The women appeared at the Petty Sessions in the neighbouring town of Chipping Norton ; they were undefended ; they met the evidence of the farmer's two witnesses with a general denial, but had prepared no testimony on their own behalf. Of the law, it is certain, they knew nothing, for they had made preparations for the payment of the fine they ex- pected to be imposed on them,—an alternative punishment not provided for in the Act. But two country clergymen, the Rev. T. Harris and the Rev. W. E. D. Carter, were the presiding justices on this occasion, and more jealous for the farmers' right to grind down his labourers than the farmers themselves, they refused to release the women on that

own recognisances with a warning,—evidently the proper course, where intemperate language only was charged,— or even to accept sureties, but passed a sentence of a week's imprisonment with hard labour on nine of the defendants, and of ten days' on the remainder. All the women thus un- expectedly condemned to a sojourn in Oxford Gaol bore an excellent character, and the punishment meted out to them for the too free use of the tongue, of which they were at the worst accused, fell as severely on them as it would have fallen on the wife of any decent workman in a manufacturing town.

It is too late to redress the wrong done to these poor women, for wrong it unquestionably is, when the penalty is so far disproportioned to the offence ; but it is not too late to take notice of the conduct of the clerical justices who presided at the Chipping Norton petty sessions. It may be said that they were guilty of nothing worse than an error in judgment, but such errors in judgment., if passed over in silence, would quickly break down that respect for law which is the surest guarantee for order in this country, and which makes political progress possible without risk to the frame- work of our institutions. The Lord Chancellor has the power to remove magistrates who have shown themselves unfit to exercise authority from the commission of the peace, and in the present instance this power ought certainly to be used. We do not see much reason to hope for an improvement in the Criminal Law Amendment Act that will make such acts of injustice impossible for the future. It would be difficult to abolish " intimidation " as an offence altogether, and yet if the offence remain, its definition must to a great extent be left to those who have to decide on the facts. Technically, the women tried at Chipping Norton were probably guilty of "intimidation," but the degrees of guilt in this offence are infinitely various, and if the magistrates had not been influ- enced by a partisan spirit to "make an example" of the offenders, a sharp rebuke, or even a light penalty, would have been tolerated by public opinion. The worst of it is, that the labourers are beginning to feel that they cannot count on an im- partial trial by magistrates of the temper of the clerical Shallows of Chipping Norton, and a deep distrust of those who administer the law is growing among them. The time is coming when there will be a cry to which the Legislature cannot turn a deaf ear for the reorganisation of the Magistracy, and the squires, with their clerical allies, have themselves to thank for the revolution that will eject them from the last stronghold of their power.