ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 2, 3 July 1922, Page 6

ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE

The on-Gallic stolidity of British, law and British legal administration formed the foundation of the defence with which a Frenchman successfully wooed a Sydney juryso successfully that the jury saw no crime in his -admission that he took away the clothing of his lover to prevent her going out with any other man. The principle that " all is fair in love and war" is not applied in British Courts; and Alphonse—we will assume that is his name—pleaded that the Continental view of gallantries is different, and that in his country, if a young man trespassed in order to climb to his lady's window to say: " good-night," and was chased by gendarmes, such an incident amounted to "nothing." Alphonse " passionately pleaded with the Judge and jury to forget that ithey were British and try to see with the eyes of a Frenchman." Apparently, he did not make any general tilt against the afore-mentioned unGallic stolidity of the British, but merely pleaded that he was a Gaul —a passionate Gaul not altogether bound to do in Home as Romans do. On the whole, Alphonse was lucky in his acquittal. If\ the French view of gallantries is to protect a Frenchman in British Courts, is the American idea of " the unwritten law " to protect an American, and is a communistic faith to be a sufficient answer to a charge of theft brought against somebody from Moscow ? Cosmopolitanism in Courb would have its drawbacks, and the average jury is on safer ground when it thinks in English than when it thinks in French or Russian. - The defendant's quite true statement that "the French mind works quite differently from the English " explains and .defends the principle of nationality and excuses the international complications that arise. At the same time •'it .also illustrates the impracticability of any legal system that tries to adapt itself to other codes than i its own.