should be condemned to death without a
hearing, slow indeed has been the progress
in the direction of that state of perfect fairness
towards an accused man, which we have
now reached in England. The day is still
within the memory of many, when men on
trial for their lives were not permitted to
defend themselves by counsel, and this deprivation
was made in the name of fairness, "because,"
saith Coke, "that the testimony and
proof of the crime ought to be so clear and
manifest, that there can be no defence of it."
If we travel back still farther, we come to a
time when no prisoner was entitled to a copy
of the indictment against him, of the panel,
or of any of the proceedings; such necessary
aids to a defence were refused to Sir Harry
Vane and Colonel Sidney. Hearsay evidence;
things said to have been said by dead or
absent persons; testimonies of the loosest kind,
were admitted against a prisoner in the middle
of the seventeenth century. It was not usual
even to examine witnesses against the Crown.
When Thrakmorton on trial for his life asked
for the reading of an entire deposition, wherefrom
portions had been quoted against him,
he was assured that "it would be but loss of
time, and would make nothing for him."
Then again, persons prosecuted by the Crown,
used to be tried by judges holding place and
pension at the pleasure of the prosecutor,
as well as by juries liable to unlimited fine
and imprisonment and, not seldom, reminded
that they were so liable for verdicts
unpalatable to the Court. Sheriffs, too, were
submissive, and commonly returned juries
so partial that, as Wolsey said of them, "they
would find Abel guilty of the murder of
Cain." In the reign of Henry the Eighth, to
which we have just referred, seventy-two
thousand adjudged criminals were executed,
being an average of six a-day, including
Sundays. Towards the latter end of the
reign of Elizabeth, the average came to be
one each day for all the working week, and
two for Sunday.

Again, not only were men accused of felonies
refused the right to look at the indictments
framed against them, but until the
twelfth year of the reign of George the
Second, the indictments themselves, with the
pleas, verdicts, judgments, and so forth,
were all uttered in an unknown tongue, and
written in a law-hand with ambiguous
abbreviations; some of which it was allowable to
interpret in more ways than one. And in
this language—which was neither Latin,
French, nor English, but a compound of
all three—in this language rather than in
his innocence lay the accused man's best
chance of acquittal. If it was said in the
indictment of the act of a man who had
slain another "murdredavit," instead of
"murdravit," or of a felonious act, that it
was done "feloniter," when it should have
been said "felonice," the indictment was
quashed and the criminal set free. In Queen
Elizabeth's time, one John Webster a brutal
murderer, was acquitted because the letter
h was omitted in the Latin word for arm,
the indictment had "sinistro bracio," instead
of "sinistro brachio," and another man was
liberated because it was judged material that
u was put instead of a, in the Latin for the
phrase "otherwise called." It was, "A. B.
alius dictus A. C., butcher;" when the law
ruled it to be essential to write "A. B."
alias dictus A. C. butcher." These niceties
were in the highest degree arbitrary. Gross
blunders were sometimes held to be within
the bounds of legal language; and whether
right or wrong, the terms of the indictment,
except tor any flaws they might
contain, mattered not much to the accused.
Until Henry the Fifth's time, so little
regard was paid to the liberty of the subject,
that it was not even essential that the indictment
should contain the Christian and surname
with the state and degree of the accused
person.

It is curious to note how long and how
steady has been the process of reform in
the administration of our criminal justice.
The spirit of English liberty—the sense of
equal rights among all citizens—has, in this
one department of the law, prevailed against
every unwholesome precedent, and has slowly
raised our courts of criminal law to a
character of which we have had, in the trial of
the Poisoner, certainly a crowning illustration.
They are undoubtedly the freest
and the fairest courts of justice—we may say
it most deliberately—in the world. They
fail now only in some accessory matters; but
always in the direction of allowing to the
criminal too much chance of escape from
punishment. Much was wanting of this
present perfectness when, in the time of a
living generation, men accused of felony had
limited rights of defence; very much more
was wanting at a period only a little more
remote, when the most conspicuous inequality
and injustice was an ordinary part of
criminal procedure, in the form of the custom
called the Benefit of Clergy. Except for a
few crimes that were declared not clergyable,
men guilty of the greatest outrages against
society might be discharged, upon such proof
that they were competent for holy orders as
was furnished by the reading of a scrap of
Latin from the Psalms, called the neck-verse,
because it saved men's necks, and beginning,
"Miserere mei, Deus." Before the eighth
year of Elizabeth, the reading of this charm
cleared men, not only of the crime in question,
but of all crimes previously committed;
so that, to many rascals, conviction,
with benefit of clergy, was a much
better thing than an acquittal. Until the
fourth year of William and Mary, little or no
benefit of clergy was allowed to women, who
were, as to their education, competent to
claim it; and, of course, the entire custom
told iniquitously on behalf of those whose