Proceeding To The Interior, I Reached The Criminal Court, Where A Squalid-Looking Prisoner Was Undergoing Trial For Murder.

The judges and officers of the court were almost entirely without insignia of office, and the counsel employed, I

Thought, evinced much tact in their proceedings, especially in the cross-examination of witnesses, although they manifested great acerbity of feeling towards each other, and their acrimonious remarks would not, I imagine, have been allowed to pass without remonstrance in an English court of justice. I was told by a by-stander, with whom I entered into conversation, that if found guilty, the prisoner would be conducted to an underground apartment used for the purpose, and privately executed, the law of the State of New York, from motives that ought to be appreciated in England, prohibiting public executions. It is also customary there to allow criminals more time than in England, to prepare for the awful change they are doomed to undergo.

I was informed by a friend that there are some very astute lawyers in America, and I subsequently had opportunities to test the accuracy of the remark. Their code, however, differs materially from the English, although professing to be based upon its principles; and has the preeminent advantage of being pretty free from the intricacies and incongruities that so often tend to defeat justice in the mother-country, and render proceedings at law so expensive and perplexing. The slave laws (called the "_codenoir_"), adapted for the Southern States, must, however, be excepted, for it is notorious, that to subserve the ends of interested parties, they have been framed so as to present what may with propriety be termed a concatenation of entanglement and injustice to the slave subjects; the very wording of many of these enactments, carrying unmistakable evidence of their being concocted for the almost sole protection of the slave-owners.

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