ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE BY LONDON ALDERMEN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 316, 2 March 1878, Page 21

ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE BY LONDON ALDERMEN.

A writer in the Echo, who evidently knows what he is talking about, says : "The Aldermen are elected by voters in City Wards. The character of some of the elections is the opposite to that which ought to distinguisn men called upon to administer justice. One of the occupants of the Aldermanic bench has been stamped by an Electoral Commission as guilty of .corrupt practices, and the story of some City ward elections is a very dark one. These Aldermen, elected by five or six score rotes, are then ex officio magistrates for life. They know nothing about law, and sometimes very little about grammar either, and in cases which are araued before them by counsel they rely helplessly upon the advice whispered to them by their chief clerks. The Chief Clerk at the Mansion House Lord Mayors with clerkly law whereby to defeat the suggestions of wily counsel, and the principal cle.ik at the Guildhall has £SOO a year for doing the same work, aud, in addition to this, has his life insured at the expense of the Corporation. Why this latter precaution is taken it is difficult to say, unless it be in case some irate prisoner, Avho has watched him priming the Aldermen with criminal law, should some day make an attack upon him. If any one has leisure, and wishes for half-an-hour"s amusement, let me advise him to attend what on the lucus a non lucendo principle is called the 'administration of justice?' at the Guildhall or the Mansion House. The air cf judicial solemnity with which the presiding functionary will suggest to counsel the legal points with which he has just been primed by his clerk—form any opinion—is simply inimitable.

_ " Seriously—in many ways the administration of justice by City Aldermen is a farce and worse. Many efforts have been made to remove it, but in spite of Commissions and Committees and Government Bills, it still remains. Its character remains the same, and probably Lord Brougham would say the same of it now as he did in 1843, when, speaking of City Magistracy in the House of Lords, he said, ' I complain of the administration of justice in the City of London, aud I bring it before your lordships that you may pronounce sentence against it, and that that grevious abuse which by a perversion often is called the " administration of justice" in the City may cease.' It has not ceased, but goes on still in the same old style, and probably will remain till the day when the Metropolis, arising in its might, shall sweep away for ever both the discreditable institution and also the discreditable system to which it is attached."