bd 
sense of fair play, and to concentrate it for a short time upon 
matters demanding public ventilation no less than Parliamentary 
enactment. 
The object of all criminal procedure is to establish the truth, to 
vindicate the law by punishing the guilty, and to protect the inno- 
cent; whilst the indirect result should be to -deter others from 
crime of all sorts. To this end procedure divides itself into two 
parts : that which is publicly and that which is privately carried out. 
I deal first with the private steps taken in criminal procedure. 
The discovery of crime rests with the police, for the most part, to 
whose knowledge the circumstances may come from various 
sources ; they have, so to speak, the getting up of the case, or the 
preparation of an accusation for the magistrates or the coroner. 
These higher authorities await the evidence brought before them 
by the police, and the upshot of the preliminary investigation 
depends much upon the intelligence which has been brought to 
bear upon the case by the police. ‘The coroner is often, as much 
as the magistrates, in the hands of the police ; for whether he may 
or may not discover the guilty party depends mainly upon the 
evidence brought before him. 
Those who know anything of criminal justice are aware that in 
cases which turn on circumstantial evidence, as cases of murder 
almost always do, it requires great intelligence and some experience 
to avoid a blunder. It requires an intellect to construct a theory 
of guilt upon certain facts, so as to arrive at conclusions as to the 
course to adopt. I lay stress upon the fact that the earliest stage 
in our criminal procedure is the most important, and is, under our 
present system, left in the rudest and clumsiest hands. I am not, 
at the present moment, casting any reflection upon so useful a 
body as our police, who are more cr less educated, and more or 
less intelligent. 
When, however, we consider the ranks from which they are 
necessarily recruited, the wonder is, not that they should occasion- 
ally make mistakes, but that the blunders are not more frequent 
than they really are. 
A man is one day a railway porter, or an agricultural labourer ; 
