THE COLONIST. NELSon, TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1861.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 365, 23 April 1861, Page 2

THE COLONIST. NELSon, TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1861.

Most matters are generally considered to be somewhat loosely conducted in the colonies; and law is certainly no exception to the rule. Whether this looseness on the part of legal practitioners arises from incapacity, indolence, design, or the want of proper vigilance on the part of the client, we will not say; but clients, singularly enough, in many cases, put blind faith in lawyers, and that too in many instances where they might be well convinced of the incapacity of their legal adviser. It is on the principle, we presume, that every man thinks his neighbor's sins worse than his own as naturally as he thinks his own toothache is the most painful of any; and in this self-conceit hugs himself with the thought that, although other people have been deceived, he, from some unknown cause or assumed superior virtue, shall escape the usual doom. When he has been entrapped in the arachnoidal web of a chicaning lawyer, he immediately cries out, ' I did not think he would serve me so!' although Dick, Tom, and Harry bad been treated in a similar manner scores of times before by the same legalised extortioner. The folly of trusting too much to one's lawyer is fully exposed in the report of the following trial before Lord Campbell and a common jury. It will be seen that the solicitor ' was a highly respectable solicitor, and would not knowingly have been guilty of the negligence alleged for the sole purpose of increasing the costs.' Now many people have heard of the barmaid's definition of 'respectability' in a case which caused so much excitement and consternation throughout England many years ago, and which a literary gentleman thus described :— They cut his throat from ear to ear, His brains they battered in ; His name was Mr. William Weare, He lived in Lyon's Inn. ,She thought that a man who 'kept a gig ' was the beau ideal of respectability. It is not mentioned in this case whether Mr. Chapman, the negligent solicitor, kept a gig. Be that as it may, Mr. Chapman was pronounced to be 'a highly respectable solicitor,* though he •really did cot think' of going the shortest way to work, but had to pay for his want of thought. ■ .