Privy Council.[1] It was an especially unpleasant case, but in reading this suggestive debate, one may see how vigorously a democracy, through its leaders, may assert both its rights and its public conscience.
Two members of the Legislative Assembly had been convicted of receiving bribes, and were expelled; more than this the two bribers, who had behind them all the weight and respectability of local "squatterdom," were committed to prison, but released by the Supreme Court. This was the point in dispute, and the lawyer who opposed the popular party in thus bringing to punishment the corrupters, as well as the corrupted, made out from a purely legal point of view a very good case. But no one whose own life and future were at all bound up in that of Victoria but must have felt the irresistible force of every word used by
- ↑ The attitude of Mr. Higinbotham in this matter is not to be taken as in any way hostile to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as a final Court of Appeal. Perhaps that Committee might be strengthened by the accession of really eminent Colonial legists, such as Judge Molesworth of Victoria, but its decisions have ever been received with universal confidence and respect in Australia. Mr. Higinbotham's contention in this debate was that the local Supreme Court had no power to over-ride the decision of the local Legislature, on a matter affecting its own rights and privileges.
