Mr. Cross has set at least one very dubious precedent
by re- mitting, apparently on the weakest ground, one half of the sentence orfourteen days' imprisonment passed on a young man for cruelly beating a cat. In answer to Sir W. Stirling-Max- well, on Monday night, he stated that he had remitted the sentence because there was a doubt about the lad's cruelty. The magistrate who investigated the case had no such doubt, and Mr. Cross did not state that there was any new evidence which had not come out on the original hear- ing. Had the lad belonged to the poorest instead of to the middle-class, he would probably have had no friends to intervene, and so the whole of the sentence would have been put in force. It is very dangerous to give the im- pression that justice in such cases is not even-handed, but leans -towards the culprits who have the most influential friends. Mr. Cross would have done better not to intervene.
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