Curiously enough, owing to the irony of our party system, it was the Conservatives who brought in this reform and the Radicals who opposed it. It was left for Sir Richard Webster to point to the progress of all the States of America, and the experience of our Colonies, and to ask that we should not lag behind in the good work of reform. That sturdy radical, Mr. Pickersgill, was shocked, and elaborated the quaint argument that an innocent man should be debarred this privilege lest he might be an ignorant person who would tell lies, and get confused and muddled, thereby prejudicing his chance of acquittal. A large body of influential legal opinion was adverse to the Bill, and in the division lists voting against the reform you find the names of Sam Evans, John Morley, W. S. Robson, Lawson Walton, and other well-known Liberals. It is one of the crosses that a legal reformer has to bear that only through the services of one or other of the great parties in the State can he hope to see his pet dream materialise and there seems a certainty that, if one party is converted to a proposal, the other party makes a point of being diverted by it. Over and above that unhappy difficulty to progress there is the certainty that the lawyers, as a profession, will always offer a strong opposition to any proposition of legal reform, and, when this is defeated, will fight strenuous little rearguard actions to cripple and delay it. The Poor Prisoners Defence Act met with less opposition. It was a comparatively small affair, and there were a few fees in it. Mr. Justice Grantham--whose merits as a friend of the prisoner and a humane judge are often lost sight of in remembering his daring dives from the bench into the sea of politics--this good judge was a keen supporter of the movement for the better defence of poor prisoners. He thought the magistrates ought to ask the prisoner what his defence was, and tell him that, if he would state it, they would do all they could to assist him in proving it, and that, if he wanted evidence, they would adjourn the case and get evidence. His ideal was that the magistrate and the police should assist a man to prove his innocence, and that any sort of reasonable defence should be followed up at the public expense.