176 report— 1877. 



Attorney-General) of all prosecutions from the yery commencement to the final 

 stage, C09t only £27,960 a year, viz. : — £23,332 for salaries, £3,708 for other emo- 

 luments, and £920 for office expenses. The effect of this public local officer taking 

 charge of prosecutions arising out of sudden deaths was to dispense altogether with 

 coroners' inquests, the inquiry by the Crown Solicitor into every sudden death that 

 might possibly have resulted from crime being accepted as a complete substitute for 

 coroners' inquests, which do not exist in Scotland. In England the direct cost of 

 coroners' inquests was £84,285. From this it may be estimated that the dispensing 

 with coroners' inquests iu Scotland is a direct saving of about £14,000 a year, or 

 half the whole cost of the Crown Solicitors. There is a further saving in having 

 only a single instead of a double preliminary inquiry : this diminishes the time and 

 expenses of witnesses, and saves double information, with all risk of complication 

 and failure of justice the double informations before coroners and justices give rise 

 to. The Scotch system leads to a further saving at the trial. With them the case 

 goes hefore only one jury, composed partly of special and partly of common jurors. 

 Their proceeding is like information in England, and, except in cases of treason, 

 bills of indictment are not sent to a Grand Jury. This saves time of witnesses, of 

 judges, and jurors when trials actually take place. The witnesses especially are 

 saved, because the public prosecutor can regulate the whole course of the business, 

 and witnesses need not as at present necessarily attend from the commencement of 

 the assizes, hut only when the trial is fixed. The single jury system leads to 

 another saving, prosecutions in Scotland being stopped at an early stage, which in 

 England and Ireland are stopped by Grand Juries, involving cost of attendance, of 

 witnesses, and of court proceedings. In Ireland (if the cost of inquests, £8,094, 

 which the Scotch precedent would indicate to be unnecessary, be deducted) the 

 true cost of the public prosecutor system, £69,025, very slightly exceeded the cost of 

 the English system, £02,015,' in a portion of the population equal to that of 

 Ireland. The slightly greater cost of the public prosecutor system in Ireland was 

 far more than counterbalanced by having only 9§ in each 10,000 of the population, 

 instead of 14, as in England and Wales, confined at the cost of the State in goals, 

 convict prisons, and reformatories. These institutions cost only £187,155 in the 

 year in Ireland, as compared with a cost of £239,926 in an equal population in 

 England and Wales, or £52,771 less. The Irish system does not, like the Scotch, 

 meet frauds connected with public companies, and embezzlement on private 

 people : these are left to the private prosecutor, as to which there is a strong de- 

 mand for a public prosecutor intervening. This arises in part, no doubt, from the 

 idea that crimes of this class seldom occur without some great carelessness or neglect 

 of checking on the part of the person injured making it proper for them to bear 

 the cost of prosecution. This view could, however, be met without entrusting the 

 conduct of the cases to them, with the strong temptation to abandon a prosecution 

 that must disclose their own neglect and want of caution. The true plan would 

 appear to be, not only in those cases of fraud and embezzlement, but iu all cases 

 where crimes arose to any considerable extent from culpable carelessness or neglect, 

 or from provocation of the person against whom the crime was committed, to give 

 the court power, while punishing the crime on the one hand, to award, on applica- 

 tion of the public prosecutor, the whole or any portion of the costs to be paid by 

 the person whoso neglect or provocation led to the crime being committed. 



On the Law of Succession to Property. By W. Neiison Hancock, LL.D. 



The author said that fewpeople who discuss laws of succession seem to be aware that 

 there are in England three laws of succession as to property in land, and were, till 1856, 

 three laws of succession as to personal property. They rest, however, upon nogeneral 

 or scientific principle. The differences in the succession of real property depend 

 on the accidents of tenure ; those in personal property arose from the customs which 

 prevail in the Province of York, including a large portion of the North of England 

 and in the City of London, and which were recognized as modifying the Statute of 

 Distributions ; the differences as to land prevailed for many centuries ; those as to 

 personal property for two centuries. In succession to fee-simple all goes to the 



