NATIONAL JURISDICTION.
Sia—Allow me to suggest to your correspondent Mr. W. J. Linton, that the end of English laws is to protect and regulate society id England. A crime perpetrated in France, though both its authorAnd its victim should be British subjects, affects the security of life and the existence of order in that country only, and consequently can come under the juriscliction'of ia tribunals alone. We have nothing to do with the matter, unless we suppose it the duty of our Government to keep a perpetual and minute moral sur- veillance over the conduct of its subjects ; which, however desirable, would be impossible. I do not advocate the doctrine that a government is simply the protector of body and goods. I hold that England has a right to interfere in such cases as those of the Medlin, and of Mr. Mather and 'Mr. Newton ; because there a clear principle is involved paramount to the private injury—of religious free- dom in the one instance, and of national honour in the other. These every effort must be made to maintain. But in the murder or homicide (be it which it may) of Mr. Morton by Mr. Bower, there is nothing beyond the private wrong, which the French law undertakes to punish, and to the conditions of which both parties by residence in the country bad silently submitted, and the crime against French society, which French society must vindicate.
There would be impropriety, if not insult, in undertaking to amend the decisions of foreign tribunals on matters simply of individual injury. Had Courvoiaier or Mr. Kirwan been acquitted by an English jury, and made their way to France, they might as reasonably have been tried a second time there as Mr. Bower again here. I have no sympathy, I need not say, with the unhappy man whose ease has suggested Mr. Linton's remarks. I write only because I think your correspondent has misapplied a principle, in regard to our foreign relations, to which I am as much attached as he is.
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