THE BERNARD VERDICT.
UNEXPECTED as most of us have professed to consider the Bernard verdict, we no sooner learn it than we readily understand its causes, and equally appreciate its conseciuene,es. The causes, in- deed, are unusually simple, direct, and visible on the surface ; the consequences stare one in the face, and certainly do not include a French invasion. If our neighbours had desired to make us an unexpected visit, they should have kept the idea to themselves ; and least of all should they have told the French taxpayer that they contemplated an expedition so costly as a military pie-nio in England would inevitably prove to be. The stupefaction, the indignation, which they have expended on the verdict, may pass, therefore, as nothing more than an outburst of emotion, resultless except as an instructive exhibition opportunely reminding as of the essential differences that divide England from France even more than the British Channel does. Almost the universal cry of the press in Paris is, that the public is indignant, astonished. The Moniteur delays the announcement of the result, and is elo- quent in its silence. The Univers mingles the verdict with the hurrahs in court, and represents the English Government as being dominated by the Times, " which governs public opinion." The Constitutionnel contrasts the result with the " undoubted" guilt of Bernard, as if the acts of the man and the verdict were things utterly irreconcileable, and the verdict a pointblank avowal of English hostility to France. In England we say " love me, love my dog" ; in France, it seems, they say " love me, hang my enemy," or they will not believe in you. England cannot be sin- cere in her desire to maintain good relations with France, say our neighbours, or at least the party of the Government in France, because she has not condemned our criminal. Nothing could place the two countries and their institutions in broader contrast than this treatment of the trial. In Paris it was from the begin- ning assumed that Bernard was guilty and must be condemned as a sequel in logic. The English Government, it was supposed in Paris, intended to do its duty ; its duty was to hang Bernard ; but, as Bernard was acquitted, the Government which professes to rule in England must be insincere.
It would appear that the French mind cannot by any possibility admit the idea that the jury is, in fact as well as theory, a tribu- nal as independent of any other authority as England is of France, France of Germany, or Germany of Turkey. The question of guilt was one which could not be assumed. The decision of it had to be extracted with honest painstaking from the evidence ; and it must be admitted that the evidence comprised many points of doubt. A great deal of the testimony which went to make most of us believe that Bernard was mixed up with the assassins of the 14th of January, on being examined by the exact scrutiny of an English criminal court, is found to be not close in its tissue. The letters of Allsop, for example, the conversations of Bernard with third persons, and the coincidence of his movements with the ulti- mate results, are all enough to make a reader of novels jump to the conclusion that Bernard was really a party to the intention of attacking the Emperor. But an English jury does not scan evidence with the holiday eyes of a novel-reader. The whole discipline of the court, the traditions of English justice, make it a point of honour, almost of personal vanity, to find a doubt if it lurks in any part. In this very imposing array of evidence, the jurymen dis- cover that Allsop was an inconsiderate scatter-brains for whose acts no friend could reasonably be answerable ; that the conversa- tions ascribed to Bernard implied some things not consistent with his knowledge of an assassination-plot; and that he was ap- parently astonished at the event when he was told of it. Now under the most ordinary circumstances a jury sitting at a trial in a Criminal Court is bound to look out for those flaws in the evi- dence, and is equally bound to acquit the prisoner, if one single flaw can be detected ; for a single flaw is enough to create the "doubt" of which the prisoner has, by the principle and. nave of our law, the " benefit." If the jurymen could have forgotten this they would have been reminded of it by all the circumstances attending the case. They were made only too distinctly aware that,, although the prisoner stood arraigned on an ordinary charge of murder, he was, in the highest sense of the word, a political offender. Many of the con- siderations involved in the case were political considerations ; it was a political trial ; and at the hands of the jury was expected a political verdict. It was all very well for Lord Chief Justine Campbell to bespeak the forbearance of the press in abstaining from notice of the trial until it should be completed ; but the day is almost gone when such forms are of any practical value. Every subject is now so thoroughly discussed day by day, that the chief points put in issue by Bernard's trial were well understood by all newspaper readers ; a class which of course includes everybody likely to serve on a petit jury. But it was by no means the Eng- lish press alone which thrust political considerations upon the no- tice of the juryman class. The lawyers of the Crown had, at some stages of the affair, pursued an unusually rigorous cours0. Besides the prosecution of Bernard as an active participator in the
late affair there are two prosecutions for political libel, in the case of the Pyat pamphlet, and the Adams pamphlet. The Government began by instituting proceedings against Ber- nard on the charge of conspiracy, and presently elevated the charge to one of murder. The jury, therefore, had strong reasons for believing that the Government looked for a politicafverdiet. Nor was it in England alone that this " culpable expectancy " existed. The very terms in which foreign journals spoke of the impending trial showed the state of expectation in Paris. Thus the Paris correspondent of the Daily News quotes, from " a letter by a French Government writer in the Nord" of Brussels, the report that " if a verdict of guilty be returned, Lord Derby's Go- vernment feels confident that Lord Campbell and the Judges will find means to pass a capital sentence. Lord Campbell's zeal and loyalty in the matter are highly approved of." This passage, of course, is no evidence as to the feeling of Lord Derby or Lord Campbell, but it shows the state of expectation in Paris ; and we had rather a strong foretaste of the same feeling in the letters of Colonels, to say nothing of the official despatches by Count Walewski and Count de Persigny. However attentive, therefore, to judicial etiquette, it was impossible for the jury to shutout the impression created by all those circumstances,—that the verdict anticipated from their members was to be political. Now there is one incident attending a political verdict which is peculiar. Not only is an English jury, especially. in the present day, doubly jealous of its duty when the verdict is to be of this character, but in strictly criminal cases it is almost impossible to introduce political reasons into the pleading or the evidence against the prisoner. Even when the charge is directly political, as in the instance of English rebels, the politics of the matter are very gently handled by a prosecuting counsel, who dwells upon the simple fact that the accused has broken the law, and it is the breach of the law, with the direct evidence establishing_ the fact, on which the attention of the jury is concentrated. Introduce any question of general politics, and you create the impression on the mind of the jury that the prisoner is an unfortunate man, subjected to a powerful and irresponsible adversary—the very best aspect in which a political prisoner could desire to stand be- fore a jury.
The existence of political considerations, too, piques the jury to ask itself, whether the Executive, for purposes of its own, is not invading the privileges of the jury-box, and seeking, by the instrumentality of the law, to obtain a political advantage. Now the jury-box belongs to the jury, and never will English jury- men permit the Executive to intrude into it. The evidence, too, disclosed a use of the police which is alien to all English feeling. It is true that the governing authorities must inform themselves as to what passes in society ; but in a country where publicity is so common, secrecy so nearly impos- sible, the responsible authorities can soon inform themselves of i
what passes in any street whatsoever. Society will assist them. If we think that there is anything secret, immoral, and noxious, our plan is, not to turn in the detective,—at least that is a new fashion, not yet naturalized amongst us' but to improve the street, to widen the ways, to cut down the shrubberies or the walls which assist concealment, to throw in the broad light of day, or of gas ; and society helps to keep watch upon itself. It has been well shown by Mr. Fitzjames Stephen in the last volume of the Cambridge Essays, that in England the employment of the police is litigant not inquisitorial. V e use it only as the instru- ment of the Executive in the prosecution of specific charges for overt acts, and not as an organization of spies. The trial tended to show that an alien practice has made some progress amongst us ; it exposed so far a consolidation of 'our system with that of France ; and if there was a political element in the verdict, it was a protest against that consolidation.
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