to the conspiracy, no one would have questioned its admissibility in evidence; but it related to matters wholly unconnected with the charge, and on this ground alone, as it appears, the prisoner so slandered, falsely as he alleged, took his objection. No doubt this aggravated the offence committed against every principle of justice, every dictate of common sense. But had the subject matter of the rumour gone directly to the subject matter of the charge, still any thing more disgraceful to a code of criminal procedure can hardly be imagined, than that it should permit a witness to tell the Court all the rumours which he had heard regarding the conduct of the parties on their trial.

We hope our English readers will excuse us for dwelling on points so familiar to every one in this country, when we add that our remarks are at present addressed to the French people, and above all, to their lawyers: yet it is fit that we add how little even the jurisconsults of our own country have a right to look down upon their neighbours when they reflect how strangely the first of legal philosophers erred, and upon this very subject of hearsay evidence. But the fundamental principle, the rule which requires its absolute and unqualified rejection, is so thoroughly well established in reason and common sense that nothing can shake it, and no one has ever persuaded himself to entertain a doubt respecting it, unless by confounding together two wholly different matters -- inquiries of police, and inquiries of trial. When the only question is, who shall be put upon his defence, - that is, who shall be convicted as suspected, no injury can arise from hearing whatever can lead to the detection of the suspected persons, at least no injury that is not abundantly compensated by the clue thus afforded; no risk is run that must not of necessity be incurred of giving trouble to the innocent, unless we would lose all means of tracing the guilty. But it is wholly different where the object is not to discover who has committed the offence, but whether or not the party suspected, and therefore accused, is the real offender. In this case what can be more important than the necessity of excluding all hearsay; in other words, of only allowing them to be examined who know the facts to which they speak?

If a witness were allowed to tell what another not produced had told him, we should be hearing the wrong man. We could only, by cross examination, sift his credit and judge of whether or not he had heard the story from another. He may be the most respectable of men in his life and conversation; he may give the most clear and consistent account; he may be entitled in every particular to our entire belief; we may believe all he says as implicitly as if we had ourselves been witness to the fact he relates, and after all what is that fact? Merely that some one had told him the story. But if that narrator were produced, he might be the worst of men, the most false, the most biassed by personal prejudices; the most inconsistent in his account, the most manifestly perjured upon his own showing,―a person whose whole demeanour on every question put to him proved him utterly unworthy of credit. Then observe the inevitable consequence of receiving his story at second hand. The party hearing most of the story knows that he could only damage the case by producing the original relater of it; and therefore keeps him back, while he hopes that its edition at second hand will produce an impression against which the accused cannot struggle.

We cannot help entertaining the hope that the gross absurdity of receiving all kinds of hearsay as if it were evidence, may, upon full consideration, be found rather to be an abuse which has crept into the French procedure, than a part of the Law itself. We well remember the famous trial of the Fualdes murder in 1817, already referred to more than once in the pages of this Journal. By the French law, no child under a certain age could be examined as a witness; two children said they had seen the murder committed; they were under the legal age and could not be heard to depose; but they told their story to a person of competent age, and he was examined-To what? not to the fact of the murder, but to the fact that the children had told him of it; this was supposed to get rid of the legal objection; and the Court considered that it had evidence of the murder. It was said at the time that the absurdity of this proceeding appeared too glaring, and that in a State trial, which took place immediately after,

some eminent English lawyers, among others the late Lord Ellenborough being present, they recommended the counsel for the prisoner to take an objection to the admission of such evidence. Possibly the question was not raised, but the belief prevails that no such evidence has ever since been admitted. We need scarcely add, that there is no one objection applicable to the admission of the child's evidence at second hand, which does not also apply to the admission of any other hearsay. Nay, we can figure to ourselves some colour of a reason for letting the child's story be heard which may not exist in the ordinary case. The child cannot be called; the adult may. There can be no ground for saying that the witness who heard the child's account is put forward while the child is kept back; a strong reason against hearing the adult's testimony at second hand. But it is needless to argue on the comparison of absurdities, either of which is so gross that no one could believe in their ever having been allowed to deform the procedure of a civilised State.

We trust we may be allowed in closing these remarks to express the unfeigned sorrow with which we regard the present unquiet and alarmed state of the great nation to whose jurisprudence we have been adverting. Is it doomed to pass through further and more severe trials than it has yet undergone? The bad spirit prevailing in many parts of the country, and the sad example of its government overthrown in a few hours while all seemed tranquil and prosperity everywhere reigned, forbid any very confident expectation that all will be well. But we have only to do with Jurisprudence; and we cannot help reminding the English reader, whose attention has been of late so powerfully fixed upon the judicial misconduct in Naples, and the French reader, of the Republican party whose gratification has been so loudly expressed at the judicial excesses of a Legitimate, Royalist government, how little the Republicans have to boast of in comparison of even the most despotic forms of European Monarchy. Let them cast their eyes back, not upon the Reign of Terror, but upon the mitigated the greatly mitigated rule of the Directory ; and ask themselves if any thing that has been done at Naples can be compared with the famous 18 Fructidor (4 Sept. 1797),

when, without the pretext of any plot, except the design of peaceably and legally preparing the way for a restoration of limited and constitutional Monarchy, 220 persons, including many members of both branches of the Legislature, four generals, one member of the Directory itself, some scores of priests, many aged men, many men labouring under grievous bodily infirmity, were seized, sent through the country for eight or ten days in iron cages like wild beasts, that they might be exposed to the scoffings of the infuriated mob, and then carried over to linger or to perish miserably in a pestilential climate, after a voyage more intolerable than that of the negro slaves, with the denial of every comfort to which civilised men are accustomed.

To this insupportable treatment was the conqueror of Holland, Pichegru, subjected for two months of the "Middle Passage" (as it might well be termed); the venerable Murinais, the amiable and accomplished Barthelemy, Barbè Marbois, Tronçon de Condray, Gibert des-Molieres: men second to none in Europe for unsullied integrity, and all the qualities both of the head and the heart that must endear and exalt our species. Each of the tyrants was allowed to name a certain number of victims; and they all inserted their personal enemies. This we know from M. Roderes, who had been inserted, but Talleyrand begged him off, and inserted Perlet in his stead. It is painful to reflect on the part which both Moreau and Talleyrand had in this atrocious proceeding, ignorant, doubtless, of the frightful and disgusting details which the histories of De la Rue, Aymè, and Ramel, as well as others, have given of their intolerable sufferings; but the one planning the whole measure, the other participating in its execution, with the profligate Republican tyrants, the Barras's, the Rewbells, the Lepauxs, who were plundering and degrading their unhappy country. Assuredly the delight of the present race of Republicans at the exposure of enormities under a Regal government, should be tempered with the reflection how much worse scenes were enacted under their favourite system; unless indeed it be worse to outrage the forms of justice in the trial of assassins, than to punish with tortures

that made death a consummation devoutly wished for, without even the pretence of a trial, men not even accused of any grave offence, and men whose only crime was designing to turn their persecutors out of the public trust of which they abused all the powers.1

MR. LYNE has addressed a letter to Lord Brougham in the papers of the 5th September last, from which we extract the following passages relative to the important subject of Tribunals of Commerce, now, we sincerely rejoice to find, occupying the attention of the mercantile body in the City of London:

"MY LORD, A thousand most influential firms (representing many thousands of individuals), in the first instance, united to call the attention of the Lord Mayor of London to the change the trading community now seek for; and all the great trades of this empire are at this minute combining to create a fund to pay the expense of agitating the country on the subject in question; and, in the midst of all this preliminary movement, it was not a little pleasing to the merchants of London to notice that Lord Grenville,

1 The History of the 18 Fructidor is well deserving of the closest attention from those who are speculating upon the advantages of Republican Government. There are other works beside those we have named, as General Dutertre's Memoirs, vindicating himself; Anecdotes Secrets du 18 Fructidor; Recueil des Victimes de la loi du 19 Fructidor, &c. The picture presented by these works is frightful in the extreme; and some of the most important of them, as Ayme's, were published at the time and while the oppressors were in a condition to make answer and defend themselves. Yet, bad as these deeds of the Republicans were, what are they in comparison to the reign of blood and pillage with which their successors in the present day threaten us,— - the men in whose eyes the Directory were mild and feeble and irresolute rulers, — the men whose political divinities are the Robespierres and the Billauds,—the men who openly avow from their secure retreat in London, that their object is to involve all Europe in anarchy and confiscation?