18 B.
SIR,—May an old reader of The Spectator, and an old lawyer, record his regret at your mild benison on the above regulation?
(s) Under it the Home Secretary is at once (a) accuser, (b) gaoler, (c) prosecutor, and (d) judge.
(2) The prisoner gets no formal charge; no preliminary magisterial in- vestigation.
(3) His only recourse is to a creature tribunal of Home Office (Advisory Committee) whose procedure smacks somewhat of the Holy Office of old.
(4) The prisoner is questioned from a secret dossier, the contents of which are known only to the committee. He is denied (a) the name of the informer, (b) legal representation, (c) advocacy. This is, as Lord Morley wrote of Robespierre's Law of the 22nd Prairial, the very negation of all law.
(5) Even if the Committee reports in favour of the prisoner (as it often does) the Home Secretary (as he often does) can still, at his arbitrary will, imprison him.
(6) A satisfactory solution is so simple. Here it is:
(7) Let any Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature in England, sitting in camera, and being only responsible to Parliament, as the Home Secretary is, exercise this supreme judicial office (which now twice in succession has fallen on a layman); and every Englishman, including the accused, would be (or should be) completely satisfied.
(8) Sir, the confidence of this people in the Bench of Judges is vaster in such a matter as the liberty of the subject than its confidence in any politician or Minister of the Crown, however eminent.
(9) The noble fabric of English law is largely Judge-made law. The humanity and austere integrity of men lice Romilly, Russell. and Reading ameliorated it; the Statute Book. in due course, translated their delibera- tions -upon it, their wrestling with it.
(to) Political ministers come and go. The mass applaud one day a man they dismiss the next. But through the centuries, one thing stands fast above political turmoils and convulsions, and that is the respect in which the people hold the Sovereignty of Law as translated by the English Judges; and dire will be the day should that pillar of State ever be shaken. England says of her Judges what Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare: " Others abide our question: Thou art free."—I am. Sir, yours faith-
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