I never saw anything more of them from that day to this.

[In a case at Devizes Sir Henry showed in a striking manner the character he always bore as a humane Judge.  He was not humane where cruelty was any part of the culprit’s misdeeds, for he visited that with the punishment he thought it deserved, and his idea of that was on a somewhat considerable scale.]

I was down upon cruelty, and always lenient where there were any mitigating circumstances whatever, either of mental weakness, great temptation, provocation, or unhappy surroundings.

A woman was brought up before me who had been committed to take her trial on a charge of concealing the birth of a child.  For prisoners in these circumstances I always felt great sympathy, and regarded the moral guilt as altogether unworthy of punishment.  The law, however, was bound to be vindicated so far as the legal offence was concerned.  She had already been in prison for three months, because she was too poor and too friendless to find bail.  I am always pointing out that if magistrates would send more cases to the Judges than they do, they would get some precedents as to the appropriate measure of punishment, which they seem badly to need.  This woman had already been punished, without being found guilty, with three times the punishment she ought to have received had she been found guilty.  A month’s imprisonment would have been excessive.

Prisoners should always be released on their own recognizances where there is a reasonable expectation that they will appear.

The result was that the unhappy woman, who had been punished severely while in the eye of the law she was innocent, was discharged when she was found to be guilty.

We have seen how Mr. Justice Maule examined a little boy as to his understanding the nature of an oath.  I once examined a little girl upon a preliminary point of this kind, before she had arrived at that period of mental acuteness which enables one to understand exactly the meaning of the words uttered in the administration of the oath.  The child was called, and after allowing the form of “the evidence you shall give,” etc., and “kiss the book,” to be gabbled over, I said, before the Testament could reach the child’s lips,—­

“Stop!  Do you understand what that gentleman has been saying?”

“No, sir.”

I think it is a great farce to let little children be sworn who cannot be expected to understand even the language in which the oath is administered, to say nothing of the oath itself.  How can they comprehend the meaning of the phrases employed?  And many grown-up uneducated people are in the same situation.  Surely a simple form, such as, “You swear to God to speak the truth”—­or, even better still, to make false evidence punishable without any oath at all—­would be far better.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

JACK.