These things are of interest to us because our laws and our poor come from the same stock and, though we pride ourselves, and I think rightly, on the superiority of our legal machine, yet it is not so perfect that we may not learn something from the troubles and difficulties of our neighbours. If the working class should, even on false premises, come to a conclusion that they could not find justice in our Courts owing to judicial social myopia, it would be a sad day for everybody. For my part, though I quite recognise that there was a bias in the late Lord Abinger, for instance, against poor Priestley's way of looking at things, I do not think that anyone believed then or believes now that he gave his judgment in any unrighteous class spirit adversely to the rights of Priestley and mankind. On the contrary, I think he did his best. He expressed what he and his fellows believed to be the law. This idea of "bias" in judges is well worth a little consideration. We have not the same problem that America has about our judiciary and, let us hope, we never may have, but no one who knows the working man can fail to have observed that he has been, as he would say, colourably--I modify the adverb--"colourably fed up" with several recent judicial decisions. It has certainly become too common a thing in England to grumble about our judges, and to say--especially when the costs are taxed and the bill is delivered--that the judge was biassed. But let us remember that it is our birthright to grumble. To grumble, as Cox pointed out to Mrs. Bouncer, is a verb neuter meaning to complain without a cause. In England we grumble at all our best beloved--our wife, our children, our weather, our constitution, the three-year-old that fails to carry our money to the winning-post, and the stewards who disqualify him when he does. And when we grumble at our judges and say there is bias on the bench it is only our little way. For what is "bias"? I have never been able to make out why the word should have a sinister meaning. Bias--as all good bowlers know--is that mysterious weight within a good "wood" or bowl whereby the skilful is enabled to direct it by an arc-like course towards adjacency of "the mark," which is the historic name of the jack. In Lancashire, where the game of bowls is played, as it should be, upon a crown green--and not, as in the South, on a tame, flat rink--the bias and the use of the bias make the glory of the green. By means of bias scientifically used we may reach "the mark" by the circuitous "round peg," or play straight up against "the watershed," as I once heard a geologist among bowlers describe the slope of the green.