JURIES IN BENGAL.
THE importance of the action of the Government of Bengal, in abolishing trial by jury in the districts to which it had been extended, has been greatly exaggerated in one way, but can hardly be exaggerated in another. It is nonsense to talk of its producing an ebullition of popular feeling. The real " People " of Bengal, to whom Radicals pay no respect—that is, the millions of small farmers with perpetual leases, who pay all taxes and sustain the Govern- ment on their shoulders—care nothing whatever about the matter. They have been accustomed for ages to be judged by individuals ; and if they dislike English Judges at all, it is because they consider them very slow, rather stupid, and a great deal too much inclined to rely upon sworn evidence, much of which the audience in Court know quite well to have been manufactured. The persons annoyed by the abolition of juries are the wealthy natives, who can in- fluence juries, but not the Judge ; the educated natives, who like to favour any English way of securing " liberty ; " and some lawyers, who succeed with juries, but not with the civilian Judges. We do not see, however, if these latter classes like the system, and it has lasted for thirty years, why they should not be indulged, and certainly the reasons sent home in support of the change are as yet inadequate. The juries, unless corrupt or timid, must be of real use, for they understand the witnesses in a way the Judge can never pretend to do, they know a hundred reasons for leniency or severity imperceptible to the Court, and they relieve the Judge of a responsibility sometimes trifling, but sometimes very serious. The mischief they have done is not described as very great. Very few of their verdicts, not five per cent., have been upset by the High I Court, and the evidence that justice suffers is as yet very weak. It always did suffer more or less, for our country Courts in Bengal have always been by far the least successful of our institutions, being based on the principle that testimony, is proof until disproved, which has never been true in Asia since the days of Solomon, and is not true now. Besides, if the Judges are the best arbiters, they seem, at least, to be amply protected, for if the Judge differs from the jury, he can send the case up to the High Court ; and, in the High Court, the Judges are trained Europeans, who can order a new trial, or themselves give a final decision. We should not have introduced juries ourselves, holding that what the country wanted was two paid native Assessors in each Court, with power of recording their opinions, and a law inflicting a light penalty for perjury, with the consent of the Assessors, as contempt of Court. As, however, juries have been introduced, and are liked by the educated from whatever feeling, we should have advised that the system be im- proved, perhaps by the introduction of an official foreman, but in principle let alone. The outcry raised by Radicals here, however, and the attempt to bully Lord. Kimberley into a reversal of the decision passed by the Indian Government on review of Sir C. Elliott's decree, form together a formidable menace to the successful administration of India. If we cannot trust our own picked Referees on the spot, who did not issue the decree, who have no earthly interest in the matter except justice, and who know all the true reasons, which are often different from the written reasons, we cannot govern India properly at all. To make of " Parliament "—that is, in practice, of the House of Commons—a supreme Court of Appeal on Indian details, is not only to destroy the moral authority of the Government of India, but to transfer the power of decision from a competent to an incompetent tribunal. The Indian Government is on the spot, it hears the opinions of governing Indians in many States, it knows the precise intellectual capacity of Sir C. Elliott and the Judges who agree with him ; and it knows, too, whether there is, among the Indians affected, any suspicion that juries are influenced by bribes, by terror, or, what is quite possible, by an undue confidence in particular lawyers, who are therefore always re- tained for a wealthy man's defence. Suspicions of that kind, supposing them to exist, can hardly be put into despatches sure to be published to the whole world, yet may furnish solid reasons for the action of the Local and the approval of the Central Government. Of all these subjects, the House of Commons can know exceedingly little, and its electors nothing at all. The latter hardly know where India is, or what is the difference between a Mussulman and a Hindoo ; while the former, though individually fairly informed, neither do, nor can, comprehend the social results, some admirable, some horrible, of civilisa- tions which have endured for tens of centuries, and which are radically different from their own. If they were told, for example, that a jury had acquitted a Brahmin because his sacerdotal rank is evidence that he had acquired much merit in former births, and was not likely to do evil in this one, they would smile with contempt of their informant, and disbelieve utterly that " such idiots " could exist. Yet it is as certain as such a thing can be that the Burmese, who also hold this doc- trine, pardoned King Theebau's cruelties for this reason, and no other, and would, had be been tried for them, have acquitted him in spite of all the Judges in the world. The Members of Parliament are most respectable men, and often very acute men, and they can lay down very fairly the general principles on which their distant agents are to act ; but when it comes to the application of those principles under varying circumstances, many of them wholly beyond their grasp of thought, they must trust the agents whom they have themselves approved. It is nonsense to say the local agents are prejudiced. They are no more prejudiced than the House of Commons, which will in all probability vote for juries in Bengal, because a Judge and jury is the "natural" system of trying anybody, and which is quite capable of voting that to be competent a jury must consist of twelve. The Supreme Government of India is, of ccurse, like every other Government, capable of prejudices; it entertains prejudices, we do not doubt, on the subject of silver, the price of which affects its interests ; but on matters like the distribution of justice, there is nothing to inspire even a faint beginning of prejudice. It can only desire that the innocent should escape, and that the guilty should be punished. The Viceroy never was an Indian Judge ; nor are the majority of his colleagues in the slightest degree influenced by caste prepossession, which, indeed, would influence them the other way,—the real complaint against the juries being that the jurymen, in obedience to popular sentiment, India being Tory to the bone, incline to acquit the powerful, the cultivated, and those protected by sacer- dotal rank. It is the English Radicals, not the Indian Supreme Council, who desire the acquittal of Indian aris- tocrats, Dons, and dignified clergy.
The plain truth is, that the Radical majority are in- fluenced mainly by two prepossessions,—a prepossession for juries, because juries were once in England a defence against oppression ; and a prepossession that acquittals, even if a little too numerous, cannot do much harm. On the contrary, they can do the greatest harm. The steady acquittal of a particular class of offender may make that offence a terror to a country, as it threatened for a time to make agrarian intimidation in Ireland. If smugglers were always acquitted, there would be no Customs revenue. The greatest protection for highway robbery in England, when that particular crime interrupted civilisation, was the reluctance of juries to find verdicts sure to be followed by a capital sentence. The chance of ac- quittal is to-day the grand defence of the Italian criminal societies. The proportion of acquittals is the greatest, if not the only, apology ever offered for American Lynch Law. A special chance that an aristocrat, or a great priest, or a popular man, will escape on trial, is, in a country like India, a premium on the violent oppression which only men belonging to those classes can commit, and must promote a state of society which one would think a decent Radical would regard with horror. Their want of logic is not, however, our point to-day ; but the danger they are incurring in their doctrinaire zeal for democratic trials of rendering government in India by wise experts, anxious only to benefit the Indian masses, practically im- possible. They might as well order the engineers of a new main-road always to use carts with springs instead of tumbrils, because carts with springs are clearly at once products and evidences of a higher civilisation.
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