58o 



The Review of Reviews. 



December 1, 1906. 



and girls, men and women alike, and was founded 

 entirely on the strength of a message from the dead, 

 transferred to the sorrowing parents bv a spiritualist 

 medium. Senator Leland Stanford had only one son. 

 He was immensely wealthy, and he centred all his 

 hopes upon his boy, but suddenly the boy took 

 Roman fever and died. The Senator and his wife 

 were so stunned by the blow that thev first refused 

 to allow the body to be buried, and reason itself 

 appeared about to give way. At last a medium 

 succeeded in getting into communication with them, 

 and gave them a message purporting to come from 

 the dead boy. On the strength of that they went 

 to a seance : — 



They received a. " communication " to the effect that there 

 was no cause for grief, that the deatii had been, on the 

 contrary, nrovidential ; that thereby the boy's earth-life 

 mission would be best fulfilled, and that the vast fortune 

 which would have been his, was to be used by his father 

 to found a great Califoruian seat of learning, which was 

 destined to become a mighty centre of light and under- 

 standing. 



The Senator and his wife were fulh satisfied as 

 to the authenticity of the message, and that thev 

 were in very truth communicating with the spirit of 

 their dead son. Their grief calmed, and they de- 

 voted themselves to carrying out the will of their 

 boy by founding the university and endowdng it with 

 all their n-ealth. What is more remarkable i^ that 

 neither the Senator nor his w'ife had before their 

 son's death any dealings with spiritualists. The 

 motto of the University is '• Use your own judgment," 

 and in the organisation the development of character 

 and of independence of judgment are placed be- 

 yond everything. 



Mr. Reginald B. Span contributes " More Glimpses 

 of the Unseen," which are decidedly uncanny. 'V^^lat 

 with spectral dogs with staring eyes, and monstrous 

 ajje-like ghosts with human faces and of revolting 

 hideousness and weird, blood-curdling laughs, we 

 feel that when we have finished Mr. Span's paper we 

 have indeed supped full of horrors. 



Miss Goodrich-Freer, now Mrs. Spoer, continues 

 the extracts from her note-book, and the same writer 

 sends a letter in which she describes the persistence 

 of evil smells hundreds of years after those who 

 have caused them have passed away. The smell of 

 stables and tobacco on a spot where Queen Elizabeth 

 hunted over three hundred years ago is still there. 

 .■\re there, therefore, she asks, ghosts of odours > 

 Judging from her paper one would think that such 

 things actually existed. 



AN ATTACK UPON ENGLISH LAW. 



" I always call a spade a spade," said a man bv 

 way of apology for his foul language. "Indeed!" 

 said his neighbour. " I should have thought vou 

 called it a bloody shovel '." Dr. T. Miller Magiiire 

 is a controversialist of the Bloody Shovel method 

 of argument. In Broad Vieivs for October he pub- 



lishes an article entitled " English Law a Con- 

 temptible Anachronism," which for vigour of expres- 

 sion can hardly be excelled. Dr. Maguire tells us 

 how he made the acquaintance of a fair and lovable 

 creature, a veritable Child of Heaven, who was also 

 a daughter of shame, \vho was being torn to death 

 by the fell machinery of the fiendish law : — 



As I spoke to her, I saw that she was labouring under 

 some strons emotion. Fain would I have soothed that 

 Child of Heaven, and tenant of the slum. But she showed 

 me a subpfrna which she had received to be a witness. She 

 then spat upon it and defiled it, and in a perfect storm of 

 tears and passion, as fierce as it was entirely ju.stifiable, 

 gave vent to terrible imprecations aeainst the whole of 

 that hateful legal system, which, w-hen I was her age, I 

 was taught to venerate as the Majesty of English law. 



In his article in Broad Viavs Dr. .Maguire does 

 his best to emulate the methods of that Child of 

 Heaven. He ransacks his copious vocabulary for 

 words of execration and contempt: — 



Verily the Enfriish Themis, albeit arrayed in tawdry and 

 costly robes, is an ill-conditioned and ill-bred visen and 

 courtesan — it is time she were nublicly stripjied and her 

 fulsome features discovered plain in the sight of all me:i. 

 Then our people would shrink from her in horror and 

 disgust. 



I tried to iirove lately that the Courts of Jusiice were 

 even worse dens of inintxiiy, waste, folly and dismay than 

 the War Office, the Home Office, Somerset House, and all 

 the other ruinous institutions called Government Depart- 

 ments. Clergymen, soldiers, authors, teachers, working-men 

 and ordinary folk in restaurants have since declared to 

 me that I was absolutely true and ri^-ht, and that no wise 

 man would touch law with a tongs. 



In order to be ouite certain that I was not exaggerating, 

 I went out several times in the course of writing this ar- 

 ticle and asked certain neighbours, as L met them casual- 

 ly, ' What do you think of English Law?" Shopkeepers, 

 agents, caterers, clerks, bankers, men who had been jurors, 

 and women of every class replied that they utterly abhor- 

 red the whole "system — judges, law, and lawyers. Not one 

 person, not even persons whose relatives were lawyers, had 

 one good word for this supreme fatuity. 



It is only moderation to sav that everything which solici- 

 tors and lawyers touch thev injure or degrade. I have 

 been obliged to hearken to them again and again, and on 

 only one occasion was their advice worth one penny to 

 either myself, my opponents, ajid my clients. 



Our jurisprudence is a blighting moral plague centre in 

 our State. I do not exaggerate when I say that there is 

 not one man except a paid official of my rank within a 

 mile of m.v house who does not curse our law when its 

 name is mentioned. Ever.v lawyer when pressed admits its 

 folly, cost, and disastrous iuBuence on our social condition- 

 In this article we have only a foretaste of what is 

 to come : — 



There is nothing which Law. like the Army Council, 

 touches that it does not degrade. I intend to return at 

 some future period to discussing the divorce Court, that 

 whirlpool of domestic hore and family honour; that very 

 focus of degradation: that breeding-ground of worse than 

 malarial abomination. I iiropose also to discuss our Police 

 System and Criminal Law, as I have observed both for a 

 quarter of a century. 



The Younri Man for Sept-ember is very topical, in- 

 asmuch as it coiit-aiiiK a character sketch of Mr. 

 Augustine Birrell and a long illustrated article on 

 Rembrandt, whose tercenteuar.v was celebrated on 

 August loth last. 



