THE BAKER CASE.
SOME thousands of Londoners employed the Statute Holiday on Monday last in going down to Croydon to hear the trial of Colonel Baker, and the fact is quoted in some quarters as evidence of popular degradation. We suspect, however, there was a deeper cause for the interest of the populace in this case than that passion for prurient detail which exists, no doubt, in great strength under all our English respectability, and which would make another trial like that of Queen Caroline as hurtful a nuisance as that one was. The lower orders of this country have shown of late by their conduct in reference to the Orton trial, by their election of Dr. Kenealy, and by their agitations against necessary grants to the Monarchy, that the feeling of caste- jealousy so universal on the Continent, and, we are told, so power- ful in sections of the United States, has been diffused here also, and may yet produce consequences of the utmost gravity. This jealousy was highly excited by the attendant circumstances of the ease, which in itself was not an attractive one, either to the modest or the prurient. The mob could not believe that " a Colonel of the Tenth," a man well known in society, an acquaintance of the highest personages, a man who could engage the first counsel, and for whom any amount of bail was immediately forthcoming, would be tried like anybody else, and receive if guilty an ordinary punishment. The great effort made to postpone the trial, and substitute a special jury for the ordinary one, exasperated this suspiciousness, till the most absurd rumours of bribery, of social pressure upon the complainant, of astute and false defences, began to float about. Newspapers full of veiled suspicions were circulated everywhere, and one which pretended to deny a story exactly suited to popular suspicion was sold in all the great thoroughfares in reams. The populace began to suspect caste- influence, and that suspicion of itself was sufficient to send thou- sands to Croydon, to enable Colonel Baker's counsel to argue that be ought to have a special jury, as no common jury would be fair, and to send the newsboys all over London, shouting the
verdicansent'nce " all in one word, as if the news had been of victory. Nor was the popular suspiciousness wholly without justification. Colonel Baker did not benefit by his position so much as to escape either a righteous verdict or a just sentence; but he did benefit by it to obtain a trial exceptionally fair, the kind of trial which an Utopian law-giver would like to secure for every man accused. We have no serious fault to find either with the Judge's charge, or the verdict, or the sentence, except as regards one possibly misinterpreted remark; but to talk of the trial as an illustration of English equality before the law is absurd. No "rough" .accused of a similar attempt on a girl of his own class would have been allowed or have been able to consume all that time in elicit- ing the exact facts. No Judge would have exerted himself, had the defendant been a petty tradesman and plaintiff a milliner's appren- tice, to draw that fine and scarcely beneficial, though strictly legal distinction between an attempt at rape and an attempt at seduc- tion through both caresses and force. The judicial exposition of 'Colonel Baker's motives was a specimen of subtle analysis such as would have delighted Balzac, and was probably entirely accurate, but whether a little tailor accused of assaulting an apprentice-girl would have got the full benefit of it may reasonably be doubted. Certainly no tailor would have heard the expression of the Judge's hope that he would redeem himself by some brilliant achieve- ment, or have obtained from the most successful counsel of the day an eloquent description of his deep remorse. Colonel Baker had every advantage that could be given him except an unfair trial, and was crushed solely by his own conduct and the irre- sistible weight of evidence which, except as to the first charge—a charge adduced, it should be observed, by the Magistrates, and not by the plaintiff—did not allow of doubt, and was in fact to be met only as Mr. Hawkins met it, by a well-worded plea of " Guilty, my lord ; but he is very sorry." The same special considerateness--we do not mean consideration—was shown in the Judge's sentence. It was not, as we are told, an ex- tremely light one. Colonel Baker was not sentenced to imprison- ment such as a libeller sometimes endures, and which is prac- tically only close detention, but to imprisonment for crime, which involves much hardship and degradation, and though hard labour was remitted as coming too near torture, the usual sentence was quadrupled in length. The maximum penalty for indecent assault is two years' hard labour, but in nine cases out of ten the criminal, if the plaintiff is a girl of his own class, escapes with three months' hard labour, the Magistrates finding that if they commit, the sufferers will not, except under a compulsion which makes evidence inexact, carry on the prosecution. Colonel Baker obtained no unjust favour, but we doubt if for a humbler man Justice would have weighed punishment so carefully, and feel certain that the Judge's expression about the possibility of some future brilliant achievement redeeming the accused would have been omitted. If that sentence only implied the natural regret of a Judge at such a fall, and the rightful though unusual hope that it might be redeemed by the criminal's subsequent career, we have nothing to say ; but it has been interpreted to mean that he hoped Colonel Baker would remain in a service from which men are every day dismissed for less offences, and in which all officers are required to be gentlemen. Such a misreading should have been made impossible. Caste, in fact, did influence the treatment of the defendant, and so, though less obviously, it influenced also the treatment of the plaintiff. No plaintiff per- haps ever stood in a case of this kind so thoroughly and so justly acquitted by the public as Miss Dickenson, but then no ordinary plaintiff ever gets her utter innocence so carefully brought out. The defendant's caste came out favourably in his entire exoneration of the plaintiff. Mr. Hawkins does not cross-examine milliners so, nor does the Judge who hears their complaints pay such eloquent tribute to the way in which their evidence is given. If they did, the reporters would not report them, and the public would be left to its own opinion, which is almost invariably, though of course in different degrees, condemnatory of the woman.
That caste should secure an exceptionally fair trial is not, that we can perceive, an evil, for the conspicuous fairness of any con- spicuous trial must deepen public confidence in the Law, and every improvement in the method of trying raises the general standard of a procedure which tends of necessity in ordinary cases to-be much too rough-and-ready. But there is one prejudice or im- pression created by the caste-feeling about sentences which re- quires still a little discussion. A great many people are now saying, and a great many more would say if they only dared, that the sentence on Colonel Baker is too heavy, not from any fault in the Judge, but from the force of circumstances ; that there ought to be equality in punitive suffering for the gentleman and the "rough," and that there is not. The navvy convicted of such an assault scarcely suffers physically, for his diet is improved and his labour scarcely increased, and hardly incurs degradation, for he slips back easily among a lenient crowd. The gentleman, on the other hand, incurs a punishment very like torture in all but motive, is enormously fined—for example, Colonel Baker's loss will not be less than £20,000—and endures a degradation which is worse than any other punishment, and worse in exactly increasing proportion with the amount of good iu the offender. There is no equality, say these critics, in the punishments on the two men. In part., no doubt, they are right, and no doubt also the popular argument that an educated man has less excuse for crime is strained when applied to offences against which education is but a slight guarantee, but their conclusion is very much exaggerated. The inequality of suffering is, to a great extent, only apparent. The " rough," no doubt, suffers less physically and mentally than the man of position for an offence produced by much the same impulses; but the majority of the people by whom and for whom laws are made are not " roughs," and once above them, the poor man suffers just as much as the rich one, or so nearly so that the rich man's certainty of a more careful and considerate trial is ample compensation. The little tradesman, or the artisan, or the respectable agricultural labourer falls just as painfully and as far as Colonel Baker, is as much hurt by imprisonment, is as much degraded in the eyes of his own class, is proportionally as heavily fined, and is just as completely cut off from his expected future. It is true the poor man has his handicraft to fall back upon and his social obscurity for shelter, but the rich man has his money and his acquaintance with foreign countries to act as equal reliefs. The difference of suffering is very slight, and certainly not greater than is required to keep up what we may call the disciplinary un- fairness of the social system. Position may not help a man to resist certain impulses, but it involves a necessity that he should be specially punished for them. Drill does not kill temper, but it is not unjust to punish an explosion of a lieutenant's temper against a colonel on parade as we should never punish the explo- sion of a civilian's temper against his superior. The lieutenant gets his commission on condition of that liability, and he is not unjustly treated when it is exacted. Men of position like Colonel Baker, and especially men who have position by virtue of selec- tion, hold it upon the well-understood tenure that if they commit crime like common men their fall will, on the whole, be sharper than that of their rivals in guilt. They may not morally be worse, any more than the officer who strikes his colonel need be worse
than the gas-fitter who strikes his foreman, but they not only know, but have agreed, that for the sake of the order for which laws exist the penalty must be heavier.
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