If you tell no actual fibs the law does not mind you imposing as much as you like. You may transfer the savings of the working class into your pockets by promises of the wildest character and schemes of the silliest and most romantic sort, and if you do it successfully enough the nearest you will ever get to the dock will be a seat on the borough bench, from which altitude you may sentence the poor, mean criminal who never had any capital, and had no one to advise him as to the law of false pretences. This is not a fancy picture. There was at least one such a magistrate on the bench once, and for aught I know there may be some J.P.'s to-day whose wealth has been made by stealing the savings of the working classes within the law. Certainly in this country we have been free from the subordination of the Criminal Courts to the power of gold that is said to exist in other civilised places. Any preferential treatment that exists is of a class character--snobbish if you will, but not corrupt. As an Irish barrister said to me at Liverpool--he was a great Home Ruler with a grand hatred of England and a real affection for many Englishmen: "My dear Parry, you'll never convince me that the Government ever meant to hang Mrs. Maybrick. They're a cowardly lot of snobs, and anyhow they couldn't hang a woman they might have to meet out at dinner afterwards." And there is undoubtedly running through all our English institutions, even the administration of the criminal law, a certain amount of class snobbery which it would be better should be eliminated. Judges and magistrates are, of course, only human. The wrong doing of a man or woman of our own class naturally appeals to our bump of forgiveness more readily than that of a slum dweller whose temptations and environment we know nothing about. Thus we can remember cases where lady shoplifters were discovered by eminent physicians to be suffering from some extraordinary form of neurasthenia--not insanity, of course--but one of those nervous breakdowns that made an acquittal and a rest cure in a nursing home the only appropriate course. Magistrates seem to grasp the medical facts about these well-to-do unfortunates almost too readily; but had it been a drunken woman snatching a pair of boots from a shop-nail in the street no eminent physician would have diagnosed her peculiar form of neurosis. Even if her husband had tendered evidence that of late the poor lady had been strange in her manner, he would scarcely have been listened to with much sorrowful attention. The good magistrate would have felt bound in the interests of the poor tradesman to make an example of this criminal. Such cases are not cases for acquittal, and the rest cure is generally three months hard.