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WILLIAMS & NORGATE, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

AND

SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.

1870.

BIRMINGHAM:

PRINTED BY JOSIAH ALLEN, JUN., LIVERY STREET.

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Essay I.

THE

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HE English have long valued themselves on their administration of justice: trial by jury throughout their history, and the habeas-corpus acts nearly perfected two centuries ago, have placed them on a height from which they could look down with contempt on French and German political slavery. The groans of the victims of the Inquisition were made familiar by Corporal Trim, in the sermon borrowed, as we are told, from the great scholar, Bentley and so far were the English from exaggerating foreign judicial iniquities, that they overlooked the fact of the ordinary criminal procedure being that of the Inquisition, with its secrecy and its prolonged tortures: an ignorance as unfair to the Inquisition as unduly favourable to the lay courts. Everyone however, did know that these courts inflicted torture on suspected persons before trial, and that thus the innocent as well as the guilty were victims of judicial cruelty.

B

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