Mr. Windham has been received on his entrance into public life by a panoramic view unfolded by his relatives to the public eye, in which have been por trayed, not the events of his life, but all such isolated acts as ingenuity or perversion could twist into the appearance of that which is hideous and ob scene. And what is the object for which this has been done? That a young man, the heir to a con siderable property and to an illustrious name, who from his boyhood upwards has gone out and come in, who has acted and been treated by all about him as capable and sane, with whom his relatives have dealt and bargained and negotiated upon a footing of perfect equality, who has been deliberately al lowed by them to go out into the world and to enter into contracts, including among them the most momentous contract of life, should now be adjudged incapable of taking c?re of himself, in order that his persecutors should be authorized to administer his estate. In one of the books which Mr. Windham used to read at Eton there is a story told of a tyrant in ancient days who invented for his prisoners the terrible torture of chaining a living man to a lifeless body, leaving the living to die, and both to decompose together. That, in truth, was a melan choly and terrible fate; but I own that seems to me a severer punishment, and a more cruel, because a more exquisite and more enduring torture, which would consign a warm and living soul, with all its sensibilities and affections, with all its hopes and aspirations, with all its powers of enjoying life and everything that makes life valuable, to the icy and corpse-like embrace of legal incapacity and lunatic restraint. Such, gentlemen, is the torture which his relatives have prepared for Mr. Windham, and of that torture they ask you to be the ministrante and agents. But, gentlemen, 1 appeal from them to you; from them, from whom I can anticipate no mercy, -to you, from whom I can confidently expect justice. I implore you, gentlemen, to sweep away the cobwebs which theory and prejudice, which partizanship and ignorance, which interest and false hood have woven around this case, and to show by your verdict, as often has been shown before, that whatever gloss and whatever covering may be thrown around a proceeding such as I have endeav ored to expose, it is at once the highest and most t grateful duty of an English jury to detect deceit and to defeat oppression."
Coming, now, to an examination of Cairns' work as a judge, the reader is fore warned that on first view it will be some what disappointing. In the first place ill health constantly interfered with his work. I do not believe he participated in the hear
ing of more than four hundred cases during his whole judicial career. In more than half of these cases he did not formulate an inde pendent opinion. Moreover, Cairns was rarely in the habit of explaining the process by which his mind reached a result. Yet his mind was severely logical; he had attained the perfect mental discipline which enabled him to follow without reflecting on the rule. With his swift, strong, subtle instinct for the truth he was able to disregard the slow, syl logistic processes along which ordinary minds move. He made no display of learn ing, like Willes and Blackburn, though his learning was unquestioned. He would ex haust the argument from principle and only in conclusion illustrate it by reference to a few leading cases. His solution of the great case of Rylands v. Fletcher, 3 E. & I. App. 330. on the "duty of insuring safety, is a typical illustration of his method: '• My Lords, the principles on which this case must be determined, appear to me to be extremely simple. The defendants, treating them as the own ers or occupiers of the close on which the reservoir was constructed, might lawfully have used that close for any purpose for which it might in the ordinary course of the enjoyment of land be used; and if, in what I may term the natural uses of that land, there had been any accumulation of water, either on the surface or underground, and if, by the oper ation of the laws of nature, that accumulation of water had passed off into the close occupied by the plaintiff, the plaintiff could not complain that that result had taken place. If he had desired to guard himself against it, it would have lain upon him to have done so by leaving, or by interposing, some barrier between his close and the close of the de fendants in order to have prevented that operation of the laws of nature. . . On the other hand, if the defendants, not stopping at the natural use of their close, had desired to use it for any purpose which I may term a non-natural use, for the purpose of introducing into the close that which in its natu ral condition was not in or upon it, for the purpose of introducing water either above or below ground in quantities and in a manner not the result of any work or operation on or under the land : and if, in consequence of their doing so, or in consequence of any imperfection in the mode of their doing so. the water came to escape and to pass off into the close
