to police officers; and, finally, he is in all these matters subject to the control of the Attorney General. The Director of Public Prosecutions makes to Parliament an annual report of his doings, enlivened by narratives of the most interesting cases. But in spite of his activity the vast bulk of the prosecutions are conducted as of old under private direction; for out of the many thousands of criminal cases tried every year, only from three hundred and fifty to five hundred are in his charge, and the number shows no marked tendency to increase. Enough has been said to justify the statement that no single officer exercises any considerable part of the functions of a minister of justice. Such duties are not only divided among a number of persons, but scattered in small fragments among different departments. An illustration of this is furnished by the Return of Public Prosecutions, which is submitted to Parliament by the Home Secretary, and bears his signature on the first page; while the return itself is signed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, and dated from the Treasury. Gneist, in his work on the English administrative system, portrays the Lord Chancellor as the minister of justice for civil, and the Home Secretary for criminal, matters,[135:1] but such a generalisation is overstrained and misleading, and it is safer to assert that when the English bring confusion into any administrative department they usually succeed in confounding utterly all general principles, and making all general statements inaccurate. [Sidenote: The Church.]