“God forbid, prisoner at the bar, that the defence attempted by your counsel yesterday should aggravate the punishment which I am about to inflict upon you; and with a view to dispel from my mind all that was then urged on your behalf, I have taken the night to consider what sentence I ought to pronounce.”

Having said thus much about the speech for the defence, he gave a very moderate sentence of two or three months’ imprisonment.  Every sentence that this Chief Justice passed had been well thought out and considered, and was the result of anxious deliberation—­that is to say, in the serious cases that demanded it.  Of course, I do not claim for my adopted system an infallibility which belongs to no human device, but only that during some years, by patiently following it, I was enabled the better to determine how I could combine justice with leniency.

CHAPTER XLV.

HOW I CROSS-EXAMINED PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLEON.

I have been often questioned in an indirect manner as to the amount of my income and the number of my briefs.  I do not mean by the Income Tax Commissioners, but by private “authorities.”  I was often told how much I must be making.  Sometimes it was said, “Oh, the Associates’ Office verdict books show this and that.”  “Why, Hawkins, you must be making thirty thousand a year if you are making a penny.  What a hard-working man you are!  How do you manage to get through it?”

Well, I had no answer.  It is a curious inquisitiveness which it would do no one any good to gratify.  I did not think it necessary to the happiness of my friends that they should know, and if it would afford me any satisfaction, it was far better that they should name the amount than I. They could exaggerate it; I had no wish to do so.  It is true enough in common language I worked hard, but working by system made it easy.  Slovenly work is always hard work; you never get through it satisfactorily.  It was by working easily that I got through so much.  “Never fret” and “toujours pret” were my mottoes, as I told the chaplain; I hope he remembers them to this day.  If they would not help him to a bishopric, nothing would.  But I will say seriously that nothing is so great a help in our daily struggles as good temper, and with that observation I leave my friends still to wonder how I got through so much.

Judges often talk over their experiences at the Bar.  Sometimes I talked of mine, and on one occasion told the following curious incident in my long career.

I mention this circumstance as a curiosity only so far as the incident is concerned, but as more than a curiosity so far as the legality of evading the substance of the law by a technicality is concerned.

All men are not privileged to cross-examine royalty, and especially future emperors.

On July 1, 1847, which was not very long after my call to the Bar, Prince Louis Napoleon, who afterwards became Emperor of the French, was residing in England.