Contributions to All The Year Round | Page 8

two
gentlemen; one of them, who presided, a Doctor of Music. A piano was
the only instrument. Among the vocal pieces, we had a negro melody
(rapturously encored), the Indian Drum, and the Village Blacksmith;
neither did we want for fashionable Italian, having Ah! non giunge, and
Mi manca la voce. Our success was splendid; our good-humoured,
unaffected, and modest bearing, a pattern. As to the audience, they
were far more polite and far more pleased than at the Opera; they were
faultless. Thus for barely an hour the concert lasted, with thousands of
great bottles looking on from the walls, containing the results of Friar
Bacon's Million and one experiments in agricultural chemistry; and
containing too, no doubt, a variety of materials with which the Friar
could have blown us all through the roof at five minutes' notice.
God save the Queen being done, the good Friar stepped forward and
said a few words, more particularly concerning two points; firstly, that
Saturday half-holiday, which it would be kind in farmers to grant;
secondly, the additional Allotment-grounds we were going to establish,
in consequence of the happy success of the system, but which we could
not guarantee should entitle the holders to be members of the club,
because the present members must consider and settle that question for
themselves: a bargain between man and man being always a bargain,

and we having made over the club to them as the original
Allotment-men. This was loudly applauded, and so, with contented and
affectionate cheering, it was all over.
As Philosewers, and I the Dreary, posted back to London, looking up at
the moon and discussing it as a world preparing for the habitation of
responsible creatures, we expatiated on the honour due to men in this
world of ours who try to prepare it for a higher course, and to leave the
race who live and die upon it better than they found them.

FIVE NEW POINTS OF CRIMINAL LAW

The existing Criminal Law has been found in trials for Murder, to be so
exceedingly hasty, unfair, and oppressive--in a word, to be so very
objectionable to the amiable persons accused of that thoughtless
act--that it is, we understand, the intention of the Government to bring
in a Bill for its amendment. We have been favoured with an outline of
its probable provisions.
It will be grounded on the profound principle that the real offender is
the Murdered Person; but for whose obstinate persistency in being
murdered, the interesting fellow-creature to be tried could not have got
into trouble.
Its leading enactments may be expected to resolve themselves under the
following heads:
1. There shall be no judge. Strong representations have been made by
highly popular culprits that the presence of this obtrusive character is
prejudicial to their best interests. The Court will be composed of a
political gentleman, sitting in a secluded room commanding a view of
St. James's Park, who has already more to do than any human creature
can, by any stretch of the human imagination, be supposed capable of
doing.
2. The jury to consist of Five Thousand Five Hundred and Fifty-five
Volunteers.
3. The jury to be strictly prohibited from seeing either the accused or
the witnesses. They are not to be sworn. They are on no account to hear
the evidence. They are to receive it, or such representations of it, as
may happen to fall in their way; and they will constantly write letters
about it to all the Papers.

4. Supposing the trial to be a trial for Murder by poisoning, and
supposing the hypothetical case, or the evidence, for the prosecution to
charge the administration of two poisons, say Arsenic and Antimony;
and supposing the taint of Arsenic in the body to be possible but not
probable, and the presence of Antimony in the body, to be an absolute
certainty; it will then become the duty of the jury to confine their
attention solely to the Arsenic, and entirely to dismiss the Antimony
from their minds.
5. The symptoms preceding the death of the real offender (or Murdered
Person) being described in evidence by medical practitioners who saw
them, other medical practitioners who never saw them shall be required
to state whether they are inconsistent with certain known diseases--but,
THEY SHALL NEVER BE ASKED WHETHER THEY ARE NOT
EXACTLY CONSISTENT WITH THE ADMINISTRATION OF
POISON. To illustrate this enactment in the proposed Bill by a case:- A
raging mad dog is seen to run into the house where Z lives alone,
foaming at the mouth. Z and the mad dog are for some time left
together in that house under proved circumstances, irresistibly leading
to the conclusion that Z has been bitten by the dog. Z is afterwards
found lying on his