III. There has occurred a disclosure upon the course pursued by the Irish Government in naming the Sheriffs of Counties, which any one interested in the great subject of the Irish judicial administration, must feel to be most important, and which connects itself closely with the topics discussed in the foregoing speech of 1823. It appears that the executive government habitually interferes with the choice of those important Ministers of the Law; does not, as in England, consider the lists given in by the judges to be at all binding; displaces without any scruple all the names so selected; and frequently appoints others without any communication from the Bench. This course of making pocket-sheriffs, or sheriffs without any judicial authority for their nomination, is found to have been followed no less than twenty-two or twenty-three times in three years. So grave a matter unavoidably called for the attention of Parliament, and it was ably and temperately submitted by Lord Lyndhurst to the House of Lords, as the especial guardian of the purity of our Judicial Establishment. A Committee was in consequence appointed to investigate the whole of this subject; and a more important inquiry has, perhaps, never been undertaken by either branch of the Legislature. It is hardly possible that results favourable to the cause of good government and popular rights should not follow from the Committee's labours. Certainly, had the things now known been disclosed before the debate in 1823, it would have been wholly impossible to resist the motion then made and rejected. For an habitual interference of the Crown with the appointment of an officer upon whom depends both the execution of all judicial orders and the return of all members to serve in Parliament, must at any rate be put a stop to, in whatever misapprehension of the law such an abuse may have had its origin. EXTRACT FROM SPEECH ON THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IN IRELAND. HOUSE OF LORDS-AUGUST 6, 1839. Ir there be any one thing which more than another deserves the anxious attention of this House, above all other tribunals, it is the thing, whatever it may be, that touches the function peculiarly appertaining to this assembly, this supreme judicature, this highest court of justice in the kingdom. Whoever has practised in our courts,-whoever has presided over them, -whoever has observed the mode in which the judicial business is carried on,-whoever has meditated on the constitution of these realms, as regards its executive, legislative, and judicial branches, must be prepared to say, with me, that, of all the branches of our polity, the pure, correct, and inflexible administration of justice is by far the most important. It is this great power, this prodigious clamp, which binds all the parts of our vast social structure together. It is this great solid belt, which guards and strengthens our whole system, our great pyramid,-formed as it is, of various and of discrepant materials, in shape and size differing from the lowest and broadest to the most exalted and the most narrow. As long as that mighty zone which connects the upper and lower parts, while it strengthens the whole edifice, remains unimpaired, you may well disregard all the perils with which the constitution can be threatened, in what quarter soever its assailants may be found, or against what part they may point their attacks. Let the Crown have all the lust of power that can inflame a tyrant-give it a venal House of Lords-give it an obsequious House of Commons give it a corrupt Court, and a people dead to the love of freedom,-from the King's Court at Windsor, I will appeal to the King's Courts at Westminster; thither I will flee for safety, to the remains of liberty, and, in the sacred temple of justice, I shall find the indestructible palladium of the constitution. Or let the danger come from another quarter. Let there be a vacillating House of Commons,-a Parliament in which the people's representatives know not their own minds, dare not declare any firm or fixed opinion, but mutter resolutions which they cannot articulate-voting, now this way, by a narrow majority, and now that, by no larger a balance, -let the force of the constitution, thus neutralized in the one House, be concentrated in the other, so that the Lords shall seem to rule the whole, the mixed monarchy to be gone, the balance long vaunted to be at length destroyed, and an aristocracy to be all but planted in its stead,-still, against the corruptions of oligarchy and the insolence of patrician domination, I seek for shelter to liberty and protection to right, in the impregnable bulwark of judicial power. Or, again: if the danger should threaten from another quarter,the quarter whence, certainly, it is the least to be dreaded, if the pressure should come from the swelling, and loosening, and cracking of the foundations,if the "fierce democratie" should wield unsafely its powers, if the outrages of popular violence should assail the fabric,-to its wild waves I will oppose the judicial system as a rock against which the surge may dash-and must dash in vain. Of that judicial system, the assembly which I now address is emphatically the guardian; with that administration of justice, this House is eminently, and in the last resort, entrusted by the constitution; and to you, therefore, my Lords, it |