1 90 Letter on Affairs in general. [FEB. 



and less opportunity, for the commission of crime ; and, consequently, has 

 her market far less crowded with those speculators whose business it is to 

 live by the defence of crime, than ours is here. The thieves alone of 

 Edinburgh, do not pay (as those of London do) ten thousand pounds a 

 year to counsel and attornies : all the rogues of the three kingdoms do not 

 flock to her shops and dwellings to plunder ; nor all the adventurers to her 

 bar, to struggle no matter how for briefs, and fortunes. The quantity 

 of crime to be dealt with in Scotland, the temper of the people, and the 

 style, and regime established at the bar, all differ widely from the state of 

 things which prevail in England ; and yet Scottish advocates, I believe, 

 are well aware and, unless I am misinformed, no man has a better right 

 to know the fact, than Mr. Jeffery himself that culprits are sometimes 

 acquitted, even in Scotland, by the ingenuity of their counsel, where they 

 ought to have been punished ? 



Because we have not made our arrangements dull as we are in 

 England, without some meaning of our own, if we could be allowed to 

 explain it. When we allow a man to defend himself in an action for tliq 

 price of a pair of breeches, by the mouth of Mr. Scarlett but not against 

 an indictment in which his life is implicated for murder our motive, 

 right or wrong, has been this we say, " it matters very little, (in the first 

 instance, which way the trial goes ; but in the last, society has too deep an 

 interest at stake, to permit any babbling, or trifling, or equivocation, which 

 may interfere with the course of justice. We will allow more latitude to 

 the shewing of real truth no great matter as to the strict regularity of the 

 method by which it is got at in a trial for felony, than we do in a civil 

 case : but at the same time, we shut out, more peremptorily, the chance of 

 any miscarriage by juggling or by quibble." 



I do not mean at all to decide that the law ought to remain as it is ; 

 or even to say peremptorily that the balance of argument may not be in fa- 

 vour of giving full liberty to counsel to address the jury in capital cases, 

 as upon inferior indictments ; but I do not think that the case for doing 

 this is quite so clear as the writer in the Edinburgh Review seems to 

 make it. 



The first effect of allowing counsel to address juries in capital cases, 

 would be the introduction of a new style of forensic display, which would 

 be at least unseemly, if not very mischievous. The getting a " prisoner's 

 brief" for some capital crime, in that case, woul be the getting an oppor- 

 tunity of making a speech : and that opportunity would be used, by a 

 great number of persons who have little general hope in cases of import- 

 ance to be entrusted, without the slightest regard to any object beyond 

 that of doing, or saying, something which should relieve them from obscu- 

 rity. We should have, from the counsel for the prisoner, abuse of prose- 

 cutors ; denouncement of witnesses : appeals to all the prejudices and 

 passions of juries. This would lead, of absolute necessity, to counter ap- 

 peals to inferences of extreme severity to arguments addressed to men's 

 fears of robbery or wrong and, in fact, to a merciless pleading against the 

 prisoner's life, by the counsel for the prosecution. We should have just 

 the same description of squabbling, and defiance, and recrimination only 

 of a more vulgar description in a court of life and death, that we have in 

 the court of Common Pleas : one advocated prospects being built upon 

 acquitting a prisoner right or wrong ; and the other's reputation at stake 

 right or wrong upon the hanging him : all which sort of hdte, and 

 combat, may be well calculated to do eventual justice, and has nothing 



