Life 
 
 IN THE 
 
 I GEORGE 
 
 IwiTT.K.C. 
 
 CORNELL LAW LIBRARY 
 
Qlorn^U Ham ^rljool Jjibrary 
 
 dift of 
 
 EDWARD E. WILLEVER 
 Law Librarian 
 1911-1935 
 
ll,!j,te fn the law / 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021669845 
 
LIFE IN 
 THE LAW 
 
REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY 
 POLITICIAN. By John A. Bridges, 
 J. P. Demy 8vo, 8s. 6d. net. 
 
 WITH JOHN BULL AND JONATHAN. 
 Reminiscences of Sixty Years of an Ameri- 
 can's Life in England and the United 
 States. By John Morgan Richards 
 (President of the American Society in Lon- 
 don, 1901-z). Very fiilly Illustrated, and 
 with Photogravure Frontispiece. Demy 
 8vo, cloth gilt, i6s. net. 
 
 THE CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS. 
 Intimate Reminiscences of Notabilities. 
 By Henry Haynie, author of " Paris, 
 Past and Present," and Chevalier de la 
 Legion d'Honneur. With 8 facsimiles of 
 autograph letters. 84 x 5J. Cloth gilt, 
 348 pages. Price 6s. net. 
 
 NOTES FROM MY SOUTH SEA LOG. 
 By Louis Becke, author of "By Reef 
 and Palm." Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. net. 
 
 Anaccountof Mr Becke's sporting and fishing 
 adventures whilst supercargo in the South Seas, 
 together with many notes on the habits and super- 
 stitions of the Islanders. 
 
 R. L. STEVENSON : A Record, an Esti- 
 mate, and a Memorial. By Alexander 
 H. JAPP, LL.D., F.R.S.E. Illustrated, 
 with facsimile letters and photogravure 
 frontispiece. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. net. 
 
Jrontispiece 
 
 JOHN GEORGE WITT, K.C. 
 
LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN GEORGE JVITT, K.C. 
 
 BzNCHER OF Lincoln's Inn 
 Formerly Senior Fellow of King's College, Cambridge 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 T. WERNER LAURIE 
 
 CLIFFORD'S INN 
 LONDON 
 
,: I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
 * TO 
 
 MY FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES 
 THE BENCHERS OF LINCOLN'S INN 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Early Days 
 
 I 
 
 II. In Court 
 
 . 42 
 
 III. The Bench 
 
 . 98 
 
 IV. America . 
 
 . 141 
 
 V. The Sins of the Law . 
 
 . 184 
 
 Index 
 
 . 221 
 
LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY DAYS 
 
 I HAD no encouragement to be a barrister. 
 When I was nine years old I went on a visit 
 to a relative noted for her sour and un- 
 comfortable disposition. In a burst of 
 confidence I told her that I intended to be a 
 barrister. " A briefless one no doubt," was 
 her cheerful reply. 
 
 Later on I tried the other side. Now my 
 mother's family were of the men of Devon, 
 and they boasted first that not one of them 
 had ever been a lawyer. They had befen 
 parsons, landowners, farmers and sportsmen 
 time out of mind. • One hundred years ago 
 old Mrs Tucker of Exeter said that her 
 grandson was to be a lawyer. " Why," said 
 my uncle, " whatever has the poor boy done 
 that you should sell his soul to the evil 
 
2 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 one ?" In later years and in his extreme 
 old age he said to me — "My dear boy, I 
 suppose you rob a rare lot of people between 
 one year and another. I am an old man and 
 I have known many lawyers, and I never met 
 an honest one yet." • None of these survive, 
 so that I cannot now ask them to reconsider 
 their verdict. Perhaps their spirits take a 
 kindlier view. 
 
 The first matter of law that I can remember 
 was the murder committed by Tarvell, the 
 Quaker, at Salt Hill. Dr Champneys of 
 Slough was called in to see the victim, and 
 having satisfied himself that the woman had 
 been poisoned by Tarvell he went to the 
 Great Western Railway Station at Slough 
 and sent a telegraphic message to Paddington, 
 with the result that Tarvell was arrested. 
 My eldest brother was at that time a pupil of 
 the Rev. Charles Champneys at Milton near 
 Cambridge. Mr Champneys came over to 
 our house at Denny Abbey, and told us the 
 tale of his brother's achievement, to which 
 I listened with breathless interest. It is 
 certain that this was the first case in which 
 the telegraph had been used to catch a 
 criminal, and the news was spread far and 
 
EARLY DAYS 3 
 
 wide in the Press. Tarvell was tried at 
 Aylesbury Assizes, and the Quakers made 
 great efforts to get him acquitted. They 
 retained Mr William Bevan as solicitor, and 
 Mr Fitzroy Kelly as counsel, to defend the 
 man, and Mr Kelly ran the case on the theory 
 that the prussic acid found in the body got 
 there by the woman eating apple pips. He 
 must have been a great actor to command 
 his countenance while addressing the jury on 
 this hypothesis. Mr Kelly did not go so 
 far as to suggest that the apple pips killed 
 the woman, his contention being that her 
 death was not due to poison. 
 
 In after years, and while I was a boy at 
 Eton, I used to dine with Dr Champneys. I 
 was for many years, when living in London, 
 on intimate terms with Mr Bevan. I have 
 practised before Chief Baron Kelly, and I 
 also knew Mr Charles Head, of turf and 
 theatrical renown, who was the operator at 
 the instrument when the message was sent 
 from Slough. 
 
 The tale of the murder of Mr Jermy 
 at Stansfield Hall by farmer Rush has been 
 told over and over again, and as a child I 
 remember the excitement which the crime 
 
4 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 created all over the eastern counties. Mr 
 O'Malley, Q.C., used to describe in vivid 
 language the scene at the trial before Baron 
 Rolfe at Norwich Assizes, when the prisoner 
 endeavoured to overawe with his cruel eye 
 the wounded servant as she was being carried 
 into court to give evidence, and how the 
 prisoner would have had some chance of 
 acquittal if the lady who lived at his house 
 had been his wife, and thereby had been 
 excused or prevented from giving evidence 
 against him. Rush insisted on conducting 
 his own defence, and the public actually 
 believed that the horror at his crime was so 
 intense and universal that no one at the Bar 
 would undertake the duty of defending 
 him. Baron Rolfe became Lord Chancellor 
 Cranworth on the fall of Lord Westbury, 
 and it is an undoubted fact that Her late 
 Majesty said to Lord Cranworth on his 
 promotion, *' Now you see how much better 
 it is to be honest than clever." I suppose 
 that this is the only instance on record 
 in which Queen Victoria meant to say the 
 right thing and managed to say the wrong. 
 
 The next law case that I can remember was 
 that of a man named Edward Smith, who 
 
EARLY DAYS 5 
 
 resided at Fen Ditton near Cambridge, and 
 whose proper trade was that of a gardener. 
 He was gifted with a fine ear for music and 
 for gossip. He used to come to our house 
 at Denny Abbey and perform on the violin 
 when we had a dance. We all liked him for 
 the pleasure he gave us. However, a sad fate 
 befell him. In his idle hours at the alehouse 
 he had said things which had better have 
 been left unsaid about the wife of the rector 
 of his parish. Thereupon, in 1847, ^^^ ^^'^Y 
 instituted a suit of defamation against him 
 in the ecclesiastical court, and the talent of 
 no less a person than Sir Herbert Jenner 
 Fust, Dean of the Arches, was brought to 
 bear upon the unlucky fiddler. That most 
 learned judge made the following decree, 
 which the custodian of the Probate Library 
 found for me on the top storey of No. 
 I, "The Sanctuary," Westminster, my 
 previous searches at Ely, Norwich, Somerset 
 House and elsewhere having proved useless. 
 Here it is, " James against Smith. In pain, 
 etc., for informations and sentence," and 
 the certificates of the decrees are continued. 
 In pain of Edward Smith the party cited 
 therein called and not appearing Brickwood 
 
6 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 prayed the judge to pronounce that he had 
 sufficiently proved the contents, the libel by 
 him given in, and admitted on the part and 
 behalf of Martha James (wife of the Reverend 
 William Brown James, clerk) his, Brick- 
 wood's, party, and prayed that he, the said 
 Edward Smith, may be duly and canonically 
 corrected and punished, and that he may 
 also be condemned in the costs of this suit. 
 The judge having heard the evidence read, 
 and an advocate and the proctor on behalf 
 of the said Martha James thereon, by inter- 
 locutory decree, having the force and effect 
 of a definitive sentence in writing, pro- 
 nounced that Brickwood had sufficiently 
 proved the contents of the libel by him given 
 in and admitted on the part and behalf of 
 Martha James, wife of the Reverend William 
 Brown James, clerk, his, Brickwood's, party, 
 and that the said Edward Smith did at the 
 times and places libellate maliciously, utter, 
 publish, and report several scandalous, re- 
 proachful and defamatory words as libellate, 
 tending to the reproach, hurt and diminution 
 of the good name, fame and reputation of 
 the said Martha James, and that the said 
 Edward Smith ought to be canonically 
 
EARLY DAYS 7 
 
 corrected and punished, and did order and 
 direct as a salutary penance for his demerits 
 that he, the said Edward Smith, shall on 
 Sunday, the sixth day of May next ensuing, 
 immediately after Divine service and sermon 
 are ended in the forenoon, go into the vestry 
 room or church of the said parish of Fen 
 Ditton, and in the presence of the minister 
 or officiating minister of the said parish, and 
 likewise in the presence of the said Martha 
 James, and five or six of her friends, if they 
 be there, otherwise in their absence, shall 
 with audible voice confess and say as follows : 
 "Whereas I, Edward Smith, have uttered 
 and spoken certain scandalous and oppro- 
 brious words against Martha James, wife of 
 the Reverend William Brown James, clerk, 
 rector of the parish of Fen Ditton in the 
 county of Cambridge, to the great offence of 
 Almighty God, the scandal of the Christian 
 religion, and the injury and reproach of my 
 neighbour's credit and reputation by calling 
 
 her a , and using other defamatory 
 
 words of and against her, I therefore before 
 God and you humbly confess and acknow- 
 ledge such my offence, and am heartily sorry 
 for the same and do ask forgiveness, and 
 
8 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 promise hereafter never to offend her in like 
 manner, God assisting me," And the Judge 
 did direct the said Edward Smith to certify 
 the due performance of such penance on or 
 before the fourth session of this term, to wit 
 Wednesday, the ninth day of the said month 
 of May, and decreed at petition of Brick- 
 wood a monition to issue accordingly, and 
 moreover condemn the said Edward Smith in 
 costs and assign to him on taxation thereof 
 the next court, Brickwood having first 
 brought in bill of costs. 
 
 But it is one thing to make a nonsensical 
 decree, and another to get it executed. 
 From an early hour on the Sunday named in 
 the decree the church was filled with a mob 
 of river cads mixed up with some few young 
 bloods from the University and county. 
 The rector and the slandered lady were in 
 the rectorial pew. • Proceedings began with 
 the ascent of a clergyman named Small to 
 the pulpit. He was received with cat-calls 
 and shouts of " Speak up, old boy," and a 
 smart volley of hassocks was hurled at his 
 head. The penitent then entered, clothed in 
 a white sheet with a candle in his hand. 
 His appearance evoked "Three cheers for 
 
EARLY DAYS 9 
 
 Smith," while he waved his recantation over 
 his head. A dog fight came next to add to 
 the uproar and confusion, and at last the 
 Reverend Mr Small gave up his task as 
 hopeless. Then a part of the mob seized 
 Edward Smith, and with one cheer more 
 raised him aloft and carried him in triumph 
 to the Plough Inn, where the afternoon was 
 spent in drinking his health and confusion to 
 the parson, while another part of the mob 
 marched to the Rectory, howling at the 
 rector and his wife, and amused themselves 
 by smashing all the windows in the house. 
 I am quite sure that Brickwood never got 
 his costs out of Edward Smith, and I do not 
 suppose that the slandered lady got much 
 satisfaction out of her suit. It almost passes 
 belief that such things should happen in the 
 Victorian era. 
 
 • There was tremendous excitement on our 
 side of the county when it became known 
 that Mr Henry Giblin, who resided at 
 Swaffham Bulbeck, had shot at and wounded 
 a burglar. It was a cold night in the 
 depth of winter with six inches of snow on 
 the ground. Considerable sums of money 
 were kept in the counting-house, and by way 
 
lo LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 of guarding his treasure Mr Giblin had in 
 his bedroom an old - fashioned, double- 
 barrelled blunderbuss loaded with buck-shot. 
 The story had best be told in his own words, 
 as I had it from him. " I heard someone in 
 my yard and I got out of bed as quietly as 
 I could and took up the blunderbuss and 
 went to the window. My wife asked me if 
 she should strike a light. I said to her, 
 'You keep quiet where you are or I shall 
 shoot you.' I moved the blind a bit on one 
 side and I saw by the light of the full moon 
 a great long-legged rascal creeping down my 
 yard. I up with the window and gave him 
 a view halloa. He bolted back. I waited 
 till he got close to the corner of the house 
 and then let drive at his hinder-part. He 
 screamed and I knew I had hit him. So I 
 shut down the window and got into bed and 
 went off to sleep. When my men came in 
 the morning, I went down to explore, and 
 behold ! there were marks of blood from the 
 corner of the house to my front gate, and up 
 to the track of the wheels of a cart. So I 
 went over to the Cambridge borough police, 
 and they very soon found the gentleman in 
 bed in Barnwell, and took him off to Adden- 
 
EARLY DAYS ii 
 
 Brooke's Hospital until he was fit to go 
 before the justices. He was sent for trial, 
 and in March I went over to the assizes, and 
 the prisoner was put to the Bar at the Shire 
 Hall before my Lord Chief Baron Sir 
 Frederick Pollock, and I gave my evidence, 
 and when I had done, his lordship turned 
 to me and said : * Do you mean to tell me 
 that you deliberately shot at this man, when 
 he was outside your house ? ' ' Well, my 
 lord,' I said, ' I did not wait until he got 
 inside and stole my money and frightened 
 my wife to death.' And the Lord Chief 
 Baron said he thought I ought to have been 
 tried and not the prisoner, and his lordship 
 advised the jury to acquit the rascal, and the 
 jury did not much like it, but they thought 
 they ought not to go against the judge. So 
 they returned a verdict of ' Not Guilty,' and 
 the Lord Chief Baron discharged Long 
 Tom. So I came out of court, and there 
 stood the rascal and his friends grinning at 
 me, and I walked into the middle of the 
 crowd, and then to the top step of the 
 entrance of the Shire Hall, and I said, 
 ' Well, gentlemen, I listened to all the Lord 
 Chief Baron had got to say, and I beg to 
 
12 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 give you all notice that the second barrel of 
 the blunderbuss is loaded, and that anyone 
 who comes down my yard at night will find 
 that I can shoot as straight as I did at Long 
 Tom.' And the farmers gave me a loud 
 cheer, and I have had no burglars round my 
 house since that night, and I am sure that a 
 charge of buckshot is better than all the 
 judges and juries and all the rural police to 
 keep rascals from disturbing the sleep of 
 honest men." 
 
 The Lord Chief Baron no doubt had in 
 his mind the legal distinction between an 
 attack on a man who is actually committing 
 burglary and on a man who, although in- 
 tending to commit burglary, is still outside 
 the house. For in Levet's case. Hale, p. 
 474, it was held that " a man who, making a 
 thrust with a sword at a place, whereupon 
 reasonable grounds he supposed a burglar to 
 be, killed a person who was not a burglar, 
 was held not to be a felon, though he might 
 be killing per infortunium or possibly se 
 defendendo, which then involved certain 
 forfeitures." In other words, he was in the 
 same situation, as far as regards the homicide, 
 as if he had killed a burglar. But these 
 
EARLY DAYS 13 
 
 nice distinctions of law would not have 
 commended themselves to our worthy 
 neighbour. 
 
 While I was a boy at Eton I actually had 
 the audacity to prosecute a man for stealing 
 a football. He was tried at the Quarter 
 Sessions at Aylesbury, and was defended 
 with great ability by Mr Power of the 
 Norfolk Circuit. Mr Power died some few 
 years after he became Queen's Counsel and 
 before I joined the same Circuit. I had two 
 jolly days away from school and was enter- 
 tained at the Bar mess in the room at the 
 old White Hart, where the horse with his 
 " owner up " had cleared the dining table, 
 decanters, glasses, plates and all for a big 
 wager. The hotel has long ago been pulled 
 down. 
 
 The next time that I was in a court of 
 justice was during my student days at King's 
 College, Cambridge. One of our fen farmers 
 was arraigned at the assizes for the murder 
 of his wife, before Mr Justice Wightman. 
 The prisoner was a fine manly fellow, and in 
 spite of the earnest entreaty of the learned 
 judge insisted on pleading " Guilty." He 
 was sentenced to death, and met his doom 
 
14 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 with unflinching courage. It was a very sad 
 case. He had gone to market and got 
 drunk, and when he returned home his wife 
 foolishly upbraided him and insulted him, and 
 when he asked her to make the tea, she told 
 him to go back to his friends and drink with 
 them. In his fury he struck her a fatal blow. 
 The court was filled with farmers, for the 
 man was well known, and the fate of these 
 two young people, who had really loved each 
 other, excited immense sympathy. As I 
 was leaving the court I heard a discussion. 
 "Terrible thing," said one farmer, "to kill 
 your wife for a cup of tea." "Yes," said 
 his friend, " but there is nothing so aggravat- 
 ing as a woman who refuses to make you a 
 cup when you are dry." ' • 
 
 During my undergraduate days I used to 
 attend the Assize Court at Cambridge, mainly 
 for the pleasure of seeing and hearing the 
 Lord Chief Baron, Sir Frederick Pollock. 
 
 ' Since the above was written Mr Witt prosecuted for 
 the Treasury on January 15, 1906, in the same court 
 and for the same offence, a man for murdering his wife 
 under the influence of drink, but there the coincidence 
 ceased. The couple were not on friendly terras, the 
 man did not plead guilty, and though convicted was 
 reprieved. 
 
EARLY DAYS ij 
 
 He was a grand old man, and was much 
 admired in the county. If he had a fault it 
 was that he was too merciful. The chaplain 
 at the gaol had worked a hardened sinner 
 into a better frame of mind, and the repentant 
 one had declared his intention of pleading 
 guilty to the indictment, as a small reparation 
 to society. However, when he was arraigned 
 at the Bar he pleaded " Not Guilty," and was 
 acquitted. The chaplain asked why he had 
 professed so much and done so little, and the 
 rogue said, " Well, your reverence, I did 
 intend to plead guilty, and take my punish- 
 ment, and mend my ways, but, Lor' bless 
 you, 1 never guessed that it was to be the 
 Lord Chief Baron. As soon as I clapped my 
 eyes on the dear old boy I knowed I had a 
 good chance, and so I up and said 'Not 
 guilty, my lord,' and I knowed by his look 
 he meant to get me off. If they was all like 
 him it would be better times for us." . 
 
 I was also present when Mr Newton, the 
 late police magistrate, appeared as counsel 
 to prosecute half-a-dozen men for man- 
 slaughter. There had been a public-house 
 quarrel, and two men had got up a fight. 
 An unlucky and fatal blow had been struck. 
 
1 6 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 so the police arrested the whole party. As 
 soon as Mr Newton had opened the case for 
 the Crown, the Lord Chief Baron said, 
 "What case is there against these five men? " 
 "I submit, my Lord," said the learned 
 counsel, "that they were aiding and abet- 
 ting." " No," said his lordship, " they 
 were there to see fair play," and he directed 
 the jury to find the five men " Not Guilty." 
 The sixth man who struck the blow was 
 found guilty and sentenced to one month's 
 imprisonment. Sir Frederick believed in 
 the old English theory of settling a dispute 
 with the fist. Indeed it is recorded of him 
 that catching a poacher fishing in his river, 
 and justly incensed at words of abuse from 
 the trespasser, the Chief Baron whipped off 
 his coat and went for the man in style. 
 Some few years later I used to go to his 
 country house at Hatton, where there was 
 hearty welcome and unbounded hospitality. 
 The Whigs wanted him to resign his office 
 so that they might find a seat on the Bench 
 for their Attorney - General. The Chief 
 Baron said, *' I know I am not the man I 
 once was, but I am a good deal better than 
 old Atherton." And so he was. When the 
 
EARLY DAYS 17 
 
 Tories came in he did resign, and they put up 
 Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who was then much too 
 old for such an office. But what he lacked 
 in vigour he made up for with the courage 
 of expectation. Once at a judge's dinner at 
 Croydon I told him that I had seen him 
 more than forty years before walking in 
 procession at the head of the Tories as the 
 new Member for Cambridge. "Yes," said 
 he, " and let us hope that forty years hence 
 we may again meet under equally auspicious 
 circumstances," In the prime of life Sir 
 Fitzroy Kelly was noted for his rapid grasp 
 of facts, but in his old age it was impossible 
 to make him understand a case unless the 
 facts were stated very slowly and in strict 
 chronological order, with dates attached like 
 tags to parcels, Mr Tom Jones, who was a 
 noted wag, played a wicked trick on the old 
 judge. He gave forth a long story with 
 dates innumerable, and then with an air of 
 innocence said, " Has your lordship got all 
 these dates down? " " Yes, Mr Jones, I 
 have," said the judge. " Then I may tell 
 your lordship that none of them have any 
 bearing whatever on the case." Although 
 Sir Fitzroy could not in his old age appre- 
 
1 8 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 hend the facts of a case, his law was ab- 
 solutely right, and there is not on record, so 
 far as I remember, a single case in which his 
 judicial opinion on a point of law has been 
 reversed. 
 
 My desire to be at the Bar was perhaps 
 stimulated in very early days by my father 
 taking me over to the County Quarter 
 Sessions, where he frequently acted as fore- 
 man of the Grand Jury, and also to the 
 Board of Guardians at Chesterton, of which 
 he was chairman for sixteen years. Not 
 only have I been in the Grand Jury box 
 when the jurors were sworn in, but I have, 
 in defiance of the law, actually been in the 
 room when they were considering the bills 
 sent up to them, and at the Board of 
 Guardians I have sat by the side of the 
 clerk and written down in the official book 
 the relief ordered. I certainly was not ten 
 years old at that time, and how such things 
 were allowed I cannot now imagine. On our 
 return journey from Quarter Sessions my 
 father explained to me what had been done, 
 and how after the Grand Jury had found 
 about a dozen true bills, one of the persons 
 suggested that they should throw out a bill. 
 
EARLY DAYS 19 
 
 "But," said the foreman, "the evidence is 
 very clear against the man." " Yes, I know," 
 replied the person, " but if we do not throw 
 out a bill now and then Mr Eliot Yorke, the 
 chairman, and Mr Pemberton, the Clerk of 
 the Peace, will think that we are a pack of 
 fools, and not taking any trouble about our 
 business." 
 
 It is yet more strange that my father, 
 when he was twelve years of age, should have 
 been taken by his schoolmaster, with all the 
 other boys belonging to the school, from 
 St Ives to Cambridge Castle to see Daniel 
 Dawson hanged for poisoning of race-horses 
 at Newmarket after a trial before Mr Justice 
 Vaughan. The master of the school went 
 to the expense and trouble of the journey in 
 order to demonstrate to his scholars the 
 result of a wicked life. We have got rid of 
 public executions, but if they still existed, I 
 should like to hear of some schoolmaster 
 following ,the example of the pedagogue of 
 St Ives, because it would be so delightful to 
 read a leading article in the Daily Telegraph 
 on the subject. Of course in those days 
 it was common enough to inculcate moral 
 precepts by awful examples of the conse- 
 
20 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 quences to those who disregarded them. But 
 even this barbarous method of education was 
 not quite so bad as that of the French 
 patriots during the? Revolution. As a child 
 I attended at Cambridge a dancing-class held 
 by Monsieur Venud. He was at school in 
 Paris in 1793, and on i6th October of that 
 year the boys at the school had a whole 
 holiday, and Were placed so as to see the 
 Queen Marie Antoinette drawn to her execu- 
 tion. This, however, could hardly have 
 been intended as a lesson to avoid wicked 
 acts, but was for the purpose of impressing 
 on the young the glories of liberty and 
 fraternity. 
 
 At the school at St Ives there was a 
 suspicion that one of the pupils had com- 
 mitted a theft, and the same master resolved 
 to bring home the crime to the thief. All 
 the boys were placed in a row in the school- 
 room, and then a servant brought in a cock. 
 The master ordered each boy in turn to 
 stroke the bird, telling them that when the 
 thief touched the cock the bird would crow 
 as surely as he did at the fall of Peter. This 
 dreadful ordeal the boys went through, each 
 fearing that the wretch might crow ; and 
 
EARLY DAYS 21 
 
 when the last boy had passed, the master 
 ordered all the boys to hold up their hands, 
 when lo and behold ! only one boy had clean 
 hands, all the others being dirty from the 
 stuff with which the back and neck of 
 chanticleer had been smeared. 
 
 Professor Vambery in his recent auto- 
 biography says that while he was the guest 
 of a pasha at Teheran, about thirty years ago, 
 a valuable diamond ring was lost, and the 
 pasha, suspecting his servants, sent for a 
 famous sheikh, who seems to have been on 
 a level with a thirdl- class Scotland Yard 
 detective. This is the professor's description 
 of the scene, "The sheikh sitting cross- 
 legged produced from under his mantle a 
 black cock, and holding it in his lap he in- 
 vited all the servants, each in turn, to come 
 up to him, stroke the cock softly, and 
 straightway put his hand in his pocket ; then, 
 said the sheikh, the cock without any more 
 ado will declare who is the thief by crowing. 
 When all the servants had passed in turn 
 before the sheikh and touched the cock, he 
 told them all to hold out their hands. All 
 hands were black with the exception of one 
 which had remained white, and whose owner 
 
22 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 was at once designated as the thief. The 
 cock had been blackened over with coal dust, 
 and as the thief, fearing detection, had 
 avoided touching him, his hand had re- 
 mained white, and consequently his guilt was 
 declared," 
 
 It is a far cry from Huntingdonshire to 
 Persia, and the sheikh could hardly have 
 heard of the schoolmaster of St Ives, but 
 each was unconscious of the infirmity of the 
 test, neither understanding that the clean 
 hand was likely to be as much the result of 
 cowardice as of guilt. 
 
 There was, however, another side to the 
 picture, for jurors drawn from Cottenham, 
 the big village famous for incendiary fires, 
 cheeses, and steeple-chases, would never find 
 a verdict of " Guilty " if they could help it. 
 Squire Martin had spent a weary week at 
 the Shire Hall at Cambridge sitting as chair- 
 man at Quarter Sessions. The acquittals by 
 the jurors from Cottenham had been numer- 
 ous and outrageous. On his journey home 
 to Quy Hall the old squire saw a hare 
 being chased by three greyhounds. " Run, 
 poor hare," exclaimed the squire, " nothing 
 can save you but a Cottenham jury ! " In 
 
EARLY DAYS 23 
 
 those days the defences put forward by the 
 late Mr Thomas Hack Naylor, both at 
 assizes and sessions, were fine specimens of 
 the ancient art, which has been ruined by 
 the law enabling the prisoner to give evi- 
 dence. Even in his declining years he was 
 very successful with the county jurors. I 
 once heard him cross-examine an unhappy 
 witness for twenty minutes on a subject 
 which had no relevance whatever to the case. 
 The witness was wearing a waistcoat of many 
 colours, and Mr Naylor worried him with 
 questions where he got it, what he gave for 
 it, and how long he had had it, and so forth, 
 that the witness became bewildered, and con- 
 tradicted himself over and over again. Then 
 Mr Naylor appealed to the jury whether they 
 could safely convict the prisoner on the 
 evidence of a man who could not reasonably 
 account for the possession of a waistcoat 
 which he was wearing in the witness box ; 
 and thereupon the jury found a verdict of 
 "Not Guilty." 
 
 However, these Cambridgeshire juries 
 might be forgiven, for the county has been 
 of late years, and is, singularly free from crime. 
 In my early days we had fifteen incendiary fires 
 
24 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 in one year in the village, and Cottenham 
 was twice destroyed by fire. No one was 
 prosecuted for these crimes, and the offence 
 of arson died out, when the discovery of 
 gold in Australia tempted the most desperate 
 of our neighbours to leave us for their own 
 and our good. The most respectable place 
 in the county was Newmarket, and the 
 calendar at the assizes seldom contained any 
 serious charge from that town or the villages 
 near it. Jurors in the country are much 
 more prone to acquit, when crime is rare and 
 not of a heinous character. It is otherwise 
 when there is an epidemic of burglaries or 
 highway robberies with violence, in which 
 cases jurors are naturally impelled to do 
 their utmost to put down dangerous viola- 
 tions of the law. 
 
 My inclination to study the law was to 
 some extent encouraged by hearing so much 
 in my early days about Lord Brougham and 
 his advocacy of Reform, about Lord Truro 
 whom my father knew as Serjeant Wilde, and 
 about the trial of Queen Caroline for whom 
 evidence was collected by a near relative, 
 and by stories about James Wood of Bristol, 
 and about Alderman Wood whom my father 
 
EARLY DAYS 25 
 
 also knew. So after I had taken my degree, 
 being a fellow of King's College in its opulent 
 days, I was able to follow my own desires, 
 and these led me to exchange the luxurious 
 life of the College for the dreary, dismal 
 existence which London provides for 
 strangers within her gates. One piece of 
 good fortune fell to me by the merest 
 chance. Because one of our fellows was a 
 member of Lincoln's Inn I entered that 
 honourable society, and I can never express 
 what I owe to that lucky chance. 
 
 In my student days it was not necessary 
 to pass an examination before being called 
 to the Bar. The alternative was a certificate 
 that the student had been in a barrister's 
 or a pleader's chambers for one year at the 
 least. There is nothing so perilous as to 
 dogmatise about education general or 
 special, but so far as the Bar is concerned I 
 regard the examination as not only useless 
 but highly pernicious. It may be very 
 desirable that a candidate for Holy Orders or 
 a student of medicine should be required to 
 pass an examination before being admitted to 
 the ranks of the clergy or of the medical 
 profession, but a barrister undergoes a 
 
26 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 public examination in every case in which 
 he holds a brief from the beginning of his 
 career to the end. He may have achieved 
 the highest honours in the examination and 
 yet fail as counsel in every case in which 
 he is retained. He may just manage to 
 scrape through the examination and yet 
 prove himself a great advocate or a learned 
 lawyer in court. The judges know who is 
 worthy of their attention, the solicitors 
 know to whom it is wise to deliver briefs, 
 because counsel are "intellectual gladiators" 
 and are day by day exposed to criticism. 
 That is why I say that the examination is 
 useless. But go further and say that it 
 is pernicious, because every student feels 
 that he must at all hazards pass it, and he 
 spends the time, that will never come again, 
 not in learning his business, but in equip- 
 ping himself for the paper struggle in which 
 he must avoid failure. Cramming is substi- 
 tuted for a well-ordered course of reading, 
 and lectures, which are in themselves import- 
 ant aids to legal education, are apt to be 
 attended rather with a view to the examina- 
 tion than to sound learning. But the para- 
 mount evil of the ordeal of examination is 
 
EARLY DAYS 27 
 
 that it discourages what I may call the 
 principle of " apprenticeship." The three 
 years' preparation for the Bar ought to 
 be spent in the chambers of counsel. 
 Resort should be had both to Lincoln's Inn 
 and the Temple, whether the student proposes 
 to practise in Equity or in Common Law, if 
 he wishes that his knowledge of law should 
 be built on a solid foundation. There is no 
 greater fallacy than to suppose that the law 
 can be picked up in the course of practice 
 piece-meal. Besides the knowledge to be 
 gleaned in the chambers of counsel, there 
 is the not less important matter of the 
 traditions of the Bar. From ignorance 
 thereof young counsel find themselves placed 
 in embarrassing positions in their practice, 
 not from any wrong intent, but because of 
 their want of experience. Of no career can 
 it be more truly said, 
 
 " Sunt certi denique fines, 
 Quos ultra citraque requit consistere rectum." 
 
 For these reasons I would restore the 
 alternative of "apprenticeship," with safe- 
 guards against any abuse of it, for while it 
 would be going too far to shut out men who 
 
28 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 could not afFord the fees for reading in 
 chambers, yet the latter qualification should 
 be preferred. I speak of course with hesita- 
 tion as to the education of solicitors, but I 
 have been assured by a solicitor of great 
 ability and great experience that the ex- 
 aminations are equally pernicious in that 
 branch. "Here," said he, "is my son, a 
 clever man, who has read well for all his 
 examinations and passed with much credit. 
 Now he will be admitted a solicitor, and will 
 have to devote three years to learning his 
 business, of which he is quite ignorant. Our 
 business can only be learned as an apprentice 
 learns his handicraft, by being shown how 
 things are done, and by seeing others do 
 them ; you cannot learn from books and 
 lectures. The experience I have gained 
 leads me to the conclusion that the present 
 high standard of requirements for the final 
 examination, coupled with the almost irre- 
 sistible inducement to purely theoretical 
 studies in the pursuit of distinctions and 
 prizes, is inimical to the efficient training of 
 a clerk for the solicitor's branch of the pro- 
 fession. An articled clerk serves four or 
 five years, according as he has or has not 
 
EARLY DAYS 29 
 
 passed the London Matriculation, or some 
 other examination, under which his term of 
 service is reducible to four years, or three 
 years if a University graduate, and five 
 years' service is all too little in which to gain 
 a practical acquaintance with the routine and 
 methods of a solictor's practice and that 
 knowledge of business without which a 
 solicitor is helpless and unfitted to give that 
 practical advice to clients which in all cases 
 is required of him, and those five years must 
 be not partially but wholly devoted to the 
 task if any useful results are to be expected. 
 No one appreciates more than I do the 
 utility of book learning, but it is valueless 
 without the practical experience of business, 
 to be gained only in the actual work of a 
 solicitor's office. Moreover, apart from 
 such practical use, it quickly fades away into 
 mere blurred reminiscences. In the present 
 state of things, according to my experience, 
 it is impossible for the principal, particularly 
 having regard to the suspicion of personal 
 interests, to control the natural and legiti- 
 mate ambition of his pupils to go up for the 
 distinctions and prizes. The result is that 
 just as the pupil is beginning to get an 
 acquaintance with office routine, and to take 
 
30 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 impressions of practical affairs, he is switched ofF 
 on to a painful and elaborate study at Stephen, 
 in order to get into the first division of the 
 'Intermediate.' After his examination he 
 needs some rest, and slowly he comes back 
 to the practical concerns of life and takes 
 his place in the office. Scarcely has he begun 
 to realise the problems of every-day life 
 than he is again absorbed in book learning, 
 classes and lectures ; and for six or nine 
 months before the final examination ^he is 
 withdrawn entirely from the business and 
 has to devote his whole days and nights to 
 study. The result is, that of the four or 
 five years he has not given two to continuous 
 application to practical affairs, and he faces 
 his task of commencing practice on his own 
 account equipped only with a load of case 
 law, and has nothing like sufficient experience 
 to give him confidence in dealing with the 
 business affairs of his client." I venture to 
 think that these are words of wisdom. 
 
 Soon after I had entered as a student at 
 the Inn I became a pupil in the chambers of 
 the late Mr T. S, Badger, editor of Jarman 
 on Wills, and lecturer on the Law of Real 
 Property. His business was conveyancing, 
 
EARLY DAYS 31 
 
 and at the end of a month it became clear to 
 me that there was not much to be said in 
 favour of that kind of work. The labour 
 was very great and very monotonous, and the 
 labourer, although beyond all cavil worthy of 
 his hire, got very poor wages. Mr Badger, 
 who assumed the name of Eastwood while I 
 was with him, was most industrious and care- 
 ful, but he was not a very clever man. We 
 pupils were often checkmated by a problem, 
 and when we found that our master could 
 not solve it, we adopted a simple device. 
 We went off to lunch in the room at 
 Lincoln's Inn below the hall and sat down 
 opposite George Jessel, who was then doing 
 a fine business at the Junior Bar. We at 
 once began to talk about the point which had 
 baffled us. Jessel instantly pricked up his 
 ears, and in less than five minutes we had 
 the problem solved, with full information as 
 to all the cases and references to the reports 
 in which they were to be found. That very 
 learned lawyer, who presided as Master of 
 the Rolls in the Court of Appeal with so 
 much distinction, never imagined that we sat 
 down opposite to him for the express purpose 
 of " drawing " him. He was an " enthusiast " 
 
32 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 about law, and could not restrain himself 
 when the temptation to discuss a point was 
 held out to him. Having spent about a 
 year over abstracts of titles, requisitions, 
 conveyances and wills, I deserted Lincoln's 
 Inn and went to the chambers of the late 
 Mr Thomas Chitty, the pleader. His 
 practice in pleading, summonses at chambers 
 and advising was in quantity about equal 
 to that now done by a dozen junior bar- 
 risters. I stopped in London one whole 
 Long Vacation while Mr Chitty was at Buxton, 
 and within the space of nine weeks no less 
 than forty-five cases came in for " opinions." 
 The chambers in the preceding Long Vacation 
 had been under the care of the late Mr 
 Charles Lanyon, who was a pupil there with 
 Lord Rowton, Mr Justice Grantham, Sir 
 William Marriott and myself. Charles 
 Lanyon knew very little law, but he made 
 up for his legal weakness by strong self- 
 confidence. He was always ready to give his 
 opinion on any point of law. He never 
 hesitated and never suggested a doubt. In 
 the early part of that Long Vacation a solicitor 
 visited the chambers with a big indenture 
 of lease in his hand containing this clause — 
 
EARLY DAYS 33 
 
 " Provided always, and it is hereby agreed 
 and declared between the said parties to these 
 presents that if the said yearly rent or sum 
 of ^100 hereinbefore reserved or any part 
 thereof shall be behind or unpaid in part or 
 in whole by the space of twenty-one days 
 next over or after any of the days of pay- 
 ment whereon the same ought to be paid 
 as aforesaid contrary to the true intent and 
 meaning of these presents although no formal 
 demand shall have been made thereof . . . 
 it shall and may be lawful to and for the said 
 lessor or his assigns into and upon the said 
 messuage or tenement and premises hereby 
 demised or into or upon any part thereof in 
 the name of the whole to re-enter and the 
 same to have again retain repossess and enjoy 
 as in their former estate and the said lessee 
 his executors administrators or assigns to 
 expel put out and amove without any legal 
 process whatever and as effectually as any 
 Sheriff might do in case the said lessor or his 
 assigns had obtained judgment in ejectment 
 for the recovery of the possession thereof, 
 and a writ of habere facias possessionom or 
 other process had issued on such judgment 
 directed to such Sheriff in due form of law, 
 
34 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 and that in case of such entry and of any 
 
 action being brought or proceedings taken 
 
 for the same by any person whomsoever the 
 
 said lessor or assigns may plead leave and 
 
 licence in bar thereof, and these presents may 
 
 be used as conclusive evidence of the leave 
 
 and licence of the lessee his executors 
 
 administrators or assigns to the lessor or 
 
 assigns and all persons acting therein by their 
 
 order for the entry or trespasses or other 
 
 matters complained of in such action or other 
 
 proceedings." " Now," said the solicitor, 
 
 *' a quarter's rent has been in arrear for thirty 
 
 days, and the tenant defies me, his landlord, 
 
 and everyone else. I want to know if the 
 
 landlord can enter the house and put the 
 
 man out." Lanyon read the clause and said, 
 
 *' It is quite a plain case. Tell your client 
 
 to get some men and eject the fellow." 
 
 Seven days afterwards the solicitor again 
 
 appeared, but with a troubled countenance. 
 
 " Oh, sir," said he, " my client and five men 
 
 are to appear this afternoon before the 
 
 magistrate at Clerkenwell upon a summons 
 
 for doing what you advised me should be 
 
 done." This piece of intelligence would have 
 
 struck terror into the soul of any ordinary 
 
EARLY DAYS 35 
 
 barrister, but Lanyon was not in the least 
 degree perturbed. " This magistrate," said 
 the learned counsel, "does not know his 
 business. I will go at once and put him 
 right." So a cab was called, and away went 
 counsel and solicitor at full speed to the 
 court. The case was called on, and up rose 
 Lanyon and explained to the justice how 
 wrong it was to bring these six men before 
 the Court, and gravely read out the clause 
 in the lease. The magistrate waited quietly 
 until the learned counsel had finished his 
 address and then said, " Now I will read 
 out something else. 'The King defendeth 
 that none from henceforth make any entry 
 into any lands and tenements but in case 
 where entry is given by the law ; and in 
 such case not with strong hand nor with 
 multitude of people but only with peaceable 
 and easy manner, and if any man from hence- 
 forth do to the contrary and thereof be 
 duly convicted, he shall be punished by im- 
 prisonment of his body and thereof 
 ransomed at the King's will.' That is the 
 statute passed in the fifth year of the reign 
 of King Richard the Second, and it is 
 therefore older than your lease. So I 
 
36 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 shall commit these six men for trial 
 at the sessions." The story ran like 
 lightning through the Temple, and Lanyon 
 woke up to find himself famous, and as 
 notoriety is better than obscurity, solicitors 
 became familiar with his name and briefs 
 began to roll in. Many years afterwards I 
 was counsel for the mortgagees in possession 
 of a ship, who were defendants in an action 
 for detention of a boiler. The plaintiff had 
 let to the owner of the ship the boiler on 
 hire, and I had contended that the defendants 
 were under no obligation to get the boiler 
 out of the ship and put it on the quay, so 
 that it might be restored to its true owner. 
 The late Sir Archibald Smith was the judge, 
 and he said to me : " What do you say that 
 the plaintiff ought to have done ? " I replied, 
 " He could have come on board and un- 
 screwed his boiler and taken it away," I 
 daresay," said the judge, "you wanted him 
 to play Charley Lanyon's game." Where- 
 upon the judge and I had a hearty laugh, 
 which became more hearty when we dis- 
 covered that no one else in the court knew 
 what was meant, and everyone marvelled 
 at our merriment. Lanyon never looked 
 
EARLY DAYS 37 
 
 back, but went on year after year winning 
 more clients and more briefs, and being a 
 sharp, clever man he ultimately learned a fair 
 amount of law, more or less at the expense 
 of his clients. Many a quiet laugh have I 
 had watching him, as he with an air of in- 
 fallibility laid down the law to silent groups 
 of admiring solicitors and clients, unem- 
 barrassed as he was by recollection of 
 awkward cases and harassed by no doubts. 
 Lanyon was a merry, light-hearted soul, and 
 we all deplored his death in the prime of 
 life, but I have never known so marvellous 
 an example of appearances being better than 
 realities. 
 
 Lord Rowton, then Montague Corry, was 
 a most industrious man, and acquired a very 
 considerable knowledge of law and business 
 while he was a pupil in chambers, and there 
 can be no doubt that, if he had practised as 
 a barrister he would have risen to a high 
 position in the law. The nobility of his 
 nature and the charm of his manner fitted 
 him admirably for the career which he marked 
 out for himself. 
 
 We used to tell in confidential moments 
 wonderful things about the business in our 
 
38 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 chambers, how by skilful pleading this 
 plaintiff had been thrown over the assizes 
 and that plaintiff over the Long Vacation, 
 how we had drawn unconsciously the plead- 
 ings on both sides and only found out the 
 blunder when we were asked to advise on 
 evidence on both sides. In those days three 
 judges attended at chambers, one from each 
 of the Courts of Common Law, and we used 
 to go over to Serjeants' Inn to find out who 
 was sitting, because we got to know, under 
 the instructions of our master, which judge 
 was likely to make the orders we wanted. 
 Counsel had to wait in a room about ten 
 feet square, and there was no list of 
 summonses. The clerk used to come out 
 to see who were waiting, and precedence was 
 generally accorded to Mr Chitty, and next 
 to him came favoured mortals, the tradition 
 being that the clerk would ask, " Is there 
 any judge's son with a summons ? " I 
 never saw Mr Chitty seated at his chambers. 
 He stood up all day long at a high desk with 
 slippers on his feet, and after he had attained 
 the age of three-score years and ten he was 
 ready to march any distance with the Inns 
 of Court Regiment. He had a clerk who 
 
EARLY DAYS 39 
 
 was manifestly deaf and apparently dumb, 
 but with the reputation of being one of the 
 very best in the Temple. I think I see Mr 
 Chitty now rushing out of his slippers and 
 into his boots, and grasping a select bundle 
 of summonses on hearing from me that 
 Baron Martin had arrived at Serjeants' Inn. 
 
 My next master was the late James 
 Hannen (Lord Hannen), a very great lawyer. 
 Lord Herschell, Lord Bowen, Sir Archibald 
 Smith, Sir Matthew White Ridley, Sir 
 Charles Hall and Edward Stanhope, Secre- 
 tary of State for War, were at various dates 
 his pupils. The business was enormous, 
 and the chambers were crammed week after 
 week with cases about charterparties, bills 
 of lading, marine insurance, bills of ex- 
 change and mercantile contracts of every 
 variety. The difficulty was to get the plead- 
 ings and opinions done, because Hannen was 
 every day and all day in court or at 
 consultations, and he never liked night work. 
 However, the pupils did their best, and on 
 Saturday our drafts were taken to his house 
 to reappear on Monday morning revised and 
 amended. My principal occupation on 
 Monday afternoon and Tuesday was to 
 
40 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 interpret Hannen's handwriting, which fairly 
 baffled the solicitor's clerks. However, the 
 handwriting of Dr Goodford at Eton, of 
 Mr Badger, and Mr Chitty were quite as 
 cryptic as Hannen's. I never saw Hannen 
 look at an authority but once, and that was 
 when Governor Eyre was up before the 
 magistrate at Bow Street in reference to the 
 death of Gordon during the Jamaica Riots. 
 Hannen was Junior Counsel to the Treasury 
 and had to appear for the defence. I found 
 him on his knees with Coke upon Littleton 
 before him, and shouted with joy to find that 
 a case had come in which required research. 
 The joke of the thing was that he found 
 a splendid passage in that mine of learning, 
 and when he exhibited it at Bow Street the 
 magistrate was fairly amazed, as well he 
 might be. No one but Hannen would have 
 thought of looking into Coke upon Littleton 
 in order to find a justification for hanging a 
 man not a soldier by the sentence of a sort 
 of court-martial. We all congratvdated him, 
 and prophesied a brilliant career for him at 
 the Central Criminal Court, where we declared 
 that he would speedily oust from pride of 
 place Mr Hawkins, Mr Ballantine, Mr 
 
EARLY DAYS 41 
 
 Hardinge GifFard and Mr Poland. Hannen 
 was in those days an ardent Radical, but 
 before he had done with the defence of 
 Governor Eyre he had persuaded himself 
 that force was the best remedy. Not long 
 afterwards he was made a Judge of the Court 
 of Queen's Bench, and when he walked out of 
 his room at 11 King's Bench Walk, A. L. 
 Smith walked in and captured nearly every 
 one of Hannen's clients, thereby at one blow 
 commanding a splendid practice. Such a 
 chance as this falls to few men, but there are 
 also but few who could turn such a chance 
 to such good account. In addition to a 
 thorough knowledge of law, A. L. Smith 
 possessed sound sense, rapidity of perception, 
 and a terse epigrammatical power of expres- 
 sion beyond anyone I have ever known. 
 The result was the choice of him as Junior 
 Counsel to the Treasury, followed by pro- 
 motion to the Bench, and ultimately to the 
 position of Master of the Rolls. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IN COURT 
 
 On being called to the Bar I first joined 
 the old Norfolk Circuit. The leaders were 
 Mr O'Malley and Mr D. D. Keane. Why 
 these two Irishmen favoured the East of 
 England with their patronage I do not know, 
 but they certainly brought with them 
 manners such as would not now be tolerated 
 either by the Bench or the Bar. Mr Keane 
 had a monstrous infirmity of temper, and 
 apparently he made no effort to control it. 
 Mr O'Malley knew exactly how to plunge 
 his adversary into a paroxysm of anger 
 whenever he chose. The result was a quarrel 
 which vexed the judge, distracted the jury, 
 and created a scandal to justice. These 
 scenes are recalled by way of contrast to the 
 relations which now exist between members 
 of the Bar. The excitement of forensic 
 contest must at times give rise to a certain 
 degree of heat, and the warm blood of youth 
 42 
 
IN COURT 43 
 
 Is apt to betray itself in altercation. But no 
 one who has seen three decades of the law can 
 fail to observe enormous improvement in the 
 demeanour of counsel towards each other. 
 Moreover, there is a remarkable absence of 
 anything like malice or uncharitableness out 
 of court. Indeed the profession, which is 
 by no means the bed of roses which the 
 public fondly imagine, has this to its 
 advantage, that the friendships formed among 
 its members are very numerous and very real. 
 Side by side with the change in manners of 
 counsel, one to another, there has also been 
 an advance in courtesy towards the suitors 
 and witnesses. There must be occasions on 
 which it is necessary to press witnesses into 
 admissions against themselves, and even to 
 recall their past history, but this is now done 
 with the desire to inflict as little pain as 
 possible. No one wishes to arrogate to the 
 Bar any special credit for these reforms. 
 They are only part of the general tendency 
 in the minds of the people at large towards 
 pity for rather than condemnation of wrong- 
 doers. Indeed it is now a somewhat risky 
 business to cross-examine a witness as to his 
 past career with a view to his discredit, for 
 
44 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 the foreman of the jury will stand up and 
 say, " My lord, has this anything to do with 
 the case ? " And then the counsel begins to 
 think that the verdict is slipping away from 
 his side. Neither the jury nor the public 
 has the least idea how often the brief of 
 counsel contains a mass of information about 
 the suitors and the witnesses with the 
 intention that this shall be used in cross- 
 examination to their discredit, and how often 
 the information is not used in spite of the 
 pressure put upon counsel by the client, I 
 am told that not many years ago the Irish 
 Bar was distinguished for its terrible ferocity 
 in attack upon the witnesses both in cross- 
 examinations and speeches, but that there has 
 been the same change there as here in recent 
 years. 
 
 I know nothing so embarrassing to counsel 
 as an instruction to ask questions derogatory 
 to character. Suppose counsel has in his 
 brief a sad record of the party to the suit 
 against whom he is retained, or of the 
 principal witness. It by no means follows 
 that it is just to use it. You have to ask 
 yourself many searching questions. Is the 
 matter at Issue so serious as to demand 
 
IN COURT 45 
 
 exposure with all its pain to the victim? 
 Does the record really imp each the veracity 
 of the person, as distinct from his morality ? 
 Will justice be hindered or advanced by the 
 question ? Although the client may rub his 
 hands with delight at the discomfiture of his 
 foe, it is no part of the office of counsel to 
 lend himself to that kind of warfare. The 
 only justification for an interrogatory as to 
 th'e past history of a witness is, that the 
 answer must tend directly to show that he 
 is not at all likely to tell the truth. Apart 
 from these considerations of what is just 
 there is the policy of the thing. Will it 
 shock the jury and enlist their sympathy for, 
 rather than th^r distrust of the witness? 
 And if the witness is a woman who can put 
 on a pathetic air and pour forth a flood of 
 tears at the right moment, the humanity of 
 the jury is apt to revolt at the treatment. 
 On the other hand, if no such questions are 
 asked, the counsel on the other side demands 
 of the jury that his client shall be believed, 
 because nothing has been asked tending in 
 any way to prejudice his or her reputation. 
 The Daily Tekgrapk has written that counsel 
 as such has a duty to ask questions which 
 
46 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 must make him shiver as a gentleman. 
 There is not and cannot be any such duty. 
 Counsel sometimes, either from want of ex- 
 perience or in the heat of the moment, insert 
 between their questions observations which 
 ought not to be made, and if such observa- 
 tions are " smart," they elicit a murmur of 
 approbation. But of course they ought not 
 to be made. Here is an illustration of the 
 impropriety of this practice. Counsel, " What 
 was your business at that time ? " Witness, 
 " I was a financial agent." Counsel, " Do 
 you mean that you were a money-lender ? " 
 Witness, "Yes." Counsel, "I understand 
 that you are no longer in business." Wit- 
 ness, "No." Counsel, "I am glad to hear 
 it." Witness, "If our positions were re- 
 versed, I should try to treat you as a 
 gentleman." The judge is to some extent 
 to blame for this sort of impropriety, for it 
 must be his function to check and reprove 
 those who go wrong. Moreover, cross-ex- 
 amination ought to consist of questions and 
 answers, not of rhetorical invective with 
 a note of interrogation at the end of the 
 sentence, or of offensive comments on the 
 answers of the witnesses. But although it 
 
IN COURT 47 
 
 is wrong to show discourtesy to a witness, 
 it is not necessary to go as far as the late 
 Mr Searle once did in the opposite direction. 
 I met Lord Hannen one day in the street 
 and he stopped me, because he had, as he 
 put it, a story which he was sure would 
 please me. "You know," said he, " what a 
 good fellow Searle is and how much we 
 all respect him, but he is not what you would 
 call a powerful cross-examiner. This morn- 
 ing in my court I tried a very doubtful will 
 case, and the only witness in support of the 
 will was a solicitor who had been struck off 
 the Rolls. Searle was there to upset the will, 
 and had to cross-examine the witness, and it 
 was quite obvious that he had full instruc- 
 tions as to the history of the witness. So 
 after the evidence-in-chief had been given 
 he got up and said, ' I think, sir, you were 
 at one time a solicitor.' 'Yes,' replied the 
 witness. ' And you are not a solicitor now.' 
 ' No ' said the witness, and down sat Searle, 
 and the jury thought, ' Here is a man 
 who has retired with age and honour from 
 his profession, and is probably now a Justice 
 of the Peace, and so there can be no doubt 
 at all about the verdict.' " 
 
48 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 It is by no means difficult for a witness 
 to turn the tables on counsel. My friend 
 the late Mr George Williams did not like 
 giving evidence in horse cases, and he was 
 rather too candid a man for the work. But 
 of course there were occasions on which, as 
 the busiest man in his profession, he could 
 not help himself. He was called to prove 
 that a horse was a "roarer." Serjeant 
 Ballantine was on the other side, and in his 
 best Mephistophelian manner he said to the 
 witness, " If you say that my client's horse 
 was a roarer, just represent to the jury the 
 sort of noise he made." " No," said Mr 
 Williams, " you see that is not my business. 
 Now if you will be the horse and make the 
 noise I, as veterinary surgeon, will determine 
 whether you are a roarer or not." This 
 concluded the cross-examination. 
 
 One of the most amusing controversies I 
 ever heard in court was in an action brought 
 by a tradesman against a husband to recover 
 the price of goods sold to the wife. The 
 plaintiff called the wife as a witness against 
 her husband, and in the course of her evi- 
 dence she said, " My husband must be out 
 of his mind to suppose that I can dress 
 
IN COURT 49 
 
 myself and pay my charities on an allowance 
 of ;^I500 a year." This seemed plausible 
 enough until the other side was heard. But 
 then the husband gave his evidence and he 
 said, " My father was a rich man. He had 
 ;^6o,ooo a year, and my poor mother never 
 had more than ^800 a year pin money. 
 Now I am a very poor man. I have only 
 ;^30,ooo a year, and I think that ;^I500 a 
 year is quite as much as I can aiford for my 
 wife's dress and pocket money." The jury 
 was of the modern special jury type, and 
 their faces at a man with a million sterling 
 describing himself as a pauper were a study. 
 
 In the good old days a learned counsel of 
 ferocious mien and loud voice, practising 
 before Mr Justice Maule, received a magnifi- 
 cent rebuke from that famous judge. No 
 reply could be got from an elderly lady 
 in the box, and the counsel appealed to the 
 learned judge. " I really cannot answer," 
 said the trembling lady. "Why not, ma'am .'' " 
 asked the judge. " Because, my lord, he 
 frightens me so." "So he does me, ma'am," 
 said the judge. 
 
 I was once counsel in an action tried before 
 the late Lord Justice Cotton at Maidstone 
 
50 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Assizes. There was nothing whatever in the 
 case to alarm anyone, the whole affair being 
 of a very common-place kind. But the 
 plaintiff could not be induced to utter a 
 ^ word. We all tried our hands at him, 
 including the learned judge who, as will be 
 remembered, was the gentlest of men, but it 
 was absolutely in vain. The judge seemed 
 to think that the man would not speak 
 because his case was untrue, but there were 
 really no facts in it which were capable of 
 dispute. At last the gentlemen of the jury 
 relieved the situation, for they rose as one 
 man and declared they would have no more 
 of the case as it was a mere waste of time. 
 The joke of the thing was that the plaintiff 
 had a perfectly clear case, but that he was 
 entitled in law to a verdict of one shilling 
 only. So no harm was done. But I never 
 saw or heard of a like case. 
 
 Business men, in spite of the frock coats 
 and sober neckties which they invariably 
 assume out of respect for the Court, and in 
 assertion of their own respectability, are very 
 seldom good witnesses. Nearly all money- 
 makers are stupid. If anyone denies this 
 proposition, let him recall the dinners at 
 
IN COURT 51 
 
 which he has been present with successful 
 seekers after wealth, and the utter dreariness 
 of those functions. The reason is that 
 money is made by concentration of the 
 faculties on that one pursuit. But although 
 these people are stupid, they are not at all 
 conscious of their deficiency. They regard 
 cross-examination as a duel, in which they 
 are to pit their brains against those of 
 counsel. They are therefore on the alert to 
 guess at the drift of the questions, and to 
 make their answers fit in with what they 
 suppose to be the theory of their case, with 
 the result that at the end of half an hour 
 they are in a hopeless tangle. It never occurs 
 to them that if their case will not admit of 
 the truth being told it must be a bad one. 
 
 That is a blunder into which women very 
 rarely fall. Now and then in her own case a 
 woman will commit the grossest perjury, but 
 when she is called as a witness she far 
 surpasses man In the perspicuity of her 
 narrative and in the honesty of her replies. 
 No counsel who has any pretence to tact ever 
 tries to get the better of a plain country 
 woman giving evidence at the assizes. There 
 is just a chance of eliciting some favourable 
 
52 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 answer if you treat her with profound respect, 
 call her " madam," and soften your voice, 
 but even these artifices will not induce her to 
 swerve from what she has made up her mind 
 is the real truth of the case. 
 
 I was counsel in an action involving a 
 large sum of money with the late Sir 
 Archibald Smith as the judge and Sir Robert 
 Finlay as my opponent. My client was a 
 solicitor, and the hearing began in the 
 afternoon. He was cross-examined for about 
 half an hour before the Court rose, and the 
 case got weaker with every answer which he 
 gave. When the adjournment came I said to 
 him, "If you do not promise me that 
 to-morrow you will tell the whole truth, 
 without the least regard to the effect of your 
 answers, you will have to get someone else to 
 go on with your case, for I will not." He 
 was cross-examined the next day for two 
 or three hours, and he did his utmost to 
 answer honestly and fully. When the judge 
 gave judgment he said, " I believe all that 
 the plaintiff has said. At least I mean that 
 I believe all that he has said to-day, for I 
 did not believe one word of what he said 
 yesterday." My client went out of the court 
 
IN COURT 53 
 
 richer by a large sum of money than when 
 he came in, and his success was entirely 
 attributable to his resolution to give honest, 
 not calculated replies to what was asked. 
 There are cases, however, in which duplicity 
 may serve the case of the suitor. Mr Justice 
 Bucknill and I were counsel for a man who 
 was sued for ;^5000 damages for the loss of 
 a cargo of explosives laden on a barge which 
 sunk at her moorings in the estuary of the 
 Thames. We regarded the case as hopeless, 
 because we thought that the owner of the 
 explosives, having paid a high price for the 
 hire of a floating warehouse, might reasonably 
 expect it to be seaworthy. So we did our 
 best to persuade our man to pay up, if 
 he could get ofF with seventy-five per cent, 
 of the claim. He said, " I have got just 
 ;^4000 in the world, and if I do as you 
 advise I shall have to take myself, my wife, 
 and children into the workhouse of the town 
 of which I was last year mayor." That 
 settled us, and we worked like shipwrecked 
 mariners at the pumps, and got into port 
 with a verdict for the defendant, and what is 
 more, we held that verdict in the Court of 
 Appeal. Two years afterwards the man died, 
 
54 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 and his personality was sworn at ;^20,ooo. 
 But I shall always believe that his pardonable 
 deceit got him that verdict. 
 
 I can speak of the honesty in court of 
 costermongers from experience. In two 
 cases tried before the late Lord Chief Justice 
 the evidence given by a large number of 
 these useful traders was so scrupulously fair 
 that I ventured to utter a word of praise, 
 and Lord Russell said to the jury, " I sit 
 here and listen to the testimony of persons of 
 all classes, and I think that what we have 
 heard from these men stands out in relief as 
 compared with what we often hear from 
 persons in a much higher position in society." 
 
 Sailors in collision cases have earned a very 
 different character. The late Mr Pritchard 
 was marshalling the evidence to be adduced 
 on behalf of his ship, and worried the wit- 
 nesses in a vain effort to reconcile their 
 statements, until at last the captain said, 
 " It is of no use to bother any more about 
 it. Just you write down what I and the 
 mate and the crew are to swear to and I 
 will see that it is done." This was too much 
 even for the nerves of an Admiralty solicitor 
 of forty years' experience. 
 
IN COURT 55 
 
 Lord Hannen once held forth to me on 
 the sad lack of truth among his nautical 
 witnesses. He had spent his life as counsel 
 in the old Courts of Common Law, but, be- 
 cause he was the greatest common lawyer on 
 the Bench, the Prime Minister or the Lord 
 Chancellor took him away from the work 
 he knew and set him down to divorce, 
 probate and Admiralty business, of which he 
 knew nothing at all, and an important part 
 of which he loathed. There is no objection 
 to this sort of absurdity in politics, because 
 in the Cabinet it is most desirable to have 
 respectable mediocrity if you can get it ; but 
 it is quite another matter where the law, 
 which is far more difficult and more noble 
 than statecraft, is concerned. Moreover, at 
 the time when Lord Hannen was so trans- 
 ferred, and at more recent dates, the late Mr 
 Inderwick was practising in that division, 
 and besides being a man of high intellectual 
 attainments, great learning, and tranquil 
 disposition, he knew more than any living 
 person about the business of the court, yet 
 he was passed over. While Lord Hannen 
 admitted that in the Common Law Courts he 
 had to deal with strange evidence in road 
 
56 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 collision cases, he maintained that drivers and 
 their passengers were not really as bad as 
 sailors. I offered him an explanation which 
 I venture to think is the true one. The 
 sailor is loyal to his flag. He has signed 
 articles for a voyage on a ship. He gets 
 board and lodging and wages from the 
 owner. His captain is his superior officer, 
 whom he has to obey and to help in storm 
 and stress. In a damage suit the purse of 
 the owner and the character of the captain 
 are put in jeopardy. His plain duty is to 
 save both, and he thinks that duty is just as 
 binding on him in a court of law as in a 
 tempest. So a strain on his conscience is no 
 more to him than it was to the Highlander 
 of 1745, swearing to an alibi to save from 
 the halter the chief of his clan, who had 
 "gone out" in the cause of the young 
 Pretender. 
 
 There is one difficulty under which we all 
 labour, judges, counsel and jurymen alike, 
 and that is in hearing what the witnesses say. 
 All the courts in the Strand building are 
 constructed on a wrong principle. Court of 
 Appeal No. 1 is the worst and that of the 
 Lord Chief Justice is the best for hearing. 
 
IN COURT 57 
 
 The Assize Court at Lewes is the proper 
 model, although there the Bench is rather 
 too high. Queen's Hall, Langham Place, 
 is also admirable for its acoustic properties. 
 But what is worse than the structure is the 
 method of the witnesses. It must be re- 
 membered that at least half the persons who 
 come to give evidence have been taught in 
 Board Schools, and they constitute an awful 
 object lesson of Board School inefficiency. 
 I do not know whether the art of saying 
 what you have to say distinctly and audibly 
 is taught at all in our elementary schools, 
 but if it is, the results are disgraceful. The 
 judge says, " You really must speak up. 
 What does he say ? " The counsel inter- 
 venes, " The jury have to hear your evidence. 
 Look across to them and speak more clearly." 
 The jury, after straining their ears in vain, 
 give the witness up as a bad job, and wisely 
 conclude that if he will only mutter his 
 evidence is worthless. The power of the 
 voice is generally right enough, but the 
 enunciation is to blame, and that is a thing 
 that might and ought to be educated. One 
 of the most ludicrous results of this mum- 
 bling sort of testimony occurred in a case tried 
 
58 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 before the late Mr Justice Manisty. In the 
 middle of the second day the last witness 
 for the defendant, a gentleman of clear 
 utterance, was in the box, and in the course 
 of his evidence he said, "The near wheel of 
 the omnibus then struck the side of the 
 tramcar." "What did you say?" said the 
 learned judge ; " this is the first I have heard 
 of any tramcar." " My lord," said the late 
 Mr Henry Winch, " we are trying a collision 
 between an omnibus and a tramcar." " Oh 
 dear, oh dear," exclaimed the learned judge, 
 " I thought it was a collision between an 
 omnibus and a sand cart ; now I shall have 
 to alter all my notes." Eton School may be 
 open to criticism, but when I was there 
 they did teach us to open our mouths and 
 speak in a manner to be understood by all 
 people. 
 
 Of course if all our judges and counsel had 
 the hearing power of Chief Justice Jervis, 
 whispering witnesses would do as well as 
 people of distinct utterance. That famous 
 judge was trying a case in the course of 
 which a witness gave some evidence appar- 
 ently fatal to the other side, and no witness 
 was called to contradict the assertion. When 
 
IN COURT 59 
 
 the judge came to sum up he said, " I happen 
 to have very acute hearing, and when the 
 witness gave this evidence I distinctly heard 
 the leading counsel on the other side whisper 
 to his junior, ' Tell our attorney to go out 
 of court and ask Mr C. if he can contradict 
 this.' Then 1 observed that the junior 
 counsel, rather more cautious than his leader, 
 wrote the question down on a piece of paper 
 and passed it to the attorney, who thereupon 
 went out of court, but did not bring Mr 
 C. back with him. I suppose that Mr 
 Merewether knew by experience the extra- 
 ordinary power of hearing with which I am 
 endowed, and that is why he was careful to 
 communicate with the attorney in writing," 
 
 Many of my young friends who have just 
 been called to the Bar, and who have no 
 connection among solicitors, and do not 
 know any land surveyors, or even a chair- 
 man of a railway, gas or water company, 
 ask me how they can possibly expect to get 
 a start. Of course I have to repeat the oft- 
 told tale of Lord Russell of Killowen, Lord 
 Herschell, and the late Speaker of the House 
 of Commons dining together at Liverpool 
 Assizes ; how these three men, who rose to 
 
6o LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 such eminence, almost despaired of the Bar, and 
 talked of trying their fortune in other ways, 
 and how my dear and lamented friend, the late 
 Lord Chief Justice, used to adorn the tale and 
 point its moral, and how he could explain 
 that one not here to be named was called on 
 the same day that he was, and at once 
 entered upon a lucrative practice, but later 
 on faded into obscurity. I knew Lord 
 Herschell at the Junior Bar, when his practice 
 was of a meagre description. His success 
 came with a rush immediately on his pro- 
 motion to the " Inner Bar " and his election 
 to Parliament for Durham. All men admit 
 that Viscount Selby has never been surpassed 
 as " Speaker." 
 
 Lord Cairns and Lord Selborne were the 
 two best counsel at the Equity Bar of their 
 own and probably of any time. Mr Palmer 
 had city relatives and friends of wealth and 
 influence just as Mr Page Wood (Lord 
 Hatherley) had in his day, but Mr Cairns 
 came from Ireland to London an unknown 
 man. His start at the Bar was in this wise. 
 He called on Mr William Bevan, whose name 
 has already been mentioned as the solicitor 
 who defended TarveU, with a letter of intro- 
 
IN COURT 6 1 
 
 duction in order to instruct Mr Bevan to 
 obtain probate of a will of which Mr Cairns 
 was executor. Some weeks afterwards Mr 
 Bevan delivered to Mr Cairns a brief in a 
 suit in chancery, the other parties to which 
 were represented by Messrs Gregory and 
 RowclifFe. After Mr Cairns had delivered 
 his argument the representative of the latter 
 firm asked Mr Bevan the name of his 
 counsel, and thereafter briefs came in a 
 regular stream from No. i Bedford Row 
 to the chambers of Mr Cairns. That 
 was the tide of his affairs which taken at 
 the flood led on to fortune. Lest such a 
 story as this should create too great expecta- 
 tions, it should be remembered that the 
 personality of Mr Cairns at the Bar was as 
 striking as that of Mr Gladstone in the 
 House of Commons, His presence, his 
 intellectual force, his profound knowledge 
 of law, and the copious, exact and simple 
 language in which he clothed his argument 
 were such as to command success anywhere 
 and under any circumstances. His great 
 rival, Mr Palmer, was also a counsel who 
 must have risen to the highest position 
 under any circumstances, for he was a most 
 
62 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 brilliant and powerful advocate. He, how- 
 ever, had friends ready from the first to do 
 all they could for him. 
 
 But as an example of the sort of 
 accidents which may bring a brief to a 
 modest beginner, I may tell the following 
 story. One day I was sitting at the extreme 
 end of the row of the Junior Bar in the old 
 Queen's Bench Court at Westminster. 
 From a small window in the robing-room 
 upstairs the whole of the Bar could be seen. 
 The managing clerk to a firm of solicitors, 
 having in his hand a brief for counsel to 
 move for a rule nisi, went up to the robing- 
 room and asked Mr Howard, the manager, 
 whether he could tell him the name of a 
 junior counsel to whom the brief could be 
 delivered. Now Mr Howard had on his 
 staff an attendant named "Ben," a very 
 worthy man to whom I had shown some 
 trifling kindness, such as asking him about 
 his health, and to whom I had given an old 
 coat and a Christmas box. Ben seized hold 
 of the clerk, led him to the window, pointed 
 me out to him and advised him to entrust 
 the brief to me. Down came the clerk and 
 delivered the brief to me, and I got a 
 
IN COURT 63 
 
 " rule" which later on was made " absolute." 
 It was a trumpery county court appeal, and 
 and at the time I thought no more of it. Start- 
 ing with that "old coat" brief I got into a large 
 amount of business with the firm of solicitors 
 from whom it came, for at that time they had 
 cases of all sorts and conditions, abounding 
 in appeals and involving important interests. 
 Not long ago a visitor told my wife this 
 story, declaring on the highest authority 
 that the adventure happened to Charles 
 Russell, and was the starting-point of his 
 brilliant career. 
 
 If a young man gets into a big case, does 
 his part fairly well, and wins, he is apt to 
 imagine that he is on the high road to 
 fortune. A chancery counsel, now a judge, 
 bestowed infinite labour on a very difficult 
 case and won it. The solicitor delivered his 
 next brief to the junior counsel who had 
 appeared on the losing side. His excuse 
 was that the opponent had fought so well. 
 On the other hand, some insignificant case 
 will turn out to be the beginning of great 
 things. In early days I had a brief in a 
 very rotten case. It was tried before the 
 late Mr Justice Blackburn (Lord Blackburn) 
 
64 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 and a common jury in the old Bail Court at 
 Westminster, and my opponent was that 
 grand old gentleman, Mr Montagu Chambers, 
 the leader of the old Home Circuit. Mr 
 Chambers was gazetted an officer in the 
 Grenadier Guards about the year 1816. 
 His elder brother had fought at Waterloo. 
 Finding that neither Buonaparte nor anyone 
 else was likely to disturb the peace of Europe 
 he forsook the sword for the gown. He 
 was counsel for the plaintiff and I was for 
 the defendant. My client had bought some 
 goods but had omitted to pay for them, had 
 used them, and then alleged that they were 
 worthless. This was a miserable defence, 
 but I struggled on as best I could. When 
 Mr Chambers, who was then more than 
 seventy years old, came to his reply he said, 
 " Gentlemen of the Jury, my youthful learned 
 friend reminds me of the chimney-sweep 
 boy who went into a confectioner's shop, put 
 his black finger into the middle of a rasp- 
 berry-jam tart and said, ' How much is it,' 
 and when the confectioner said, ' One penny,' 
 the boy said, ' I won't have it.'i" Of course 
 I was glad when the farce was over and tried 
 to forget what a lot of nonsense I must have 
 
IN COURT 65 
 
 talked to justify such a reply. To that 
 case I am able to trace the pedigree of 
 many briefs of great importance, and the 
 family is even now very far from being 
 extinct. 
 
 The late Lord Sherbrooke (Mr Lowe) 
 once held forth to me on the absurdity of 
 anyone expecting to get a start at the 
 English Bar unless he was related to busy 
 men in the solicitor's branch of the profession. 
 This opinion was of course erroneous. " If," 
 said a learned counsel, " I get a brief from 
 my brother's firm everyone says, ' He only 
 got it because the solicitor is his brother,' 
 and if I don't get the brief then everyone 
 says, 'What sort of a counsel must he be 
 when even his own brother will not trust 
 him with the case.' " If anyone bearing the 
 name of an eminent solicitor and very nearly 
 related to him desires to be called to the Bar, 
 he would be well advised to change his name 
 on becoming a student. He might by this 
 simple artifice avoid all the drawbacks and 
 win all the benefits of his relationship. But, 
 after all, it is very difficult to determine what 
 constitutes success in the profession. If you 
 
66 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 have a constitution of iron and the digestion 
 of an ostrich you may rise every morning 
 before five and keep at it for fourteen con- 
 secutive hours, Sundays and weekdays, and if 
 you are ambitious you can sit in the House 
 of Commons, or rather walk in and out of 
 the lobbies on divisions in your spare time, 
 and this sort of thing would perhaps be all 
 right if you were not restricted to one life 
 and that a very short one. 
 
 I never knew a man of greater physical 
 force than Charles Russell. Ten years 
 before his death he rode in one day on 
 horseback from his house in Harley Street 
 to Cambridge, and the next morning he 
 rode from Cambridge to Newmarket, arriving 
 at the Heath before nine o'clock ; yet his 
 strenuous life was brought to an untimely 
 end by the pressure under which he worked. 
 Sir John Rolt, who began his life in the law 
 as a paid clerk in the office of Messrs 
 Pritchard & Sons, and who rose to be 
 Attorney-General and was afterwards Lord 
 Justice, said that no honour, no rank and 
 no wealth could compensate him for the 
 labour he had undergone in his struggle for 
 
IN COURT 67 
 
 success. I quote the wise words of Mr 
 Choate, spoken at the Mansion House on the 
 5th May last year : " I was brought up to 
 believe that work was the end and aim of 
 life, that that was what we were placed here 
 for. But on contemplating your best ex- 
 amples I have learnt that work is only a 
 means to a higher end, to a more rational 
 life, to the development of our best traits 
 and powers for the benefit of those around 
 us, and for getting and giving as much 
 happiness as the lot of humanity permits." 
 And Gustav Frensen writes : *' Woe to the 
 man who is only a hunter after bread or 
 money or honour, and has not a single 
 pursuit he loves, whereby, even if it be only 
 over a narrow bridge, Mother Nature can 
 come into his life with her gay wreaths and 
 her songs." 
 
 I was sitting next to one of the first 
 jewellers in London at a city feast, and we 
 had discussed the tremendous energy of 
 American traders and the invincible pertina- 
 city of the Germans. I said to him, " You 
 tell me all this, but you do not explain why 
 this country holds its own at all." "The 
 
68 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 reason," he replied, " is that the Americans 
 and the Germans exhaust themselves ten years 
 earlier than the Englishmen, so that the spare 
 vitality of the latter makes the result equal." 
 It should never be forgotten that "Life 
 is not a fair field and no favour." The only 
 things in life which can be so designated are 
 examinations at school and college, and for 
 that reason the retrospect of those contests 
 is always to me delightful. They were the 
 best examples of ideal justice. But in after 
 life political, social, family and self-regard- 
 ing interests are tremendous forces, and for 
 that reason promotions to offices great and 
 small are open, and justly open, to criticism 
 in all professions. I once met the late Mr 
 W. E. Forster at dinner and walked home 
 with him at night. It would be difficult to 
 find in our political history a man of nobler 
 character. He said to me, " If I had been 
 at Eton I should have been in the Cabinet 
 ten years earlier." The wise man ought 
 never to feel hurt when he sees greatness 
 thrust upon his neighbour, however unfitted 
 the latter may be for the office, because he 
 knows that it was so in the beginning, is 
 
IN COURT 69 
 
 now, and ever shall be. Now and then 
 there is a shout of indignation at a job of 
 extraordinary wickedness, but it is only a 
 shoutj for the thing cannot be undone. It 
 is best to shrug the shoulder and pass on. 
 In 37 Henry VIII. c. I., there is a recital 
 that certain persons have by labour, friend- 
 ship and means attained and gotten grants 
 by His Majesty's letters patent, and that 
 sort of thing still goes on. 
 
 The general public have no great opinion 
 of the great lawyers who become law- 
 officers of the Crown and judges. They 
 do not understand, and so do not read the 
 reports of civil causes. Their idols are the 
 shining lights of the Central Criminal Court. 
 Mr Percival, the well-known horse-dealer, 
 said to me, " I am afraid, sir, you are not 
 getting on so well at the Bar as I could wish. 
 I thought that long before this I should 
 have read in the newspaper your defences 
 of three or four first-class murderers." He 
 never could quite understand why the late 
 Mr Montagu Williams was not made Lord 
 Chief Justice of England, and his astonish- 
 ment on the point became greater when he 
 
70 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 read the memoirs of that clever advocate. 
 If I tried to explain to him that the training 
 of those barristers did not as a rule fit them 
 for such exalted positions, he triumphantly 
 destroyed my argument by reminding me 
 that Lord Halsbury was the first man of 
 his time in that line of business. One of 
 his friends, an illustrious chiropodist, stood 
 in jeopardy of the law for assault and battery 
 committed on a rival, and the wife of the 
 former came to Mr Percival in sad distress. 
 " Now," said Mr Percival, " if we retain 
 Mr Hawkins, Mr Sergeant Ballantine and 
 Mr Henry Bodkin Poland and have him 
 well defended, we may get him oiF with six 
 months' hard labour." However, his opinion 
 of the judges when he was himself a litigant 
 in horse causes was not very high, for as he 
 justly observed the horse is all right in the 
 dealer's yard, but who is to prognosticate 
 what he wiU do when he has once passed out 
 of the gate. 
 
 I am afraid that if Mr Percival were still 
 alive his admiration for the leading counsel 
 of the Central Criminal Court would be 
 to some extent abated. The Act which 
 
IN COURT 71 
 
 allows prisoners to give evidence is on the 
 whole a wise measure. But the blot on it 
 was hit not long ago by my learned friend 
 Mr Avory. The prosecution now put before 
 the jury a case so slight that before the Act 
 the judge would have directed a verdict of 
 "Not Guilty," or the jury would have found 
 that verdict. But as the law admits the 
 evidence of the prisoner, the case goes on 
 in order that his explanation may be heard, 
 so that the golden principle that the pro- 
 secution must satisfy the jury by the 
 evidence adduced on behalf of the Crown 
 is no longer observed. That appeared to 
 me to be a strong and just criticism from 
 the mouth of the first criminal lawyer of 
 the present time. But whether it be just 
 or not this much is certain, that the Act has 
 destroyed the art of advocacy in criminal 
 prosecutions, reducing them to the level of 
 ordinary nisi prius cases. 
 
 It is not often that counsel feel exultant 
 over their success in a law suit or downcast 
 at failure, but I confess that I did rejoice 
 when my learned friend, Mr Danckwerts, 
 who was with me in the action which 
 
/ 
 72 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 knocked the conceit out of the Windsor 
 Corporation and abolished the toUs on 
 Windsor Bridge, convinced the Court of 
 Appeal that his view of the law was right 
 and that of Lord Russell was wrong. But 
 the conceit was also knocked out of me soon 
 afterwards when I paid a visit to the lady 
 who taught me in my earliest days, and in 
 whose presence I mentioned that victory. 
 "Oh, yes," said she, "I read in the news- 
 papers that you had won an action which 
 was brought to recover twopence " ; that 
 being, of course, the amount which the 
 plaintiiF had paid under protest to test the 
 right of the corporation. This observation 
 prevented any exaltation over the abolition 
 of the toll at Maidenhead Bridge, in which 
 Mr Danckwerts and I played a not unim- 
 portant part. 
 
 But the real honour of these two victories 
 rests with Mr Joseph Taylor of Eton, and 
 with his solicitor, Mr Edward Betteley. 
 These gentlemen conceived the idea that 
 the tolls taken by the Corporation of 
 Windsor from passengers over the bridge 
 were illegal, and Mr Taylor brought the 
 
IN COURT 73 
 
 action which determined the question in his 
 own name and at his own risk, and it will, 
 • in my opinion, remain a blot upon the fair 
 fame of Eton College that its provost and 
 masters never gave Mr Taylor a word of 
 encouragement and never made an effort to 
 indemnify him against the costs, to which 
 he was put in fighting a battle and achieving 
 a victory from which they derived more 
 benefit than did any other body of persons. 
 Although he was successful and the Corpora- 
 tion of Windsor had to suffer smartly in 
 costs payable to him, yet such litigation 
 carried up to the House of Lords of 
 necessity involved the winner in costs over 
 and above those which the corporation had 
 to pay, and I, having been for many years 
 associated with Eton and the sister college 
 at Cambridge, felt that better things might 
 have been expected of the guardians of the 
 foundation of King Henry VI . 
 
 When we see barristers year after year 
 attending chambers in Lincoln's Inn or the 
 Temple and making no progress at all in 
 the profession, we must not set the failure 
 down to bad luck or want of friends. So 
 
74 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 far as forensic business is concerned, it is 
 manifest that certain physical, moral and 
 intellectual qualities are essential to success. 
 Yet every year there are many men called 
 to the Bar who are obviously lacking in 
 these qualities. Often it is the fault of 
 parents who insist on choosing for their 
 sons, and who of course are the worst 
 possible judges. I knew a solicitor who 
 was one of the ablest men I ever met, and 
 a man who had deservedly achieved a great 
 position. He had two sons in the law, one 
 at the Bar, the other a solicitor. To any- 
 one, not their father, it was as clear as the 
 sun at noonday that the elder ought to be 
 a solicitor and the younger a barrister. But 
 the father had arranged it the other way, 
 and although the younger one was a most 
 worthy successor in the business of his 
 father, yet if he had been a barrister he 
 would in all human probability have risen 
 to the highest positions in the profession. 
 The elder was a sage man with a business 
 mind and a pleasant manner, but when he 
 was face to face with a jury, neither he nor 
 his audience looked at all comfortable. Of 
 
IN COURT 75 
 
 course there are reporters, and revising 
 barristers, and recorders of insignificant cities 
 and boroughs, and there are county court 
 judges, and men struggle on in the hope of 
 attaining to these offices. But these are not 
 the goals of their ambition on the day of 
 call. 
 
 It is superfluous to speak of the loyalty 
 of counsel to their clients, both as regards 
 industry in mastering the case and in 
 strenuous effort to win. Faith in their in- 
 tegrity is universal among the educated 
 portion of the community, although among 
 certain classes scepticism is not unknown. 
 I remember marching out of the Temple in 
 the ranks of the Inns of Court Rifle Volun- 
 teers in all the pride and panoply of war, 
 and hearing in Fleet Street this conversa- 
 tion : " Fine fellows, ain't they, George ? " 
 " Yes, Bill, they are. Why, they are bigger 
 and better than the Grenadiers. What a pity 
 they are such a set of rogues." There is 
 only one instance on record of a barrister 
 being corrupted by a bribe, and that scan- 
 dalous affair happened half a century ago. 
 The offender was disbarred for a fraud not 
 
76 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 connected with the profession, but when he 
 applied to the benchers of his Inn to be 
 restored, Sir John Karslake, as he himself 
 told me, insisted that his petition should be 
 rejected on the ground that the counsel had 
 accepted a bribe to refrain from cross-ex- 
 amining a witness. I suppose also that most 
 of the members of the Bar are well born 
 and well educated, and may be regarded as 
 gentlemen. But that was not exactly the 
 opinion of the late Sergeant Dodd, formerly 
 of the Rifle Brigade. That veteran, whose 
 energy and ability at drill could not be 
 surpassed, was at his favourite post in 
 Lincoln's Inn when he was saluted by ex- 
 Private Grimshaw of the brigade, "Why, 
 sergeant, whatever are you doing here and 
 in that uniform .? " " Well, Grimshaw, I 
 drill the Inns of Court." " Who are they, 
 sergeant?" "Why, the barristers to be 
 sure." "I suppose, sergeant, they are all 
 gentlemen." "Well, just about half of 
 them," exclaimed the sergeant. 
 
 The first assizes that I attended as a 
 barrister were held at Cambridge, and the 
 case of Lord Coventry v. Willes was tried 
 
IN COURT 77 
 
 before Mr Justice Crompton and a special 
 jury. The plaintiffs were the stewards of 
 the Jockey Club, and the defendant was 
 " Argus," the sporting correspondent of the 
 Morning Post. Mr Willes had been warned 
 off "Newmarket Heath," and the action 
 was brought against him, because he per- 
 sisted in coming to see the races. Mr Keane, 
 Q.C.J made a desperate defence for "Argus," 
 and said all sorts of absurd things about the 
 Jockey Club. I knew every man on the 
 jury, and I knew that not one of them 
 would find a verdict against the Jockey 
 Club if he could help it. The judge too 
 was just as keen to smash up "Argus" as 
 were the squires on the jury. The summing 
 up was short and decisive, and a verdict 
 was instantly given for the plaintiffs, and 
 since that date no one has disputed the 
 right of the Jockey Club to control the 
 race-course. The joke of the thing was 
 that in the preceding November a demurrer 
 had been argued at Westminster in the 
 same action. Some bold pleader had set up 
 as a defence to the action that " From time 
 whereof the memory of man runneth not 
 
78 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 to the contrary horse-races had been, and 
 of right ought to have been, and still of 
 right ought to be holden on Newmarket 
 Heath at certain reasonable times, to wit 
 on certain days in the months of April, July 
 and October in each and every year, and 
 that from time whereof the memory of man 
 is not to the contrary there hath been and 
 still of right ought to be an ancient and 
 laudable custom, that all the subjects of the 
 realm have used to enter, and still of right 
 ought to enter and stay and remain for a 
 reasonable time for the purpose of witness- 
 ing the said horse-races." "Legal memory " 
 goes back either to the 6th July 1189, or 
 to the 3rd September 1189 or to the nth 
 September 11 89. Which of these is the 
 true date from which the memory of man 
 starts on its race in the contemplation of 
 the judges, no one knows. But the late 
 Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, while observ- 
 ing that the right to hold the races seemed, 
 according to the pleader, to be laid in the 
 horses and not in the owners, declined to 
 believe that Richard I. ran horses at New- 
 market, it being much more probable that 
 
IN COURT 79 
 
 the monarch of the lion heart tried them 
 at long distance running between Joppa and 
 Jerusalem. The counsel said that Henry 
 VIII., when he had time to spare and was 
 not getting rid of his wives, and James I., 
 when he was not writing his counterblast 
 against tobacco, had horses in training at 
 Newmarket, but even these historical revela- 
 tions had no effect. So old Blackstone was 
 brought into court, and as he said that 
 there could not be a custom in all the 
 subjects of the realm to go to Newmarket 
 three times a year, " Argus " was blown out 
 of court. 
 
 At an early date I migrated from the Nor- 
 folk to the old Home Circuit. In those 
 days the business on the Home Circuit was 
 very heavy. I have seen a list of one 
 hundred and fifty causes at the Assizes at 
 Kingston-on-ThameSj and a list of one 
 hundred and sixty causes at Guildford, the 
 spring assizes being held at the old Royal 
 Town, and the summer assizes at Croydon 
 and Guildford in alternate years. The 
 Judicature Act destroyed all this business, 
 and when we grumbled at this extinction 
 
8o LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 the Powers said, " Oh, you people have no 
 grievance, for while everybody else will be 
 scattered over the country during the spring 
 and summer assizes, you will have the 
 Metropolis to yourselves, because we mean 
 to have continuous sittings in Middlesex, and 
 of the business there you will have the 
 monopoly." So we abandoned our agitation, 
 and now we know that the "continuous" 
 sittings in Middlesex mean innumerable 
 " solutions of continuity." In those ancient 
 days the Home Circuit on its social side as 
 well as on its legal side was a great institution, 
 and " Grand Night " at the principal towns 
 was kept with solemnity and with due regard 
 to tradition. Before my time the Circuit 
 indulged in the luxury of a poet who burst 
 into song on memorable occasions. The 
 Common Law Procedure Acts were the 
 work of Bramwell and James Shaw Willes, 
 and the poet represented Bramwell dreaming 
 pleasant dreams and seeing delightful visions 
 until his happiness was rudely interrupted 
 by the ghosts of the ancient pleadings and 
 writs, which were abolished by the Act 
 of 1852 : — 
 
IN COURT 8r 
 
 " Traitor we curse thee one and all, 
 
 We are demurrers and rules to compute, 
 
 And nunc pro tunc, you barbarous brute. 
 
 Re. Fa. La. Pone and great Sci. Fa. 
 
 Qui Tam and Quare Impedit, 
 
 Absque hoc and Pluries Writs 
 
 And surrejoinders and surrebutters. 
 
 You grim ghost, who gloomily flutters, 
 
 Veil your eyes ! it is the awful spectre 
 
 Of what was once the casual ejector. 
 He who lies like a swab below 
 
 All gone to pie was once John Doe. 
 That lathy phantom you see afar 
 
 Was once, you traitor, the Common Bar. 
 And yon brown blotch — none now can be duller 
 
 Looked cheerily once as " express colour." 
 There Trover flits and case and assumpsit, 
 
 Who, whether he likes it or whether he lumps it. 
 After his centuries of hard service, 
 
 Is turned out of doors by Sir John Jervis." 
 
 And at a later stage of the dream Lord 
 Brougham appears before the same com- 
 missioners and addresses them in the 
 turgid style for which that voluble person- 
 age was so celebrated : — 
 
 " Crass, dense, intense in stupidity, 
 Nor less obtuse in morality, 
 And to all feelings of decency, 
 
 F 
 
82 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Beyond all hope lost to eternity 
 Must that foolish commissioner be. 
 
 Who would dare to venture to think of doing 
 What, if done, must be his and his country's 
 ruin. 
 
 To venture, I say, to presume, to dare, 
 To put his hand to a single hair. 
 
 Be the hair little or be it big, 
 That bristles on Themis' hoary wig — 
 
 Until that I much pondering 
 Upon all these things consent to bring 
 
 From the land of the Yankee whither I go 
 The absolute wisdom of Doe and Roe — 
 
 Till then, thou crass commissioner, know, 
 That if thou wouldst escape grief, sorrow and 
 woe. 
 
 Regret, compunction, and all the train 
 Of ills attendant on my disdain. 
 
 Stay thy rash hand, be counselled, refrain 
 From the meddling work — till I come again. 
 
 These dreadful words ' I come again ' 
 Put the commissioner out of his pain. 
 
 The thought was more than flesh could bear, 
 And up from his couch he sprang in despair. 
 
 And the last he saw of that wild pell mell. 
 Was Lord B. shipped for Boston with Dora Snell." 
 
 In those days also the Attorney-General 
 of the Circuit was ever on the alert to bring 
 to the bar of justice, as represented by the 
 
IN COURT 83 
 
 Bar mess, all persons guilty of standing for 
 Parliament, or of becoming Queen's 
 Counsel, or recorders, or even of smaller 
 misdemeanours. Thus on a festive evening 
 the late Sir George Honyman presented to 
 the court a bill of indictment against one 
 of the leaders in this form. 
 
 Home Circuit to wit, — 
 
 The jurors of the Home Circuit upon 
 their oaths present that William Shee of 
 Maidstone in the county of Kent, serjeant- 
 at-law, being an evil disposed person and 
 not having the fear of the junior before his 
 eyes heretofore, to wit on the 20th day of 
 March in the year of our Lord 18 — and in 
 the first year of the reign of the new junior 
 at Maidstone aforesaid and within the 
 jurisdiction of this court in a certain open 
 court there with very many people therein, 
 to wit one hundred attorneys, and two 
 hundred briefless barristers, did hold up a 
 certain brief of a certain brother of him the 
 said William Shee, to wit one William Fry 
 Channell, serjeant-at-law, of great thick- 
 ness, to wit the thickness of ten feet, 
 and which said brief was then and there 
 
84 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 indorsed with a certain fee of great magni- 
 tude, to wit a fee of forty-two guineas, and 
 did then and there ask a certain witness, to 
 wit one Theophrastus Snooks, " How thick 
 was it ? Was it as thick as this ? " Mean- 
 ing thereby the said brief and thereby then 
 and there intending to cause divers jurors, 
 witnesses, attorneys, gaol birds, and others 
 (whose names are to the Attorney-General 
 unknown) to believe that such brief then 
 and there was the brief of him the said 
 William Shee, whereas in truth and in fact 
 he the said William Shee never had a brief 
 with as large a fee or anything like it as the 
 said William Shee then and there well knew, 
 to the great aggrandisement of him the said 
 William Shee and in contempt of the junior. 
 Indorsed G. W. Bramwell. "SWORN in 
 Court." « A true Bill." 
 
 The glory of these days has departed, and 
 now the old Home Circuit and Norfolk 
 Circuit are merged in the South Eastern 
 Circuit. In a recent examination an Eton 
 boy was asked this question : " What is the 
 most pathetic line you know ? " His prompt 
 reply was "the South Eastern," and I am 
 
IN COURT 85 
 
 quite sure that the South Eastern is the most 
 pathetic Circuit. It is but the ghost of the 
 two which it has devoured. There is little 
 business, and most of it is very thin. One 
 judge only is sent and the greatest un- 
 certainty prevails as to the day on which 
 the civil business, if any, will be taken. 
 The result is that counsel wait in town until 
 the moment when the telegraphic message 
 bids them start, and when they have arrived 
 at the Circuit town they are in constant 
 anxiety lest they should be suddenly 
 summoned back to the courts in the Strand. 
 Not long after I was called I held a brief 
 for a lady whose houses were required by a 
 railway company and whose claim for com- 
 pensation was to be adjusted by arbitration 
 under the Lands Clauses Act. The case 
 presented no difficulty, and inexperienced 
 though I was in this class of business I had 
 no lack of confidence when I had read the 
 brief. But before the reference came to a 
 hearing, I was solemnly informed that the 
 lady had said to her solicitor these words : 
 " I have prayed night and morning that the 
 heart of the arbitrator may be turned to give 
 
86 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 me a good award." And I own that my 
 anxiety then became great. It was not my 
 business that if this extraordinary prayer 
 were answered the shareholders in the rail- 
 way company would suffer an injustice, but 
 what 1 did fear was that if the award turned 
 out to be insufficient in the opinion of the 
 owner of the property, the blame would rest 
 on me alone. I have never had a like ex- 
 perience since, and indeed the claims put 
 forward against railway companies, supported 
 though they have been by the evidence of 
 eminent surveyors, have not often been 
 such as to merit the sanction which was thus 
 invoked. However, in all ages different 
 opinions have prevailed both as to the pro- 
 priety and efficacy of prayer. The Duchesse 
 de Novilles prayed before a statue of the 
 Virgin of the church of the Abbaye-aux-Bois 
 to obtain for her husband, the Duc-Mareschal, 
 the Orders of the Garter and of the Holy 
 Roman Empire, being the only titles he did 
 not possess, and my sporting friend, the late 
 Major Elwon, prayed fervently that his 
 famous horse, Jack Spigot, might win for 
 him the City and Suburban Handicap with 
 
IN COURT 87 
 
 the big bets for which the Major had backed 
 him, and the horse won in gallant style. 
 
 Public morality would be advanced if all 
 expert testimony were abolished in courts of 
 law and at arbitrations. The Admiralty 
 system of assessors ought to be universally 
 adopted. Suppose that a man is injured and 
 brings an action to recover compensation, 
 the court ought to name a surgeon to ex- 
 amine the plaintiff one week before the trial, 
 and to write out a full report to be delivered 
 to the judge with a copy for the counsel on 
 either side. The surgeon who has attended 
 the man could of course be called to state 
 the facts, but he should not be allowed to 
 depose to the condition of the plaintiff at the 
 time of the trial, or to offer any opinion as 
 to the probable date of recovery. The same 
 rule should be applied as regards building, 
 engineering and all other cases where it is 
 now the practice to adduce expert evidence. 
 To call three surveyors on oath to appraise a 
 property on behalf of the owners at ;^ 10,000, 
 and then to call three surveyors on behalf of 
 the company to swear that its value is only 
 jCZ'^oo is a scandal of high degree. The 
 
88 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 conflict of surgical opinion is not so bad 
 because the element of uncertainty is great, 
 but there is quite enough to justify a reform 
 in this direction. 
 
 Perhaps the most strange case with which 
 I have been connected was tried at Norwich 
 Assizes many years ago before Mr Justice 
 Hawkins, now Lord Brampton. The action 
 was brought by the widow as administratix of 
 her deceased husband to recover one thousand 
 pounds on a policy against death by accident. 
 The deceased had resided near Gower Street 
 Station, and one of his favourite diversions 
 was to visit Madame Tussaud's exhibition, 
 which in those days was in Baker Street. 
 There was no doubt that he had on the fatal 
 day travelled by the Metropolitan Railway 
 from Gower Street, spent some time at the 
 exhibition, and had then walked back to 
 Baker Street Station in order to return home 
 by train. The driver of a. train going west 
 from Baker Street to Edgware Road had 
 noticed a dark object lying between the rails 
 on his right hand, and information having 
 been given to the Inspector at Baker Street by 
 telegram, the latter instituted a search. The 
 
IN COURT 89 
 
 deceased was found lying in the tunnel about 
 one hundred yards west of Baker Street Station 
 on his back. The hands were close to the sides 
 and the feet were close together. The head 
 was towards Baker Street and the feet towards 
 Edgware Road, and the body lay between the 
 metals at an equal distance from each rail. 
 The back of the head was smashed in, but 
 otherwise there was not a mark on the body, 
 and the clothes were not torn, injured or 
 soiled. The case for the plaintiff was that the 
 man had wandered into the tunnel and had 
 been knocked down and killed by the engine 
 of a train which had passed over him. The 
 defendant company suggested suicide. But 
 no one on either side, counsel or witnesses, 
 could suggest any plausible explanation of the 
 condition of the body or clothes upon either 
 of these theories, for if the engine hit him on 
 the back of the head, where the only injury 
 was, how came he to be lying on his back 
 with his feet towards Edgware Road ? And 
 how could the position of his hands and feet 
 be explained .'' I thought that when we got 
 into court some light might be thrown on 
 the case by the learned judge, but his lord- 
 
90 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 ship kept strictly to his judicial function, and 
 as Sherlock Holmes had not then begun to 
 practise in Baker Street the mystery remained 
 unsolved. The jury failed to agree and were 
 discharged without a verdict. 
 
 Another case, which at the risk of egotism 
 I will mention, was the action against Mr 
 Maskelyne, the clever conjurer, to recover 
 jCsoo, the reward which he offered if anyone 
 could do his box trick. Two young men 
 accepted the challenge, and made a box of the 
 same dimensions as that used by Mr Maske- 
 lyne, out of which one of them could escape 
 under apparently the same conditions as the 
 gentleman at the Egyptian Hall. At the first 
 trial the jury disagreed. At the second trial 
 the jury found a verdict for the plaintiffs. 
 The defendant appealed, but the Court up- 
 held the verdict. Then Mr Maskelyne, with 
 admirable courage, appealed to the House of 
 Lords. When we got there two noble Lords 
 thought that the verdict was wrong, and the 
 other three thought that the verdict could 
 not be disturbed. So my clients got their 
 ;^500, but as the Duke of Wellington said 
 of the Battle of Waterloo, "It was such a 
 
IN COURT 91 
 
 near thing, such a near run thing," I have 
 good reason for believing that if Mr Maske- 
 lyne had won the day in the House of Lords 
 he would not have pressed his adversaries for 
 the payment of his costs, and I am not sure 
 that he would not have offered a gift to his 
 gallant and ingenious opponents by way of 
 consolation. 
 
 When the late Sir Joseph Chitty was a 
 judge of first instance a case was tried before 
 him in which I was counsel on one side and 
 my friend, Mr F, Low, K.C., was on the 
 other side. There was a lady in it, who 
 had for many years carried on a substantial 
 business as a builder, and worn male attire, 
 and had been regarded as a man by her 
 neighbours. This r$le she had assumed for 
 convenience in the transaction of business. 
 Finding a solitary life unbearable, she had 
 invited another lady whom she had known 
 for many years to live with her, but the 
 difficulty was that scandal might thereby be 
 caused. So she hit upon the idea of going 
 through the ceremony of marriage with her 
 friend, the builder, of course, passing as the 
 bridegroom. The ceremony took place in a 
 
92 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 church, and the couple lived for years in 
 happiness. But Sir Joseph Chitty declined 
 to believe a word of this story, of the truth 
 of which 1 entertained no doubt, and the 
 learned judge, with the marriage certificate 
 on his desk before him, evolved from his 
 inner consciousness a Dutch husband, and 
 turned my bridegroom into the bride. The 
 Dutch gentleman, according to the learned 
 judge, could not exactly say Vent, vidi, vici, 
 but veni, vidi, fugi, for what became of him 
 after the ceremony the judgment did not 
 explain. I suppose that the improbability 
 of one woman marrying another was to his 
 lordship gigantic, but, of course, this was by 
 no means a solitary example. On the 20th 
 August 1904, at page 515 of Tit-Bits^ there 
 was an article headed " Ladies who walk in 
 Male Attire." In it there are recorded the 
 cases of a lady who had for nearly fifty years 
 worked as a painter and decorator in male 
 attire in the docks; of Surgeon-General James 
 Barry, an army officer ; of M. Falle of 
 Brittany, twice wed, and of Henri Blanc 
 of Provence who had married and buried 
 three wives, all of these supposed men being 
 
IN COURT 93 
 
 of the female sex. And these by no means 
 exhaust the list. Sir Joseph Chitty was a 
 master of the principles of Equity and 
 thoroughly versed in the practice of the 
 Court of Chancery, and in addition to these 
 accomplishments he was a very great common 
 lawyer, but I am afraid that he would not 
 have excelled as a common juryman. His 
 achievements on the river and in the cricket 
 field are fresh in the memory. Few men 
 have been so popular in the profession as he 
 was, and we all felt his loss grievously. 
 
 I do not suppose that many barristers 
 have had the misfortune to be themselves 
 litigants. I had a strange experience of that 
 kind. Many years ago one Allan had a 
 grievance. Morally he had right on his 
 side, but he had no case whatever in point 
 of law. However, he declared war against 
 his enemies, and died pending suit. His 
 executor took up the struggle and he died, 
 and then a friend of the executor began a 
 third campaign. In the earlier history of 
 this litigation, which lasted for more than 
 twenty years, the defendants were a joint 
 stock company and its promoter, but the 
 
94 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 friend of the executor did not limit himself 
 in this way. He brought actions against 
 Ministers of State, and Charles Russell when 
 Attorney-General appeared as counsel for 
 them. I have been counsel for the company 
 and the promoter on several occasions. So 
 at last the friend did Charles Russell and me 
 the honour of putting us into one of his 
 writs, and he claimed against each of us a 
 quarter of a million of money. The founda- 
 tion of his claim against me was that I had 
 been " covinous " when counsel against the 
 executor in the House of Lords, and was 
 liable to pay ;^2 50,000 under a statute 
 passed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. 
 The whole thing presented itself to me as 
 an elaborate joke, but Charles Russell, whose 
 sense of humour was not great, waxed serious 
 over the matter. He insisted on having a 
 prolonged consultation, and arranged that 
 he and I should appear by separate solicitors 
 and counsel. The plaintiff must also have 
 taken a serious view, for he set the action 
 down for trial, and it came on for hearing in 
 due course. I was not able to be present, 
 but I understood that the learned judge who 
 
T,j f,iLi- imgp Si 
 
IN COURT 95 
 
 tried the action displayed no appreciation of 
 the absurdity of the whole thing. I rather 
 regret that we were not defeated, for the 
 Government must have passed an Act enabling 
 it to pay the money in relief of its Attorney- 
 General, and the Treasury could not in that 
 event have left me out in the cold. How- 
 ever, we won the day, and it is hardly 
 necessary to add that we did not tax our 
 costs against the plaintiff. My solicitor's 
 bill of costs, modest as it was, did not pre- 
 sent itself to me as a jest. I forgot to 
 ask Charles Russell whether the Treasury in- 
 demnified him. It was a great disappoint- 
 ment to me that the suitor did not bring 
 an action against Frank Lockwood, also as 
 Solicitor-General, He would have thoroughly 
 enjoyed himself over it, and we should have 
 been richer by several more clever sketches. 
 It was always a delight to me to have a 
 case against Frank Lockwood, as it meant 
 a drawing of some sort, besides a string of 
 jokes between us. We were waiting for the 
 trial of an action between the captain and 
 mate of a tramp ship, and Lockwood drew 
 two delightful pictures to illustrate our rival 
 
96 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 contentions. In one the captain was hurling 
 miserable pilgrims all about the deck, and 
 under it were the words, " This is how Witt 
 says we treated the Pilgrims." In the other 
 picture three pilgrims were sitting in com- 
 fortable deck - chairs, clothed in gorgeous 
 dressing-gowns, and the captain was stand- 
 ing in front of them carrying a huge waiter 
 laden with sherbet, coffee and pipes, and 
 under it was written, "This is how I say 
 we treated the Pilgrims." Unfortunately, 
 the judge, Lord Field, got hold of the 
 sketches, and after going into convulsions 
 over them he put them away in his book. 
 When the exhibition was held in King Street 
 of Lockwood's drawings, I worried Lord 
 Field to send these, but he had mislaid them, 
 and I am afraid that they will never see the 
 light. However, Lockwood gave me an 
 excellent picture of myself in the stage- 
 costume of a ship's mate indulging in a 
 hornpipe, with a telescope under my arm. 
 I have also a picture representing me as the 
 Chief Rabbi, because Lockwood happened 
 to come into court and saw me talking to 
 Dr Adler. Besides these artistic efforts 
 

 To fact- jM^fv m 
 
IN COURT 97 
 
 which contributed so much to our gaiety, 
 he generally had a good story ready where- 
 with to fill up the gaps in the day's work. 
 
 I will conclude this chapter with a notice 
 of an occurrence which must be very rare in 
 the history of the Bar. I have argued a case 
 before the sovereign of a great country. 
 Lord Esher was presiding in the Court of 
 Appeal, and my opponent was nearly at the 
 conclusion of his argument when, after a 
 slight commotion, a young lady accompanied 
 by two ladies of more mature years came in 
 and sat on the Bench close to the Master of 
 the Rolls. I had not the least idea who they 
 were, the argument proceeded, and I briefly 
 addressed the Court. The young lady was 
 no less a personage than Queen Wilhelmina. 
 My vanity does not go so far as to suppose 
 that she was told who the counsel was, but it 
 is at least a coincidence that this royal lady 
 should have listened to an address from a 
 namesake of the Grand Pensionary, the 
 personal and political enemy of the House of 
 Orange. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE BENCH 
 
 The general advance in education and the 
 lack of veneration which is at the present 
 day the offspring of youthful omniscience 
 and infallibility tend to diminish the dignity 
 of the Bench in the public mind. It is by 
 no means an uncommon thing in the course 
 of a trial to hear criticisms of the judge from 
 the mouth of the laity, and although they 
 are sometimes unjust, because the critic does 
 not appreciate the difficulties in which the 
 judge is placed, yet they are often shrewd. 
 The abnormal complexity of modern affairs 
 adds greatly to the judicial task, and the 
 mass of evidence is in some cases over- 
 whelming. Three or four large joint stock 
 companies, created and maintained by the 
 tortuous brain of a financier, each formulat- 
 ing with each contracts that were never 
 intended to be intelligible, with volumes of 
 98 
 
THE BENCH 99 
 
 minute books and correspondence obscuring 
 rather than elucidating their subject matter, 
 are submitted to consideration, and the un- 
 fortunate judge has to pick up the thread of 
 the story as best he can from the more or 
 less lucid explanation of counsel, and the 
 more or less logical order of the evidence. 
 The reports published fifty years ago may be 
 searched in vain for cases approaching in 
 difficulty those which have become numer- 
 ous since the Companies Act of 1862, and 
 the Judicature Act, 1873, have been passed, 
 and since business has been transacted by 
 or through correspondence, telegrams and 
 telephones. 
 
 This modern condition of things in the 
 law courts renders it indispensable that 
 counsel should put before them as their first 
 duty that of assisting the judge. It may be 
 that that duty is more loyally discharged by 
 my friends of the Chancery Bar than it is by 
 the common lawyers. But the moment a 
 judge imagines that counsel are not trying 
 to assist him but to embarrass him, his task 
 is vastly increased, and his success is in 
 grave jeopardy. It is much better for a 
 
loo LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 judge to trust counsel, even if now and then 
 his faith is misplaced, than to conduct the 
 business of his court upon the hypothesis 
 that craft is being used against him. 
 
 I used to admire Vice-Chancellor Sir 
 Richard Malins, and I read with sympathetic 
 interest the charming sketch of him in the 
 recent novel, The Vice-Chancellor s Ward. 
 But he always seemed to think that the very 
 able men who practised before him were 
 there to bother him, and that he could get 
 on much better without any counsel at aU. 
 The result was that, although the counsel 
 had no idea of misleading him, yet they 
 could not resist the temptation to indulge in 
 the sport of worrying him. The miserable 
 Shed in Lincoln's Inn in which his tribunal 
 was erected was always crowded with visitors, 
 and there was generally some excellent fun 
 going forward. In those days the suitor in 
 chancery, or rather his solicitor, could choose 
 his judge, and when a man had a glaring 
 moral grievance without either law or equity 
 on his side, he used to file a bill and mark it 
 for the Vice-Chancellor, and move the Court 
 for an injunction. The counsel for the 
 
THE BENCH loi 
 
 defendant showed by argument and upon 
 authority that no relief could be given. But 
 Sir Richard saw no reason why, if Lord 
 Loughborough and Lord Hardwicke could 
 in their day manufacture equity, he should 
 not do the same, and then after an eloquent 
 denunciation of the defendant, his counsel, 
 and sometimes his solictor, he would order 
 the injunction to issue. 
 
 I used to ride in the Park with him, and 
 he would lament to me that the members 
 of the Bar who had just been called did not 
 attend his court. "How," said he, "do 
 they expect to learn the law and the practice 
 if they do not attend my court ? " So I 
 thought I would go and learn, and I went. 
 Unluckily there was a very dull case for 
 hearing, and I had "The Times in my pocket, 
 so, wanting to read a judgment of Sir James 
 Shaw Willes I opened the paper and was 
 trying to understand what that most learned 
 judge was driving at when up came the 
 usher and said to me, " Sir, the Vice- 
 Chancellor requests that you will not read 
 the newspaper in his court." I should not 
 have felt aggrieved by this order if the 
 
I02 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 judge himself had kept to the matter in 
 hand, but when Mr Benjamin came into 
 court and mentioned that the principal event 
 in his case occurred on the 2nd September, 
 and the Vice-Chancellor exclaimed, " Mr 
 Glass, was not that the day on which you and 
 I dined together at Chamounix ? " I did feel 
 that I had been interfered with unrighteously. 
 On another visit to the Shed the learned 
 judge was hearing a rather remarkable case. 
 A traveller had been hurt on the railway, had 
 been compensated and had signed a receipt 
 in full. Some months afterwards he filed a 
 bill to set aside the compromise. His case 
 was that the shock of his accident had made 
 him dumb or stupid, and that his mind did 
 not go with his act when he signed the 
 receipt, but that he had since had another 
 shock, which had restored him to speech and 
 reason. The Vice- Chancellor said, " Mr 
 Glass, I never heard of a case like this before. 
 Is there any precedent ? " Then that famous 
 counsel turned to his junior and said, "What 
 was the name of the husband of Elizabeth ? " 
 and the junior having told him, Mr Glass 
 said, " Oh, yes, your honour, there is the case 
 
THE BENCH 103 
 
 of Zacharias." " Where is that reported, Mr 
 Glass," replied the judge. Now when this sort 
 of thing was possible, it is not to be wondered at 
 that the judge had to be on guard with his Bar. 
 Vice-Chancellor Bacon was also to some 
 extent imbued with the idea that counsel 
 were there to obfuscate his mind. Now and 
 then he had some reason for that opinion. 
 A German trader had sent an agent to 
 London to push his goods. That agent 
 registered a trade-mark on his master's goods 
 and having quarrelled with his employer had 
 the audacity to claim the trade-mark for his 
 own benefit. The counsel for the master 
 instead of so stating the point took three 
 parts of a day to open the case, and in the 
 course of his speech gave a fine essay on the 
 law of trade-marks, all of which was utterly 
 irrelevant. Some excuse could be made for 
 him, because he was what is called a patent 
 lawyer, and a patent lawyer is of no use at 
 aU if he cannot keep the mind of the Court 
 away from the real point for at least two 
 days. Of course the judge, who was as sharp 
 as a needle, understood what was going on, 
 but he let everyone alone to see, I suppose, 
 
I04 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 how long they would keep it up. The 
 witnesses were all Germans, and all spoke the 
 most dreadful English. After all the evi- 
 dence and all the speeches were finished the 
 judge on the third day said, " It is an old 
 abuse of God's patience and the King's 
 English." On another occasion I heard this 
 in his court. Counsel to witness, " You are 
 the clerk of the market, and have been so for 
 thirty years .'' " Witness, " Yes, and my father 
 before me." Counsel, "Oh, never mind 
 your father." Witness, " But I do mind my 
 father." The Vice-Chancellor, " He means, 
 Mr Hemming, that though his pedigree does 
 not interest you, it is of consequence to 
 him." On the death of the learned judge I 
 was made a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn in his 
 place, and to this day some of my country 
 friends insist that I also succeeded him in 
 his office of Vice-Chancellor of England, 
 being thereto induced by a paragraph in the 
 newspapers at the time. One of the greatest 
 feats the judge ever performed was to sit in 
 court on his ninetieth birthday and try a 
 case in which Mrs Weldon appeared. That 
 talented lady was involved in many law-suits, 
 
THE BENCH 105 
 
 and one day one of her cases was called on 
 before Baron Pollock. The lady was not 
 in court and the judge was informed that she 
 was at that moment engaged in addressing 
 the Court of Appeal. Baron Pollock said, 
 "This lady has now such a very large 
 business at the Bar that we must give her 
 every indulgence." Mrs Weldon said many 
 clever things in court, but one of her very 
 best sallies was in the Court of Appeal. She 
 was endeavouring to upset a judgment of 
 Vice-Chancellor Bacon, and one ground of 
 complaint was that the judge was too old 
 to understand her case. Thereupon Lord 
 Esher said, "The last time you were here 
 you complained that your case had been tried 
 by my brother Bowen, and you said he was 
 only a bit of a boy and could not do you 
 justice. Now you come here and say that 
 my brother Bacon was too old. What age 
 do you want the judge to be.''" "Your 
 age," promptly replied Mrs Weldon, fixing 
 her bright eyes on the handsome countenance 
 of the Master of the Rolls. No man ever 
 enjoyed a clever repartee more than did Lord 
 Esher, and if counsel had a smart answer 
 
io6 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 ready so much the better. What he could 
 not endure was a counsel who knuckled 
 under to him. Often he would advance 
 some proposition of the most heretical 
 character from inborn love of paradox or for 
 the sake of testing the man before him, and 
 if the counsel meekly said, " Yes, my lord, I 
 take your ruling on the point," that man at 
 once passed into the class of persons un- 
 worthy of serious consideration. 
 
 On the 14th July 1904, a learned judge of 
 the Court of Appeal said, " According to my 
 understanding the law as laid down by the 
 majority of the Court of King's Bench in 
 Blundell v. Catterall has been recognised ever 
 since by the whole of the profession as an 
 accurate and binding statement of the law. 
 If that is so I do not think that we ought, 
 after the lapse of eighty years, to upset the law 
 as thus settled." Some years ago I was reading 
 out to the Court of Appeal the judgments in 
 that very case. " What," exclaimed Lord 
 Esher, " is the use of reading out to us what 
 those old men hsLd got to say.?" I hope that 
 I can possess my soul in patience, but this 
 was too much. So I replied, " Well, I would 
 
THE BENCH 107 
 
 have your lordship to know that great men 
 lived before Agamemnon." 
 
 On another occasion I ventured to cite a 
 passage from the Roman law to him. " Oh," 
 said he, " if you are going to give us that we 
 will go out to luncheon," and this he said 
 although he must have known that the 
 Council of Legal Education insist on students 
 passing an examination in Roman law. One 
 thing we could all admire in Lord Esher — 
 while he did not care a rap for anybody or 
 anything, and was always ready to hit out 
 from the shoulder at Queen's Counsel, 
 especially those who had a pleasant conceit of 
 themselves, he never snubbed a young man, 
 and any beginner might be sure of a compli- 
 ment from him if there was any sort of 
 justification for one. The great feature of 
 the career of this very able judge is that he 
 completely ruined the market for the old 
 Common Law reports. Forty years ago ex- 
 travagant prices were paid for the volumes of 
 reports of cases in the old Courts of King's 
 Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer ; and 
 now they are almost a drug in the market. 
 The main reason is that the decisions of the 
 
io8 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Court of Appeal, while Lord Esher sat in it, 
 have so fully explained the law on an infinite 
 number of points, that it is seldom necessary 
 to go further back for authority. It is, how- 
 ever, only right to add that the House of 
 Lords during the last twenty years, in the 
 exercise of its appellate jurisdiction, has ex- 
 hibited such talent, industry and sound sense 
 in things commercial and social that no 
 previous epoch in legal history can pretend to 
 rival its recent achievements. 
 
 In my early days Sir Colin Blackburn and 
 Sir James Shaw Willes were regarded as the 
 most profound lawyers on the Common Law 
 Bench, but the former had rather a rough 
 way with him. Once at Kingston Assizes he 
 tried three men on some criminal charge. 
 They were acquitted, and having been dis- 
 charged they walked down towards Surbiton 
 to celebrate their triumph by a row on the 
 river. Hannen, then a junior on the Home 
 Circuit, happened to overhear their conversa- 
 tion. " I say, Bill, how that judge did bully 
 our counsellor to be sure," "Yes, he did, 
 George, he did , but he were fair, for he bullied 
 that there persecuting chap just as much." 
 
THE BENCH 109 
 
 Hannen told the story, and Mr Justice 
 Blackburn on hearing it exclaimed, " That is 
 the greatest testimony to my impartiality 
 that I have heard since I sat on the Bench." 
 
 I had the misfortune to argue the last case 
 which Lord Blackburn sat to decide in the 
 House of Lords, and to me who had known 
 him and admired him in the brightest period 
 of his splendid intellect, it was most painful to 
 watch his utter incapacity to grasp the matter 
 in debate. Singularly enough I was the last 
 counsel who appeared before the chief of his 
 old court. Sir Alexander Cockburn. At 
 twenty minutes before four o'clock on a 
 Friday I rose, and the Lord Chief Justice 
 asked me if the case was at all pressing, to 
 which I replied in the negative. " Then," said 
 he, " we will take it on Monday morning." He 
 went home, dined according to his custom 
 in the most frugal manner, and died in his 
 chair in the evening. It was always a great 
 delight to practise before him. His patience 
 and courtesy to all, the sound rulings 
 which he gave on law and on the admissi- 
 bility of evidence, and the extraordinary 
 lucidity and fairness of his addresses to the 
 
no LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 jury made his court a model of what a 
 Nisi Prius Court should be. It is of course 
 a matter of opinion which of the judges of 
 the past forty years were pre-eminent as 
 judges when sitting at Nisi Prius. But I 
 should place Sir Alexander Cockburn, Sir 
 Robert Lush, Baron Huddleston, Sir 
 Archibald Smith and Sir Henry Lopes 
 (Lord Ludlow) in the front rank ; and I 
 should certainly relegate Sir William Bovill 
 and Sir John Duke Coleridge to the 
 rear rank. Sir William Bovill was always 
 running breast high with one side 
 or the other, and sometimes he would 
 suddenly forsake one pack and gallop off 
 with the other, ridiculing and belittling the 
 efforts of the leaders with whom he was not 
 running at the moment. I am not quite 
 accurate when I say always, for at the trial 
 of the ejectment action brought by the 
 Tichborne Claimant he was as nervous as a 
 Barrister with his first brief. " Think," 
 said he to me, when riding in the Park 
 during the trial, " if I make a single mistake 
 there will be a new trial." And he assured 
 me afterwards that the strain of that case 
 
THE BENCH iii 
 
 would be fatal to him. I met him at 
 Homburg in 1872, and he then repeated to 
 me his firm conviction that the " Claimant " 
 had undermined his health and hastened 
 his end. This was a distorted view, the real 
 fact being that his health was not good 
 enough to withstand the strain of a long or 
 important trial. I tried in vain to persuade 
 him to play at " Trent e et Giuarante " or 
 " Roulette," thinking that the game might 
 rouse him and take him out of himself ; but 
 no doubt he thought that a gamble of that 
 kind would be indecorous. There were 
 many reasons why Lord Coleridgp made a 
 dreadful mess of his trials. When he was 
 Attorney-General he would come into court 
 at Westminster, and if he had to wait for his 
 case to come on he would go oiF to sleep at 
 10.30 a.m. just as if it was 10.30 p.m., and 
 when I asked him whether he had been up 
 all night or was not well he would say, " Oh, 
 no," but he did not care to explain this 
 predisposition to slumber. Of course it 
 did not matter a bit when he was at the Bar, 
 because as soon as his case came on he was 
 keen, alert, and clever beyond imagination. 
 
112 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 But it was a very serious matter indeed on 
 the Bench, and nothing but his extraordinary 
 quickness of perception enabled him to deal 
 with the case at all. I have often seen his 
 pen drop from his hand, while, in a sort of 
 stupor, he was trying to take down the evidence, 
 and I was very much shocked when a waiter 
 at Ventnor explained to me that he spent his 
 idle time in winter in the court of the Lord 
 Chief Justice, where, he said " it is always 
 warm and comfortable, plenty to amuse you 
 and nothing to pay," and he added, " Now, 
 sir, I quite understand that when you have 
 had a day's hunting, and your dinner, and a 
 glass or two of wine, you may take forty 
 winks in your arm-chair, but how a gentle- 
 man can go off to sleep just after breakfast 
 and keep so until it is nearly time for 
 luncheon beats me altogether." If this 
 waiter talked in this manner, how notorious 
 must have been this terrible infirmity of the 
 learned judge. But in truth Sir William 
 Bovill, Lord Coleridge, and many other 
 judges demonstrated the truth of the maxim 
 that intellect and learning do not make a 
 judge. There must be the right tempera- 
 
THE BENCH 113 
 
 ment, patience without weakness, the faculty 
 of listening to and considering the evidence 
 and arguments on each side with a power to 
 make up your mind, and in practice these 
 lesser virtues will more readily achieve 
 success on the Bench than brilliant talent 
 and boundless research. I may illustrate my 
 meaning by giving a conversation which at 
 this distance of time can offend no one. Sir 
 Henry Lopes said to me, "I am not a 
 clever man and I do not pretend to be 
 a clever man, but I know how to try a 
 case, and there has never been a new trial 
 ordered in any one case heard before me. 
 Now, Coleridge is a very clever man, and yet 
 we are always ordering new trials in his cases." 
 I ventured some few years afterwards to 
 suggest to Sir Henry Lopes that although 
 Lord Coleridge made many mistakes in his 
 own court, yet his judgments in the Court of 
 Appeal were excellent. " That is easily ex- 
 plained," replied Sir Henry, " when the argu- 
 ment is over Lord Justice tells him what 
 
 to say, and you know that when Coleridge has 
 once found out what he ought to say, no 
 man living can say it better." One Long 
 
 H 
 
114 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Vacation I was riding near Ascot and stopped 
 at an old-fashioned public-house to make an 
 inquiry. In the porch sat two veterans 
 sunning themselves and taking their modest 
 glass of mild ale. According to my in- 
 veterate habit I got up a talk with them, and 
 in the course of it they told me how they had 
 done a lot of work on Lord Coleridge's house 
 at Ottery St Mary. Then one of them said 
 " You must understand that this was a time 
 ago. He was not a lord then. He was only 
 a duke (i.e. Sir John Duke Coleridge). They 
 made a lord of him after that, " When I got 
 back on the 24th October to London I 
 offered up this story on the altar of Lord 
 Coleridge's contemplation, but he insisted 
 that it was only one of my ingenious inven- 
 tions. Indeed, you may pick up splendid 
 pieces of information about lawyers in the 
 country. One of my neighbours, a well- 
 educated man, said to me, •' Why do you 
 trouble yourself to be in London in 
 November .'' Surely the salary of ;^3000 a 
 year which you receive as King's Counsel is 
 enough without wanting to add much more 
 to it." 
 
THE BENCH 115 
 
 The least competent judge before whom it 
 has been my lot to practise was Sir James 
 Fitzjames Stephen. Everyone recognises 
 that with a pen in his hand he was admirable, 
 but he was not in the least degree fit to be a 
 judge. He had no practice at the Bar, and 
 it is of course a dangerous experiment to 
 put on the Bench a man who has not had 
 a fair share of forensic experience. Perhaps, 
 however, he wovild have done better if he had 
 given to his work his undivided attention. 
 No judge has a right to devote to the Bench 
 a share only of his time and energy. The 
 country has a claim not only to his best but 
 to all his best. Sir James was a literary man 
 by taste, by capacity, and by association, and 
 as far as I could make out he rose early, 
 knocked off some magazine work, and then 
 did a most foolish thing, that is, he took a 
 big walk. He arrived at court a tired man. 
 And this sort of life told its own tale only 
 too plainly during the later years of his 
 judicial career. The impairment of nervous 
 energy is just as fatal to the success of a judge 
 as to the success of a race-horse. I always 
 felt very sorry for Sir James, for we were 
 
ii8 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Bramwell then said, " I appeal to you as a 
 family man to state whether you think that 
 the lady was more likely to walk to church 
 forty-eight hours before or forty-eight hours 
 after the appearance of the heir. If you say 
 the latter, I will leave this important issue to 
 the Gentlemen of the Jury." 
 
 However, the learned judge said his best 
 things when sitting in the Court of Appeal 
 and hearing arguments on abstruse points 
 of Equity. For example, " I do not know 
 whether I have grasped the doctrines of 
 Equity correctly in this matter, but if I have, 
 they seem to me to be like many other good 
 doctrines of Courts^ of Equity, the result of a 
 disregard of general principles and general 
 rules in order to do justice more or less 
 fanciful in certain particular cases," Or this, 
 " I agree that it is not necessary to reserve 
 judgment in this matter, for I have listened 
 attentively for two days to the learned and 
 lucid arguments of the very eminent counsel 
 without, unfortunately, being able to under- 
 stand any of them, and I have just listened 
 to most profound and luminous judgments 
 of my learned brethren with still greater 
 
THE BENCH 119 
 
 attention, but I regret to say with no better 
 result. I am, therefore, of the same opinion 
 as they are and for the same reasons," 
 
 It was a sort of liberal education to spend 
 a day in the Divisional Court taking the 
 Crown paper, if Mr Justice Cave was sitting. 
 The universality of his legal knowledge 
 was unsiu-passed in that sphere. Somehow 
 or other he seemed to know all about rating, 
 alehouses, poor law, irremovability and 
 settlement, gas, drainage and police — that 
 forest of legal business which is labyrinthine 
 and tortuous, dark and repulsive. Now and 
 then he made the profession laugh with some 
 bizarre dogma. For example, when dealing 
 with the law as to beer-drinking on Sunday, 
 he spoke of a bona-fide thirst as the true test 
 of a bona-fide traveller. Unfortunately, in his 
 later years, he was inclined to somnolence in 
 the afternoon, being rather too robust for a 
 sedentary life. There is, however, one thing 
 to be said, and that is that he did not often 
 give way to this weakness, except when one 
 of us was delivering an oration, and as he 
 had got the evidence on his notes he did not 
 want to hear our addresses. One of his 
 
I20 LIFE IN THE LAW / 
 
 finest efforts was when the counsel for me 
 plaintiff had called four witnesses without 
 advancing the case at all. The learned 
 judge said, " These are very bad witnesses, 
 very bad indeed. Have you got a good 
 one ? " " Oh, yes, my lord," said the 
 counsel. " Then call him at once," said the 
 judge ; " if you keep him any longer he will 
 go bad like the rest." I shall never forget 
 the trial by the judge of the case of the 
 Attorney-General v. Wright. The fishery 
 concerned had belonged to Lady Katherine 
 Howard, and on her marriage to Henry VIII, 
 the king took it and stuck to it, even after 
 he had cut his wife's head off. Edward VI. 
 inherited the fishery, but the Lord Chancellor, 
 Baron Rich of Leeze, knowing that his 
 master had a bad title to it, thought that there 
 was no harm in stealing it. So he appro- 
 priated it, and passed it on to his descendants 
 the Earls of Warwick. At the close of the 
 eighteenth century it belonged to Lady 
 Olivia Sparrow, and ultimately it was pur- 
 chased by " General " Booth. After I had 
 explained this history to the jury, and had 
 proved the precise boundaries of the fishery 
 
THE BENCH 121 
 
 for a century, my opponent got up and 
 proceeded to read half-a-dozen original deeds 
 of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This was 
 too much for Mr Justice Cave. " Now," 
 said his lordship, " the counsel for the owner 
 of this fishery has proved a title of one 
 hundred years. That is long enough for 
 anyone. But you, his opponent, stand there 
 and keep reading a lot of dusty, fusty old 
 parchments of the reign of Elizabeth with 
 what you say are different boundaries. You 
 would uproot the title of every man in 
 England if you had your way. I won't 
 have it. There may be another world in 
 which they will let you do it, but you shall 
 not do it here." The learned judge always 
 delighted in telling counsel that the points 
 which they raised and the proofs which 
 they tendered " had nothing whatever to 
 do with the case," and therefore he was alike 
 a terror to young men and a sore vexation 
 to garrulous old men. Now and then he 
 overdid it. There was a case before him 
 about the liability of a lady who kept a big 
 London dairy and who had a son who 
 bought cows on his mother's credit, having 
 
122 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 used the cash which his mother had entrusted 
 to him for his own pleasures. At the close 
 of the case the learned judge asked the 
 counsel what questions they wanted to have 
 put to the jury. One side wrote out five 
 questions, the other side four. The judge 
 read them and said, "They have none of 
 them got anything to do with the case," and 
 then he wrote out five new ones of his own 
 invention. The case went to the Court of 
 Appeal, and when we got there the Lord 
 Chancellor said, " I have been trying in vain 
 to find out what these five questions which 
 were asked by the learned judge have to do 
 with the case," and then there was a chorus, 
 " My lord, we none of us know." 
 
 Just as the Long Vacation began the news- 
 papers announced that Mr Justice Cave had 
 resigned, and I wrote to him on the subject. 
 His reply, which contained the words, " I 
 intend to sit a bit longer," reached me but a 
 few hours before the news of his death. So, 
 also within a brief space of time, I had a note 
 from my dear friend Mr Justice Denman, 
 " The doctors tell me I am dying by inches 
 or rather by ounces," and received the sad 
 
THE BENCH 123 
 
 news of his death. But I think that the loss 
 I sustained by the premature removal of 
 Lord Russell affected me most. These are 
 the penalties of survival. Charles Russell 
 had a hot and hasty temper, and he some- 
 times said things which he deeply regretted, 
 but I can aver, and the memory of it is always 
 sweet, that neither an angry look nor an 
 angry thought ever passed between us. For 
 me, at least, there was always the kindly smile, 
 the bright eye, and the pleasant word. He 
 once said to me, " How I envy you your phleg- 
 matic Dutch disposition." I do not know 
 that descent had anything to do with it, for 
 my father was a most impetuous man. But 
 this disposition has made me absolutely in- 
 different to betting and gambling in all forms, 
 although some people have been kind enough 
 to imagine the contrary, I was counsel in a 
 case in the Court of Appeal in which their 
 lordships deemed it important to understand 
 how the business of a noted gambling-house 
 in London was conducted. As soon as I got 
 up Lord Esher said, "Now you know all 
 about these things, tell us how it is done." 
 I disclaimed the character of an expert, said 
 
124 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 that I had never even seen the game of bac- 
 carat, and had never been in a gaming-house 
 in London in my life. " Well I never," said 
 Lord Justice Lopes, " I made sure that he 
 would tell us all about it." And I verily be- 
 lieve that the general audience regarded me 
 as a consummate hypocrite. I, on the con- 
 trary, felt vexed with myself for not knowing, 
 for a common lawyer ought to make himself 
 acquainted with all the follies of mankind as 
 jvell as their virtues and vices. It was true 
 that as editor of the Law Journal Reports I 
 had corrected the judgment of Lord Justice 
 Smith in Jenks v. Turpin, 53 Law J. Rep., 
 M. C, page 172, which as delivered and as 
 printed in the Law Reports, 132, B. 8, page 
 529, contained an inaccurate description of 
 the game of baccarat, but I got my informa- 
 tion from one of the most notorious gamblers 
 of the time, and not from experience. As 
 regards betting I suppose that the Bar ought 
 to be very much obliged to the ladies and 
 gentlemen who have led a crusade against it, 
 for our Law Reports teem with discussions 
 more or less logical about it. Personally, I 
 consider that backing horses is a waste of 
 
THE BENCH 125 
 
 time and energy, but where is the harm of it ? 
 The losses in betting incurred by mechanics, 
 artisans and labourers, in town and country, 
 are absurdly small compared with their use- 
 less and pernicious expenditure in drink. 
 As for crime, every young rascal spoofs the 
 magistrate with lamentations that he has 
 been tempted into stealing through backing 
 horses, because he knows perfectly well that 
 he will get a short lecture instead of a long 
 sentence, and half the bankrupts who prefer 
 not to state the truth as to what has become 
 of missing money tell the registrar that it has 
 gone on the turf. In my early days there 
 was plenty of big betting, and I was not 
 brought up near Newmarket without know- 
 ing what was going on, but it was among 
 very few people. Now betting is universal, 
 but in small amounts. Education and the cheap 
 Press, and nothing else, have brought this 
 about. No part of the penny and halfpenny 
 newspaper is better done than the Sporting 
 Intelligence. It gives the past and the 
 present and predicts the future. The de- 
 scriptions of the horses, the races, the visitors, 
 and the odds are all admirably set forth. 
 
126 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 You get the pedigrees of the horses, the 
 names and the characteristics of the jockeys, 
 with appreciative notices of the owners and 
 trainers. A race is the nearest approach to a 
 battle in point of excitement, and the actors 
 are elevated into heroes, just as they were in 
 the days of Pindar. Therefore it captivates 
 the imagination, and the reader is carried 
 away by enthusiasm, aad so he works him- 
 self up to the exaltation of a prophet and 
 backs his opinion. Fifty years ago it was 
 Bell's Life at sixpence a week ; now there is 
 a host of daily papers with as much rivalry 
 in talent as there is in speed on the course. 
 On the other hand many of these same papers 
 fan the flame of patriotism, and by their lead- 
 ing articles and their ample information make 
 their readers feel that they have a country 
 worthy of their devotion, and compel them 
 to understand what are the political and 
 social problems involved in its progress. 
 The humbler classes of readers whose lives 
 are dull find profit and pleasure in the study 
 of these journals, and horse-racing forms for 
 them a subject of interest and conversation, 
 gives them something to puzzle over, and is 
 
THE BENCH 127 
 
 fine exercise for the memory. However, if 
 Parliament thinks that betting is very awful 
 and desires to try its hand at a little more 
 empirical legislation, lawyers will not grumble, 
 and I think that I may venture to say that 
 there will not be one single bet less made in 
 consequence. 
 
 I have already told one anecdote concern- 
 ing the late Mr Justice Manisty, and I may 
 venture on another. The learned judge, who 
 was very thin and spare, was accustomed to 
 take some few glasses of fine old port after 
 dinner. Not being quite so well as usual 
 and feeling rather weak, he consulted Sir 
 Andrew Clarke. The famous physician 
 played on his patient the time-honoured 
 trick of asking what the patient ate and 
 drank and advising something contradictory. 
 "Sir Henry," said the doctor, "you must 
 discontinue the port and try claret." The 
 learned judge had no faith in this advice, 
 because, being a man of wisdom and ex- 
 perience, he knew perfectly well that the 
 wine of Portugal is very much better than 
 the wine of Bordeaux. However, he had 
 paid the fee and got the opinion and thought 
 
128 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 that he ought to try the experiment. So for 
 three weeks he substituted Chateau Margaux 
 for the grand old wine which had ripened in 
 his cellars. At the end of three weeks he 
 again visited the medical adviser and ex- 
 plained that he had felt himself weaker each 
 week, and that if he went on with the 
 French stuff he would not be able to get 
 down to the court at all. So Sir Andrew 
 gave way and said that the patient must 
 return to the port. " That is all very 
 well," said Sir Henry, "but how about the 
 arrears ? " 
 
 Sir William Wightman held office in the 
 old Court of Queen's Bench far beyond the 
 prescribed time, and at last, on the eve of the 
 Long Vacation, he took a sort of farewell of 
 his brother judges. However, when "the 
 morrow of All Souls" came round, he 
 turned up smiling at Westminster Hall. 
 "Why, brother Wightman," said Sir 
 Alexander Cockburn, " you told us that you 
 intended to send in your resignation to the 
 Lord Chancellor before the end of August." 
 "So I did," said Sir William, "but when 1 
 went home and told my wife she said, 
 
THE BENCH 129 
 
 ' Why, William, what on earth do you think 
 that we can do with you messing about the 
 house all day ? ' so you see I was obliged to 
 come down to court again." 
 
 Sir William was a most worthy man, but 
 a very matter-of-fact person. When he was 
 at the Junior Bar some politician, wishing to 
 stir him up to fight a constituency, said to 
 him, " Mr Wightman, are you a Whig or a 
 Tory ? " " Oh, I am a pleader," said the 
 devotee of the fine art. But much may be 
 forgiven to a man who drew pleas before the 
 Common Law Procedure Act of 1852, and 
 who knew the exact difference between a 
 replication de injuria and a "conclusion 
 to the country," who had a clear vision of 
 " express colour," and who understood the 
 meaning of absque hoc. I do not suppose 
 that many students of the law read Stephen 
 on Pleading, The volume is one of my 
 treasured possessions, although I am bound 
 to admit that there are passages in it even 
 more obscure than Mr Joshua Williams's 
 description of a " Common Recovery " or his 
 explanation of the difference beween a " Con- 
 tingent Remainder" and an "Executory 
 
I30 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Interest " in his treatise on the Law of Real 
 Property. 
 
 No Englishman ever doubts the integrity 
 of the Bench, and every foreigner who is a 
 resident in this country has a magnificent 
 faith in our judges and juries. The cause 
 lists prove this last assertion, for the names 
 of the suitors betray the support derived by 
 the Bar and solicitors from the controversies 
 of the sojourners in our land. What would 
 become of us if alien immigration were 
 wholly stopped I really cannot conjecture. 
 These foreigners are splendid litigants. 
 They never grumble, are always most grate- 
 ful to counsel for what is done on their 
 behalf, and never dream of doubting the 
 desire of the Court and Jury to do justice. I 
 remember an application being made to one 
 of my learned friends for a subscription to a 
 fund for assisting the Jews to return to the 
 Promised Land. " What," said he, " do you 
 think is to become of my wife and my ten 
 children if you take them all out of London.'' " 
 But this lofty opinion of the honesty of 
 our judges is certainly not shared by all 
 foreigners of wealth, who happen to be 
 
THE BENCH 131 
 
 plaintiffs or defendants in some litigation in 
 this country. Three or four years ago one 
 of my learned friends was junior counsel for 
 a small syndicate of foreign gentlemen. A 
 consultation was held at his chambers, and 
 to his amazement one of the syndicate asked 
 him point blank what sum of money it was 
 desirable to present to the judge who was 
 about to try the case, and my friend had 
 the greatest difficulty in persuading his 
 client that such a thing was unknown in 
 this country. But this was a trifle to my 
 own experience. Many years ago a European 
 sovereign, whose son now reigns in his stead, 
 filed a bill in Equity, and the suit was in the 
 Court of the late Vice- Chancellor, Sir Charles 
 Hall. Some of the witnesses were ordered 
 to be cross-examined before an examiner, 
 and I attended as counsel for the king to 
 re-examine. When the cause itself was ripe 
 for hearing, the gentleman whom the king 
 had sent over to watch his interests said to 
 the solicitor, ' ' My master is most anxious 
 to win this case " — it was a matter of 
 personal, not of national property — " and I 
 intend to do so if possible. Now what shall 
 
132 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 we give the judge? My master will not 
 object to a large fee." I do not know what 
 was the precise demeanour of the solicitor 
 on hearing the suggestion, but when he told 
 me the next day he was convulsed with 
 laughter, as well he might be at the idea of 
 calling at the Vice-Chancellor's hospitable 
 house on Bayswater Hill on such an errand. 
 However, he, of course, did his best to per- 
 suade the royal envoy that we did not do it 
 that way here. The envoy was incredulous, 
 and among other observations commented 
 on the youthful innocence of the solicitor in 
 comparison with his own experience of the 
 world. The suit came to a hearing, and as 
 soon as the counsel for the king had opened 
 his case the judge said that it was pre- 
 eminently a matter for friendly adjustment, 
 and ordered the case to stand adjourned with 
 a view to a compromise. The envoy came 
 out of court triumphant, and said to the 
 solicitor, "There, young man, what did I 
 tell you. He would not decide the case, 
 because he had not received his fee." In 
 due course the case was again brought to a 
 hearing, and the counsel proposed to put 
 
THE BENCH 133 
 
 in evidence a letter written in a foreign 
 language. " Is there a sworn translation ? " 
 said the judge, and that formality not having 
 been observed, the judge said, " This case 
 must stand over for ten days." "Now," 
 said the envoy to the solicitor, "do you 
 believe me or not ? Twice has this case been 
 put off on mere excuses, and the reason is 
 manifest. The time has arrived to take 
 definite action." How the solicitor managed 
 to prevent the envoy attending upon the 
 judge with the cash I do not know. But 
 what I do regret is that I never got a chance 
 to tell the Vice-Chancellor the story, which I 
 am sure would have afforded him much 
 amusement. The original idea in days gone 
 by was that a judge should receive his fees 
 as an arbitrator does, in other words, that 
 the litigant should pay for justice, and then 
 came the notion of one party being more 
 generous than the other. I was once dining 
 with a rich merchant who had a business in 
 one of the old Spanish colonies, and I asked 
 him how he got on as regarded justice. 
 " Oh," said he, " I keep a judge. I find it 
 so convenient when I want an injunction." 
 
134 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 For obvious reasons I have abstained from 
 speaking of judges that are happily still with 
 us, but I must make an exception in a case 
 in which the credit of a really good thing is 
 often diverted from its real author. Twenty 
 years ago there was an action of Knight v. 
 Clarke which is reported in the fifteenth 
 volume of the Law Reports, Queen's Bench 
 Division. I was one of the counsel for the 
 plaintiff. The late Speaker of the House 
 of Commons and Mr Justice Bray were 
 counsel for the defendant. The defendant 
 held under a lease dated the loth January 
 1810. At that date the land of which the 
 plaintiff desired to recover possession was a 
 grass field which long before the time of the 
 action had been converted into Calvert Street, 
 Mile End. The difficulty of identifying the 
 parcels in old deeds with the warehouses and 
 shops of modern London is often very great, 
 and in this action would have been attended 
 with much expense. However, at an early 
 stage of the proceedings the defendant made 
 an affidavit, which began by stating that he 
 was in possession under the lease of 18 10 of 
 the premises sought to be recovered in the 
 
THE BENCH 135 
 
 action. The trial came on before Mr Justice 
 Mathew, afterwards Lord Justice, and counsel 
 for the plaintiff put this affidavit in evidence. 
 At the close of the case for the plaintiff, 
 counsel for the defendant objected among 
 other things that no evidence of identifica- 
 tion of the land has been offered. There- 
 upon the learned judge read out the first 
 paragraph of the document relied on by the 
 plaintiff, and said, "Truth will leak out, 
 even in an affidavit." I have so often heard 
 this story told of other judges under all sorts 
 of fantastic circumstances, that I feel justified 
 in placing the real truth on record. 
 
 Since the Judicature Acts were passed and 
 the Circuit system modified, and the attention 
 of one judge in London secured during the 
 Long Vacation, the position of the Bench in 
 reference to sittings and vacations has been 
 more or less affected, and the discussions as 
 to reform in these matters have been frequent. 
 Sufficient weight has not been attached to 
 the practical opinions of the Incorporated 
 Law Society on the subject. So far as 
 concerns the Bench, thirteen weeks out of 
 fifty-two might fairly be regarded as holiday 
 
136 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 enough. To work three quarters 0/ the 
 year and rest one quarter would appear to 
 be a just arrangement, as between the 
 Bench and the suitors. ' If this were the 
 principle to be adopted, the adjustment of 
 times would become a mere detail, but if 
 the Christmas and Easter Vacation remained 
 as they now are, and the Long Vacation 
 began on the first of August and ended on 
 the thirtieth day of September, and the 
 Whitsuntide Vacation were abolished, the 
 suggested time would be secured for business 
 with reasonable regard to the health and 
 comfort of the judges. In one of his speeches 
 Mr Choate explained to us that in New 
 York there were practically no judicial holi- 
 days except the Long Vacation, " but," said 
 he, "in this country, when you have done 
 eight or nine weeks' work, you are all tired 
 out and want a recess." As regards the 
 date of the commencement of the Long 
 Vacation, it is absurd for the Courts to 
 expect jurymen and witnesses to stop in 
 London after the first day of August, so 
 long as it is the universal custom of Londoners 
 of all classes to leave the metropolis on that 
 
THE BENCH 137 
 
 day. Indeed the twelve days are to a large 
 degree frittered away, as the jury cases are 
 not then taken. The only reason why the 
 vacation does not begin on the first day of 
 August is that so many notable lawyers 
 must remain in town until parliament is 
 prorogued, so that such a change would be 
 to them very inconvenient. But, after all, 
 the Bench and the Bar exist for the public, 
 although experience rather suggests the 
 opposite doctrine. In these days, when there 
 is an idolatry of idleness abroad among the 
 people, and football, cricket, lawn tennis and 
 bridge come first, and business a poor second, 
 it would be well for the Bench and the Bar 
 to set a good example. 
 
 In England it is difficult to keep separate 
 the idea of trial by jury from the considera- 
 tions which attach to judicial functions. 
 Aristotle in his Rhetoric explains that the 
 jury, which at Athens was multitudinous, 
 "looking to their own gratifications and 
 listening with a view to amusement, surrender 
 themselves up to the pleaders, and, strictly 
 speaking, do not fulfil the character of 
 judges." 
 
138 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 This mental attitude in the Athenian 
 '* Dikastae " accounts for the Demosthenic 
 style of oratory, of which in England we 
 have fortunately now no examples. I 
 suppose that Henry Brougham was the only 
 man of modern time who addressed juries 
 after that fashion, and he was probably the 
 most unsuccessful advocate of the last 
 hundred years. Those of us who are alive 
 seven years hence may celebrate the seven 
 hundred and fiftieth anniversary of trial of 
 civil causes by jury as established by the 
 Great Assize, a.d. i 162, in the reign of Henry 
 the Second, and four years later the criminal 
 lawyers may celebrate the like anniversary 
 of the institution of " Grand Juries " by the 
 Assize of Clarendon, A.D. 1166. It is im- 
 possible to believe that trial by jury in civil 
 causes would have endured through all the 
 political and social changes and chances of 
 these long years if our juries had at all 
 resembled those of Athens, and if experience 
 had not demonstrated that counsel must 
 appeal to their reason and not to their 
 passion. The system of collecting a dozen 
 men, strangers as a rule to each other, and 
 
THE BENCH 139 
 
 of divers occupations, and getting from them 
 decisions foi: a day or a week, and then 
 sending them back to their ordinary life has 
 its enemies, but it can afford to laugh at 
 them with a record like this at its command. 
 In our time we have never had a judge with 
 a larger measure of sound, solid common 
 sense than the late Sir Archibald Smith. 
 When he had been five years on the Bench 
 he told me that day by day his opinion 
 of juries grew higher. " Sometimes," he 
 said, " I think the verdict is wrong and I 
 feel disappointed with it, but I think the 
 case over and I find on reflection that the 
 jury were quite right." 
 
 The system, however, like the constitution, 
 is a more or less delicate piece of machinery, 
 and there is one thing that will throw it out 
 of gear, and that is, bad management on the 
 part of the person who has to guide it. A 
 judge, of course, ought not to be a mere 
 figure-head. He must have a mind of his 
 own, but then he ought to respect the mind of 
 the jury. I have heard more than one judge 
 boast that he has not lost a verdict during 
 an assize or a sitting, which, of course, meant 
 
I40 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 that he had perverted the mind of the jury 
 so as to make it subservient to his mind, 
 which is exactly what he ought not to do. I 
 have also seen a judge at an early stage of a 
 trial deliberately set to work to ridicule the 
 case of the plaintiff or the defendant, to 
 magnify the evidence on the one side and to 
 belittle the evidence on the other side, with the 
 result that the machinery cannot do its work 
 properly, and that the verdict is either given 
 in favour of the judge's leaning or against it, 
 not in the least because it is the result of the 
 evidence in the opinion of the jury, but 
 because they have either blindly submitted 
 to the judge or blindly rebelled against his 
 dictation. But where the judge deals fairly 
 with the jury, assisting but not controlling, 
 influencing but not dictating, putting the 
 issue plainly before them, and clothing what 
 he has to say about the law in plain language, 
 the twelve men will very rarely make a 
 mistake, and neither side will trouble the 
 Court of Appeal by a vain effort to upset 
 the verdict. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 AMERICA 
 
 By chance, which rules our lives more than 
 design, I became in my student days ac- 
 quainted with Henry Hotze. He was by 
 origin Swiss. His great - uncle was the 
 famous General Hotze, who was killed by 
 Souk's men while holding the line of the 
 Linth River in support of the Russian army 
 against Massena on the 26th September 
 1 799. My friend's father was Captain of the 
 Swiss Guard of Charles X., and in the Revolu- 
 tion of 1830, when the elder line of the 
 Bourbons was finally expelled from France, 
 that gallant officer vainly implored the king 
 to be allowed to fire on the mob. Henry 
 Hotze at the age of sixteen years left his 
 home in Zurich for New Orleans, and some 
 few years later he lived in Mobile, where he 
 edited The MoMk Register, a. journal of great 
 influence in the Southern States. During the 
 141 
 
142 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 contest for the succession to the presidency 
 of Buchanan, he supported Stephen A. 
 Douglas, but after the rupture between the 
 North and the South he went heart and soul 
 for the Confederacy, and joined General Lee's 
 army as a private soldier. Mr Jefferson 
 Davis took him from the ranks and sent him 
 on secret service to Europe. Hotze made 
 his way to the extreme western line of the 
 northern army, reached Canada, and came 
 on to London. Having fulfilled his mission 
 he boldly took the steamer from Liverpool 
 to New York, made his way south, crossed 
 the Potomac River, and getting through the 
 northern lines arrived safely at Richmond. 
 
 The captain of the steamer on the 
 Potomac was an ardent Southerner, and 
 suspecting that Hotze was a spy and fearing 
 that he might be detected, the captain walked 
 up and down the deck, uttering the most 
 fearful imprecations on Jefferson Davis and 
 ail his fellows, and vowing that if he ever 
 caught one of the rebels on his vessel he 
 would hang him out of hand. This demon- 
 stration so satisfied the Federal police that 
 they made no effort to search the steamer, 
 
AMERICA 143 
 
 but Hotze was thoroughly alarmed, and hid 
 himself in the innermost recesses of the 
 ladies' cabin, as he had not given the captain 
 credit for so much diplomacy. 
 
 When Hotze was called upon to make 
 a second venture he ran the blockade to 
 Nassau. Having once more arrived in 
 London he took rooms at 17 Savile Row, 
 which thenceforward became headquarters 
 for the Confederates in England. Thither 
 came ordnance officers, merchant refugees, 
 purchasers of ships and stores, managers of 
 the Confederate loan, and in later times, 
 after the fall of Richmond in April 1865, 
 war-worn soldiers and politicians. All these 
 men I knew intimately, and fine fellows they 
 were. 
 
 It would have been impossible to find a 
 man better fitted than Hotze for these secret 
 missions. In stature and face he was not at all 
 remarkable ; he had not a single American 
 characteristic, and he had no sort of trans- 
 Atlantic accent. During the war he published 
 a weekly newspaper called The Index, which 
 at his request I edited for some months. 
 The historian of the war may find in it 
 
144 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 materials not readily to be obtained else- 
 where. It was largely supported by the 
 purse of a very patriotic and worthy gentle- 
 man, Mr Henry O. Brewer of New York 
 and Mobile, but its mission came to an end 
 with the fall of Richmond, The most ardent 
 and consistent supporter of the Confederate 
 cause in London was The Standard news- 
 paper, but apart altogether from questions of 
 public policy, the editor, who had from the 
 first maintained the right of the Southern 
 States to secede and to establish an in- 
 dependent Government, was bound to Hotze 
 and the cause by other and less lofty con- 
 siderations. He and Hotze were on the 
 most friendly terms. Indeed he was a man 
 of very attractive manner, appearance, and 
 disposition, one of those whom you might 
 wish to rebuke, but whom you could hardly 
 refuse to help. He did rather a big specula- 
 tion on the Stock Exchange, imagining no 
 doubt that his intimate knowledge of public 
 affairs enabled him to prophesy the jump of 
 the market. The event, of course, proved 
 him to be quite wrong, and the broker sent 
 in an account showing a very big loss on 
 
AMERICA 145 
 
 differences, which the editor, who was always 
 as impecunious as Edgar Poe, was wholly 
 unable to meet. Thereupon he applied to 
 Hotze to help him out of the difficulty. 
 Hotze was moved by three considerations : 
 first, by a genuine regard for his friend ; second, 
 by the thought that, if the editor was made 
 bankrupt and had to resign his office, the 
 Southern cause would lose its most strenuous 
 supporter in the London Press ; third, that 
 here was an opportunity of binding the editor 
 by golden ties to the cause. So the debt was 
 paid with the public money of the Con- 
 federacy, and whatever might have been said 
 or thought of the propriety of the transaction 
 if Hotze had ever rendered his account to 
 his own Government, no one would have 
 questioned the policy of the thing. The 
 editor was a very lucky man, for not long 
 afterwards Mr Colin M'Rae arrived in 
 London to take charge of the Southern 
 Finance, and the editor would have fared 
 badly at his hands. 
 
 The Evening Standard in the year 1865 
 had one notable day in its history, for on the 
 1 6th April 1 865, when it published the news of 
 
146 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 the assassination of Mr Lincoln, no less than 
 1 00,000 copies of the paper were sold. Mr 
 Johnstone, the proprietor, would have had a 
 short answer ready for anyone who had then 
 proposed to him an amalgamation with any 
 rival newspaper. 
 
 Some time after the war Hotze went to 
 Bucharest. A Roumanian trader had come 
 over to England and paid a visit to the chief 
 partner in a firm in East Anglia, and had 
 persuaded his host to sell him on credit 
 ;£ 1 0,000 worth of agricultural implements. 
 The goods were duly sent to Bucharest and 
 sold at a large profit by the buyer there, 
 but the latter had omitted to pay over the 
 money to the firm. Hotze at my suggestion 
 went out on behalf of the English firm to try 
 his hand at getting the money. 
 
 While he was there Prince Couza was 
 pulled out of bed by a band of patriots and 
 kicked out of the country, as he richly de- 
 served. The Roumanians thereupon were in 
 want of a prince to rule over them. This 
 state of affairs was a joy to Hotze, who at 
 once set to work to put the second son of 
 Anthony,PrinceofHohenzollern-Sigmaringen 
 
AMERICA 147 
 
 in Couza's place. Events have proved the 
 wisdom of this plot, for on the Continent 
 there has not been a more honest, or a more 
 sage monarch than the ruler of the proud 
 Boyards, and of " the white-clad peasantry, 
 frugal, grave, and endowed with weird powers 
 of untaught eloquence and poetry." Hotze 
 took infinite pains about the details, and even 
 prepared the time-table for the journey of the 
 prince from his father's palace to Bucharest. 
 The prince had to cross Austria in disguise, 
 because the Austrian Government was 
 strongly opposed to his election. Neverthe- 
 less Hotze, like a born conspirator, kept him- 
 self in the background, and let other people 
 strut on the stage at his prompting. He had 
 an intense admiration for the father of the 
 new prince of Roumania, and for the political 
 wisdom displayed by that representative of 
 the elder branch of the famous house of 
 HohenzoUern, and he often used to explain 
 how, before Sadowa, when Bismarck had to 
 struggle with the Prussian Parliament, the 
 Prince of HohenzoUern placed at the dis- 
 position of King William the whole of his 
 enormous wealth, so long as the Parliament 
 
148 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 hesitated to furnish the money demanded by 
 Bismarck. 
 
 Some years later Hotze lived in Paris, and 
 when the Comte de Chambord came forward 
 to claim the throne of his ancestors, Hotze 
 worked might and main for the Royalists, 
 spending his time and his money lavishly in 
 the cause. The rejection by the Bourbon of 
 the Tricolour destroyed Hotze's brightest 
 hopes, and he ultimately retired with loss of 
 health and property to a village in Switzer- 
 land, where he died. My connection with 
 him did not even then come to an end. Not 
 long before his death an advertisement ap- 
 peared in the " agony column " of 'the 'Times 
 for information as to his place of abode. I 
 answered it, and from this simple circumstance 
 I became acquainted with Dr Ranger, and was 
 retained by him in many actions for General 
 Booth and the Salvation Army. 
 
 Mr M'Rae, whom I have already 
 mentioned and whom I knew intimately, was 
 a citizen of Mississippi, but carried on 
 business in New Orleans. He was very 
 proud of his race, being of pure Celtic 
 descent on both sides. His mother had 
 
AMERICA 149 
 
 enormous influence in that State, and was 
 supposed to control the return of the two 
 senators, of whom Mr Jefferson Davis was 
 one, to Congress before the war. She was a 
 devout Presbyterian, but her son was some- 
 what lax as concerned the "kirk." He 
 attended his mother to the Presbyterian 
 Church in New Orleans, and thus held con- 
 verse with her. I give his own words : 
 " Madam," I asked, "are these men whom I 
 see seated in the high places the elders of the 
 church ? " and she said, " My son, they are." 
 I said, " Madam, I suppose they are all holy 
 men?" She said, "My son, they are." I 
 said, " Madam, they may be, but there is not 
 one of them who could get his Bill of Ex- 
 change discounted in New Orleans." 
 
 Mr M'Rae came over to take charge of 
 the business of the Confederate loan of 
 ;^3, 000,000 sterling, which had been negoti- 
 ated in March 1863, through Baron Emile 
 Erlanger of the Rue Chassee d'Antin, a 
 gentleman of the highest ability, who is still 
 happily among us. The South made the absurd 
 blunder of borrowing only ;^3, 000,000, 
 when they might have obtained ;^ 10,000,000, 
 
ISO LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 as the loan was subscribed three or four times 
 over by the public. Mr M'Rae was a great 
 student of history, ancient and modern. He 
 regarded the Roman republic as the true 
 model of a state. " Sir," said he to me, " in 
 the time of Augustus Caesar there lived a 
 learned gentleman of high rank, Titus 
 Livius. He was the friend of the Emperor, 
 and he had access to all the archives of Rome. 
 He wrote a most beautiful history, which 
 was accepted by his countrymen as a noble 
 record of the mighty deeds of their fore- 
 fathers. I have read that work, and I know 
 that you have. Well, sir, eighteen hundred 
 years afterwards there arose a confounded 
 German, a fellow called Niebuhr, and he said 
 ' The books of Titus Livius are all lies. I 
 will write a true history of Rome,' and then 
 he proceeded to say that the seven kings of 
 Rome, although Virgil and Horace wrote of 
 them, never lived at all, that my ancestors 
 under their Fremines, that is their king, whom 
 Livius calls Brennus, and whom your Eton 
 masters thought bore that name, never sacked 
 the city, and to write out a lot of stuiF, 
 destitute alike of heroism and of truth. Sir, 
 
AMERICA 151 
 
 I prefer Titus Livius to Niebuhr or any 
 other German." Mr M'Rae was a 
 worshipper of Napoleon, whose history he 
 knew thoroughly, and whose proclamations 
 to his army he would declaim magnificently. 
 He had a secretary, Mr Charles Walshe, whom 
 he constantly upbraided for his ignorance of 
 the doings and sayings of Buonaparte. He 
 was also an admirer of the Red Indian, 
 having arranged on behalf of the Govern- 
 ment for the removal of a tribe beyond the 
 Mississippi River, and he regarded the race 
 as on an equality with the white man, up- 
 holding their right to possess slaves, a right 
 fully recognised in the South. In appearance 
 he bore a most striking resemblance to the 
 Count Bathyany, who was shot by the 
 Austrians in 1 848 for upholding the liberties 
 of his fatherland. 
 
 One summer Mr M'Rae was not in very 
 good health ; so he took a small furnished 
 house near Lord's Cricket Ground for a few 
 months, having faith in the salubrity of the 
 air of that district. His friends used to go 
 up at eventide to visit him, and occasionally 
 there was a mild game of poker before we 
 
152 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 walked back into London in the summer 
 night. Some neighbour went to Scotland 
 Yard and informed the police that the modest 
 house in which we so came together was the 
 headquarters of a dangerous band of Fenian 
 conspirators, and therefore detectives were 
 set to watch our movements, and clever men 
 visited the house and cross-examined the 
 servants. The thing became such a nuisance 
 that I wrote to the Chief Inspector at 
 Scotland Yard and explained who these 
 gentlemen were, and that so far from being 
 Fenians they were the enemies of all such 
 persons, and I added that it was a pity that 
 the police, who really had in their hands some 
 heavy work with the Fenians, should be put 
 on a false scent. The next day I had a call 
 from one of the principal detectives, and for 
 some time he doubted my assurances, think- 
 ing, I suppose, that I was playing a game of 
 " bluff" with him. However, he was con- 
 vinced at last and we parted on excellent 
 terms, and there was no more " shadowing " 
 in that direction. 
 
 I met Mr Mason and Mr Macfarlane soon 
 after their arrival in England. These two 
 
AMERICA 153 
 
 gentlemen, with Mr Slidell and Mr Eustis, 
 had run the blockade to Nassau, and there 
 they had gone on board the Royal Mail 
 steamer, the Trent^ bound for Liverpool. 
 Captain Wilkes of the San Jacinto had 
 stopped the mail steamer on the high seas, 
 had seized these gentlemen and had 
 carried them as prisoners as fur as Boston on 
 the 1 9th November 1861. Lord Palmerston 
 demanded their immediate release, to which 
 the Government at Washington had con- 
 sented, and they were released on the ist 
 January 1862 and brought on a British man- 
 of-war to England. Mr Mason was ac- 
 credited as envoy to our court, with Mr 
 Macfarlane as his secretary, and Mr Slidell to 
 the court of the Tuileries with Mr Eustis as 
 his secretary, 
 
 Mr Mason was a tall, fine-looking man, 
 with the style rather of an owner of broad 
 acres than of a lawyer or a diplomatist. Mr 
 Macfarlane was a nephew of General 
 Wingfield Scott, and had been in England 
 some years before, on a mission to present a 
 sword from the conqueror of Mexico in the 
 campaign of 1847 to the hero of the 
 
154 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Peninsula and of Waterloo. On his final 
 departure from England Mr Macfarlane pre- 
 sented me with the table on which all Mr 
 Mason's dispatches were written, and it is in 
 daily use in my chambers in the Temple to 
 this day. 
 
 Mr Slidell and Mr Eustis were men of 
 Latin blood, of refined manners, and of the 
 type of courtiers of an ancient monarchy. 
 It was, however, possible to discover that 
 Mr Slidell was an American on a first en- 
 counter, whereas Mr Eustis would have 
 passed as an Englishman accustomed to live 
 in Rome or Paris. Indeed, he was much 
 more at home in those cities than he was in 
 London. He was a delightful companion, 
 and we spent pleasant days together in 
 London and in Paris. I shall never forget 
 the just reverence with which the manager of 
 Philippe's then famous restaurant regarded 
 him, and he deserved it. Mr Eustis and Mr 
 M'Rae were my guests at King's College, 
 Cambridge, on the memorable occasion of the 
 first visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales 
 to Cambridge after their marriage. 
 
 Among other visitors to 1 7 Savile Row was 
 
AMERICA 155 
 
 Captain Bullock, who fitted out the famous 
 cruiser, the Alabama, and was gifted beyond 
 all men with the power of holding his tongue 
 and guarding his secrets. I also knew Mr 
 Williams, who before the war had been one 
 of the senators from Tennessee and had 
 served as United States Minister to the 
 Ottoman Porte. Mr Williams was the best 
 poker player whom I had ever encountered. 
 His lace shirt-front, gorgeous waistcoat of 
 many colours, and imperturbable countenance 
 will never fade from memory. He must 
 have been more than a match for the Sultan 
 and his ministers. 
 
 By constant association with these Con- 
 federates the rights and the wrongs of that 
 awful quarrel between North and South 
 became very familiar to me. Looking back 
 one can see what a gigantic political blunder 
 the South made in her attempt to break up 
 the union. On the other hand, the deplorable 
 condition, even at this distance of time, of 
 many of the States as concerns the mutual 
 relations of the white and black races 
 condemns the proclamation issued by Mr 
 Lincoln on the 22nd September 1862, which 
 
156 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 set the slaves free ofF-hand without adequate 
 preparation by wise education and just laws. 
 I do not think that the people of England ever 
 quite understood the attitude of the South 
 towards slavery. In this country we re- 
 garded it as a property question. That was 
 a mistake. A negro in his prime cost a 
 thousand dollars. It would have been as 
 cheap to pay him wages. The South knew 
 that it was a political and social not an 
 economical question. Their creed was to 
 have a class without civil or political rights, 
 devoted to labour, and there was the negro 
 ready to hand. The white community con- 
 stituted the governing class, all white men 
 being deemed equal. Socially there was to 
 be a defined line of demarcation across which 
 no trespassers were to be permitted. If this 
 creed had not been outraged, and proper 
 compensation had been provided as in the 
 case of our West India plantations, the 
 South would never have raised its hand 
 against the North. It is, however, a great 
 consolation to know that, after forty years 
 of adversity, the South is now making 
 economic progress undreamed of before the 
 
AMERICA 157 
 
 war, and that there has been complete recon- 
 ciliation between the two sections. The 
 Southern idea did not really differ from the 
 condition of Poland at the time when the 
 feudal system prevailed in Western Europe. 
 "All the Polish nobles," writes Hallam, 
 "were equal in rights and were independent 
 of each other ; all who were less than noble 
 were in servitude." And Aristotle wrote, 
 " It is evident that in a State in which a 
 perfect polity prevails, and in which the 
 citizens are just men, in an absolute sense, 
 the citizens ought not to lead a mechanical life, 
 for such a life is ignoble and opposed to virtue." 
 After the fall of Richmond, General 
 "Wirt Adams, General Dick Taylor, and 
 many other notable men came to England, 
 and I knew them well. General Dick 
 Taylor, who was the son of President 
 Zachary Taylor, continued the war until the 
 4th May 1865, five weeks after the surrender 
 of General Lee. He was a visitor at Sand- 
 ringham, and in the evening the Princess of 
 Wales, now the Queen, asked him to join 
 in a rubber of whist with the King of 
 Denmark. I never knew a Southerner who 
 
158 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 was not ready for cards at any moment, and 
 who was not a high-class player. Naturally 
 the general won from the king, and on 
 receipt of the money the general said, " This 
 is the first instalment of the repayment of 
 the Sound Dues, which Denmark has un- 
 justly levied on the United States since the 
 treaty of Vienna." General Wirt Adams 
 was a man of gigantic stature, and it was 
 capital fun to walk along Piccadilly with 
 him. It is said that he fought in more 
 battles than any general in the Southern 
 army, but his appearance, apart from his 
 prowess, was bound to win many looks of 
 admiration. 
 
 Mr JeiFerson Davis came to England after 
 his release from prison, and some time before 
 the Attorney-General of the United States 
 had entered a nolle prosequi, dated 6th 
 February 1869, in his prosecution. Mr 
 Davis was a delightful man of the most 
 simple manners, and it is worthy of remark 
 that, like Mr Eustis, he spoke with an 
 English accent. He and Mr Benjamin 
 went with me one summer day to Eton 
 College where we had lunch with Provost 
 
AMERICA 159 
 
 Goodford, and after a look at Windsor 
 Castle drove to the river-side inn, the Bells 
 of Ouseley, to tea. Mr Davis walked 
 about the old-fashioned room adorned with 
 prints of race-horses and coaches. No man 
 could be more delighted. " I have read," 
 said he, " heard and dreamed of such a room 
 in such an inn in England, but never hoped 
 to visit one," and I am sure that he enjoyed 
 the tea and bread and butter and boiled eggs 
 more than any dinner ever set before him. 
 "Now," said Mr Benjamin, "this is the 
 first time he has laughed since the fall of 
 Fort Sumter." If any American will visit 
 the College Library at Eton he will find the 
 signatures of Mr Davis and Mr Benjamin 
 in the Visitors' Book, and I am proud 
 to think that my signature is bracketed with 
 them. We also visited the Island of Runy- 
 mede, where King John signed Magna 
 Charta. We were all affected by the genius 
 loci, and Mr Davis lingered on the island, 
 recalling that here the barons had won these 
 liberties which are the rich inheritance of our 
 race. 
 
 What shall I say concerning my lamented 
 
i6o LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 friend Mr Benjamin ? I was the first 
 Englishman to shake hands with him on his 
 arrival at 17 Savile Row after his extra- 
 ordinary escape from Richmond. We were 
 on terms of friendship from that hour until 
 his death, and he did me the honour of 
 appointing me his executor. What the Pro- 
 fession, which received him from the first 
 with cordiality, thought of him was proved 
 by the affectionate farewell accorded to him. 
 We dined in the Inner Temple Hall with 
 the late Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, in 
 the chair, Mr Benjamin, our honoured guest, 
 being seated at his right hand. There were 
 manifest traces of the accident which had 
 compelled Mr Benjamin to retire from 
 practice, but the hidden fire burst into flame 
 once more when he rose to thank us. On 
 the one hand we had recognised in the course 
 of his short but brilliant career his talent, his 
 urbanity, his sterling integrity ; and on the 
 other hand he recognised that he had come 
 among us a stranger and an exile, and that 
 we had never hesitated to welcome him with 
 that liberality of feeling for which the Pro- 
 fession has always been celebrated, for with 
 
AMERICA i6i 
 
 us birth, rank, nationality are nothing ; 
 talent, learning, honour, good faith and 
 good manners are what we require ; and he 
 who possesses these commands alike our 
 respect and our regard. Mr Benjamin was 
 a philosopher, and it was quite impossible to 
 upset his equanimity. In his mode of life 
 he was temperate and regular, yet as host or 
 guest he knew how to enjoy the good things 
 of life. He never allowed private affairs to 
 interfere in the least degree with his pro- 
 fessional work. " No lawyer," he would 
 say, "or medical man should ever do any 
 work outside his profession, or ever make an 
 investment which can give him a moment's 
 uneasiness. Give your banker a list of safe 
 securities, and when you have spare money 
 let him buy from the list. Bring to bear 
 upon your legal work a mind absolutely free 
 from worry and anxiety. Clients have a 
 right to your best, and you cannot give them 
 that if you have anything to think about 
 ^ther than their interests." He held that 
 the pride of good advocacy, the anxiety to 
 do the utmost for the cause of the client, the 
 maintenance of popular faith in the devotion 
 
1 62 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 of counsel were the real objects for which 
 the Bar ought to strive, and he acted upon 
 these principles. 
 
 Of course every Englishman grumbles at 
 the weather, but no one was permitted to 
 indulge in that national privilege in the 
 presence of Mr Benjamin without rebuke. 
 " Why do you find fault ? " he used to say ; 
 " you never get a day on which you are pre- 
 vented by the weather from pursuing your 
 ordinary business or calling. If you had 
 lived where the cold is intense, or the heat 
 unbearable, you would understand what I 
 mean, and if you had ever experienced months 
 of continued fine weather, and the weariness 
 of it, you would not grumble at the changes 
 to which this island is subject." He also 
 was highly amused at the behaviour of 
 Englishmen at railway stations. "If a man 
 has to wait half an hour at a station, or if the 
 train is five minutes late, how he frets and 
 fumes and worries, and yet I see the same 
 man wasting his time hour after hour with 
 absolute serenity." Sir Frank Lockwood 
 told me a story which well illustrated Mr 
 Benjamin's knowledge of human nature. 
 
/ AMERICA 163 
 
 Nothing wins a man's heart so readily as the 
 art of being a good listener. For my part I 
 am sure that at a consultation it is better, if 
 you can only get the chance, to hear than to 
 talk. The lay client likes to tell his tale, 
 and if you attend to what he says, and put in 
 here and there a word of sympathy, he goes 
 away with a higher opinion of you than if 
 you give him the benefit of your own view 
 on the most abstruse legal proposition. But 
 here is Sir Frank Lockwood's story as he 
 told it to me : "I have a relative who wanted 
 to take counsel's opinion on a matter of 
 family property. So we fixed up a consulta- 
 tion with Benjamin, and my relative came 
 two hundred miles to attend it. As soon as 
 we were seated he said to Benjamin, ' It 
 seems to me, sir, essential that you should 
 clearly understand the exact position of the 
 family in this matter,' and away he went and 
 gave Benjamin an explanation which lasted 
 twenty minutes, Benjamin sat mute and 
 smiling all the time. Then in came the 
 clerk and said, ' The parties are ready, sir, 
 in the next consultation ; ' and Benjamin 
 rose, shook hands with us all, and the clerk 
 
1 64 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 bowed Jus out. When we got outside my 
 relative said, * What an agreeable, courteous, 
 delightful man Mr Benjamin is.' 'Yes, 
 said I, ' but you do not seem to have got much 
 advice out of him.' ' No,' said he, ' now 
 you come to mention it I do not know that 
 I have.' " 
 
 The ability of Mr Benjamin as an advocate 
 was patent to all lawyers, and I remember 
 the late Mr Justice Denman saying to me, 
 *' What a lot of law he taught us." But he 
 had another virtue not known to the world 
 at large, but to which I can speak, namely, 
 his generosity to all those of his countrymen 
 who sought his aid. Mr Benjamin was 
 much impressed with the moderation of fees 
 paid to counsel in this country as compared 
 with those paid in America. But a man 
 who has received a fee of ^^ 10,000 may 
 be forgiven for such comparisons. Mr 
 Benjamin entered Lincoln's Inn as a student 
 on the 13th January 1866, and these are the 
 words of the register of admission : " Judah 
 Philip Benjamin of London (54), first son of 
 Philip Benjamin, late of State South Carolina, 
 America, merchant, deceased." Mr Benjamin 
 
AMERICA 165 
 
 was born in the West Indies. His father 
 had migrated from England, and the ship put 
 in at an island then in the occupation of and 
 under the dominion of Great Britain, so 
 that he claimed to have been born a subject 
 of King George the Third, in the year of 
 the retreat from Moscow. The New York 
 Herald said that he was descended from 
 Judas Maccabasus, who defied Rome as he 
 did Washington. For about half a century 
 he was a citizen of the United States, and 
 was offered a seat in the Supreme Court 
 by President Filmore. For about four years 
 he was a citizen of the Confederate States. 
 He was called to the Bar by a special resolu- 
 tion of the Bench of Lincoln's Inn in June 
 1 866j after five months of studentship instead 
 of three years, and he may fairly be regarded 
 as an Englishman from 1866 to 1883. But 
 from the latter year until his death on 
 the 6th May 1884, his domicile was in 
 France. In his will, bearing date the 30th 
 April 1883, were these words: "I have 
 no real estate in England, but I have in 
 France the family mansion or hotel at No. 
 41 Avenue d'Jena, Paris, in which I have 
 
1 66 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 resided since my withdrawal from the Bar, 
 and in which I contemplate residing the rest 
 of my life." His will was admitted to 
 Probate on the 28th June 1884, and the 
 authorities at Somerset House, without 
 hesitation, recognised that the domicile of 
 the testator was French, and that no legacy 
 duty was payable to the Crown on his 
 personal estate. Any other testator would 
 have declared his domicile in terms, and 
 so have raised a doubt and a contest, but he 
 more wisely declared the facts, leaving the 
 inference to be drawn. In 1872, after six 
 years spent at the Junior Bar, Mr Benjamin 
 applied to the Lord Chancellor for promotion 
 to the rank of Queen's Counsel. Lord 
 Chelmsford, while quite admitting that the 
 applicant was fully entitled to that rank, 
 expressed his anxiety not to give cause of 
 offence to the Government of the United 
 States. Mr Benjamin was equal to the 
 occasion ; he got himself appointed Queen's 
 Counsel of the Court of the County Palatine 
 of Lancaster, and then persuaded the Lord 
 Chancellor to grant him a Patent of 
 Precedence under the Great Seal in the 
 
AMERICA 167 
 
 Courts of Westminster. In these happier 
 days we can hardly realise the possibility 
 of the Government of the United States 
 taking umbrage at honour being paid to an 
 American citizen ; but hearts were sorely 
 tried between the years i860 and 1879. 
 Now our only strife is to rival each other in 
 friendship and hospitality. We all rejoice 
 and are proud when Mr Choate honours us 
 by becoming a Bencher of the Middle 
 Temple, when he consents to be the guest 
 of the Bench and Bar, when he addresses 
 us in a farewell speech, the most eloquent 
 and the most impressive which I have ever 
 heard or am ever likely to hear, and when 
 he tells us that the name of my lifelong friend. 
 Lord Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice of 
 England, has become a household word 
 throughout America. It is the crowning 
 glory of Mr Choate' s brilliant career that he 
 has done more than any living man to make 
 both countries forget all that was unhappy in 
 the past and to bring them nearer to each 
 other, and I think that we in England have 
 also a right to be ptoud of what our Chief 
 Justice did in the matter of the Alaska 
 
1 68 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Boundary. I would quote the words of 
 President Grant who, on the 2nd December 
 1 872, 'declared that the result of the Alabama 
 arbitration left the United States and Great 
 Britain " without a shadow upon their friendly 
 relations," and apply them with increased 
 force to the decision of Lord Alverstone. 
 
 Mr Wigfall, whom I met on two occasions 
 only in London, presented a violent contrast 
 to Mr Benjamin. No one could imagine 
 Mr Wigfall giving dinners to bring political 
 opponents together and soften the asperities 
 of public life as Mr Benjamin did when he 
 sat in the Senate at Washington in the days 
 before the war. ' Mr Benjamin told me that 
 Mr Andrew Johnson received one of these 
 invitations, never answered the letter, and on 
 being reminded of it some days later said 
 " Yes, I had the letter, but I have not thought 
 about it yet." The Southerners who were 
 in London fought rather shy of Mr Wigfall. 
 That gentleman was brought up in South 
 Carolina, but he did something which, even 
 in the worst days of duelling, was deemed a 
 gross outrage, and he found it desirable to 
 migrate to Texas. He sat in the Senate at 
 
AMERICA 169 
 
 Washington before the war for that State. 
 There were nights on which he saw the ghost 
 of the judge with whom he had the difficulty 
 in Carolina, but I was fortunate not to be 
 present at these painful scenes. One of his 
 speeches deserves to be recorded as a splendid 
 specimen of invective, and we know on the 
 authority of Mr Disraeli that invective is 
 "the ornament of debate." A politician 
 during the war, in an impassioned address, 
 had declared that he would fight the North 
 to the last, and that if defeated he would 
 never surrender, but go away and live with 
 the Red Indian. Thereupon Mr Wigfall, 
 who detested the orator, rose and said, " I 
 love the Red Indian. He is my friend. We 
 white men have sent smallpox to decimate 
 him, whisky to ruin his body and soul, 
 gunpowder to enable him to kill his brother, 
 but we have not yet sent him this man, and 
 in the name of the Eternal One I protest 
 against this further infliction upon the 
 wretched Red Indian." This style of oratory 
 appeared in a speech of another Southern 
 politician, who on being asked to vote for 
 a candidate exclaimed, " What ! vote for 
 
lyo LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Herschell v. Johnson of Georgia ? No, sir, 
 
 I'd see him so far into h that the 
 
 Almighty Himself with one of Lord Ross's 
 telescopes would not find him in a thousand 
 years." 
 
 Among the notable persons whom I knew 
 in those days was Mr Martini, the inventor 
 of the breech action of the rifle adopted by 
 our army, who regarded himself as a bene- 
 factor of the human race, because in his 
 opinion such inventions tended to the abolition 
 of war. Mr Martini was a mechanical 
 engineer at Winterthur in Switzerland. I 
 also knew Nubar Pasha when he came to 
 England to forward his scheme of abolishing 
 the consular jurisdiction under the capitu- 
 lations in Egypt and of establishing the 
 mixed tribunals. He had spent some time 
 in Paris and had secured the assent of M. 
 Drouyn de Lhuys, then Minister of Foreign 
 Affairs to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. 
 For the purpose of making his case clear to 
 the Continental powers he had written in 
 French a very able note to the viceroy on 
 the subject. I translated this note and went 
 over the translation with him. Then we 
 
AMERICA 171 
 
 had it printed, together with a report of 
 Monsieur P. Manoury of the Bar of Paris, 
 and distributed the pamphlet among the 
 members of both Houses of Parliament. The 
 Times and Standard did their best to help us 
 by excellent leading articles. The late Lord 
 Derby, who was then Secretary of State for 
 Foreign Affairs, was entirely in favour of the 
 scheme, but rather resented having his hand 
 forced in this way. On a later occasion 
 Nubar Pasha came to England with the 
 Khedive of that day, and they stayed at 
 Buckingham Palace. I called at the palace 
 and asked the attendant to take up my card. 
 The gentleman was full of pomposity and 
 said, "I do not think that his excellency 
 can see you." However, I was shown in at 
 once and spent a long morning with Nubar. 
 He would not let me go, because, so far as 
 I could make out, I was the only caller who 
 did not want to get something out of him, 
 or out of the Khedive — and he told me that 
 it was the only rest he had had since his 
 arrival in London, for he was besieged from 
 morning to night by jewellers, who had 
 diamonds to sell to the viceroy, people who 
 
172 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 wanted concessions or favours, and other 
 importunate beggars. Every time the door 
 opened he said, " I am engaged and cannot 
 possibly see anyone." However, I took my 
 leave at the end of two or three hours, and 
 as I went down the staircase and through the 
 hall of the palace, a line of officials and 
 servants bowed down before me in the most 
 extravagant manner, while the gentlemen 
 from Bond Street and the city cursed me in 
 their hearts. I never saw Nubar Pasha 
 again. He was a man of grand appearance 
 and manner, of immense ability and master 
 of many languages. I laughed heartily to 
 myself, for all these people imagined that 
 Nubar and I had been discussing the affairs 
 of Egypt and of Europe, whereas our talk 
 had been of the most frivolous character. 
 
 Many years later I had a similar experi- 
 ence. I went to a consultation with Charles 
 Russell, and we very quickly got rid of the 
 solicitor and the client. Then Russell began 
 to enjoy himself over a discussion on the 
 chances of the horses in the coming races 
 at Epsom. When at the end of a quarter 
 of an hour I went downstairs the solicitor 
 
AMERICA 173 
 
 seized me. "Now do tell us what Sir 
 Charles really thinks of our case." "Good 
 Heavens ! " said I, " you don't suppose that 
 we have nothing better to talk about than 
 this miserable case? Why, we have settled 
 which horse will win the City and Suburban 
 Handicap." 
 
 One of the most important law-suits 
 arising out of the Civil War was that known 
 as the Alexandra case. On the 5th April 
 1863 the steamship Alexandra was seized at 
 Liverpool by our Government, on the ground 
 that she was intended for the service of the 
 Confederate States, and was therefore for- 
 feited to the Crown under the 7th section 
 of the Foreign Enlistment Act, 59 Geo, 
 III., c. 69. On the 25th May 1863 the 
 Attorney-General filed an information charg- 
 ing that "Mr Sillem, Mr C. A. Prioleau, 
 Mr J. Bullock and others did equip the 
 ship for the service of the Confederate 
 States." The cause was tried before Chief- 
 Baron Pollock and a special jury. His lord- 
 ship told the jury in substance that if the 
 object was to equip, fit out, or arm the 
 vessel in Liverpool, they were to find a 
 
174 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 verdict for the Crown, but if the object was 
 to build a ship under a contract, leaving it 
 to the buyers to do what they pleased with 
 it, they should find a verdict for the de- 
 fendants. In November four judges of the 
 Court of Exchequer sat to determine whether 
 this view of the law was right. Sir Hugh 
 Cairns on behalf of the defendants delivered 
 an argument which lasted nine hours and a 
 half, and the speech of Sir Roundell Palmer 
 on the side of the Crown took up rather 
 more time. Both were models of style and 
 reasoning, and in the result two judges held 
 one way and two the other, so that the 
 verdict stood. Then the Crown appealed 
 to the Court of the Exchequer Chamber, 
 whereupon the counsel for the defendants 
 objected to the jurisdiction of the Court, 
 contending that no such appeal could be 
 brought. Four judges decided that there 
 was no appeal, three dissenting. The Crown 
 then appealed to the House of Lords, and 
 in April 1864 the then Lord Chancellor and 
 four other lords held that there was no 
 appeal, while two noble and learned lords 
 thought that there was an appeal. So the 
 
AMERICA 175 
 
 defendants won the fight, and the Crown 
 wisely bought the ship from the defendants 
 as the simplest method of preserving the 
 neutrality of Great Britain. 
 
 Mrs Greenhow sat in court throughout 
 the argument in the Court of lExchequer. 
 I took her to the court and got a place for 
 her where she could see and hear with com- 
 fort. She had taken a very prominent part 
 in the War of Secession, and was supposed 
 to be in the confidence of Mr Jefferson 
 Davis. She had been arrested as a spy in 
 the Federal States and imprisoned for some 
 time at Washington. On her release she 
 came to England, In October 1864 she 
 determined to go back to Richmond, and 
 sailed in the Condor to run the blockade. 
 The ship got aground off Wilmington, and 
 Mrs Greenhow, fearing capture by a Northern 
 cruiser and a second imprisonment, attempted 
 to get into a boat which the crew had 
 launched. Unfortunately the boat was 
 swamped and the poor lady was drowned. 
 Perhaps she would have been saved, but she 
 carried a large amount of gold round her 
 waist, which prevented her from rising readily 
 
176 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 to the surface. Her body was recovered, 
 and she was accorded a splendid funeral. 
 The coffin was followed by many people to 
 Oakdale Cemetery. The Richmond Sentinel, 
 after giving a full description of the cere- 
 mony, added : " Rain fell in torrents during 
 the day, but as the coffin was being lowered 
 into the grave the sun burst forth in the 
 brightest majesty, and a rainbow of the most 
 vivid colours spanned the horizon. Let us 
 accept the omen not only for her, the quiet 
 sleeper, who after many storms and a tumultu- 
 ous and chequered life came to peace and 
 rest at last, but also for our beloved 
 country, over which we trust the rainbow 
 of hope will ere long shine with brightest 
 dyes." 
 
 Soon after the Jlabama had been destroyed 
 in the English Channel by the Kearsage, 
 the ship Sea King took the sea to prey on 
 what was left of the mercantile marine of the 
 Northern States. The secret of her building 
 equipment and destination had been well 
 kept, and no one seemed to have any sus- 
 picion of her enterprise. The Sea King was 
 built at Liverpool under the supervision of 
 
AMERICA 177 
 
 Captain Bullock, and in September 1864 
 sailed for Madeira under the command of 
 Captain Corbett, an Englishman. There she 
 was met by another ship called the Laurel^ 
 laden with guns and stores, which were suc- 
 cessfully transhipped on to the Sea King off 
 Desertas. Then the Confederate flag was 
 hoisted on the ship, her name was changed to 
 that of the Shenandoah, and she sailed as 
 a cruiser in the service of the South. Some 
 of the crew of the Sea King consented to 
 serve on her, and several of the old Alabama 
 men who had gone out on the Laurel also 
 joined. At the close of the war the Govern- 
 ment of the United States pressed for the 
 prosecution of Captain Corbett, and he was 
 indicted under the Foreign Enlistment Act 
 on a charge of having persuaded the men of 
 the Sea King to serve in war against the 
 United States. Captain Corbett was tried 
 at Westminster before the late Lord Chief 
 Justice Cockburn. It was the first important 
 case in which I had a brief. The Crown was 
 represented by the Attorney-General (after- 
 wards Lord Monkswell) and by Mr James 
 Hannen (Lord Hannen). The defence was 
 
 M 
 
1 78 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 conducted by Mr Edward James, Q.C., and 
 Mr Kemplay of the Northern Circuit. We 
 called sundry witnesses for the defence, and 
 among them four of the crew of the Alabama 
 who had been enlisted on board the 
 Shenandoah. My leaders gave me the 
 opportunity of examining three of these men, 
 and the second of them was a gentleman of 
 piratical appearance, with an immense shock 
 of black curly hair and a large scarlet necktie. 
 When asked a question he stared at me and 
 then at the judge and at the jury, and after 
 making a terrific noise low down in his throat 
 spat across the court to a distance of about 
 six feet. To my intense relief Sir Alexander 
 Cockburn threw himself back in his seat and 
 burst out into a jovial laugh, and everyone 
 followed suit. The witness remained 
 absolutely calm, apparently unconscious of 
 the cause of our hilarity. When his evidence 
 was concluded the Lord Chief Justice asked 
 if there was any more evidence, and on my 
 replying, " Yes, my lord, one more witness," 
 he said, " Exactly like the last, Mr Witt .? " 
 These witnesses had been under the care of 
 Mr Thomas Rawle, who was then an articled 
 
AMERICA 179 
 
 clerk to Messrs Gregory RowclifFes & Co., 
 of I Bedford Row, and is now the head of 
 that eminent firm, and was last year President 
 of the Incorporated Law Society, and a nice 
 task he had. " If," said he to me, " I do not 
 give these Alabama men liquor they will 
 desert, and if I give them all they want they 
 will be too drunk to give evidence." But he 
 managed them splendidly. Mr Hull, the 
 Liverpool solicitor, said, " Some of these men 
 are really Southerners, but the battle between 
 the Kearsage and the Alabama was only a 
 fight between two sets of Liverpool boys, and 
 that is why it was such a good one. I believe 
 that Mr Rawle and I are the sole survivors 
 of that memorable trial, which resulted in a 
 verdict of " Not Guilty." 
 
 Some time after the war was over Mr 
 M'Rae became the involuntary exponent of 
 important principles of Equity in the courts 
 of this country. In 1867, Vice-Chancellor 
 Wood was called upon to decide a suit 
 between the Government of the United 
 States and Mr M'Rae. The Bill in Equity 
 in substance alleged that the defendant had 
 been the agent in receipt of large sums of 
 
i8o LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 money, and of large quantities of goods sent 
 and consigned to England by the pretended 
 Confederate Government, and that the 
 property of such Government was now vested 
 in the plaintiffs, who required the defendant 
 to render an account of all such monies and 
 goods and pay and deliver over the same to 
 the plaintiffs. Now Mr M'Rae had had 
 control not only over the proceeds of the 
 Confederate Loan of ;^3,ooo,oco sterling, 
 but also of big shipments of cotton, which 
 had from time to time reached Liverpool on 
 board the blockade-runners. I do not for 
 one moment suppose that he would, except 
 on patriotic grounds, have objected to render 
 such an account if the Government of the 
 United States had on their side been willing 
 to treat him as his own Government would 
 have done, because Mr M'Rae had in fact 
 dispersed all that came to his hands in the 
 service of the Confederate States, and he was 
 a man absolutely incapable of dishonourable 
 conduct. But the United States might and 
 would have said, "We do not recognise 
 your disbursements ; they were all in fur- 
 therance of acts of treason. Pay up without 
 
AMERICA i8i 
 
 deduction." Mr M'Rae put himself in the 
 hands of Mr Benjamin, who drew a plea to 
 the bill, alleging on behalf of the defendant 
 that Congress had made a law rendering all 
 the defendant's property liable to confiscation, 
 and that proceedings had been instituted and 
 were pending in the District Court at 
 Montgomery in the State of Alabama, to 
 secure the confiscation of the defendant's 
 landed estate in Selma in the county of 
 Dallas in that State, and that the defendant 
 could not answer the interrogatories filed or 
 make answer to the bill without exposing 
 himself to the confiscation of his property, 
 and that it was contrary to Equity that the 
 United States should obtain relief in the suit 
 without first pardoning the defendant and 
 releasing him from the forfeitures. The 
 Vice-Chancellor upheld this plea as a 
 complete defence to the bill, but on appeal 
 the Lord Chancellor (Lord Chelmsford) ruled 
 that although the plea entirely defeated the 
 claim of the United States to get discovery 
 from the defendant, yet if they could prov 
 their case by evidence without discovery, 
 they had a right to go on with the suit 
 
1 82 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 and do so. In 1869 ^^^ ^"^* came to a 
 hearing. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir W. M. 
 James, asked Sir Roundell Palmer, who 
 appeared for the United States, if he would 
 have the account taken as if it was between 
 the Confederate Government on the one 
 hand and the defendant as agent of that 
 Government on the other, and to pay what, 
 if anything, might be found due from the 
 Government on the footing of such account ; 
 but the learned counsel declined to accept 
 the decree in any form which would recognise 
 the authority of the belligerent States or 
 involve any payment to their agent, and 
 thereupon the bill was dismissed with 
 costs. 
 
 This case probably explains why our Gov- 
 ernment never attacked Paul Kruger in the 
 Belgian courts, so as to make him account 
 for the gold which it is alleged that he took 
 with him when he fled from Pretoria. Our 
 Court of Chancery had dealt with a some- 
 what similar case in 1866. The United 
 States had filed a bill against Mr Charles 
 Kuhn Prioleau to establish their rights to 
 certain bales of cotton shipped at Galveston 
 
AMERICA 183 
 
 and consigned for sale in Liverpool for the 
 benefit of the Confederate Government. 
 Then Mr Prioleau filed a cross bill against 
 the United States and President Andrew 
 Johnson for discovery in reference to the 
 matters in question in the principal suit, and 
 it was held that although a Republic could 
 not be in a better position than a foreign 
 sovereign suing in an English court, yet the 
 President was not a person who could be 
 selected by Mr Prioleau as the proper person 
 to make discovery. The learned judge 
 shrewdly said, " The Court cannot take 
 judicial notice ; nor do I suppose that it is 
 a matter of fact that the United States 
 Government have control over their 
 President or can compel him to produce 
 papers or the like." The notion that Mr 
 Lincoln, Mr Andrew Johnson, or the great 
 man who is now President of the United 
 States could be compelled to do anything 
 that he did not wish to do, would probably 
 strike any American as a sublime sort of 
 joke. Certainly no American would be a 
 party to any such compulsion on the 
 suggestion of a foreign court. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE SINS OF THE LAW 
 
 The Common Law of England tempered with 
 Equity constitutes the highest expression of 
 human reason and morality. The laws 
 made from time to time by Parliament are 
 for the most part opposed to good sense and 
 morality. • 
 
 There must be a Parliament. Its primary 
 office is to prevent arbitrary power in man or 
 multitude, to hear grievances, to determine 
 after what manner and by whom the country 
 shall be ruled. History teaches that these 
 duties have been discharged splendidly. 
 Every man of right mind does his best to 
 secure that Parliament shall go on with this 
 work. Other nations follow its example, 
 and strive to emulate it. 
 
 • Lord Palmerston understood and upheld 
 the dignity and authority of Parliament. 
 He also appreciated its follies. He never, 
 184 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 185 
 
 with the notable exception of the Probate 
 and Divorce Acts, indulged in legislation if 
 he could help it. He knew that statutes as 
 a rule do much more harm than good. . 
 
 Why does every session bring forth a 
 crop of Acts altering the general law of the 
 land ? The answer is that no Government 
 can afford to produce a king's speech 
 without a list of projected statutory reforms. 
 It would be like a public dinner without a 
 toast list, a race meeting without a card, a 
 play without a programme. Think of the 
 Opposition. " Here is a Government with- 
 out a policy. Where are its measures for 
 the reform of abuses,-* where is its con- 
 structive legislation ? what heed does it give 
 to the crying needs of the people ? " — away 
 with it, and away it would go. 
 
 There have been many statutes of extra- 
 ordinary beneficence, but they have been 
 Acts to repeal wicked old Acts. For ex- 
 ample, Acts to relieve Catholics, Noncon- 
 formists, Jews and Quakers from pains, 
 penalties and disabilities imposed in bad old 
 times by malevolent kings and yet more 
 malevolent priests ; Acts to get men out of 
 
186 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 prison, who would otherwise have been kept 
 there by cruel despots and yet more cruel 
 creditors ; Acts to prevent rich men from 
 fixing poor men's wages, or regulating their 
 dresses, or determining the prices of goods 
 in defiance of laws that will not be defied. 
 All these are Statutes to knock down some- 
 thing already put up, and only prove the 
 folly and injustice of older law makers. 
 ■ In the reign of Charles II. an Act was 
 passed which arrogated to itself the dignity 
 of stopping frauds. So it said : " You shall 
 not bring an action to get damages for a 
 breach of a contract which it will take you 
 and the other man more than a year to per- 
 form, unless it is put in writing." In those 
 days the plaintiflF and the defendant could 
 not give evidence, because being interested 
 they were sure to tell lies. Of course they 
 can now be witnesses. So if you have oath 
 against oath as to something to be done 
 within three hundred and sixty-four days it 
 is all right, but if it will take three hundred 
 and sixty-six days, no writing, no case. 
 Again, by the same Statute, if you assert that 
 you have agreed to sell a man goods worth 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 187 
 
 jCg, 19s. you may swear against your buyer, 
 and he against you as much as you both like, 
 but if the goods are worth ;^io — no, you 
 have to show a writing, or a token, or 
 delivery of the whole or part. If you look 
 at a text book you will find dozens of pages 
 explaining these provisions, and references to 
 thousands of judicial decisions about them. 
 A fine harvest for the lawyers, but a bare 
 wilderness to the suitors. • 
 
 There had been at least a dozen Statutes 
 relating to bankruptcy and insolvency before 
 1883, when the present Statute was passed 
 at the instance of Mr Chamberlain. • I suppose 
 that if imprisonment for debt had been 
 swept away one hundred years ago, there 
 never would have been a Bankruptcy Act. 
 The old Romans had some sense. They said 
 to the creditor, " Here, take this debtor and 
 set him to work until he has earned enough 
 to pay you off." The English people said, 
 " Put him in prison and keep him there, so 
 will he be for ever unable to pay you, but 
 you will have the delight of knowing that he 
 is there for life." 
 
 This practice shocked mankind, and so 
 
1 88 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 Parliament said, "Let him give up all he 
 has, divide it among his creditors and let 
 him go out of gaol," and it further said, " If 
 he does give up all he has, release him from 
 his debts." Now I have never been able to 
 make out why one man in a street should go 
 free of his debts while his neighbour pays 
 up in full. What a delightful incentive to 
 dishonesty. Nor do I understand why a 
 creditor should, under any circumstances, be 
 able to put his debtor into prison. One 
 hundred years hence historians will justly 
 speak of imprisonment for debt as a " relic 
 of barbarism." • If a man were to call his 
 creditors together and say, " I must stop 
 payment, but my business is a good one, 
 and if you will all agree to give me time and 
 let me go on I believe I shall pull round," 
 and they choose to agree, that is their affair. 
 In days of old such a plan was common 
 enough, and the debtor got a letter of 
 licence, forms of which can be found in old 
 books. So also if the creditors agree to 
 divide up their debtor's property and release 
 him, that again is their aiFair. But no — 
 because the creditor could seize the un- 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 189 
 
 fortunate debtor and imprison him for life, 
 Parliament instead of saying, " You shall 
 not do such a wicked thing as that," said, 
 "Is he a gentleman? Yes? Then here is 
 an Act for the relief of gentlemanly insolvent 
 debtors." Or, " Is he in trade? Yes? Then 
 make him a bankrupt." And then Parlia- 
 ment proceeded to pile Ossa on Pelion and 
 Olympus on Ossa in the shape of pages 
 and pages of statutory stuff, which it cost 
 thousands and thousands of pounds to ex- 
 plain, and all of this cost came out of the 
 pockets of the wretched creditors. Before 
 they got anything, the Treasury took a dip 
 for fees, and then came counsel and solicitors 
 and accountants until an estate which ought 
 to have paid, say, fifteen shillings in the 
 pound, emerged with two shillings and 
 elevenpence, payable in three instalments 
 over a period of four years. • In 1849 a 
 fresh effort was made, and some years later 
 Lord Westbury tried his hand, and in those 
 happy days a debtor could get a deed written 
 out, and have it executed by his cook and 
 his housemaid and three or four friends as 
 creditors, and then say to the rest, "Look 
 
igo LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 here, a majority in number and two-thirds 
 in value of my creditors are ready to release 
 me at half-a-crown in the pound. You can 
 sign it if you like, but if you do not it does 
 not matter to me, because you are in a 
 minority." Thirty or forty years ago these 
 dreadful deeds used to be pleaded as de- 
 fences to actions, and counsel were driven 
 wild with efforts to support or upset them. 
 The scandal became at last outrageous and 
 they were consigned to utter darkness. But 
 the frauds which were committed under that 
 law demoralised thousands of people. There 
 were fictitious creditors, debts falsely multi- 
 plied by five or ten, persuasion and bribery 
 to sign — every imaginable iniquity, all the 
 necessary results of so wicked a law. ■ Well, 
 now we have a perfect law of bankruptcy, 
 just twenty-two years old. We have also 
 a beautiful new building in which to ad- 
 minister it, a judge, a staff of registrars, a 
 small army of clerks, counsel whose ability 
 and knowledge of the law of bankruptcy 
 takes away the breath of ordinary barristers, 
 and, of course, solicitors and accountants. 
 The building has to be paid for, or rather 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 191 
 
 the interest on the money by which it was 
 erected, together with all the official staff. 
 1 suppose that the Treasury fees have to 
 carry this load, and besides this burthen 
 there are stiU enormous costs loaded on to 
 these miserable estates. 
 
 • We have also that most amusing perform- 
 ance, the public examination of the bank- 
 rupt. It was a delight to me to see the 
 late Mr Aldridge at this task. For a long 
 time I could not make out why he gave 
 some of the bankrupts a tremendous dressing, 
 and why some got off with two or three 
 gentle interrogatories. At last an explana- 
 tion presented itself. One fine September 
 day I met that most worthy gentleman at 
 a shooting lunch. Then came my chance. 
 I explained to the party that when Mr 
 Aldridge had a touch of gout or indigestion, 
 and had been unable to enjoy his breakfast, 
 he came down to court and relieved his 
 feelings by a severe cross-examination of 
 the unlucky debtor, and that on the other 
 hand, when he felt spry and cheerful, the 
 bankrupt got off comfortably. Then Mr 
 Aldridge exclaimed, " There is a lot of truth 
 
192 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 in what he, is saying." . Even cabmen have 
 a fair idea of the farcical character of the 
 proceeding. One of these worthy men had 
 driven the bankrupt a distance of one mile, 
 seven furlongs and a half, and had received 
 at the door of the court what is known as a 
 " hard shilling." " Well," said the cabman, 
 " I do hope that you will get your discharge ; 
 they cannot say that extravagance has done 
 it." I had a call from a lady who explained 
 to me that her gallant husband had passed 
 an excellent examination. I asked if it was for 
 his promotion to be major of the regiment. 
 " Oh, ao," said she, " I mean his examination 
 in bankruptcy." -There are, however, lectures 
 from the registrar and suspension of certifi- 
 cates of discharge for two or three years, so 
 that we have ever with us the undischarged 
 bankrupt, whose wife or friend, male and 
 female, carries on a business singularly like 
 that of the bankrupt, with the " undischarged 
 gentleman " as agent or manager. There is 
 no doubt a beautiful Act which says, that if 
 this gentleman gets credit for more than 
 ;^20, without explaining his little misfortune 
 to the creditor, he is guilty of a misdemean- 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 193 
 
 our. Now and then some simple-minded 
 tradesman has the "gentleman" up before 
 a jury, and pretty often gets told by the 
 judge that he is wrongfully putting the 
 criminal law in motion to squeeze money 
 out of the prisoner, and the jury is advised 
 to say "Not Guilty." Yet the Inspector- 
 General treats this Statute as sufficient pro- 
 tection to the tradesman in his last report, 
 and calls it a stringent penal enactment, but 
 that gentleman manifestly does not attend 
 sessions. In his simplicity he adds that 
 " There is a steady decline in the desire of 
 bankrupts to obtain their discharge."* But 
 it is said, " How important it is to effect a 
 fair division of the property of the insolvent 
 debtor." That is of course an ideal object. 
 To carry it out there is a prohibition against 
 what is called "fraudulent preference"; which 
 means this, that if the debtor has borrowed 
 j^iOO of his best friend, and is bound by the 
 most sacred bond of honour to pay it back, 
 that bond constitutes absolute proof that he, 
 the debtor, has fraudulently preferred to pay 
 his friend rather than his enemies. Well, 
 there are hundreds of cases about this 
 
194 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 fraudulent preference, containing sublime 
 distinctions between "motive," "view," 
 "intention" and "object," with dissertations 
 as to what was in the debtor's mind, and 
 what the judge ought to say to the jury if 
 there is one, and what he ought to say to 
 himself if there is no jury ; and on the top 
 of it all, it is supposed to be a question of 
 fact, and not of law, whether there was such 
 a fraudulent preference or not. 
 
 • Another admirable illustration of the success 
 ofthe law in dividing abankrupt'sestate among 
 his creditors may be found in the tender 
 regard of the courts for marriage settlements. 
 Advice to everyone about to marry : " Exe- 
 cute a covenant to bring into settlement 
 all your after-acquired property. Go into 
 trade, and if things look bad stir up the 
 trustees of the settlement to insist on an 
 assignment to them of every bit of property 
 you may have by way of performing — or, as 
 the Scotch lawyers have it, of 'implementing' — 
 your covenant. " Of course this plan involves 
 keeping on good terms with your wife, for 
 she may leave you out in the cold, which 
 perhaps would be worse for you than the 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 195 
 
 frigid aversion of defrauded creditors. All 
 this is glorious fun for the lawyers and 
 grand exercise for the intellect, but it is poor 
 sport for the creditors. • Then there is a 
 delightful doctrine that the title of the 
 trustee relates back to what is called an "Act 
 of Bankruptcy," and there have been hundreds 
 of cases about that, and again the creditors 
 have to pay the expense of all this profound 
 learning. It has been laid down solemnly 
 from the Bench that Mr Chamberlain's Act 
 of 1883 is a new code of law, and that its 
 language is not to be governed by reported 
 decisions on older Statutes. Nevertheless, 
 the standard book on Bankruptcy Practice 
 consists of 659 pages and contains references 
 to more than 1600 cases. These at the 
 modest estimate of £9o per case for costs, 
 show a charming total of ;^ 12 8,000 expended 
 in efforts to find out what Parliament meant. 
 No doubt the idea of abolishing bank- 
 ruptcy law and all its works would be terrible 
 to a host of people. But if I were a creditor 
 I should like to be able, if I chose, to get a 
 judgment against my debtor, and have 
 execution and the fruits of it. If I got 
 
196 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 there first I should be paid. If someone 
 managed to be there before me he would be 
 paid. Anyhow, someone would be paid, 
 which to my mind is better than no one 
 being paid. But I suppose too many worthy 
 folk have a " vested interest " in the present 
 state of things to permit of such a revolution 
 as would be effected if the rule was " first 
 come first served," and no absolution from 
 debt except payment. 
 
 These reflections lead me to those mar- 
 vellous concoctions known as the County 
 Courts Acts. If I were a politician and had 
 to make an appeal to the vulgus, I should 
 put at the top of my address " Away with 
 the County Courts." Lord Brougham, who 
 was a rare man for " firework " legislation, 
 was their first author. In those days the 
 old Sheriff Courts dealt with a host of small 
 actions, and my lamented friend, Mr Thomas 
 Apps, one of the most able and famous of 
 our London solicitors, used to recall the 
 time when he spent four days a week at the 
 Sheriff's Court in Red Lion Square fighting 
 small debt cases. • An unpretentious Statute 
 to regulate and possibly enlarge the juris- 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 197 
 
 diction of those ancient courts would have 
 been useful, but then there would have been 
 no glory and no patronage. So a big Bill 
 was introduced with plenty of tall talk about 
 bringing justice to every man's door, as if 
 justice was a thing people wanted as they do 
 their milk in the morning ; and there was a 
 beautiful little sinecure office called Treasurer- 
 ship of the County Courts, and it carried a 
 salary of ;^2500 a year, and the only man in 
 all England who was capable of filling the 
 office worthily- happened, by a sort of miracle, 
 to be near of kin to the Lord Chancellor of 
 that day. ■ 
 
 Now there are two principles in the 
 practice laid down by the Country Courts. 
 The first is that if a man is wholly unable to 
 pay one pound to his creditors there shall be 
 judgment against him to pay one pound four 
 shillings. The second is that the creditor 
 may frighten the debtor, his wife and child- 
 ren with the threat that the debtor will or 
 may be sent to gaol if he does not pay up. 
 •If you read Truth and its weekly pillory 
 you will find out that in many parts of 
 England you may knock a man about as 
 
198 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 much as you like for forty shillings, that is, 
 if the justices are of a good old-fashioned 
 sort. But if you owe thirty shillings, why, 
 you may get a month in gaol if the County 
 Court judge is a bit of a disciplinarian, and 
 has all his life had plenty of money with 
 which to pay his tradespeople. • I have 
 read a lot of letters in the newspapers alleging 
 that debtors are only sent to prison when 
 they are obstinate and wilfully refuse to pay. 
 I am quite sure that such statements are not 
 true, and I appeal to a most able letter from 
 the pen of Sir Richard Harington, published 
 in The Times of the ist December 1904, 
 which supports my allegation. Here is also 
 further evidence. In the year ending 31st 
 May 1904, according to the Blue Book 
 (22,737), 18,022 persons were imprisoned 
 as debtors or on civil process. This last 
 category, of course, would account for a 
 small fraction of the number. Can one 
 conceive anything so monstrous as to reduce 
 18,000 persons to idleness for fourteen days 
 or a month, to lodge and feed them as 
 criminals at the expense of the community at 
 large, not at the expense of the particular 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 199 
 
 creditor, merely because tradesmen have been 
 so foolish or so wicked as to sell to them or 
 their wives goods on credit ?• "To what an 
 extent this mischief {i.e., the credit system) 
 proceeds," says Sir Richard, " may be shown 
 by reference to Birmingham, the largest of our 
 County Courts. In 1903 more than 67,000 
 actions for sums under twenty pounds were 
 entered in that court. I cannot vouch for 
 the population of the district with accuracy, 
 but I believe it to be under 600,000. If 
 this is so, more than one person in nine out 
 of the whole population was a litigant in 
 respect of a small debt or claim," 
 
 There is a wise act of Parliament which 
 says that no action shall be brought to re- 
 cover a debt for beer, stout, or cider sold by 
 retail. That law is a boon to publican and 
 customer alike. There ought to be a law 
 that no action shall be brought to recover 
 the price of goods sold by retail for less than 
 five pounds at one time ; of course that would 
 be a nasty knock for the County Courts, and 
 a good job too. To my mind nothing can 
 be more dreadful than for a man who cannot 
 earn more than thirty shillings a week, to 
 
200 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 have a judgment debt for things long ago 
 used up hanging round his neck, with the 
 perpetual dread of the creditor trying to get 
 him committed to prison. If the debtor has 
 any property, let the creditor sell him up, 
 but do not let the creditor lock him up. 
 There are County Court judges who feel 
 the iniquity of the system, and to alleviate 
 the evil they break the spirit of the law by 
 parcelling the debt out into instalments and 
 making orders, under which the creditor will 
 have to live many years before he gets paid. 
 But this must be wrong, for it can be no 
 business of the judge to consider how the 
 debt was incurred. He has no right to dis- 
 tinguish between a loan at sixty per cent., and 
 a loaf of bread, and yet being a man of mercy 
 he does. I will not stay to criticise those 
 courts in cases where larger sums are in 
 dispute. They are supposed to be cheaper 
 than the High Courts. Well, in one way 
 they are, because the advocates who attend 
 them, are grossly underpaid. But the ex- 
 tortion of the Treasury is shocking. The fee 
 on a plaint for forty pounds in the County 
 Court is forty shillings, and the hearing fee is 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 201 
 
 also forty shillings. The fee on a writ in 
 the High Court for a million of money is 
 ten shillings and at the Assizes the hearing 
 fee is ten shillings and sixpence, with thirteen 
 shillings for the jiiry. The last object of 
 taxation ought to be the suitor in the court 
 to which the poorer classes are invited or 
 compelled to resort. Courts of the law do 
 not exist for the suitors only. Their value 
 consists quite as much in that they are 
 beacons and warnings to people to do what 
 is right as in their power to adjust disputes 
 between actual litigants. Therefore it is not 
 equitable that the burden of their mainten- 
 ance should fall wholly on those who use 
 them, even though that burden may fall on 
 the most helpless class of people. 
 
 Twenty-seven years after Parliament had 
 flogged the humble folk with whips in the 
 County Courts, it seemed desirable to flog the 
 wealthier folk with scorpions. The old 
 Courts of Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, and 
 Exchequer, and the Court of Chancery had 
 one notable defect — the courts of law 
 would not do Equity, and the Court of 
 Chancery would not administer law. In 
 
202 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 that state of things a simple person would 
 have said, " Bring in a Statute to tell the 
 court of Chancery not to send the suitor to 
 Westminster Hall when his case wants law, 
 and tell the judges in Wesminster Hall not 
 to pack the suitor off to Lincoln's Inn when 
 his case requires Equity." The thing will not 
 often happen, as his advisers generally know 
 what is the proper remedy, but it may happen. 
 If law and Equity conflict, let Equity have the 
 better of the law. If there are some few 
 cases, as there were, in which this rule is not 
 desirable, say what shall be done. This 
 could easily have been managed, and in fact 
 there are two sections in the Judicature Act 
 of 1873 which perform the feat. Apart 
 from this modest but useful reform, there 
 was really no cause for change. The practice 
 in all the courts was well settled, and only 
 wanted some amendments of no very great 
 difficulty. But there was no immortality of 
 renown to be got out of useful and unpre- 
 tentious legislation of this kind. There 
 must be something heroic, grand, magnificent. 
 All the courts were thrust into a huge 
 cauldron, out of which, after much simmer- 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 203 
 
 ing, came a Supreme Court, not yet visible to 
 the naked eye, divided into the High Court 
 and the Court of Appeal, both of which are 
 very visible. -Then the High Court was 
 subdivided into law and Chancery, and the 
 business was distributed much as before. 
 Besides the Statute there was a bran new 
 practice, which like a badly cut coat has been 
 tried on over and over again, slashed about, 
 stitched up, altered, patched, until there is 
 very little of the original garment left. The 
 book which explains this practice contains 
 1 743 pages, and the number of cases decided 
 by the courts to explain the rules exceed 
 7000. Putting the costs of these at 
 jCso a case, we get ;^3 50,000 as the price 
 paid by the long-suflfering Englishman, not 
 for getting his cases decided, but for finding 
 out the method by which they should be 
 decided. • This is a pretty sum to pay for a 
 judicial revolution which only one man 
 wanted and which nearly everyone now 
 deplores. However, it is not much worse 
 than the building in which the modern dis- 
 pensation abides. 
 
 It occurred to some legal genius that there 
 
204 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 might be a short cut to a result where an 
 action was brought to recover a debt, and 
 where there was reason to suppose that the 
 defendant was in opposition to the plaintiff 
 only to gain time. So an application to sign 
 judgment off-hand was allowed. The first 
 application with which I had to deal when 
 this rule was made came before a judge who 
 is not now on the Bench. I went into his 
 room at Judges' Chambers and said, " My 
 lord, this is a summons under the new order 
 framed for the better encouragement of 
 wilful and corrupt perjury," and I am bound 
 to say that the learned judge did not dispute 
 that description. ■ Human nature being what 
 it is, a defendant who wants delay will make 
 an affidavit to gain time, and will strain his 
 conscience, if he has one, considerably in the 
 assertion to which he deposes. There may 
 have been one or two cases of indictments 
 for perjury committed in the affidavits, but 
 they have been very rare indeed. Practically 
 there is impunity. Who is to blame ? The 
 defendant, who is like a rat in a corner, or 
 the framers of a rule which encourages 
 the plaintiff to put him there .? I do not 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 205 
 
 know anything better calculated to break 
 down the barriers of truth than compelling a 
 suitor to swear to a defence at the inception 
 of the litigation. This is the sort of legisla- 
 tion which spreads immorality wholesale, 
 and reduces what ought to be sacred down 
 to the level of common form. It would be 
 a modest estimate if the untrue affidavits 
 made under this procedure since it was 
 established were numbered at 200,000. ■ 
 How can it be to the advantage of the 
 community at large, that for the mere 
 purpose of a plaintiff, who has chosen to give 
 credit instead of insisting on cash, bringing 
 his debtor to book four months sooner than 
 he would in the ordinary course, wholesale 
 temptation to lying should be held out ? 
 ■ No greater injury can be done to the cause 
 of truth than to have a system under which 
 wrong-doers can say, " Oh, there is nothing 
 in it, because everyone does it."- You may 
 read in legal annals about the men of straw, 
 " who stood in Cursitor Street ready to make 
 affidavits," and you may feel shocked at the 
 ways of old. But I see no difference in 
 principle. Then, as now, the crime was in 
 
2o6 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 the system, not in the miserable men who 
 gave way to its inducements. 
 • In the year 1862 Lord Westbury passed 
 through Parliament the Act for the regulation 
 of Joint Stock Companies with limited 
 liability. • The idea was right enough, because 
 on the one hand the commerce of the country 
 could not any longer be carried on by private 
 partnerships, and on the other hand unlimited 
 liability was inexpedient and unjust, when 
 the investor could not possibly see after the 
 business himself. But instead of saying that 
 these companies should only be permitted 
 where there was a large amount of paid-up 
 capital, where, in fact, you had to deal with 
 concerns beyond the means of individuals, 
 the law allowed a company to be formed of 
 seven persons at a pound apiece. • Since 1862 
 the legislature has been at enormous pains to 
 scotch the monster, which it had then created, 
 but with very indifferent success. In 1867, 
 1870, 1880, and three times in 1890, 
 Parliament tried its hand at amendments 
 of the first Statute. The leading text-book 
 on these seven Acts contains 800 pages 
 and is adorned with more than 4000 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 207 
 
 decisions of the courts on the meaning of 
 the Statutes. How many volumes would 
 it take to describe the robberies which 
 have been perpetrated under these laws, 
 robberies which for skill and audacity 
 have no parallel in any period of 
 history ? Who can depict or even imagine 
 the tears, the misery, the abject despair of 
 the victims of this legislation since the 
 second day of November 1862 ? A huge 
 army of widows and orphans, of clergymen, 
 of foolish men of all sorts and conditions, 
 dazzled by bright advertisements of promised 
 wealth, and enticed to hand over their savings 
 in the vain hope of rich dividends, rises up 
 in judgment against these Statutes and the 
 men who passed them. Imagine a Parliament 
 which suppresses a lottery for a fat goose in 
 a public house, and creates the company 
 promoter and the guinea pig. • I have said 
 that there may be a company of seven sub- 
 scribers, and of course these may be an un- 
 discharged bankrupt and his wife and five 
 members of his family, and then the family 
 may put ^500 a piece into the concern as 
 capital, and each hold a debenture for ^500 
 
2o8 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 over all the stock and assets of the company, 
 and the company may get goods on credit 
 and incur all sorts of liabilities. Then when 
 creditors issue writs, the debenture holders 
 appoint a receiver, and he swoops down on 
 all the assets, and the happy family laugh at 
 the creditor, whose execution is idle and who 
 cannot even have the satisfaction of menacing 
 any of the family with imprisonment for 
 debt. So also one man may constitute the 
 company and do exactly as he pleases with it, 
 the other six being mere names at a pound a 
 piece, and he may run the company with or 
 without capital, and if profits are made he 
 gets them, and if losses are incurred he 
 mocks at the creditors. Of course there is 
 the promoter, whose works are pretty well 
 known by this time, and there is that danger- 
 ous man, who " reconstructs " companies. 
 This operation is performed by telling the 
 shareholders that, if a new company is made 
 out of the old one, and each shareholder con- 
 tributes five shillings in respect of each of his 
 shares by way of new capital, a great and 
 glorious future awaits the enterprise. The 
 silly gambler sends his good money after bad. 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 209 
 
 and the " reconstructor " rejoices. These 
 are only examples of mean and sordid frauds, 
 but they are the things which familiarise 
 people with dishonesty under the mask of 
 business "according to Act of Parliament," 
 But wickedness is not worked with impunity. 
 Mr Satori Kato, in The Times of loth 
 September 1904, writes : "The cautiousness 
 of investors, which is so marked a pheno- 
 menon in England at the present time, has 
 not been caused either by the South African 
 War, nor is it an echo of current events in the 
 Far East. To me it seems that the cause should 
 be sought in the mushroom growth of com- 
 panies of every sort, the lack of commercial 
 probity on the part of so many company pro- 
 moters and other interested parties, which 
 has brought wealth to a few and loss and 
 even ruin to many. The law in Japan pro- 
 vides that no limited liability company shall 
 commence business unless one fourth of its 
 capital has been paid up, and the ' watering ' 
 of shares or provision of bonuses can be 
 executed in very rare cases. We have, 
 therefore, but few failures of companies." . 
 Eleven years ago Parliament, in one of its 
 o 
 
2IO LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 hot fits of virtue, passed an Act intended to 
 check betting. The effect of it is that if I 
 ask a man to back a horse for me, and he 
 does so, and the bet is lost, and he pays for 
 me, I need not make the money good to him. 
 So also if I have made the bet myself and 
 have lost, and being in want of cash I ask 
 my best friend to pay it for me, and he in 
 the goodness of his heart does pay it for me, 
 I need not repay him. On the other hand, if 
 I ask my friend to make the bet for me, and 
 he does, and I win, and he receives the 
 amount of the wager, I can make him hand 
 over the amount to me. Therefore I have 
 the sanction of Parliament for the commission 
 of a most immoral fraud, for what can be 
 worse than to encourage a man to cheat 
 another like this ? Who would not condemn 
 as dishonourable in the highest degree a man 
 guilty of such conduct ? And yet he could 
 aver in his defence that he had done no more 
 than Parliament had prescribed. The Chief 
 Justice of the year 1892 said, " If one man 
 chooses to trust another in matters which are 
 called matters of honour, he must do so at 
 his own risk and with full knowledge that he 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 211 
 
 must suffer if the person whom he has 
 trusted chooses to repudiate what is called 
 his debt of honour." Quite so, but how 
 does this observation meet the case when the 
 law does not leave it to the honour of the 
 friend to pay over what he has received upon 
 the winning of the wager, but compels him 
 to do what is just? Of course the Act does 
 not extend to Stock Exchange gambling. Oh, 
 no ! If a time bargain is made by a broker 
 for a customer, the latter has the law on his 
 side when the gamble turns out well, and the 
 broker has the law on his side when the thing 
 goes wrong. But then that is called specu- 
 lation, not betting, and even the clergy do 
 not preach against it. 
 
 " Nothing worse can happen in a free 
 country than to force people to be churlish 
 about their rights for fear that their in- 
 dulgence may be abused, and to drive them 
 to prevent the enjoyment of things, which, 
 although they are matters of private property, 
 naturally give pleasure to many others besides 
 the owners, under the fear that their good 
 nature may be misunderstood." These are 
 wise words and worthy of their author, the 
 
2 12 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 late Lord Bowen. But when the Local 
 Government Act was before Parliament 
 there was a splendid disregard of all such 
 ideas. In the supposed interests of a down- 
 trodden public large powers were given to 
 local authorities to assert and maintain in the 
 courts of law alleged rights of way over 
 private lands. To the best of my recollec- 
 tion such law-suits as have been fought have 
 been determined for the most part in favour 
 of the landowners, and enormous burthens 
 have been thrown on the rates to pay the 
 costs of the litigation. That, however, is a 
 small evil. The mischief is that " people 
 have been forced to be churlish," and have 
 been driven to stop the passage of the public 
 over land, where before the Act all the neigh- 
 bours were allowed to go, and in many parts 
 spaces, hitherto left open for healthy and 
 pleasurable exploration, have been enclosed 
 to prevent the application of the process by 
 which under our law " a robbery may by the 
 lapse of time become a right and a trespass 
 an easement." Parliament has driven land- 
 owners to close their gates to preserve their 
 property, in fear lest the District Council 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 213 
 
 should construe acts of kindly courtesy into 
 admissions of public rights. 
 
 • The principle that if a workman is in- 
 jured in the course of his employment he 
 shall be maintained for a time, or if he is 
 killed that some reasonable compensation 
 shall be paid to relatives who were de- 
 pendent upon him, may fairly be accepted, 
 but what can be worse than to say to him, 
 " You have been hurt ; here is balm for 
 your wounds," and then to hand him a law- 
 suit, starting at the County Court and going 
 thence to the Court of Appeal, and thence to 
 the House of Lords ; and if he is killed to 
 offer the same boon to his widow and 
 orphan children. We see the employer only 
 too willing that money should be paid, but 
 the employer has delivered himself over 
 body and soul to an Insurance Office, which 
 does not pretend to have a soul. The 
 workman has invoked the aid of his Trades 
 Union, and so there is a campaign between 
 the latter and the Insurance Company, in 
 which defeat in the Court of Appeal is 
 perhaps followed by victory in the House of 
 Lords. • The Law Reports are full of these 
 
214 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 cases, text-books have been written about 
 the construction of the two Statutes, and 
 certain counsel have made a speciality of 
 their study. If I insure myself against 
 accidents, the Insurance Company, whose 
 policy I hold, does not want to know 
 whether I was hurt in a building thirty feet 
 high, or whether I was on a ship in a dock 
 under such circumstances that the ship was 
 or was not a warehouse. The company 
 only requires proper evidence that the 
 policy-holder has been hurt, and then pays 
 up. When I explained the effect of the 
 Workmen's Compensation Act to a country- 
 man, he said to me, " What sort of people 
 are they that sit in Parliament and make 
 such laws ? Why, there ought to be in- 
 surances against these accidents." It would 
 not have passed the wit of man to devise a 
 system of insurance which would have 
 obviated the scandal of these innumerable 
 and extravagant law-suits in pursuit of a 
 laudable object. If we did not know better, 
 we should think that the House of Commons 
 was so enamoured of the lawyers that 
 it was moved by anxiety to provide the 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 215 
 
 courts with business when slackness is 
 apprehended. 
 
 The free Briton is always ready to gibe at 
 the much-governed Teuton, but we are 
 rapidly catching up the German system of 
 parental or rather grandmotherly interference 
 with the liberty of the subject. Parliament 
 loves to pass Statutes under which local 
 authorities obtain all sorts of powers over the 
 inhabitants of their district, and the courts 
 are worried with controversies as to the 
 validity of bye-laws framed by busy-bodies 
 and narrow-minded faddists. A borough 
 has a public library supported by a rate. 
 Thereupon some Purists carry a resolution 
 to black out the Sporting Intelligence in 
 the newspapers, and I suppose that other 
 advocates of morality by Act of Parliament 
 will try to black out the Stock Exchange 
 price lists ; others the Police News ; others 
 the Divorce Court cases ; and in the interests 
 of economy the advertisements of milliners 
 and dressmakers, except perhaps those of 
 milliners offering ladies' hats at 7s. 6d., which 
 my worthy friend, his honour Judge Bacon, has 
 from the Bench declared to be the proper price. 
 
2i6 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 One of the best illustrations of the folly of 
 this class of Statutes is afforded by the case 
 of Rossi V. Edinburgh Corporation, decided 
 by the House of Lords in November 1 904. 
 The Scotch Courts appear to have a splendid 
 method of testing the validity of acts done 
 by justices, for they allow the aggrieved 
 person to institute a suit and ask for a 
 declaration, which is certainly better than 
 our way of quashing orders by writs of 
 certiorari. The good people of Edinburgh 
 also had the luck to entertain an angel un- 
 awares in the person of a gentleman of 
 public spirit, whose name seems to indicate 
 descent from some tribune of ancient Rome. 
 It appears that Parliament had passed an 
 Act imposing a penalty for selling "ice- 
 cream " in Edinburgh without a licence from 
 the magistrates, and that Mr Rossi, the 
 pursuer in the action, had applied for a 
 licence. Thereupon their worships proposed 
 to issue to him a licence to sell " ice-cream," 
 but subject to various conditions. One was 
 that he was to shut up his shop altogether on 
 Sunday or other day set apart for public 
 worship by lawful authority ; another that he 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 217 
 
 must close his shop from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. 
 every night, another that his licence might 
 be revoked or suspended at any moment. • If, 
 therefore, he or any other tradesman in 
 Edinburgh wanted to add the sale of ice- 
 cream to fifty or one hundred other com- 
 modities, he had to come under these 
 conditions or forego the licence. So Mr 
 Rossi brought his action to have it declared 
 that the justices had no jurisdiction to 
 impose all these conditions, and In the House 
 of Lords his blow for freedom was struck 
 to a grand purpose. -Lord Halsbury said, " I 
 confess for myself I am wholly unable to 
 understand what question of public order 
 arises in the sale of ice-cream ; but I pass 
 that by, because I do not know what was the 
 occasion of this legislation. What is sought 
 to be done is to restrain a common right 
 which all his Majesty's subjects have — the 
 right to open their shops and sell what they 
 please, subject to legislative restriction." 
 And Lord Robertson said, *' The licence 
 would compel a man, who had a general 
 baking or confectionery business, to shut 
 shop at the specified hours, merely because 
 
2i8 LIFE IN THE LAW 
 
 one, and it might be an unimportant item of 
 his business was ice-cream. If the legis- 
 lature should in the future come to estimate 
 the importance of ice-cream higher than it 
 seems at present, it may adopt the strongest 
 measure proposed ; but in the meantime the 
 magistrates must be content to keep pace with 
 the legislature." These are words of wisdom, 
 but we cannot always expect to have judges 
 so determined to keep under control the 
 fantastic tricks of men dressed in a little 
 brief authority. • 
 • Sir William Anson in his book, The 
 Law and Custom of the Constitution, writes, 
 " Mediaeval legislation, where it was not 
 simply declaratory of custom, was scanty, and 
 tojudgefrom the preambles of Statutes, timid 
 and even apologetic. Modern legislation is 
 restless, bold, and almost inquisitorial in its 
 dealing with the daily concerns of life." One 
 of the worst forms of this inquisition is the 
 enormous increase in "officialdom."- Just 
 outside the great gate of Lincoln's Inn a big 
 building is being run up at huge expense, in 
 order that a pack of officials may try their 
 raw hands at Government transfer of real 
 
THE SINS OF THE LAW 219 
 
 property, and supersede the skill and wisdom 
 of counsel and of solicitors. If these officials 
 manage to get the machinery to go, county 
 after county will be invaded. This is only 
 an example of the whole tendency of modern 
 legislation, which is based upon the theory 
 that an official, whose interest in work begins 
 and ends with his salary, can do our business 
 better than we can do it for ourselves. All 
 this of course means curtailment of that in- 
 dividual liberty, which is the most precious 
 of human rights. We can boast that we put 
 down the Stuarts, that we have survived the 
 oligarchy of the early Georgian Whigs, and 
 the absolutism of the later Georgian Tories. 
 These were political triumphs, and we have 
 right to be proud of the men who achieved 
 them. But our political liberty will be of 
 small value if we are condemned to the loss 
 of personal and civil liberty, and if Parliament 
 goes on unchecked in its present course of 
 legislation, we shall have to get up a new 
 revolution, hang all local officials to the 
 nearest lamp-posts, and make huge bonfires 
 of rules, orders and bye-laws throughout the 
 country. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, General Witt, 157, 158 
 Addenbrooke's Hospital, 1 1 
 Adler, Dr, 96 
 Aldridge, Mr, 191 
 Alexandra case, 173 
 Aliens, 130, 131 
 Alverstone, Lord, 167, l68 
 Anson, Sir William, 218 
 Anthony, Prince of Hohenzol- 
 
 lem-Sigmaringen, 146, 147 
 Apps, Thomas, 196 
 Atherton, Attorney - General, 
 
 16. 
 Attorney - General v. Wright, 
 
 120, 122 
 Avory, 71 
 Aylesbury Assizes, 3, 13 
 
 Bacon, Vice-Chancellor, 103, 
 
 105, 215 
 Badger, T. S., 30, 31, 40 
 Ballantine, Sergeant, 40, 48, 
 
 70 
 Bankruptcy, 187-196 
 Bar, training for the, 25-30 
 Bathyany, Count, 151 
 Belts Life, 126 
 Benjamin, 102, 158-168, 181 
 Betteley, Edward, 72 
 Betting, 125, 126, 210 
 Bevan, WilUam, 3, 60, 61 
 Blackburn, Lord, 63, 108, 109 
 Booth, "General," 120, 148 
 Bovill, Sir William, no, 112 
 Bow Street, 40 
 Bowen, Lord, 39, 105, 212 
 Brampton, Lord, 88 
 Bramwell, Baron, 80, 84, 1 1 6, 
 
 118 
 Bray, Justice, 134 
 
 Brewer, Henry O., of New 
 
 York, 144 
 Bribery, 75, 76, 131, 132 
 Brickwood, 5, 6, 8, 9 
 Brougham, Lord, 24, 81, 138, 
 
 196 
 Buckingham Palace, 171 
 Bucknill, Justice, 53 
 Bullock, Captain, isSj I77 
 
 Cairns, Lord, 60, 61, 174 
 Caricatures, 95, 96 
 Caroline, Queen, 24 
 Cave, Justice, 119-122 
 Central Criminal Court, 40, 69, 
 
 70 
 Chamberlain, Joseph, 187, 195 
 Chambers, Montagu, 64 
 Champneys, Rev. Charles, of 
 
 Milton, 2 
 Champneys, Dr, of Slough, 
 
 2.3 
 
 Chelmsford, Lord, 166, 181 
 Chitty, Sir Joseph, 91-93 
 Chitty, Thomas, the pleader, 32, 
 
 38-40 
 Choate, 67, 136, 167 
 City and Suburban Handicap, 
 
 86, 173 
 Clarke, Sir Andrew, 127 
 Cockbum, Lord Chief Justice, 
 
 78, 109, no, 128, 177, 178 
 Coleridge, Sir John Duke, 110- 
 
 "4 
 Corry, Montague, 37 
 Cottenham village, 22-24 
 Cotton, Lord Justice, 49 
 Counsel's opinion, 32, 164 
 County Court Acts, 196-201 
 Couza, Prince, 146 
 
 221 
 
222 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Coventry, Lord, ». Willes 
 
 ("Argus"), 76-79 
 Cranworth, Lord Chancellor, 4 
 Crompton, Justice, 77 
 
 Daily Telegraph, 19, 45 
 
 Danckwerts, 71, 72 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, 142, 149, 158, 
 
 IS9, 17s 
 Dawson, Daniel, 19 
 Denman, Justice, 122, 164 
 Denny Abbey, 2, 5 
 Derby, Lord, 171 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 169 
 Dodd, Sergeant, 76 
 Douglas, Stephen A., 142 
 
 Eastwood, 31 
 
 Elwon, Major, 86 
 
 Equity, 60, 118, 131, 179, 181, 
 
 184, 202 
 Erlanger, Baron Emile, 149 
 Esher, Lord, 97, 105-108, 123 
 Eton, 3, 13, 58, 68, 73, 84, 150, 
 
 158. 1 59 
 Eustis, 153, 154, 158 
 Evening Standard, 145 
 Evidence, evil of expert, 87 
 Eyre, Governor, 40, 41 
 
 Fen Ditton, near Cambridge, 
 
 S. 
 Festive evenings, 83 
 Field, Lord, 96 
 Filmore, President, 165 
 Finlay, Sir Robert, 52 
 Forster, W. E., 68 
 Fust, Sir Herbert Jenner, 5 
 
 GiFFARD, Hardinge, 41 
 
 Gladstone, W. E., 61 
 
 Glass, 102, 103 
 
 Goodford, Dr, of Eton, 40, 159 
 
 Grand Jury, 18, 138 
 
 Grand Nights, 81-84 
 
 Grand President, 168 
 
 Grantham, Justice, 32 
 Greenhovif, Mrs, 175 
 Gregory and Rowcliffe, of Bed- 
 ford Row, 61, 179 
 Grenadier Guards, 64, 75 
 Grimshaw, Private, 76 
 Guildford Assizes, 79 
 
 Hall, Sir Charles, 39, 131 
 Halsbury, Lord, 70, 160, 21 7 
 Hanging, public, 19 
 Hannan, Lord James, 39, 40, 41, 
 
 47. 55. 108, 109, 177 
 Hardwicke, Lord, loi 
 Harrington, Sir Richard, 198, 
 
 199 
 Hatherley, Lord, 60 
 Hawkins, Justice, 40, 70, 88 
 Head, Charles, 3 
 Hearing in court, 57, 58 
 Hemming, 104 
 Herschell, Lord, 39, 59, 60 
 Honyman, Sir George, 83 
 Hotze, Henry, 141-148 
 Howard, 62 
 
 Huddleston, Baron, no 
 Hull, of Liverpool, 179 
 
 Inderwick, S5 
 Index, The, 143 
 Inns of Court Regiment, 38, 75 
 
 James, Edward, 178 
 
 James, Martha, of Fen Ditton, 6 
 
 James, Rev. William Brown, or 
 
 Fen Ditton, 6 
 James, Sir W. M., 182 
 Japan law, 209 
 Jermy of Stansfield Hall, 3 
 Jervis, Chief Justice, 58 
 Jessel, George, 31 
 Jockey Club, the, 77 
 Johnstone, President Andrew, 
 
 l68, 183 
 Joint Stock Companies, 98, 206- 
 
 209 
 
INDEX 
 
 223 
 
 Jones, Tom, 17 
 
 Judicature Act, 79, 99, 135, 202 
 Judicial Revolution, 203 
 Juries, 22-24 
 
 Karslake, Sir John, 76 
 
 Kato, Satori, 209 
 
 Keane, D. D., 42, 77 
 
 Kelly, Sir Fitzroy, 3, 17 
 
 Kemplay, 178 
 
 King's College, Cambridge, 13, 
 
 .154 
 Kingston - on - Thames Assizes, 
 
 79. 108 
 Kruger, Paul, 182 
 
 Lanyon, Charles, 32-36 
 
 Lee, General, 157 
 
 Levity in court, 102 
 
 Lhuys, Mons. Drouyn de, 170 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 146, 155, 
 
 165. 183 
 Lincoln's Inn, 25, 31, 32, 73, 76, 
 
 100, 104, 164, 218 
 Liverpool Assizes, 59 
 Local Government Act, 212, 
 
 21S-217 
 Lockwood, Frank, 95, 96, 162 
 Lopes, Sir Henry, no, 113, 124 
 Lord's Cricket Ground, 151 
 Loughborough, Lord, loi 
 Low, F., 91 
 Lowe, 65 
 
 Ludlow, Lord, no 
 Lush, Sir Robert, no 
 
 Macfarlane, 152-154 
 M'Rae, Colin, 145, 148-151, 154. 
 
 179-181 
 Maidstone Assizes, 49 
 Male attire, women in, 91, 92 
 Malins, Sir Richard, 100, 101 
 Manisty, Justice, 58, 127 
 Manoury, Mons. P., of Paris, 171 
 Marriott, Sir William, 32 
 Martin, Baron, 39, 116 
 
 Martin, Squire, of Quy Hall, 22 
 Martini, inventor of rifle, 170 
 Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall, 
 
 90,91 
 Mason, 152-154 
 Mathew, Justice, 135 
 Maule, Justice, 49 
 Maybrick, Mrs, 116 
 Merewether, 59 
 Mobile Register, The, 141 
 Money-lending, 46 
 Monkswell, Lord, 177 
 Morning Post, 77 
 
 Naylor, Thomas Hack, 23 
 Newmarket, 19, 24, 77-79, 125 
 Newton, 15, 16 
 New York Herald, 165 
 Norwich Assizes, 4, 42, 88, 117 
 Nubar Pasha, 170-172 
 
 Officialdom, 218, 219 
 
 O'Malley, 4, 42 
 
 Oratory, 169 
 
 Ouseley, Bells of, visit to, 159 
 
 Palmer, Sir Roundel, 60, 61, 
 
 174, 182 
 Palmerston, Lord, 153, 184 
 Pemberton, 19 
 
 Percival, the horse-dealer, 69, 70 
 Perjury, 51-54, 204 
 Philippe's restaurant, Paris, 154 
 Poker, 155 
 
 Poland, Henry Bodkin, 41, 70 
 Pollock, Lord Chief Baron Sir 
 
 Frederick, 1 1- 16, 105, 173 
 Power, 13 
 Prioleau, Charles Kuhn, 173, 
 
 182, 183 
 Pritchard & Sons, 54, 66 
 
 Ranger, Dr, 148 
 Rawle, Thomas, 178, 179 
 Rebuke, judge to counsel, 49 
 Richmond Sentinel, The, 176 
 
224 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ridley, Sir Matthew White, 39 
 
 Robertson, Lord, 217 
 
 Rolfe, Baron, 4 
 
 Rolt, Sir John, 65 
 
 Roman Law, 107 
 
 Rossi V. Edinburgh Corporation, 
 
 216-218 
 Roulette, iii 
 Roumania, 146, 147 
 Rowton, Lord, 32, 37 
 Runymede, Island of, visit to, 
 
 159 
 Russell, Lord, 54, S9> 63, 66, 
 72. 94. 95. 123. 172. 173 
 
 Sandringham, 157 
 
 Scott, General Wingfield, 153 
 
 Searle, 47 
 
 Selborne, Lord, 60 
 
 Selby, Viscount, 60 
 
 Serjeant's Inn, 38, 39 
 
 Sherbrooke, Lord, 65 
 
 Shining lights, 69 
 
 Sillem, 173 
 
 Slidell, IS3, 154 
 
 Small, Rev., 8, 9 
 
 Smith, Sir Archibald, 36, 39, 
 
 41, 52, no, 124, 139 
 Somnolence, 112 
 Spigot, Jack (race horse), 86 
 Standard, The, 144, 171 
 Stanhope, Edward, 39 
 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 
 
 "5 
 Summing up, 64, 118, 140 
 
 Taylor, General Dick, 157 
 Taylor, Joseph of Eton, 72, 73 
 Taylor, President Zachary, 157 
 Temple, The, 26, 39, 73, 75 
 Tichborne Claimant, no, in 
 Times, The, loi, 148, 171, 198, 
 
 209 
 Treasury Fees, 200, 201 
 
 Trials, Corbett, Captain Of the 
 Sea Xing, 177 ; Giblin, Henry, 
 of Swaffham Bulbeck, 9-12 ; 
 Rush, at the Norwich Assizes, 
 3; Smith, Edward, of Fen 
 Ditton, 4-9; Tarvell, the 
 Quaker of Salt Hill, 2, 3 
 
 Truro, Lord, 24 
 
 Truth, 197 
 
 Tucker, Mrs, of Exeter, i 
 
 United States Government 
 V. M'Rae, 179-181 ; United 
 States Government v. Prioleau, 
 182, 183 
 
 Vambery, Professor, 21 
 Vaughan, Justice, 19 
 Venud, Mons., 20 
 Victoria, Queen, 4 
 
 Walshe, Charles, 151 
 Weldon, Mrs, 104, 105 
 Westbury, Lord, 4, 189, 206 
 Wigfall, 168, 169 
 Wightman, Justice, 13, 128, 129 
 VS^ilde, Sergeant, 24 
 Wilhelmina, Queen, 97 
 Wilkes, Captain of the San 
 
 Jacinto, 153 
 Willes, Sir James Shaw, 80, loi, 
 
 108 
 Williams, George, 48 
 Williams, Montagu, 69 
 Williams, Senator, 155 
 Winch, Henry, 58 
 Windsor Bridge, 72 
 Wood, Alderman, 24 
 Wood, Vice-Chancellor, 179 
 Wood, James, of Bristol, 24 
 Wood, Page, 60 
 Workmen's Compensation Act, 
 
 213, 214 
 
 YoRKE, Eliot, 19 r- 
 
 COLSTON AND COV, LIMITED, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH 
 
T. Werner Laurie's 
 Novel Series. 
 
 A Lindsay^s Love 
 
 (A Tale of the Tuileries and the 
 Siege of Paris). 
 
 By 
 
 CHARLES LOWE. 
 
 Crown 8vo, Cloth Gilt, with Tartan Cover, 6/- 
 
 MR. CHARLES LOWE, who made his 
 first serious essay in fiction with " A 
 Fallen Star," has now completed a 
 much more ambitious novel, entitled 
 " A Lindsay's Love." 
 
 The central figure of the story, which is one 
 with a very strong love interest, is a young 
 Scotsman, David Lindsay, who — a student in 
 Paris at the outbreak of the Franco-German 
 war — joins the foreign " Legion of the Friends 
 of France," and plays a conspicuous part during 
 the siege. His cousin Margaret Gordon is the 
 heroine. 
 
 Other prominent characters are the Emperor 
 Louis Napoleon, with whom Lindsay is brought 
 into direct personal contact, and a lady palmist 
 who played a prominent role as " Prophetess of 
 the Second Empire." 
 
 The story — which incidentally presents a 
 vivid picture of Court life at the Tuileries, and 
 of the social and political corruption that proved 
 the ruin of the Empire — is a strong and thrilling 
 one, full of sensational and dramatic situations. 
 
 T. Werner Laurie, Clifford's Inn, London. 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS, 
 
 T. P.'s WEEKLY:— 
 
 " I can recommend this book to all readers 
 who appreciate' a fresh and vigorous story of 
 romance and war, told with a freshness of touch 
 which is becoming more and more rare in 
 modern fiction." 
 
 DAILY MAIL:— 
 
 " One must admire its wealth of invention. The 
 book is packed with incident and ' sensation.' 
 .... The tale should be popular." 
 
 VANITY FAIR:— 
 
 "Full of incident and vitality." 
 
 DAILY CHRONICLE:— 
 
 " A successful combination of love and adven- 
 ture. It should find many readers." 
 
 LLOYD'S NEWSPAPER:— 
 
 " A powerfully-written book, abounding with 
 sensational incidents and dramatic situations, 
 and lovers of fiction will heartily enjoy it." 
 
 PALL MALL GAZETTE :— 
 
 " Thoroughly humanly interesting." 
 
 EVENING STANDARD:— 
 
 " A capital plot, during which the hero goes 
 through adventures which are, for once, not of 
 the stereotyped kind." 
 
3 
 
 DUNDEE COURIER:— 
 
 "The romantic element quite as interesting 
 as the historical." 
 
 MORNING ADVERTISER :— 
 
 " Easy, graceful, and graphic style." 
 
 EVENING TELEGRAPH:— 
 
 " Full of the most thrilling situations, and the 
 scenes — whether of court, or war, or love — are 
 well told." 
 
 ABERDEEN JOURNAL:— 
 
 " The book is to be highly commended for its 
 clever plot, its close observation of French life, 
 and its spirited battle pieces." 
 
 EASTERN MORNING NEWS :— 
 
 " One of the best novels that the season has 
 produced." 
 
 BYSTANDER:— 
 
 "The book is masterly." 
 
 STIRLING SENTINEL:— 
 
 "We would place this stirring, healthy tale of 
 love and adventure far in front of the kailyard 
 productions." 
 
 GLASGOW HERALD :— 
 
 " Takes a high rank in modern romantic 
 fiction." 
 
 DUNDEE ADVERTISER :- 
 
 " An exciting well-told tale, strong and thrill- 
 ing." 
 
SCOTSMAN :— 
 
 " Its action is always kept moving from inci- 
 dent to incident of surprise.' ' 
 
 NEWCASTLE DAILY JOURNAL:— 
 
 " Thiere is a breeziness about the story that 
 is very refreshing." 
 
 DUBLIN DAILY EXPRESS:— 
 
 '■ An excellent story." 
 
 DAILY EXPRESS:— 
 
 " The love side of the story is equally strong 
 and full of incidents." 
 
 WEEKLY SCOTSMAN:— 
 
 " Strong and vigorous, and replete with varied 
 incident." 
 
 INVERNESS COURIER:— 
 
 " Nothing dull in the story nor uninteresting 
 in the characters who appear in it." 
 
 EDINBURGH MAGAZINE:— 
 
 " Certain to be largely read." 
 
 MONTROSE STANDARD:— 
 
 " Not only a novel of surpassing interest but 
 of profound ingenuity and skill." 
 
 London : 
 
 T. WERNER LAURIE, 
 
 Clifford's Inn.