in my foolish elderly head but love stories. . . . Come to think of it, Gosse, I believe the main distinction is that you have a family growing up around you, and I am a childless, rather bitter, very cleareyed, blighted youth. I have, in fact, lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend the hill. I am going at it straight. And where I have to go down, it is a precipice." Two days later he stepped suddenly over quite another precipice; the doom was infinitely more merciful than that which he dreaded. The loss to our literature can only be conjectured all we can say is that, great as we thought it when the news reached us, his unfinished work proves it to be infinitely greater than even his warmest admirers dreamed. To his intimates, whether with him or beyond the seas, the loss of such a friend must have been unspeakable; these letters reveal a nature that was born to love and to be loved, inevitably bound to give and to take greatly. The picture which we form of Stevenson's last days is somewhat sad; but it must be remembered, in correction of it, that we have the saddest of his faces in the letters. He was an exile, and, though his exile lay in pleasant places, he had an exile's thoughts, and these were bound to be uppermost when he wrote to his old intimates. They are uppermost in his answer to Mr. Crockett's dedication-perhaps the most deeply felt of all his lyrics :-* 'Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, 'Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home! and to hear again the call; Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying, His last volume of poems is full of passages which recall— The image of the emptiness of youth, Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice Of discontent and rapture and despair.' So intense indeed was his yearning that this volume-the Songs of Travel'-might almost more justly be called 'Songs of Home.' *Songs of Travel,' xliii. But it need not be supposed from these and similar utterances that Heimweh was the dominant chord in his later life. He had other thoughts, other occupations, as the letters fully show. Exile or not, a man writing to an intimate friend is apt to put down the inmost thoughts of his heart, and those thoughts, with most of us, are not apt to be merry thoughts. Yet if the same friend were sitting in the room such thoughts would scarcely find utterance, for we all write what we would hardly speak; and the exhilaration of companionship and talk would banish sadness. Many of his later letters, too, are full as ever of vitality. Those written to men like Mr. Barrie, whom he knew only by print and paper, are gay and high-spirited, as those who lived with him in the last years describe him to have been. One must conceive of Stevenson therefore certainly not as always melancholy, but as cheerful with strangers, if only from the duty of courtesy, gay with his friends, from the mere joy in their presence. The man as we see him in these letters is the man sitting alone. Few of us are quite the same alone and in company; with a nature like Stevenson's the current of thought changes, not only its direction, but its pace and character under the impact of a friend's personality. That at least is how we read the man-wrongly, perhaps, or rather inadequately, but not from lack of material. The whole range of his nature displays itself here, from the broad farcical humour and saturnine jesting so frequent in his letters to Mr. Henley or Mr. Baxter, to the gentle and courteous gravity of his reply to a lady who wrote to tell him of the comfort that his books had given to the dying and since dead; from the acute and witty comments upon men and books that he exchanged so often with Mr. Henry James, to the simple tenderness of his letters to his old nurse, Alison Cunningham. Much as we have quoted, we have not attempted to represent at all fully the range of interests suggested in these two volumes; there is enough criticism, for instance, of prose and poetry, old and new, English, French, and German, to furnish half a dozen small reputations; and there are passages upon the relations between white men and natives which might with advantage be written up in every room at the Colonial Office, and distributed to every missionary. We have tried simply, with the guidance of Mr. Colvin's introduction and notes, to reconstruct the main outlines of the life and character. Few readers, we trust, will be contented with such an adumbration; many, we hope, will fill it in or correct it for themselves. ART. X.-1. Pratique Criminelle des Cours et Tribunaux. M. Faustin-Hélie. Paris: Marchal-Billard et Cie., 1877. 2. Histoire de la Procédure Criminelle en France. Par A. Esmein. Paris: Larose et Forcel, 1882. 3. Exposé Général de la Loi sur l'Instruction Contradictoire. Par Georges Hatté. Paris: A. Chevalier-Maresq et Cie., 1898. 4. Compte Général de l'Administration de la Justice Criminelle en France et en Algérie pendant l'année 1896. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899. 5. Code d'Instruction Criminelle Autrichien. par Edm. Bertrand et Ch. Lyon Caen. Nationale, 1875. 6. Code de Procédure Pénale Allemand. Traduit et annoté Paris: Imprimerie Paris: Traduit et annoté Fernand Daguin. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1884. 7. Codici e Leggi Usuali d'Italia. par Dal Prof. Avv. Luigi Franchi. Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 1897. 8. A Digest of the Law of Criminal Procedure in Indictable Offences. By Sir James FitzJames Stephen. London: Macmillan, 1883. 9. Manual of Military Law. London: War Office, 1899. And other works. M. FAUSTIN-HÉLIE, in his well-known and excellent work, defines Criminal Procedure as 'l'ensemble des formes qui constituent la justice criminelle et réglent son action.' In other words, it covers all the proceedings that are taken by the law (1) to discover crime, (2) to collect evidence concerning crime sufficient to discover the criminal, (3) to ensure the due punishment of the criminal. The civilised world is divided into two camps as to the best way of securing these ends. There is the French school, which is more or less followed by the other Continental nations, excepting Turkey; and there is the Anglo-Saxon school, which is adopted by English-speaking peoples, and obtains not only in Great Britain but also in her colonies, in India, and in the United States of America. The one is technically known as the Inquisitorial system, the other as the Accusatorial system; and the great gulf between these respective modes of operation is a matter of surprise to every student of criminal law. We propose now to discuss the Inquisitorial or French system, which is, or has recently been, a subject of world-wide interest owing to its exemplification in the Dreyfus case. At the close of our article we shall briefly remind our readers of the broad lines of the British system. We hope thus to afford means of comparison, so that our readers may be able to decide which of the two systems is best adapted to the two requirements—on the one hand, that of society, which insists on the just and prompt repression of crime, and on the other, that of the accused person, who is entitled as a citizen to the full right of self-defence against the charge brought against him. It The origin of criminal procedure lies in a very dim past. is as if we stood on the banks of a great river, to reach whose source we must travel to inaccessible heights. Such a task cannot come within our present limits. We must take it for granted that the idea of crime as an injury to society, as well as to the individual injured, did not arise till society was consciously distinguished as a collective unit from the individuals of which it is composed. In the earliest stages of social development, injuries even of the gravest nature, to person as well as to property, were compensated for in money or in kind; and when the idea of wrong-doing occurred, in the traditions of Roman civilisation, for instance, it was not treated as an offence to be punished by society collectively, but rather as a matter which only concerned the injured person or family, or possibly as an offence against the gods, in which case to the gods was left the business of prosecution and punishment. Society, as such, not recognising crime as a matter that affected itself collectively, private vengeance or money compensation took the place of public prosecution. Criminal procedure in the modern sense may be said to date from Sulla's law setting up his special Courts for trying crimes. The whole body of the Sullan ordinances as to the quæstiones' (says Mommsen) may be characterised as at once the first Roman code after the Twelve Tables, and as the first criminal code specially issued at all.' Here we have the first step towards the treatment of crime as a matter of public interest. Offences which directly affected public interest (delicta publica) are now definitely separated off from offences which merely affect private interest (delicta privata). But even then the State does not prosecute; and not till the late days of the Roman Empire can we find any parallel to the action publique of modern France. What, however, chiefly concerns the present enquiry is to note the two great principles laid down in Roman criminal procedure, principles which have prevailed in many countries and will probably prevail in all, though, curiously enough, the chief Latin race seems slowest in adopting them. They were (1) the publicity of proceedings in criminal investigation, and the consequent right of the accused to defend himself at every stage; (2) the judgment by a jury which was, at any rate in theory, impartially chosen amongst the equals of the accused. In the later days of the Empire the Roman system of criminal procedure went through various phases, but the two principles we have cited were never set aside. They were maintained just as religiously in form in the early days of France. But the administration of justice was so split up into infinitesimal sections, corresponding to the multiple divisions of the country into small feudal centres, which practically acknowledged no authority but their own, that it is difficult now to say whether any real justice existed, and whether favour, or the right of the strongest, did not always prevail. Still the accusatory system obtained in those days, and publicity was enforced in all proceedings. But the want of proof was supplemented by the application of torture, and by the imposition of the 'ordeal' of fire or water as a test whether 'in the judgment of God' the accused was guilty or innocent of the crime ascribed to him; whilst every judicial proceeding could be converted from an enquiry as to facts into a deadly duel between the parties by the ordeal of battle. It is pretty clear that in feudal days there was no justice in the modern sense. But as feudalism gave way before royal power, and the petty jurisdictions spread over the country were merged in the royal courts, justice began to be better administered. Unluckily the forms of procedure were not adopted from the accusatory system of publicity, but were rather copied from the Ecclesiastical Courts which had grown up alongside of the feudal jurisdictions. These Courts of Christianity,' as they were called, had only spiritual jurisdiction, and could only punish breaches of faith with spiritual penalties. But spiritual penalties were formidable things in those days; the power of the Ecclesiastical Courts was very great; and their procedure and methods of inquisitorial and secret investigation were very attractive to the administrators of justice in troublous times, when general security seemed most likely to be attained by finding a culprit for every crime. In this almost accidental fashion the old system of publicity in the preliminary investigation of crime was set aside in favour of the inquisitorial method, by which the accused was examined secretly, subjected to torture, deprived of the assistance of counsel, not permitted to hear the evidence against him, and detained indefinitely in prison until the judicial authority in charge thought fit to send him before the Court that finally tried him. The interests of society, or what were conceived to be its interests, were allowed to prevail, and the accused was given no chance in the contest. |