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Mr. Punch has done his share towards bringing about various law
reforms. We find him hammering away continually for many years at the
Law’s delays, its costliness, its inconsistencies, and the evils he
has satirised, the inconveniences he has laughed at have largely been
remedied. He makes fun of the jesting judge and the bullying barrister,
while he is genially amusing at the expense of the timid and blundering
witness, and the youthful vanity or elderly pomposity of members of the
bench and bar. He is rightly bitter now and then when he touches on
the comparatively light sentences inflicted on audacious, but wealthy,
swindlers, and the comparatively heavy penalties exacted from lesser,
poorer, and more ignorant burglars and pickpockets; but in the main
he devotes himself to the lighter side of law and justice and the
professions that are concerned in its administration.
Here and there you come across echoes of famous law suits--of the
Tichborne trial, the Parnell Commission; here and there you have
reminders of Bradlaugh’s fight to get into Parliament without taking
the oath; of the days when London was agitated by the Fenian scare and
valorous householders were sworn in as special constables, and again
when everybody passing into the law courts had to open his bag that
the policeman on duty might be assured that he was not carrying a bomb
inside it.
The reading matter is particularly apt and good; not a little of it
was written by barristers in the intervals of waiting for briefs, and
the writers were thus intimately acquainted with the grievances they
ventilated, and were often suffering the hardships of the briefless
themselves when they sat down to make fun of them.
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