Letters to the Editor. 367 



Headquarters of the Appeal Court; 



The question of the West Indian Appeal Court will not, I think, be 

 easily allowed to retire again into the limbo of suspended proposals. It 

 is necessary to provide for the fact that Trinidad has three very busy 

 Judges, Barbados only one, Jamaica (which may under the able and tact- 

 ful administration of Sir William Manning cease to plough a lonely furrow 

 and rejoin for many purposes her West Indian sisters) only two, and that 

 British Guiana is overstaffed in the legal line. To meet local requiie- 

 inents, to conciliate local prejudices and to enable British Guiana to do 

 with as many Judges as Jamaica, a colony with three times its population, 

 it will probably be necessary to carry out the entire scheme at once and 

 to provide any Court of Appeal with a President as extra Judge. Nothing- 

 should be done to diminish the prestige of the new creation by false 

 economy or by any makeshift arrangement. But these are matters which 

 can only be decided by friendly consultation between the West Indies and 

 the Colonial Office, assisted perhaps by a conference of West Indian 

 Judges and law officers. Where whole measures, however, are more 

 convenient and equally economical I am no advocate of half-way measures. 

 Jamaica if it accedes, which cannot be anticipated with confidence, is only 

 a week by sea from Trinidad even by the Royal Mail circular route, and 

 Trinidad is the natural headquarters of any Appeal Court. 



We shall shortly have one system of civil ] a w and procedure 

 throughout the West Indies, except as regards St. Lucia, whose codes 

 are sufficiently comprehensive to make reference to the Coutume de 

 Paris merely pedantic. We shall have one system of Criminal Law, 

 that is the Criminal Law of England. No experienced Judge or 

 lawyer will advocate any change or think he can improve upon the 

 work of the great criminal Judges and lawyers of the Empire. I 

 have never seen in the West Indies any attempt to improve upon the 

 English criminal procedure (for attempts to improve upon the 

 substantive criminal law have been luckily rare) that did not lead to 

 expense, doubt and confusion. 



If the Conference of Customs authorities were assisted by some 

 leading Imperial expert in Customs and kindred economic matters we 

 should be likely to make somewhat more rapid approaches to commer- 

 cial understanding and to a uniformity in Customs matters. At present 

 the West Indian tariffs are often unscientific in the extreme, and only 

 some officer of the very highest authority would be likely to secure the 

 adoption of any radical change. I am sure our own very capable Comp- 

 troller would agree with this. 



A High Commissioner for the Caribbean. 

 The suggestion of a High Commissioner for the Caribbean is 

 worthy of further consideration. If such a step were taken the post 

 would probably be doubled at first with that of the Governorship of 

 Jamaica, where the Commissioner no doubt would have the assistance of 

 a deputy, as in the similar case of the High Commissionership for South 

 Africa which was at first combined with the Governorship of Cape 



