ENGLISH COURTS OF LAW.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 373, 21 May 1861, Page 3

ENGLISH COURTS OF LAW.

The most slatternly housewife in Europe is tbe British Themis, the mythological personage who presides over law and lawyers. If you go to a house and find the door opened to you by a dirty maid of all work,-with draggled clothes and clotted hair ; if you find the rooms all in disorder and everything out of its place, and neither comfort, nor order, nor cleanliness in the dwelling, you may depend upon it that the occupants of lhat house cannot do their business as it ought to be done, and that they are muddling away a great deal more money than if they made a respectable appearance in the world and had their comforts about them.

This is exactly how Justice is lodged in England. She has about forty Judges to supply with houseroom, and she quarters them in all the streets and alleys in the metropolis. You will find the Lord Chancellor any morning in a shed in Lincoln'sInn. The Lords Justices are sitting in another shed in the same square. All these legal magnates may be turned out at any moment and sent adrift to hold their Courts wherever they can find a roof to cover them, for they are but tenants at will of their squatters' wigwam. The Master of the Rolls may be discovered up a yard in Chancery-lane. The Common Law Judges are supposed to sit in Westminster-Hall, but in what dingy room you will find them, where they have squeezed the Nisi Prius Courts on any given day, or how they have managed to get rooms for the two Nisi Prius Courts and one Court in Bane, which each set of Judges has sometimes at work on the same day, not even the ushers can tell. You may rush about all day, looking for a Vice-Chancellor, sometimes find him iv a garret towards the evening. Sir Cresswell Cresswell has, properly speaking, no Court at all. The Lord Chancellor, when he took to the shed in Lincoln's-inn, lent Sir Cresswell his Court in Westminster Hall, where the Bar, the attorneys, the jurymen, the witnesses, and tne suitors crush and gasp as though they had come there to get a divorce between soul and body. The Admiralty Court is also homeless, and if the Elder Brethren , of the Tiinity-house had any nautical enterprise they would cut out one of those empty frigates in the Medway and moor her off Westminster-bridge as a better make-shift than they now have.

As to the officers, they are in Qualitycourt, Staples-inn, Southampton-buildings, Lancaster-place, Stone-buildings, and other discursive hiding-places. Sometimes you may meet an elderly gentleman hurrying along the Strand, red in the face, and in a state of haste dangerous for a gentleman of his years. He is one of Her Majesty's Judges; he has just stopped in the middle of a case, and, sending jurors, witnesses, and suitors away, is going to hear a mob of little boys squabble over summonses and orders. He is on his way to the Judges' Chambers in Serjeants'-inn, two miles from the scene of his other judicial labours, and thus wasting nearly an hour of the very heart of the judicial day because there is no room for Judges* Chambers near the Judges' Conrts.

As to the Courts themselves, they are fit subjects for the interference of the Inspectors of Lodging-houses. The Royal Commission say " it requires ocular inspection to conceive fully how insufficient, inconvenient, and unwholesome they are." Nobody ever pities a lawyer. There is a. not uncommon conviction that if the Judges and lawyers and the pestilent litigious people who support them were all smothered together no great harm would be done. But the odd thing is that the lawyers do not pity themselves. It is a curious fact that close lodgings and unwholesome air become a habit that people come by custom to love. What difficnliies we have in making the lower classes ventilate their lodging-houses ! How tyrannical it is considered to make householders drain their dwellings! It is all the same with people of 30s. a-week and people with £30,000 a-year. Rather than give up an old habit any man is satisfied to go on doing as he has done, to his own annoyance, and to the annoyance of every one else, and to " take his chance " of low fever and shortened life.

Judges have generally lived so long that they laugh to scorn all that vapours with long chymical names can do to mortals. Lord Chancellors, until the wiser Lord Chancellor of present date, have been as happy as backwoodsmen in their shed in Lincoln's-inn. Masteis of the Rolls would not come out of their yard even to live in a palace. Judges toil through the jostling crowd of the Strand and think it exercise; Masters of the different offices die of dust and mildew and bad smells, succumbing contentedly as to a natural death. The

Jndges have not, until now, very much complained, and, as to the Bar, such Courts relieve them from all reproach if they are not present when.a cause is called on. To the attorneys, who are open to an action for negligence, perhaps the advantage of this state of things is not so clear. The jurymen and witnesses, also, may not easily find their advantage in being fined for not being übiquitous, and in being smothered when once fairly boxed. But the suitors have every reason to be satisfied; for by destroying the energies of the Judge and jury, and by making the presence or absence of counsel, attorneys, and witnesses a hazard, this system has a tendency to reduce the decision to an equal chance on both, sides, and to such an equal counterpoise of possibilities of course no litigant ought to object.

Lord St. Leonard's has seen with great alarm that there is a proposition now coming before the House to put an end to this ancient and much venerated system. The Government is said to have been struck by the idea that while reforming the law it would be well to render it possible to carry the law into effect, and to provide Judges and lawyers with decent accommodation for the discharge of their duties. To the north of Temple-bar there is a labyrinth of courts and alleys known chiefly to the police and to those for whose supervision the police are employed. These hovels and rickety rookeries encumber acres of land and extend back towards Lincoln's-inn-fields. They must be opened up in some way, just as the region of dens on the banks of the Fleetditch was opened up. Government are about to propose to raze these all to the ground, to purify both the physical and the moral atmosphere of the spot, and to build a complete set of Courts, where Justice may sit with all her satellites around her, and where something like dignity and order may prevail. We are disposed to think that the natural site for the great Hall of Justice would be Lincoln's-inn-Fields, and that the demolition of the alleys would necessarily follows the presence of the Courts in their neighborhood. Let this, however, pass for the moment.

Government have also found out a means of paying for this great building. There has been for many years in existence a large unappropriated sum of money called " the Suitors' Fund,"—an unappropriated sum of money which has been like a bit of "flotsam "in a river. All the minnows have been nibbling at it at all times; but, strange to say, no great fish has ever swallowed it bodily. We must explain this almost incredible fact. The first thing the Court of Chancery instinctively does when such a process is possible, is, of course, to get the money in dispute into its own clutches. It now has some forty millions of such moneys. Now, it is open to the unhappy people who pay in these sums either to have them immediately invested in Stock, and take their chance of Stocks rising and falling, but of course receiving interest, or to pay in the money simply, and take the same money out again without interest. When they adopt the latter course—which many do, either from a careless hopelessness, or from a fond confidence that the cause must be decided before much interest can accrue—the Court, knowing better, invests the sum upon the Court's own risk, taking the interest and gathering it up into a Suitor's Fund, but incurring all responsibility in case the Funds should fall when the money is to be paid out. Now,, if it should ever happen that our Funds should go down to 50, as they did in the last war, this would be a very losing transaction; but as for the last half-century the Funds have rather gone up, upon the whole, this has been a very gainful Uansaction, and the Suitors' Fund has been a temptation for general plunder of a lawful kind. Pensions have, ot course, been fixed upon it. The rent of the wigwam in Lincoln's-inn has been paid out of it, and it has been reduced in various ways and under the authority of various Acts of Parliament. Still, however, law is so gainful a business that there is now a "rest" of nearly three millions, which is liable to what the Commissioners call " the shadowy and unsubstantial risk " of being called upon to make up deficiencies to the suitors. Unless the Funds should suffer a very great fall, and unless the Court of Chancery should at the same time shut its doors and pay off all its suitors at the same moment, this risk is nothing. The suggestion is that out of this money the new Courts should be built, and that, the Legislature should guarantee that if ever the unlikely contingency which this "rest" was created to meet should arise, they will make good the funds reqnired to pay the suitors. The arrangement seems to us to be perfectly unobjectionable. Whether we build in Carey-street or in Lincoln's-inn-Fields, we shall get rid of a horrible neighbourhood, we shall get a good set of Courts, we shall pay nothing for them, and we shall remove from the eyei of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, legal leers with compensation designs and others, the temptation of a large sum of money possible to be conveniently used at any pressing emergency. We shall incur nothing but a risk of being obliged to repay some part of the money in the case of an event which is, in the nature of human events, impossible to arise. This is the proposition which Lo'd St. Leonid's came down to the Lords to denounce on -Friday night, and which he did denounce in a set speech. As, however, every peer upon Lord St. Leonard's side of the House departed during the course of the speech, we suppose we may take it for granted that the dispersion of the Judges is not likely to become a party question, and that Lord St. Leonard's lamentations over the poor people of Ship-yard and Shirelane who will be turned out of their lodggings are not likely to impede a measure which, if well carried out, will do more lasting credit to the present Government than anything they have yet done*—ZVmes.