without running upon the rocks on one side, or being swallowed up in the eddying whirlpools of the other. And I fervently hope that this signal happiness and good fortune will continue, and that our children after us will exercise a similar prudence and wisdom and justice, and that, under the Divine blessing, our system of free government may continue to go on, with equal prosperity, to the end of time. SIR ALEXANDER COCKBURN. [Alexander James Edmund Cockburn, only son of Alexander Cockburn and Yolande de Vignier, was born 1802. He was educated at Cambridge, where he took high rank. In 1829 he took the degree of bachelor of civil law, and was elected to a fellowship. He was twice an unsuccessful candidate for the mastership of Trinity Hall. In 1825 he entered the Middle Temple, and four years later was called to the bar. He joined the Western circuit, then led by Follett, and soon acquired a large practice, especially in election petitions. In 1841 he was made a queen's counsel. In 1847 he entered parliament for Southampton, and soon attracted much attention by his speech in defense of Lord Palmerston's conduct of the Don Pacifico dispute with Greece. In 1850 he was knighted and made solicitor general, and in the following year succeeded Sir John Romilly as attorney general. In 1854 he was appointed recorder of Bristol, and two years later, on the death of Sir John Jervis, was made chief justice of the common pleas, and sworn of the privy council. In 1859 he succeeded Lord Campbell as chief justice of the king's bench. He twice declined a peerage. From Cambridge he received the degrees of D. C. L. and LL. D. In 1878 his health began to fail, and in 1880 he died at his home in Mayfair of angina pectoris.] Cockburn was a rhetorician and a scholar in the old-fashioned sense of those terms. Few men had a higher estimate of the capabilities of the language, and none bestowed greater care on all the products of his mind. Possibly there have been more eminent advocates; certainly there have been more profound judges; but rarely a man who united to such an extent the attributes of each, -who made so many great arguments, and displayed in so many notable judgments such grasp of the theory and application of law. Like Erskine and Brougham, with whom alone he shares the highest honors of forensic advocacy at the English bar, his mind was more capacious than powerful; clear, rather than profound. Although his ability to deal with complicated facts-to present them in harmonious order, and reason powerfully upon them-was of a very high order, his arguments fall short of the simple logical structure which characterizes Erskine's art; and his methods are in direct contrast to Brougham's energy and force. In comparison with the simplicity of Erskine's diction, Cockburn's eloquence seems picturesque. His high breeding, his great social gifts, his varied scholarship, and numerous accomplishments imparted a peculiar flavor to his mental operations. In judgment he surpassed both Erskine and Brougham, and his acute sensibility manifested itself in a range of imagination to which neither of his rivals could make any pretension. As an illustration of the manner in which his imagination colored all his conceptions, and of the robust reasoning which underlies his imaginative expression, his argument in defense of McNaughton is unsurpassed. His argument in the Hopwood will case is also an effort of singular power. His successful prosecution of William Palmer for murder shows his skill in dealing with complicated facts. Had Cockburn's imagination been balanced by equal strength in reasoning faculty, his mental equipment would have been perfect. But the acute sensibility which characterized his temperament was itself of no inconsiderable aid in the discharge of judicial functions. The law is not merely a system of rules; nor is its administration simply the application of these rules by rigid logical deduction. Since it is designed to serve the needs of mankind, its efficient administration requires a clear and just appreciation of the facts to which it is to be applied. The successful investigation of these facts is therefore an essential preliminary to, and a most important element of, a just determination. A learned lawyer who is wanting in imagination and knowledge of the world may not only fail to discover the facts; he may also misapprehend the bearing upon them of the rule of which he has no full and pregnant, but only a dry and technical, knowledge. Of course the measure of value of such qualities depends upon the extent to which they coexist with a logical basis in the understanding; but in the perfect coordination of these opposite qualities reside the elements of the highest judicial capacity. In Cockburn's equipment, imaginative qualities certainly predominated. His mind was perhaps too quick and susceptible to admit of the tenacity of grasp essential to the highest excellence in judicial exposition. Hence he was greatest in dealing with facts. At nisi prius he displayed his best powers. There his grace of manner, his knowledge of the world, his refined and eloquent diction, and his lucid and orderly intellect combined to make him an ideal judge. His most conspicuous ef fort in this sphere was his charge to the jury in the memorable Tichborne case, which occupied eighteen days in delivery. Some of his expressions in this remarkable charge will be of interest as long as trial by jury exists. With respect to his view of his duty as a judge he said: "In my opinion, a judge does not discharge his duty who contents himself with being the mere passive recipient of evidence which he is afterwards to reproduce to the jury, without pointing out the weight of the facts, and the inferences to which they properly and legitimately give rise. It is the business of the judge to adjust the scales in the balance, that they shall hang evenly; but it is his duty to see that the facts, as they present themselves, are placed in the one scale or the other, according as they belong to the one or to the other. It is his business to take care that inferences which properly arise from the facts shall be submitted to the consideration of the jury, with the happy consciousness that, if he in aught goes wrong, there is the judgment of twelve men having experience in the every-day concerns of life to set anything right in respect of which he may have erred. But if the facts are such that, placed in the scales to which they respectively belong, the one scale kicks the beam, and the other goes down, the fault is in the nature of the case, and not in the conduct of the judge. If, converging from every point, the footsteps all tend towards a common center, and there meet, and if their measure corresponds with the foot tread of the accused, it is the business of the judge to take care that that shall be brought to the minds and attention of the jury. I have long thought, and have more than once expressed the opinion, that a jury assisted by a judge is a better tribunal for the ascertaining of facts and the establishment of truth than a judge unassisted by a jury; but I am perfectly satisfied that it is the business of the judge to assist a jury in the way I have sought to assist you,—that is, by placing the whole case before them, not only bringing before them all the facts, but also pointing out the inferences which appear to arise from those facts; and I am satisfied that, without this assistance on the part of the judge, the office of the juror is liable to be imperfectly fulfilled. I have yet to learn that it is the business of the judge to suppress facts because they make against the accused, or to refrain from pointing out the conclusions to which the facts, as established by the evidence, properly lead; to suggest to the jury arguments or explanations of the unsoundness of which he is himself convinced; or to adopt those of counsel when satisfied they are delusive; or to refrain, out of tenderness to the accused, from exposing fallacies and sophistry, the hollowness of which he is able to see through, but which may have the effect of misleading minds less accustomed than his own to dissect and analyze evidence in dealing with facts, and to find the way, amid the conflict of testimony, to the ascertaining of truth, -truth, and truth alone, being the object to be attained. If such a principle were admitted, it would follow that, the stronger and clearer the case against the accused, the more reticent must be the judge, the more deficient in his duty in placing the case before the jury in the clearest and plainest light. We must remember that, while it is the business of judicial action to protect the innocent, so, on the other hand, it is the duty of the judge to take care that the guilty does not escape. Not only in the conviction of the innocent, but also in the escape of the guilty, lies, as the old saying well expresses it, the condemnation of the judge, which applies as well to the juryman who is to judge of the fact as to the judge who presides at the trial, and whose business it is to bring the whole case before the jury. We must take care that the innocent does not suffer; but we must also take care that, if guilt is brought home to the accused, it shall carry with it the consequences of your verdict." Concerning the duties of jurors he said: "Gentlemen, you have been asked to give the defendant the benefit of any doubts you may entertain. Most assuredly it is your duty to do so. It is the business of the prosecution to bring home guilt to the accused, to the satisfaction of the minds of the jury; but the doubt to the benefit of which the accused is entitled must be such as rational, thinking, sensible men may fairly and reasonably entertain, not the doubts of a vacillating mind, that has not the moral courage to decide, but shelters itself in a vain and idle scepticism. They must be doubts which men may honestly and conscientiously entertain. "I should be the last man to suggest to any individual member of a jury that, if he entertains a conscientious, unalterable conviction, although he may stand alone among his eleven fellow jurors, he should give up that profound and unalterable conviction of his own mind. The law requires the unanimous verdict of twelve men before the verdict of guilty or not guilty can be pronounced; and if a man is satisfied and convinced, after having given the case the best attention that he can give to it, that he cannot find the verdict which the rest of his fellow jurors are desirous of pronouncing, he does right to stand by his conviction. But then we must recollect that he has a duty to perform in this: that he is bound to give the case every possible consideration before he finally determines upon the course which he himself will pursue; and if a man finds himself differing from the rest of his fellows with whom he is associated in the great and solemn functions of justice as a juror, he should start with the fair presumption that he, the one individual, is more likely to be wrong than are the eleven men from whom he differs. He should bear in mind that the great purpose of trial by jury is to obtain unanimity, and to put an end to further litigation. He should address himself in all humility and all diffidence in his own judgment to the task he has to perform, and carefully consider all the reasons and all the arguments which the rest of the body may be able to advance as the ground of the judgment which they are prepared to pronounce. He should let no self-conceit, no notion of being wiser or more clever or higher in point of intelligence and judgment than the rest, no vainglorious assumption of superiority on his part, stand in the way of the most careful consideration of the grounds upon which the rest of the body may found their views. That, I think, is a duty which a juryman owes to the administration of justice, and the respect which he owes to the opinion of his fellows. "Gentlemen, the history of this case may be written by whom it may, -I care not. I am conscious of having done my duty in it, and I can only say: ""There is no terror in these threats, For I am armed so strong in honesty, "The history of this case may be written hereafter, and, for aught I know, with a pen steeped in gall and venom, that may not scruple to |