"It was a very odd sort of proceeding-for no report had been made by the police committee to the House of Commons: and the sentiments of Alderman WooD and the Corporation upon the subject of an interference with their privileges, were sufficiently known. Nothing could be more intelligible than the letter. It was the notice of a determination to commit an infraction of the privileges of the citizens."

Alderman Sir William HEYGATE spoke still more strongly. He asked,

Why should the greatest of all corporations be stripped of the privilege of directing its own police operations, while the most petty corporate bodies were permitted to act for themselves?"

The proper solution of that problem, we think, is not dif ficult. It is not the first time that the hand of arbitrary power has been stretched forth to grasp the privileges of the citizens of London. If the present race of citizens submit tamely to such an invasion of their chartered rights by any minister of the Crown-we care not whether he calls himself a whig, tory, or radical-they must have sadly degenerated from their ancestors, who, through the storms and vicissitudes of centuries, held them fast,-or soon recovered them, as when, in the reign of the voluptuous tyrant CHARLES II., and the sullen bigot JAMES II., they were temporarily confiscated.

These two sovereigns of the STUART family, we need not say, cherished designs subversive of the ancient free government and liberties of the people of England. JAMES, impelled to his ruin by his popish advisers, went farther in acts of open violence to the constitutional rights of the nation, than his more shrewd and polite predecessor. It was necessary to the execution of his tyrannical designs to change the magistracy in all the cities throughout England. What did he do? History informs us: he began with the Corporation of London. The whigs have long cherished a design of introducing a system of centralisation the very machinery of Bourbon tyranny-into England. What do they do? Just what JAMES II. did. They begin with the Corporation of London. They know that if they can, by trick and stratagem, and the aid of an obsequious majority in parliament, obtain a footing for their centralised police in the city of London, and oust the citizens

from the protection of their own property, they will have an unanswerable argument for introducing the same system into every city, town, and village, in the kingdom :-so that, although the present struggle between the Government and the Corporation appears, at first sight, to involve a question of only civic privilege, in connexion with the watch and ward of the city, it in reality concerns the liberties of the people of England; for most unquestionably, if ministers succeed in grasping for the Home-office the police of the city, it will not be very long before the contemplated introduction of a gensdarmerie takes place all over the kingdom. We care not whether a Russell or a Sidmouth be chief of the Home-office, as far as concerns this question. We hope that the citizens of London will never surrender to any minister of the Crown those rights and privileges which are among the most valued memorials of our Anglo-Saxon liberties.

Nov. 24, 1838.-As far as the city of London is concerned, there is every reason to believe that the plan of assimilating the whole constabulary force of England to that of France and other enslaved continental nations, by a system of centralisation, radiating from the Home-office, will be defeated. The metropolitan Corporation have done well in taking the reform of the city police into their own hands. They have shown that wholesome jealousy of arbitrary and unconstitutional power which, we trust, will ever be characteristic of Englishmen, let the supreme government fall into what hands it may. It is by means of our ancient local institutions of government that the life-blood of constitutional liberty circulates through the whole system of our body politic. Let the centralised system once supplant them, and a revolution against liberty will have been accomplished.

To have allowed the Home-office commissioners to intrude into the direction and control of the duties of civic watch and ward would, indeed, have been a virtual confession of the inability of the corporate authorities to discharge the offices of local government belonging to them by their ancient charter; and to abandon which, by a base surrender to any minister of

the Crown, would place the conduct of the citizens of London in the nineteenth century in contemptible contrast with that of the sturdy and English-hearted burghers, who nobly struggled of old to maintain the privileges thus flung away by their degenerate descendants.

We have never opposed a reformed system of watch and police, but, on the contrary, always advocated it. We have ever opposed a centralised system of police, because that system has never long existed in any country without being made a political engine-less protective to property and life, than dangerous to public liberty. A centralised system of police-we mean, of course, a police centralised in the hands of the executive government-is always connected with the spy system, which is the secret eye of tyranny, for liberty wants it not. If the STUARTS had had such a police to work in aid of their tyrannical schemes, as that which Louis PHILIP now wields in France, they might possibly have been successful in establishing a system of terror upon the ruins of our free government, which could not have been subverted, if subverted at all, by a "bloodless revolution."

The citizens know that if they lose the control and management of their own watch and police-force, and that a power alien to that of their charter and above it, is to supersede the civic authorities in these matters, all the rest of their ancient privileges will in time be lost. One weak concession will not only lead to a new demand, but will afford the means of rendering that demand successful, until-the substance of chartered privileges being gone-even the pageantry would follow.

What an irresistible argument it would be with all the cities and towns and rural districts in England, in furtherance of the grand ministerial scheme of establishing a centralised gensd'armerie extending over the whole kingdom, that the first city in the empire had submitted to it-that London itself, with its ancient rights, its chartered immunities, renewed and confirmed by Sovereigns and parliaments-outliving the rapacity and violence of tyrants-identified with glorious historical recollections that London, being in itself an epitome of our free Anglo-Saxon constitution, had exchanged its freedom-its

independence-its old English franchises, for the privilege of being governed according to the Gallic system of despotic centralisation! But that argument in favour of an extended system of arbitrary power, of which the foundations were to be laid in a centralised system of police, has not been furnished to the Home-office, and, we trust, never will.

TRIAL BY JURY defended.-Nov. 12, 1838.

Α

No single institution that the wisdom of man has ever devised is so well calculated to preserve a people free, or to make them so, as Trial by Jury, accompanied by judicious regulations for protecting its independence and purity. parliament may be corrupt or servile; it may be the legislative instrument to register the imperious decrees of a despot, who thinks it prudent, like HARRY the EIGHTH of England, or the "Citizen-KING" of the FRENCH, to give to essential tyranny the outward husk and colour of law. A parliament may also become the timid or base tool of faction, equally disposed to yield an implicit obedience to the mandates of a venal minister, or the unreasoning impulses of an excited mob. We have, unfortunately, in our history, examples of parliaments under all those phases of legislative depravity and degradation. We have even, of late, seen an instance of a " Reformed" House of Commons asserting an extent of "privilege," which, if established, would have created in one branch of the legislature a tyranny more than any that England ever resisted in her Kings, and which would have stripped the liberties of Englishmen of the protection of the Great Charter-the Habeas Corpus Act and Trial by Jury together, whenever it pleased a tyrant majority of the Commons to exercise so terrible a power. We have seen the practical mimicry of that monstrous claim of privilege in a Newfoundland legislature, whose illegal and vindictive violence resembled more the "fantastic freaks" of an American Lynch-law committee, than the sane and sober conduct of a civilized assembly of lawgivers. Extravagant and disgraceful as their conduct was, however, it was but the

reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine of privilege set up by a late House of Commons, whose memory is consigned to lasting execration.

But trial by jury cannot be corrupted unless the whole body of the people be corrupt; and when that is so, the ruin of the people is their own act and deed. Instances of perverse or dishonest verdicts there will be, because the attribute of perfection does not belong to any human institution. Infallibility of judgment can exist only at Rome, or in another world. Trial by Jury, guarded in this country by admirable regulations, partakes, and must always partake, of the imperfectibility of human nature. The class of " minute philosophers" see only those blemishes which are the casual specks of a glorious institution. The magnificent source of material light is not without its blemishes; but what should we say of the astronomer who would wish to reform the solar system by extinguishing the sun, because the face of that luminary is not free from spots.

Yet such is the sort of logical process by which the depreciators of trial by jury arrive at the conclusion, that the administration of justice would be reformed, as they have gravely argued, by substituting for it the individual responsibility, or rather irresponsibility, of a judge. They select instances of verdicts of a perverse or absurd character, and present them to the public as specimens of the working of the jury system. They prove nothing so conclusively as their own. incapacity to take a more comprehensive view of a great subject, than the fly upon the column, whose microscopic glance perceived with painful accuracy, the minute inequalities that came within the scope of its vision, but was blind to the beautiful symmetry of the whole design. Every column of the British constitution has its philosophic fly, that solemnly pronounces the condemnation of the magnificent structure which its pigmy faculties cannot comprehend.

In fact, we have had of late years every part and portion of the British constitution, in turn, most ignorantly and dogmatically doomed to destruction by one or other of those minute philosophers, sometimes displaying liberal colours, sometimes wearing the tory uniform. For our own part, we are content