182G.] Publication of Police Reports. 469 



And yet the main point is still to come. Thus far we have taken the 

 persons appearing in a court of law and at a police office — as persons, in 

 each case claiming or defending their supposed rights — to be persons, in 

 all worthiness of protection from annoyance, to be upon a par. But, if 

 the parties who are carried to police offices (and who elect to hold their 

 tongues there), if these persons are to be watched over so sedulously, 

 lest any statement should go forth to the world to their prejudice, when 

 it does not suit their convenience to answer it, how happens it that the 

 Judges who maintain this doctrine, never advert to the predicament of 

 the crowds of persons who stand before them, neither for fault committed 

 or advantage sought, every year in their own courts ; the persons who 

 are summoned and compelled to appear as witnesses upon trials in which 

 they have no interest ; and who, for this very service, are permitted to 

 be exposed, systematically, to the most gross and libellous imputations, 

 no one of which they have, or can have, even the common satisfaction 

 of replj'ing to ? ' 



The law of the country, for the benefit of witnesses, stands thus. A 

 man happens to have the knowledge of a particular fact. Tliat fact is 

 material upon a trial in which he has no interest ; and he is compelled, 

 under heavy penalties, and without receiving any compensation, to quit 

 his home and business to give evidence of it. He does this for the 

 public good ; and how is it that the public good rewards him ? — He may 

 be wholly uninterested in the evidence which he gives ; that evidence 

 may be true to the letter, and the very party who disputes it may 

 know it to be so ; he may be a man, in the fair sense of the term, of 

 entire respectability : and yet, the very moment this man has given his 

 evidence — which he gives, let it be remembered, upon compulsion, 

 and in which he has no interest — up rises a gentleman whose brief is 

 marked " three guineas," whose sole and particular business is to insult 

 him into an abandonment of every thing that he has stated. Every 

 circumstance of poverty or discomfort about his condition ; every mis- 

 fortune that ever befel himself or any of his family, is vigilantly 

 gathered up and stated. His calling; his appearance; his -religious 

 belief; all these are commented upon, not merely with freedom, but 

 with insolence. In default of facts elicited which may be galling, im- 

 putations are constantly conveyed in the shape of questions — questions 

 for which no foundation is ever supposed by the inquirer to exist, and 

 which are, generally indeed, suggested extemporally by the attorney's 

 clerk ; but which mere denial, it is well known, does not take the sting 

 out of. The avowed object of the counsel, constantly stated in terms, 

 and admitted by tlie court, is to '■' discredit " this witness, of whom he 

 knows nothing. All this passes in the presence of a crowd of persons, 

 and concludes with an address from the " leai-ned gentleman " in which 

 he is " compelled to insist " that for every word the witness has spoken 

 he deserves the pillory ; and, for the whole of his evidence, at least to 

 go to Botany Bay. The whole trial, with the jokes of the excellent 

 counsel (seldom more delicate tl^an those of the police reporters), is 

 published in the papers of next day. The nuisance of this whole pro- 

 ceeding is so notorious, especially where females are concerned, that 

 many persons had rather resign a trifling right, than be compelled to put 

 a woman of any delicacy into the witness box. Yet, while we endure all 

 this abomination without complaint, because it is compensated, and 

 compensated ten times over, by the immeasurable advantage of pro- 

 ceeding always upon viva voce evidence, and or' sustaining the right of 



