Tax Judge's remarks in passing sentence in the case of Regina versus Halket, deserve to be emphasised and remem-ered. It would have been easy to have merely passed sentence on the prisoner but Sir Edmund Hornby judged that the opportunity was not to be lost for delivering a concio ad populum on a subject of the first importance at the present time, There was no attempt at a sensational appeal in the observations, which the occasion called for, and which are couched in vigorous and fitting language.
In the first place it was very necessary to stamp out the notion that British subjects, by entering the service of an alien State, can escape the authority of British Law. No doctrine could be more pernicious than that a man could thus denationalize himself. Were such the case, Shanghai might very soon really deserve the name of a "sink of iniquity." But the pretension is so monstrous that it needed only a summary refutation. Indeed we fancy few would seriously prefer the tender mercies of Chinese justice to the forms and penalties of a British Court.
The second portion of the address is of far wider application than the former. The Chief Judge most earnestly denounced, as the prevalent vice of this age, "the passion for getting rich by one or more strokes of luck." This is a phrensy which has seized on men in Europe and America, and, of course, the foreigner carries it with him to India and the remoter East. The quieter and older counsels, which suggest patience and contentment with our lot, are thrust aside, and all compete in one mad race after wealth. The too frequent. offspring of the unhallowed union between vulgar ambition and the spirit of gam. bling, are frauds, embezzlements, forgeries, and larcenies. The question as to how money is to be gained, becomes secondary. The golden end is to be reached somehow, all hazards. It is, however, the inexorable law that "he who wishes for the end wishes for the means," and how disastrous these means are in too many cases, we have only to take up a file of newspapers to see. Ibis difficult to contrive any legislative enactment which would check the mania, save perhaps the revival of the Act against Time Bargains, referred to in the charge before us; but public bodies might protect themselves by regulations prohibiting all speculation on the part of their servants. When a man in receipt of a certain salary engages in ventures involving liabilities to a much larger amount than he has a right to risk, he is a dangerous servant, and should be dealt with cautiously but firmly by his employers. The chances are in favour of his dealing with borrowed capital; and a man who is so circumstanced may at any moment suc-cump to an over-mastering temptation. How much misery that failure involves, we can scarcely realise; and thus, nearly all the punishment of a trespass of this nature falls on perfectly innocent persons. It is the duty of society to hedge the man, to whom much of the money of others is entrusted, round with a wall of checks. This is, perhaps, all that can be done to shelter communities from being injured by the mania of the age. Of the individual's only means of freedom from the danger, George Eliot has told us, in perhaps the most striking sentence of "Middlemarch"—*thore is no escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watchings for death, its hinted requests, its horse-dealer's desire to make bad work pass for good, its secking for functions which ought to be another's, its compulsion often to long for Inck in the shape of a wide calamity." No words could better express that "craving for wealth" which the Judge condemns, in contradistinction to the honorable accumulation of money "by patient industry, upright dealings, and legitimate trade."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.