June 1961
Mrs. Bedford is one of the very few women writers living whose observations and comment upon almost any subject is certain to be uniformly interesting. I, for one, would buy and read her if she chose to discourse upon monotremes, madrigals or Martinique - certain that she would prevail upon my attention about these or any other matters. In this book, however, she has picked a subject in which it would be difficult for anyone to have no interest; the varying concepts and principles of justice, freedom and protection for the individual, and their administration in various courts of law - high, low and police - in such countries of Europe where she had the language to gain an accurate impression.
She begins in England with an ordinary trial in a Criminal court in London, and goes on to the courts where approximately forty thousand people a year are dealt with by lay and professional magistrates. Those accused come here, she says, steaming with their deeds, as the law is twenty-four hours from arrest to court (unlike France, where the wretched accused may languish in prison for three or four years after arrest and before trial). She describes good and ‘not so good’ magistrates at work, and confirms the general view that this country has more concern to protect the individual through its laws than most others. This is not a surprising conclusion: the surprise comes when Mrs. Bedford gets to Western Germany. There, in Karlsruhe, she listens to the trial of a Dr. Brach, for the killing of a man who had kept indecently exposing himself to the doctor’s small daughter. The trial has taken eight months to prepare, and during this time Dr. Brach has been entirely at liberty, and is subsequently treated with the utmost kindness and consideration - the verdict is a deferred sentence of four months, both sides having the right to appeal. In Munich she gives examples of summary justice - conducted there by judges of which there are eleven thousand in Western Germany - and where the same kind of humanity and concern for all offenders seemed to apply.
Austria, where she only spent one week and did not go to Vienna, rates farcically low with somnolent, cynical judges, and a Lewis Carroll-like air of unreality. France was perhaps the most frightening, and certainly the country where one would least like to be a prisoner, and in Switzerland there are twenty-five independent legal systems - one for each Canton. There is also a prejudice against lawyers; ‘it has been more or less accepted that lawyers could not be entirely eliminated from the courts’.
This is a fascinating book, and another admirable opportunity for the layman to discover how certain professional parts of the world go round, written by somebody whose perceptions really are the next best thing to one’s own.