350 AN OUT-SPOKEN APPRECIATION and sincerity, tempered with good sense, knowledge of the world, and general sympathy. If the story of his parliamentary career has been rightly told it should need no summary to help in its comprehension. Wakley can be absolutely judged by his words and deeds. But the evidence of an eye-witness and contemporary thinker may be with advantage added, that the reader may learn what was the opinion of thoughtful men of Wakley as an orator and a democratic force, and may decide how far the tale as it is here told bears out the estimate formed fifty years before. "Mr. Wakley as a speaker in the House of Commons is more distinguished for shrewdness and common-sense than for any of the higher accomplishments of the orator. A plain, simple, blunt, downright style disarms suspicion and bespeaks confidence, even at the outset of his address. A manly frankness both in his bearing and delivery, precludes the idea of any preparation or of any design to entrap by means of the ordinary tricks and contrivances of the practised debater. He has a brief, conversational manner, as though his thoughts were quite spontaneous and not the result of preparation. He seems to be thinking what he shall say next, as if the subject came quite fresh to his mind and he were, by a sort of compulsion, drawing as much truth out of it as he could. This gives both freshness and vigour to his speeches. By his singular shrewdness and common-sense, his perfect command of temper, his good-humoured irony, his store of information, available at the moment on almost all subjects, he has acquired an amount of influence in the House disproportioned to the demands of his position. He has inspired much confidence in his judgment, and by an original, because an unfettered, turn of thinking he contrives to strike out new views of the subject before the House and to supply materials for thinking or debating out of what seem to be threadbare themes. This is the consequence of the original turn of his mind and the independence of his position. "He has no party ties; he has received no training; he has no class prejudices such as obtain influence in the House of Commons; but has been a shrewd and constant observer of human nature in all grades and is not burdened with an overpowering sense of immaculate purity of public men. Still, you never hear from him those coarse charges of personal corruption against individuals which will often fall from Mr. Duncombe, notwithstanding his gentlemanly manners and superficial refinement. Broad as his insinuations sometimes are, there is a degree of delicacy in the phraseology in which they are clothed; and though he often indulges in a sarcastic humour it seldom AN OUT-SPOKEN APPRECIATION 351 or never carries a venomous sting. Although a very harsh and uncompromising popular advocate, determined in his exposure of public abuses and still more in his championship of the neglected poor, he shows a gentlemanly respect for the forms and restraints which experience has rendered necessary in debate and a forbearance to press charges to useless extremities of personality. If he has not quite conquered the prejudices entertained towards Ultra-Radical intruders by men of birth and station he has at least made them feel his intellectual power and acknowledge his moral equality. In this respect he has done more to advance the interests of the millions by making their advocacy respectable than have many more flashy and showy popular leaders. His style of speaking is the most simple and unaffected. He has been too busily engaged in the hard work of life to have had much time to bestow on oratory. The structure of his speeches is quite inartificial, and the language usually the most simple and colloquial of every-day life. It is plain, even homely, without being inelegant; a manliness of sentiment and a quiet self-possession in the speaker imparts a kind of dignity to the most ordinary expressions. There is breadth and force in his argument and declamation; and a rough pathos in his descriptions of pauper suffering which is often far more stirring and affecting than the most accomplished eloquence of more finished speakers. Mr. Wakley does not so much make speeches, as deliver the thoughts which burden his mind on any given subject with frankness and sincerity. Even hard words do not come offensively from him, such is his good humour and the amenity of his disposition. He constantly displays great shrewdness of perception, unmasking the motives of opponents with a masterly power and, at the same time, with an avoidance of coarse imputation. Yet he can be sarcastic when he chooses; but his sarcasm is more in the hint conveyed and in the knowing look of face and tone of voice than in any positively cutting expressions. He handles the scalpel with delicacy and skill, never cutting deeper than is absolutely necessary. Some of his points have, from time to time, told remarkably well; such, for instance, as that in which he described the Whig Ministry as being made of 'squeezable ' materials. That one expression contributed considerably towards gaining for him the position he holds in the estimation of the House of Commons. "Mr. Wakley has extraordinary energy both physical and mental. To see him bringing up his portly, bulky frame along the floor of the House of Commons, with swinging arms, and rolling, almost rollicking gait-his broad fair face inspired with good humour, and his massive forehead set off by light, almost flaxen hair, flowing in wavy freedom backwards around his head, and the careless ease of his manly yet half-boyish air, as though he had no thought or care beyond the impression or impulse of the moment; to watch the frank, hearty 352 AN OUT-SPOKEN APPRECIATION goodwill with which he greets his personal friends as he throws himself heedlessly into his seat, and interchanges a joke or an anecdote, or perhaps some stern remark on the passing scene, with those around; then, in a few minutes afterwards, rising to make, perhaps, some important motion, laying bare some gross case of pauper oppression, or taking up the cause of the medical practitioners with all the zeal of one still of the craft; to witness the freshness and vigour with which he throws himself into the business before him, you would little guess the amount of wearying labour and excitement he has already gone through during the day; yet he has perhaps been afoot from the earliest hour, has perchance presided at more than one inquest during the morning, listening with a conscientious patience to the evidence, or taking part with an earnest partisanship in the case; then off as fast as horses could carry him down to the committee-rooms of the House of Commons, there to exhibit the same restless activity of mind, the same persevering acuteness, the same zeal and energy; and after hours, perhaps, spent in this laborious duty, rendered still more irksome by a heated atmosphere and the intrigues of baffling opponents, returning home to accumulate the facts necessary for the exposure of some glaring abuse in the Post-office or the Poor-law Commission, or to manage the multifarious correspondence which his manifold public duties compel him to embark in. Yet such is often the daily life of this hard-working man: he is absolutely indefatigable; nothing daunts him, nothing seems to tire him." This description of Wakley in the House of Commons from the pen of Mr. G. H. Francis appeared in "Fraser's Magazine," and was afterwards published with similar essays in a volume entitled "Orators of the Age." It is an outspoken appreciation which, if not entirely complimentary, is still one which any man might be proud to have earned and which bears the imprint of truth on every line. THE OLD-FASHIONED CORONER'S INQUEST 353 CHAPTER XXXVII [1827-1831] The Coroner's Inquest Seventy Years ago-The "Lancet" and WAKLEY the coroner is better known to memory than Wakley the Radical politician or Wakley the medical reformer. His parliamentary course came to a close when he was in his fifty-seventh year, but he retained the coronership until his death ten years later, while in his earliest efforts towards a public career it was to the coroner's bench that he aspired and not to a seat in the House of Commons. To begin at the beginning it is necessary to retrace our steps some twenty-four years, and take up the tale of Wakley's life in 1827. One of the earliest regular tenets which the readers of the "Lancet" were expected by Wakley to hold was that the office of coroner should be vested in a medical man. Almost from the commencement of his editorship, certainly as soon as he felt that he had a following willing to be educated to his ideas, he commenced to familiarise the notion, then quite novel, that the coronership was a medical post. He considered the coroner's inquest to be a most valuable institution, and if properly conducted a safeguard 354 THE OLD-FASHIONED CORONER'S INQUEST to the public second to none ever devised by a civilised legislature. But its utility he held to be greatly limited, and in many instances entirely defeated, by the inefficiency of the individuals who at that time-it was about the year 1827 that he began writing voluminously in this strain-filled the office, and by the sordid environment of the court. The taint of the tavern-parlour vitiated the evidence, ruined the discretion of the jurors, and detracted from the dignity of the coroner. The solemnity of the occasion was too generally lightened by alcohol or entirely nullified by the incompetency of the judge. In short, the tribunal designed by Edward I. to be one of the most important in his kingdom, whose presidency was to be held by a knight "of the most meet and most lawful men of the county," had been universally degraded to a dreary farce, stage-managed by a foolish beadle, where the legal administration was ignominiously known as "crowner's quest law "-a thing proverbially to be laughed at, and where the majesty of death evaporated with the fumes from the gin of the jury. The harmonic meetingroom of the Sol's Arms was no exaggeration, and Dickens probably drew little Swills from life. Wakley perceived at once that half the evidence given at these courts was unnecessary, and that on numerous occasions testimony most vital to a thorough inquiry into the cause of death was not forthcoming, and that both the superfluity and the scarcity were due, as a rule, less to the legal incompetency of the coroner than to his ignorance of the elements of medicine. Leaving entirely out of his argument the discretionary powers vested in a coroner, in the exercise of which every whit as much as in his exercise of his judicial functions it was necessary for him to be guided by medical knowledge, Wakley commenced a series of articles deeply regretting that so important an institution as a court of first instance appointed to inquire solemnly into the cause of all doubtful or unexplained deaths should be so constituted that no cause ever was explained from a medical point of view, except where it explained itself publicly. The procedures of the court, also, had fallen into universal and well-merited |