Sheriff-Substitute without the special sanction of his

client.

On the judgment becoming final, if the loser does not "implement" it, the successful party obtains an extract of its tenor from the Sheriff-Clerk, and by means of a SheriffOfficer charges his opponent to comply with the judgment within seven to ten days. If this proves futile he could, till this present year, imprison the debtor if the debt was over £8 6s. 8d. By an old statute called the Act of Grace, the prisoner could then appeal to the Sheriff to get his creditor ordered to aliment him; and if the Sheriff thought the creditor's conduct oppressive, he could cause the debtor's speedy liberation by fixing aliment at a rate that the creditor would not care to pay. The fear of being imprisoned was unquestionably a most powerful compulsitor in effecting payment. But as imprisonment is now done away with, except in a few instances, the creditor's remedy will be either to "poind" and sell his debtor's goods, or, if they or his money are in some third person's hands, to arrest them there and bring an "action of forthcoming" under which the arrestee will be alike enabled and compelled to hand over the money or goods to the arresting creditor. It may be of interest to explain that a "poinding" consists in a Sheriff-Officer going with a warrant to the place where the debtor's goods are, getting their values appraised by two persons, leaving a note of this-a "schedule of poinding," as it is termed-with the debtor, and, after giving in a report to the Court, selling the goods publicly after intimation of the sale by handbills, or by the bellman, or both.

Such is a hasty outline of the procedure in the three chief civil Sheriff Courts. The mass of miscellaneous subjects which I previously enumerated as being brought to the Sheriff for disposal are dealt with for the most part in a summary manner. The total number of applications made

in the Sheriff Civil Courts during the year 1879 amount, so far as noted in the Judicial Statistics, to 92,190; and of these 29,741 were made in Glasgow. During that year, 1,706 appeals were presented to the Sheriffs against 1,310 of these applications in their various stages. This small proportion is due to various causes. Many of the matters were too simple to justify appeal; and in the great bulk of the work, e.g., against the judgments of the Sheriff-Substitute in the Bankruptcy, Small Debt and Ejection Courts, and on almost all the miscellaneous matters, there is either no appeal at all, or only to the Supreme Court. Of the 1,706 appeals 743 were to the Sheriff of Lanarkshire; 188 to the Sheriff of Edinburgh and Haddington; 120 to the Sheriff of Forfar; 101 to the Sheriff of Aberdeen and Kincardine; and 554 to the remaining fourteen Sheriffs of Scotland; or nearly forty on the average to each. This, however, is not the only work done by the Sheriff-Depute. In the Ordinary Court fifty-one cases were disposed of in which the final judgment was pronounced by them alone; in the Debts Recovery Court one of their number, the Sheriff of Edinburgh and Haddington, disposed of 144 cases as Judge of first instance. The other Sheriffs dispose of five once a year, at least, they are all bound to preside in the Small Debt Court, and some of them sit much oftener; a few of them take some part in the disposal of the criminal trials; most of them undertake the work of revising the electoral rolls; and all of them conduct a considerable amount of correspondence in regard to the arrangements made in their counties for the transaction of public business and the preservation of the peace, as well as with the Government and Exchequer.

Criminal Jurisdiction.-Civil Jury Trials have long fallen into disuse in the Sheriff Court except for assessing the value of land taken under Parliamentary authority; but criminal jury trials are common. In 1879 there were 1,129 persons

tried in this way; while 805 were tried summarily.* If a person is accused of a crime which is of too serious a character to be heard summarily, he is brought before a Sheriff immediately after his apprehension, told what the charge against him is, and offered the opportunity of making any statement he may wish. This is called his declaration. And a few days afterwards, when the Prosecutor Fiscal has had time to examine the witnesses, their "precognitions" and the prisoner's declaration are considered by the Sheriff, and the person charged is either committed for trial or liberated.

In ordinary criminal matters, the jurisdiction of the Sheriff is very important and extensive. It formerly included capital offences; but it is now exclusive of four pleas which are called the pleas of the Crown, namely, murder, rape, robbery, and wilful fire-raising. As the Sheriffs have frequent occasion to try attempted fire-raising, assaults, thefts, and assaults with intent to ravish, it is difficult to see why any plea save murder is excluded from their cognizance. It occasionally happens that the evidence given shows that the crime, though charged by the less title, amounts to the greater, whereon, as pointed out by the Law Courts Commission, there may be a miscarriage of justice, for some Sheriffs think they are in that event bound to stop the trial, with the result that the prisoner goes free and cannot afterwards be tried. In hearing cases summarily the maximum sentence is a fine of £5 or £10 (according to the statute founded on) or sixty days imprisonment; when with the aid of a jury, there is no limit to the fine, but the imprisonment, it is commonly thought, cannot extend beyond two years. In both cases the prisoner may be further required to find security for his good conduct

*This number would be much enlarged if I included in it the police cases tried by the two Sheriffs-Substitute in Edinburgh, who for six months in the year act also as stipendiary magistrates.

under the pain of fine or imprisonment; and the imprisonment may always be accompanied with hard labour. Of old, the Sheriffs had occasion not infrequently to pronounce sentence of death, or of flogging, or of banishment from the shire. Now the first, though not altogether incompetent, has for long been unknown; flogging can only be ordered to be inflicted on males not over sixteen years of age; and banishment from the shire has fallen into disuse. A Sheriff, it is generally thought, could never pronounce a sentence of banishment for life from the kingdom, but deportation to the Plantations in America was competent, and seems to have been in use about as long as the Plantations were part of the Empire. Quite recently, when looking into the records of the Glasgow Sheriff Court, I saw a case in 1761, in which, when the Sheriff had pronounced sentence of death, the prisoner thereafter petitioned the Sheriff to deport him to the Plantations instead. As penal servitude comes in lieu of transportation the power of pronouncing sentence of penal servitude has been withheld from Sheriffs. It is perhaps unfortunate that this is so. Judges holding a similar or lower position in England can award this punishment; and one evil result is that prisoners have frequently to wait longer for trial, and while some are punished insufficiently by the Sheriff, others are occasionally over sufficiently punished by the Supreme Court Judge, if they happen to be involved in the same crime with some offender whom the Sheriff cannot punish sufficiently and is therefore not allowed to try.

The amount of criminal work of a serious nature disposed of in the Sheriff Court seems to have remained much the same during many years, or indeed to have lessened. It clearly has not increased in the ratio of the population. Certain returns were obtained by Parliament in regard to the business of the Sheriff Courts during the year 1863, and from these it appears that about 3,100 persons were

committed for trial for the more serious class of offences that year against about 2,700 in 1879; and 1,252 persons were tried by Sheriffs with a jury in 1863 against 1,129 in 1879. To some extent this, like the great decrease in the number of persons tried summarily, is due to the erection of police burghs and the services rendered by the civic magistracy under the powers (sometimes of a very sweeping character) exercised by them. Still, making all allowance for this, there is, I think, good reason for believing that there has been an encouraging diminution of the more serious crimes; and this view of matters has received not infrequent corroboration from the remarks of the Judges in closing the Circuit Courts.

But as regards business in the Sheriff Civil Courts, the growth has been very great. The legislation of recent years has fostered the civil business of the Sheriff Courts to a large extent. Judicial statistics began to be issued regularly only in 1868; but the first set that gives all the necessary information for comparison with that for 1879 is the set of statistics for the year 1873. The following was the number of applications in the more important Civil Courts during these two years and does not include a great many thousand other matters.

1873.

1879.

9,379 15,122

Administrative, &c., applications

In 1863, the Ordinary Court cases which correspond pretty closely to those now disposed of in the Ordinary and Debts Recovery Court combined, seem to have amounted to about 8,022 against 15,293 in 1879.

This rapid increase in the civil business is far more than proportionate to the increase of the population of the country, and is due to four causes. The growth of mer