Tlte Englisli Bar under a New Light.

393

committee above mentioned was appointed, prosecute offenders. Then a body of metro and the English legislature entered upon politan commissioners with wider powers a consideration of the question how the were appointed and permissive provision was proper care and treatment of the insane was made for the erection of county and borough to be secured. We cannot trace the legisla asylums. At length in 1845 the present tion that followed in detail. Practically it Lunacy Board, with its unpaid and paid proceeded upon two converging lines, the commissioners (legal and medical) was one relating to jurisdiction in lunacy, the created, and subsequent legislation in 1853, other to lunacy administration. With the 1862, 1890 and 1891 established in its en former we are not here1 concerned. The tirety the present system under which every latter pursued a somewhat uneven course. asylum in the land is periodically visited, Private madhouses had already been re mechanical restraint is subjected to the quired to be " licensed " by five Fellows of most stringent regulation, persons arc the College of Physicians. But the Fellows detained in asylums only under judicial hadnopowerto refuse licenses and no funds to authority, and the utmost freedom consistent with order and safety is enjoyed by all 1 In another paper we shall give an account of the juris patients. diction in lunacy.

THE ENGLISH BAR UNDER A NEW LIGHT. THE Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was the occasion of a new departure by that most conservative of bodies — the bar of England. The Law and the Gospel in England have always had points of contact. The assizes, notwithstanding the malign memories which the hateful name of Jeffries has attached to the function, still open with a sermon. Once a year the judge proceeds in state to St. Paul's Cathedral to hear after noon service, and of late years English bar risters who belong to the Roman communion, borrowing a hint from the messe rouge which has been the initial act of the French legal year for centuries, have held a " red mass" of their own on the first day of Michaelmas sittings. But hitherto the English bar as a whole, which is preponderatingly Anglican, from the religious point of view, has taken part in no annual act of corporal worship. This reproach the Queen's Diamond Jubilee has been the means of rolling away. On the morning of Sunday, the 2Oth of June, two hundred members of the bar attended

the thanksgiving service at St. Paul's Cathe dral in their full professional costume. An account of the origin and details of this de parture may prove of interest to American readers. As everyone knows, who has followed even cursorily the progress of the recent Ju bilee celebrations in England, the Queen arrested the course of her triumphal proces sion through the capital on Tuesday, June 22, for the purpose of a brief thanksgiving service, which was held under the auspices of the primates of England and the Bishop of London at the foot of the great steps lead ing up to the main entrance into St. Paul's Cathedral. This service was intended to be entirely distinct from those that were to be held within the Cathedral on the previous Sunday. But it soon became apparent that the public were confusing the two, and ac cordingly the Bishop of London wrote a letter to the papers pointing out that the thanksgiving service on the Tuesday was a mere episode or incident in the royal pro