PRIZE FIGHT QUESTION.

Eight Judges out of eleven sitting in the Court for Crown Cases

Reserved, have decided that one may look on at a prize fight without laying ones self

open to the charge of aiding and abetting. It is a wide question.

In the case of the defendants whose conviction in thus quashed, it is

said that though they certainly were seen in the crowd at a prize fight near

Ascot, they were not seen to do or say anything, and that it did not appear how

long they were in the crowd.

Well, anybody, even the Chief Lord Justice himself, if he were a short

sighted man, might walk into a crowd to see what brought it together, and

might be seen and seized then by some police coming up at that moment to stop the

fight.

It would be hard upon Lord COLERIDGE in such circumstances, and we refer

to him because he was of the minority of three Judges in favour of

maintaining the conviction, to be liable to fine or imprisonment as a party to a

breach of the peace. But on the other hand, there is a great force in what Lord

COLERIDGE urged, that it is really the spectators who make the fight; for it is

inconceivable that in their absence two men, with no cause of personal

quarrel, would meet and knock one another about for an hour.

On the whole, we are strongly disposed to think that there is more

danger that the decision for the Court for Crown Cases Reserved will encourage a

brutal sport than that many innocent persons would suffer from a contrary

interpretation of the criminal law.

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