"When I see," I replied, "so much poverty and misery around me which needs actual relief, and when I look at this inclement weather and think how these poor creatures must suffer from the cold, it seems to me that they are the people who should apply to those who have anything to bestow in charity; not those who are the only people, as it would appear, who can take pleasure in this excruciating weather. See if your club cannot do something for these poor sufferers instead of collecting merely for your own personal amusement; contribute to their necessities, and then come and see me again. I shall be here till Monday."
The head of the deputation stared, but it did not lose its presence of mind or forget its duty. The deputation made a little speech "thanking me heartily for the kind manner in which they had been received."
I never saw anything more of them from that day to this.
[In a case at Devizes Sir Henry showed in a striking manner the character he always bore as a humane Judge. He was not humane where cruelty was any part of the culprit's misdeeds, for he visited that with the punishment he thought it deserved, and his idea of that was on a somewhat considerable scale.]
I was down upon cruelty, and always lenient where there were any mitigating circumstances whatever, either of mental weakness, great temptation, provocation, or unhappy surroundings.
A woman was brought up before me who had been committed to take her trial on a charge of concealing the birth of a child. For prisoners in these circumstances I always felt great sympathy, and regarded the moral guilt as altogether unworthy of punishment. The law, however, was bound to be vindicated so far as the legal offence was concerned. She had already been in prison for three months, because she was too poor and too friendless to find bail. I am always pointing out that if magistrates would send more cases to the Judges than they do, they would get some precedents as to the appropriate measure of punishment, which they seem badly to need. This woman had already been punished, without being found guilty, with three times the punishment she ought to have received had she been found guilty. A month's imprisonment would have been excessive.
Prisoners should always be released on their own recognizances where there is a reasonable expectation that they will appear.
The result was that the unhappy woman, who had been punished severely while in the eye of the law she was innocent, was discharged when she was found to be guilty.
We have seen how Mr. Justice Maule examined a little boy as to his understanding the nature of an oath. I once examined a little girl upon a preliminary point of this kind, before she had arrived at that period of mental acuteness which enables one to understand exactly the meaning of the words uttered in the administration of the oath. The child was called, and after allowing the form of "the evidence you shall give," etc., and "kiss the book," to be gabbled over, I said, before the Testament could reach the child's lips,—
"Stop! Do you understand what that gentleman has been saying?"