The Westport Times AND CHARLESTON ARGUS. THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 1868.

Westport Times, Volume 1, Issue 138, 9 January 1868, Page 2

The Westport Times AND CHARLESTON ARGUS. THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 1868.

Many attempts have been made to epitomise the character of the English by a word or a phrase that should sum up in a terse and epigrammatic way the characteristics which most strikingly distinguish it from that of other nations. Of these there have been few happier or more truthful epithets than the common one of a " law abiding people." Nowhere is so much readiness displayed to submit all disputed questions to the arbitrament of the law; nowhere is so willing an obedience yielded to its behests; and among no other people is there the same severe reprobation of the conduct of those who take the law into their own hands. The highest among us generally exhibit the same spirit of subordination to legal authority as the lowest; all classes alike are fully imbued with the elemental principle of good government, that the law affords a remedy for. every abuse, and that it becomes them to seek for it through the recognised channel. This spirit has gone with Englishmen to all parts of the world, and generally pervades the society of the most distant colony as thoroughly as it does that of our fathers land. It is only among those off-shoots of the British race that have broken off from the parent stem and have set themselves apart, that we see this sentiment lose its force. Among such communities only does the Anglo-Saxon love of order degenerate into rowdyism, and Lynch Law takes the place of the law of the land._ But everywhere may be found individual exceptions to a general rule, and such an exception have we recently seen amongst ourselves—an instance of an administrator of the laws not merely forgetting what was due to the dignity of his own position, but descending to a resort to that argument um ad hominem which it was one of his chiefest duties to repress with his utmost vigor. This pernicious example from one in high place could not fail to produce its effect on a population so circumscribed as ours; and how quickly the tree of evil beareth fruit was exemplified yesterday in the Magistrate's Court, where a certain Mrs Haynes, finding, or fancying herself aggrieved by the questions of the opposing counsel in a debt case, took the line indicated by high authority as the right way of redressing one's wrongs and horsewhipping the lawyer in his own office, for which offence she was brought before the Bench, and very properly bound over to keep the peace towards all Her Majesty's subjects. Whether the counsel did or did not exceed the license usually accorded to legal gentlemen in their zeal to serve their clients' cause, is beside the question; but it is manifestly time to repress this rising notion that the cudgel or the horse-whip are to be the acknowledged arbiters between disputants, and we think the Magistrate acted quite rightly in tying the hands of this Lola Montez of Westport, by every sort of legal fetter.