A Visit to an English Police Court. pair serves only on one day in a week, and a large proportion are too old to do any thing of an official nature, except to con tinue to sign their titles after their names. I went to the police court (which was as grimy and as shabby as police courts and the crowds within them usually are), and sent my card to the magistrate by a policeman. It interested me to see the respect shown to the judge by the officer; for the man was afraid to speak or to do the least thing that might attract the judge's attention. His plan was to stand beside the bench, my card in hand, until the magistrate might happen to look that way. It seemed as if his honor never would turn his head; but at last, after a delay of full ten minutes, reluctant fortune favored me, and I was bidden to go up and take a seat upon the bench. The trip-hammer effect of the blows that caste has dealt English humanity always impressed me, and almost constantly con fronted me. It was not many days after this that I met an able journalist, an editor, who said that for many years he had made it a rule to drop all other work in order to report Mr. Gladstone whenever he made a speech. I congratulated him upon being so intimate as he must be with so great a man. "Intimate!" said he. "Why, I do not know him at all. I met him accident ally in a railway car last year, and was pre sented to him. He shook my hand; but he does not remember me." At the time of that conversation the Hon. Chauncey M. Dqiew and a reporter were riding up town in New York together in a horse-car, and as it fell out that Mr. Depew (who had just arrived from England) had no change, the reporter paid his fare. But I really did go to the police court, and found it more interesting than the above digressions give reason to suspect. It was so interesting that after I had whispered my business, I asked if I might not stay up there until the last prisoner got his share of British justice. The two magistrates sat side by side at
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a desk high above everything else in the court-room. The desk was enclosed on either side by glazed partitions containing doors, and behind it and the judges was the end wall of the room. The high platform on which their throne-like box was built had its own doors, for egress and ingress, in the side walls of the room. Immediately in front of the judges' bench sat "the dark," — as we would say, the clerk of the court, — on a high stool, behind a high desk like a pulpit. The clerk is as important in the law there as he is in politics here. He knows the criminal law, and is the only one except the criminals and their counsellors who does. In this court his curly black poll came a trifle above the edge of the magis trates' desk, just where a penwiper would be useful, and for all the world like one, be cause the rest of him could not be seen. On either side of the clerk's desk a tier of short benches arose, — one tier for reporters, and one for lawyers. The dock took up nearly all the middle of the room. It looked like a huge bird cage, with the door broken off. Its wires were of half-inch iron. They rose straight from the floor to the ceiling, and were boarded up in the back so that the people on the benches for the public in the rear could not see the prisoner or be seen by him. Something like an old-fashioned cellar door, slanting from the cage toward the floor, projected from one end of the cage. It was the covered way by which the prisoner was brought up into the dock from the tunnel of masonry under the court, which led from the cells in another building. When the prisoner came up out of this covered way, he found himself facing the magistrates, whom he saw through a square break in the cage wires. A court official in police blue stood in the cage all the while, holding a sheet of paper on which were the names of all the prisoners, notes of the offences of which each was ac cused, and a record, or " pedigree," of the number of times each had been arrested be fore. — Julian Ralph, in Harpers Weekly.
