MIXED IMPRESSIONS

Southland Times, Issue 18853, 19 June 1920, Page 8

MIXED IMPRESSIONS

SIX MONTHS IN CALIIORNIA. A RACY NARRATIVE. BY ALERT NEW ZEALANDER. Just returned from a six months’ sojourn in California is Mr F. F. Haggitt, the well-known Feilding lawyer with a whole raft of vivid impressions of "Our American Cousins.” In the first place .Mr Haggitt reports the Americans a desperately ignorant people. They don’t know New Zealand. In their newspapers, in which the signing of the Peace Treaty would be jostled into a corner by’ the Bickford divorce suit (if the events synchronised), he came across only one message about New Zealand. ft read: "Wellington reports that the official recount, of votes gives a majority for Continuance” ; and the headline given by the learned news editor to this item was, "Australia Remains Wet.” BROAD FARCE IN COURT. As a solicitor, Mr Haggitt was naturally interested in their court procedure, which he describes as the most undignified procedure imaginable. As a mixture of broad 1 farce and refined music-hall humour his anecdote of one experience in a ’Frisco | court may go on record. The accused 1 person wits charged with stealing a case of liquor, and incidentally his counsel suc- | cessfully pleaded the new law “that liquor i mis no value,” and having no value could ! not be stolen. That was merely fantastic. | It was the procedure that was buffoonery. "Both counsel chewed gum energetically throughout,” says Mr Haggitt, "and I can recommend the practice to Law Society as a recipe for giving counsel a ferocious demeanour. At one stage the proceedings became so mixed that the Judge threw down his pen and interjected ‘bow-wow-wow—who’s hearing this case, you or me?’ In the meantime pending their trial, all the prisoners to come before the court were confined in a sort of cage in the court room. If they-Te not guilty they must feel like it by the time their cases are culled.” Mr Haggitt explained thal the secret of this lack of dignity and repose, so distasteful to our British ideals of justice’s demeanour, is probably to be found in the origin of the Judges. They arc those of the lower court, elected by the public, not appointed; and yet they have more power than our police magistrates. The whole system of justice, he thinks, is tainted by s-urh anomalies, for even though the higher courts are constituted in a wayfree from public interference they have not the assured isolation British courts have, so that it was common talk certain Californian circles when Mr Haggitt sailed that the Appeal Court was postponing decision on the Volstead amendment to the Constitution (the Prohibition question) to see which side would offer the biggest douceur. It was, of course, a fantastic libel on the High, Court, but the mere fact that it could be harboured bespoke something wrong in the system. The prevalent opinion in California when Mr Haggitt sailed (an opinion since proved wrong) was that the Court would decide that the amendment was unconst itutiort’al. Californians were no doubt inspired by the fact Mr Haggitt records: that the grape crops had been sold at sdol a ton better price than before. “Prohibition,” he says, “was actually and rigidly in force from January 15. After that the big drought set in. It was indeed ‘a long time between.’ ”