Some Welshmen, and among them Mr. Osborne Morgan, Mem- ber
for Denbighshire, are very anxious that a judge acquainted with Welsh should be appointed to the County Courts of the Mid- \Vales Circuit, and memorialized the Lord Chancellor. Lord Hatherley replies in a letter containing one very strong and several very weak arguments. It is quite true that to require a knowledge of Welsh would limit the field of choice very injuri- nusly, but it is surely not correct to say that while a Registrar -who knows Welsh is useful because he can settle quarrels amicably, the same knowledge would not benefit a Judge ; and it is almost absurd to hint, that in cases between Englishmen and Welsh- neon a judge selected for his Welsh acquirements would become subject to mistrust on the part of the English litigant. Why should he distrust him more than the Registrar, or more than the Magistrate who in a foreign case shows, as Sir T. Henry used to show, that he knew French rather better than most Frenchmen? Englishmen do not distrust Irish Judges, why should they distrust Welsh ? As to the English language, which Lord Hatherley is pleased to see spreading, that can take care of itself. It will spread without laws, its it does in India, while a language the use of which was enforced by rigid laws—the Persian—has .ceased to be understood.
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