shadowy claim to a barren island in the midst of the ocean.
The moment the Opposition were deprived of this subject of declamation, their quarrels began afresh. The decisions of Mansfield were not only at this period—to his eternal glory—laying the foundation of English commercial law, but were also obtaining a more doubtful celebrity by sapping the right of juries to be the judges of the intention of a libel. At the close of 1770, Glyn unsuccessfully proposed a committee to "inquire into the administration of criminal justice, and the proceedings of the judges in Westminster Hall, particularly in cases relating to the liberty of the press and the constitutional power and duty of juries," while Chatham in the Upper House engaged in a review of the legal arguments of Mansfield, as imprudent as it was improper. He would have done well to have recollected the warning of Barre, that were retired soldiers "to attempt to teach Mansfield law, the lawyers might come with their long gowns and their shaven crowns, to teach him how to encamp, how to draw up an army and storm a breach."[1] As it was, he only escaped a crushing defeat by the moral cowardice of the Lord Chief Justice himself, who shrunk from the encounter.
It is beyond doubt that the statutory powers vested in Parliament over the judges are powers to be exercised with the utmost discrimination, and that points of law should not be raised in Parliament except in connection with a motion for the dismissal of an offending judge. The arguments of Chatham in the Upper House, and of the friends of Shelburne in the Lower House, were more than sufficient to support a vote of censure, and this was clearly the course they ought to have adopted. A committee could only be the means of keeping a vote of censure hanging in terrorem over the head of Mansfield for a considerable period, and was in itself an unfit tribunal to decide on the conduct of the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. It must at the same time
- ↑ Parliamentary History, xvi. 1294.
