The Lord Justice Christian, the second of the Irish Judges,
has just given Dublin a sensation. The Lord Chancellor had dis- missed a suit brought by a tenant against the Marquis of Hertford without costs, and the tenant appealed, whereupon the Lord Justice took the opportunity to deliver a violent philippic against Lord O'llagan, who was sitting with him, for his par- tiality to tenants, declaring that if the tenant had been defendant he would have had costs, repeating his old objections to the Land Act as a law of plunder, and severely animadverting on Mr. Gladstone for his "newfangled and most unconstitutional assumption of a right of censorship" over judicial proceedings. The attack on the Premier does not matter much, and indeed he in some degree brought it on himself, but the direct imputation against a superior judge of want of impartiality between rich and poor is in Ireland a most serious matter. Law is not much re- spected there, as it is, and if the highest judges are to accuse each other of deliberate unfairness in favour of a class, it will very soon not be respected at all. Englishmen are jealous of censure on Judges even in Parliament, but their practical irresponsibility is an additional reason for exercising the self-restraint in which Lord Justice Christian would seem to be deficient.
