to be yet empowered to decide upon, he is authorized by one of the provisions to supersede the grand jury by presenting an indictment himself, which is to have the legal force of a bill found by a majority of twenty-three grand-jurymen. "Such indictment," says the bill, "shall have the same effect in law as if it had been found by a grand jury; and the prisoner may be arraigned and tried on the magistrate's indictment, and judgment and execution may be had thereon in like manner as if a true bill had been found by a grand jury against the prisoner for the like offence." This is an attempt to abolish grand juries by a side-wind, in the hope that it might escape particular notice amid the fifty-nine sections of a voluminous statute.

Another provision which is a great stride, as far as legal process is concerned, towards the centralised police system, is that which makes it lawful to serve any summons, or execute any warrant or search-warrant of a magistrate, within the metropolitan-police district, without its being endorsed by any justice of the peace of the county or place in which it is so served or executed.

To show how completely those metropolitan-police courts are to be merely snug little appendages to the Home-office-a sort of sub-offices to the great bureau in Whitehall—the bill empowers the Secretary of State to "make such rules for conducting the business in the said courts, and for securing uniformity therein, as shall appear to HIM to be fit to be made; and a copy of every rule made for enforcing any such recommendation, signed by the Secretary of State, shall be sent to each of the said magistrates, &c., and shall be observed by the magistrates, clerks, and officers of the said courts." Such are the things, called metropolitan-police courts, that are to have judicial powers even in cases of felony !

The Corporation of London, having succeeded in preserving its own ancient rights and privileges from the grasp of usurpation, acted with a patriotic regard for the rights of the people and the interests of public justice, in denouncing this bill as a most dangerous invasion of trial by jury, and an encroachment. upon some of the most valuable principles of our ancient and free constitution.

Aug. 6, 1839.-Mr. Law, the Recorder of London, has earned the thanks of the country by his manly, intelligent, and persevering, though successless, resistance to that measure for substituting arbitrary police tribunals for trial by jury—the Metropolitan-Police Courts Bill. That bill is, as we formerly demonstrated, a grand experiment of a government, working by the servile agency of a "reformed" House of Commons, to bring trial by jury into disuse.

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Can the House of Lords ever allow such a measure as this to become a law? Can they forget that their noble predecessors and ancestors rescued from the tyranny of the Norman conquest, those very institutions and liberties which the present government are labouring, by the aid of the democratic branch of the legislature, to subvert and destroy? Can they forget that the "GREAT CHARTER" was the work of the barons of old, who, in protecting the people of England against the innovations of an outlandish tyranny, only restored those Saxon institutions and liberties which were the ancient property and inheritance of Englishmen? Will the representatives (many of whom are the descendants) of the ancient barons allow those institutions to be destroyed-those liberties to be confiscated, which their brave and patriotic predecessors or progenitors rescued from a tyrant's grasp?

Who can doubt that the contemplated innovation on trial by jury is intended to be made a precedent for still more extensive encroachments upon the ancient landmarks of the constitution? Who is there so blind as not to see in the creation of police tribunals (servilely dependent on the Home-office) to adjudicate upon charges of felony--without the intervention of a jury—the beginning of the end" of trial by jury, and of the independent and pure administration of justice altogether? We say the independent as well as the pure, for servile tribunals, if not actually corrupt, must always be liable to the suspicion of corruption, which destroys all public confidence in their decisions -and scarcely a greater evil can befall civilized society than a want of public confidence in the administration of justice.

Why is it that the character of the superior courts in Westminster Hall stands so high with the country? Is it not

because the Judges are above all servile fear and all sordid temptation in the administration of their high office? Independent of the Crown, from which they derive their commissions and of the people, upon whose property, liberty, and lives they have to sit in judgment-they have no inducement to turn aside from the path of rectitude in the administration of the law, to barter an honest fame and an approving conscience, for either courtly favour, or spurious popularity.

Will it be so with mere creatures of the Home-office, exercising judicial functions, and determining-without the check and restraint of a jury-questions affecting the liberties and characters of the poor? We may with confidence say it will not. As long as stipendiary magistrates have only inquisitorial powers to exercise-as long as they have only to put the law in criminal cases in motion for decision before a jury-as long as they can merely inquire but not adjudicate, the errors of ignorance, and the worse than errors of servility or corruption may be corrected and remedied by the controlling power of the constitutional tribunals of the land. But that the hired vassals of the Home-office, whose official existence entirely depends upon the pleasure or caprice of a minister of the Crown, should be empowered to determine cases between the Crown and the subject, involving highly penal consequences, is a monstrous thing to be thought of in a free country.

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When the centralising policy shall have been fully established-when the country shall be overrun by a rural police in the hands of Government, and the towns in possession of a Home-office gensd'armerie-when independent Judges shall be substituted by Government-stipendiaries-when trial by jury shall be swept away by a House of Commons arrogating to itself powers incompatible with the existence of a free statewhen justice shall be administered by vassal judges of a SECRETARY OF STATE-when the Great Charter, the Habeas Corpus Act, and the Bill of Rights, shall have been consumed as waste paper-property will be more endangered than it now is, and the country will be nearer a revolution than ever.

Aug. 16, 1839.-The Metropolitan-Police Courts Bill stands

for the third reading this evening, Let us correct ourselves. It is not exactly the same bill that stands for the third reading as was sent up from the House of Commons. Such havoc have the Lords made upon the vile thing, that its own parents will hardly be able to recognise its identity when it drags its mutilated form back again to "the place from whence it came."

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The Lords have entitled themselves to a large portion of public gratitude by excising from the Bill the audacious and monstrous attempt to substitute police tribunals, (copied from the Turkish mode of administering justice,) for trial by jury. Thanks to the aristocratic guardians of the constitution, the kadis of the Home-office are not yet to be elevated on their despotic joint-stools to determine charges of felony in place of learned JUDGES, and grand and petty juries-though the House of Commons, as far as it could, broke down the best and noblest of the bulwarks of British liberty. * * The country is also indebted to the Lords for crushing in embryo the profligate job for saddling the country with the needless expense of superannuated allowances to all the existing police-magistrates of the metropolis, and with the still more costly appointment of twenty-seven dependent briefless barristers, of four years' standing, at £1,200 a-year each! For stopping this enormous job, and preserving the trial by jury from dangerous innovation, Lords LYNDHURST and BROUGHAM are preeminently entitled to the grateful acknowledgments of the public. *

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To ourselves, who have struggled so long and laboriously to avert the danger with which TRIAL BY JURY was threatened, this result is very satisfactory. We trust the Lords will equally protect the other bulwark of public liberty-local government — from the encroachments of centralisation. If such towns as Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, and others, be once placed under a government police, the whole of the popular institutions of England will be in a fair way of being subverted by the mandegrading machinery of a Gallican despotism. From such a tyranny, which the democratic branch of the Legislature is so ready to force upon us, may the peers of England-the

descendants and successors of the restorers of Saxon liberty, protect the country!

Dec. 12, 1839.—* Let this tyrannical scheme of Gallican despotism once overspread the land of ancient and regulated freedom, and the impartial and upright administration of rural justice by benches of independent magistrates— derived from the nobility and gentry of each county-will be supplanted by Home-office kadiism. A vast brood of [political] dependents will be fixed upon all the rural districts, in the shape of stipendiary justices-the mere servile tools and obsequious vassals of the Secretary for the Home Departmentmen fit to be ordered either to commit, or discharge, persons accused of crime, as it might please the despotic caprice of the great central Mogul of the British empire.

As to the Act of the 3rd and 4th William IV., cap. 90, it was but an extension of a very excellent statute passed for the improvement of the constabulary force in the previous reignwe mean the Act of the 11th Geo. IV., cap. 27, intitled An Act to make Provision for the Lighting and Watching of Parishes in England and Wales. [See Jan. 16, and Nov. 29, 1836: pp. 24, 241. ED.]

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Remarkable Instance of Perjured Evidence.-Sept. 30, 1839.

THE late Mr. Justice VAUGHAN† recently sentenced to death a young man, at the Central Criminal Court, for an offence which will be easily understood when we state that it is one of which Lord Chief Justice HALE said, it was "of all criminal charges the one most easy to be made, and most difficult to be disproved." On the oath of one woman, though she may be the most depraved and abandoned of her sex, any man may be legally convicted of this crime, for which the sacrifice of human life is the allotted penalty. Numbers of innocent lives have fallen victims to this law of blood, which, like some other laws of blood, but far more frequently than any, has been made

[Mr. Justice VAUGHAN survived this trial but three or four days. ED.]