Not only have the obvious and well-earned inducements to keep men honest—competence, honours, and security in office—been recklessly thrown away by the open hand of popular delusion, but all the minor expedients by which those who cannot think might be made to feel, have been laid aside, leaving the machinery of justice as naked as the hand. Although the colonial system was never elaborated in these last particulars, there were some of its useful and respectable remains, down as late as the commencement of the present century. The sheriff appeared with his sword, the judge was escorted to and from the court-house to his private dwelling with some show of attention and respect, leaving a salutary impression of authority on the ordinary observer. All this has disappeared. The judge slips into the county town almost unknown; lives at an inn amid a crowd of lawyers, witnesses, suitors, jurors and horse-shedders, as Timms calls them; finds his way to the bench as best he may; and seems to think that the more work he can do in the shortest time is the one great purpose of his appointment. Nevertheless, these men, _as yet_, are surprisingly incorrupt and intelligent. How long it will remain so, no one can predict; if it be for a human life, however, the working of the problem will demonstrate the fallibility of every appreciation of human motives. One bad consequence of the depreciation of the office of a magistrate, however, has long been apparent, in the lessening of the influence of the judge on the juries; the power that alone renders the latter institution even tolerable. This is putting an irresponsible, usually an ignorant, and often a corrupt arbiter, in the judgment-seat, in lieu of the man of high qualities for which it was alone intended.