BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF THE LATE HENRY ROSCOE, ESQ. . 495 THE LAW MAGAZINE. ART. I.-REGISTRATION UNDER THE REFORM ACT. The Law and Practice of Elections of Members of Parliament, and of the Trial of Petitions before Election Committees. With an Appendix, containing Forms, and the English, Irish, and Scotch Statutes on the subject, in Chronological Order to the Present Year. Third Edition. By H. I. Shepherd, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister at Law. London: Butterworth. 1836. AFTER the great difficulty and confusion which attended the Revision of the County and Borough Registration in 1832, the work of the two following years was performed with tolerable facility and expedition. Although the number of doubtful questions which had been raised on the first occasion was not materially diminished, yet the merely formal part of the Barristers' business was gone through with comparative ease, and, in the absence of any peculiar excitement at the period of each Registration, the litigation was by no means general, and the Registers in many places were abandoned by the tacit consent of both parties to chance. And as it was not then fully understood, except by those who had reflected on the subject, that the amount of business to be done in these courts, and the amount of legal doubts and subtleties which would be raised in the course of their proceedings, must inevitably rise or fall according to the degree of political importance attached to the Registration, (just as the vast increase of litigation and of uncertainty in our mercantile law was cotemporaneous with the sudden rise of our commercial prosperity at the end of the last century,) it was pretty generally pronounced that the Registration clauses of the Reform Act worked well upon the whole, and that both the expense and the inconveniences of the revision would proceed for some years in a diminishing ratio. The revision of the lists in 1835 was conducted under very different auspices. Parties had not, until that time, become fully aware of the working of a system of Registration, in a country where nothing of the sort had before existed. They had not learnt to estimate the advantage which it gives to the united and the active over the scattered and the indolent. It had not been understood what facilities the provisions of the Reform Act afford for the insertion of bad votes on the Register: nor, on the other hand, what advantage the power of indefinite objection gives to those who are inclined to use it without scruple; how it can be made to serve as an engine not only for the extirpation of bad votes, but also to entrap the bona fide claimant who has been unwary in his mode of entering himself on the Lists. To these circumstances must be added the unparalleled political excitement which then prevailed, arising out of the great changes which the general election of 1835 had brought about, and the nicely balanced power of the two contending parties; and, moreover, the comparative neglect of the Registration by both in the preceding year. The Conservatives were the first in the field. "The battle of the country is to be fought in the Registration Courts" was the announcement of their journals: and their adversaries, although somewhat reluctantly, as men who had less taste for the pecuniary consequences of the quarrel, accepted the challenge. All the provincial address and ingenuity, which usually find too narrow room in the precincts of a Magistrates' Chamber at Petty Sessions, or before an Under Sheriff, were set to work on the Reform Act: every means of vexation and chicanery-we speak generally, and know that our assertion is too generally true-was unscrupulously resorted to by both parties: seldom, indeed, was any reluctance evinced to use the opportunities which the Act unfortunately gives for sowing tares among the wheat, and also for rooting out tares and wheat together. We are far from casting any blame on persons who were acting zealously and ably in the office they had undertaken, and we know how difficult it is for anything like fair practice to exist, where each party is afraid to leave the smallest advantage open to his adversary. |