be conceived. I also remembered that the Duke of St. Albans was the lineal descendant of Miss Gwyn, and the truth is that this office in 1815 was being carried on as a sinecure office and given to the Duke of St. Albans, when the real purpose of the office was to enter and draw up judgments, enter the names of witnesses, and do that common, rather dreary official work that is connected with our Courts of Chancery. Pursuing the matter a little further, I found there was hardly one of the offices in the whole of the Courts that was not absolutely infested with sinecure holders, who received all the salaries, who sweated out the places, and the people whom they appointed as their substitutes in turn sweated all the litigants of all the fees they possibly could, with little check or hindrance, for the purpose of lining their purses. I found that the administration of the Court of Chancery, and of the King's Bench was what today we should call rotten to the core, and yet someone who pointed out that Lord Eldon's son held six sinecure offices was greatly reproached by Lord Eldon because he had improperly pried into his private affairs. That was the way in which people were looking at things at that date. I could tell you, but the recital would become wearisome, of an enormous number of similar instances, but I want to go on to one or two that may come home to you more closely.

Take our criminal law, which was redeemed and reformed by the efforts of one of the greatest lawyers that ever lived, Sir Samuel Romilly. At that time any person, boy, man or woman could be hung for stealing five shillings from a shop, or forty shillings from a dwelling house, for hunting in the King's preserves, for appearing in a rabbit warren with a gun and a blackened face, for not surrendering to his bail in bankruptcy, and for a variety of other causes such as fishing in other people's waters, for which misdemeanor today a man might possibly be fined twenty or thirty shillings, or might be dismissed with a caution and told never to do it again. That was the law at that time, and few could be brought to understand that it needed improvement. They might indeed have said, "What is the standard which you would apply for the punishment of man," and you would have been able to refer them to one of the edicts of King Canute issued nearly a thousand years before, because this is what he said: "Though anyone sin let the correction be regulated so that it be becoming before God and tolerable before the world, and let him who has power of judgment bear in mind what he himself desires when he says, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,' and we command that Christian men be not on any account for altogether too little condemned to death, and let not lightly

be destroyed God's handiwork, His own purchase, which He dearly bought."

None the less, at the end of nearly a thousand years, our Courts had remained in the condition of savagery to which I have referred, and the reason why I have mentioned it is this: At that time, while these courts were really honeycombed by gross sinecure patronage and were administering cruel and shameful laws, remember that we had sitting upon the Bench some of the very finest of English judges, high-minded men, who were not only justly and faithfully administering justice, but were laying down the law as we apply it today, men to whose judgment at this very hour we turn for the purpose of finding support and guidance in the difficulties that from time to time arise. Why was it that these men were unable to see what was before their eyes? Why did they consent to such a condition of things going on? The answer is the one thing that I want to impress upon you tonight-you cannot see the thing that is at your feet. You can look back upon the past, you may look forward to the future, but there is a dust that follows the flying feet of the years that puts a haze before your eyes and prevents you, unless you look very steadily, from being able to see the things that are near. The very first duty, therefore, of everyone connected with the law is to keep a constant, vigilant watch and ward over the things that are around about him, the machinery that he is using, the procedure by which he acts, the laws that he administers, and he ought, above all people, to see that these are really adequate to the needs of the country in which he works, and to be ready at any moment, without the least regard to his own self-interest, to scrap and destroy everything that stands in the light of progress.

If I may most humbly and respectfully suggest to all you people who are engaged in the profession in which I have spent my life, there is one way and one way only by which a thing can be tested. Every lawyer should look at his case as though he were the litigant and not the attorney. He should look and see whether it was possible that the case could be expedited. He should look and see whether it was possible that expense could be spared. He should regard as far as he possibly could the hopes, the anxieties, the suspense, the hazard, and all the trouble that is so often associated with law suits as though they were his own, and then, with that constantly before his mind, see what is the best thing that can be done for his client, and if he finds that his pathway is entangled he should then work to cut the rubbish away.

You may say to me: "This is all very well, but what do you suggest

that we are to look for? Things are on the whole pretty well. Why do you find fault, and say they are not.". I say there are things that want looking for, and I would lay down these principles as the principles that ought to guide all of us in our work. In the first place, of course, the Bench must be incorruptible. In the second place, justice should be swift. In the next place, as far as possible, it should be certain. And, above all things, it ought to be open to the poor as well as to the rich.

Let me say a word or two on each of those heads. In regard to the first, I don't think there is anything new to say. I have for forty years been connected with the law, and during ten years I have been privileged to assist in the administration of justice in cases that have come from some of the very farthest corners of our great Empire. You may find from time to time that there has been carelessness. You may sometimes find there has been lack of wisdom. But I say without the least hesitation that in all those forty years to which I refer, emphasized by the last ten which I have mentioned, I have never found any case in which a Judge within the British Empire could be accused of deflecting justice for an improper cause. And we may each of us repeat with pride that there is no individual whose smile or frown, there is no Government --Liberal, Conservative or Labour-whose favour or disfavour can start the pulse of one of our Judges on the Bench, nor stir by even one hair's breadth the even equipoise of the scales of justice. That has been obtained after centuries of effort and struggle because anyone who reads our history knows it was not always so. It has been maintained and it must be kept by us, not merely by vigilance, but by something more. A position upon the Bench, whatever Bench it may be, ought not merely to be an office of dignity, it ought to be a position of the highest honour, and everyone should treat the man who is administering justice, even if it is in the very humblest Court, as a man who has engaged in a work that is something far greater than the ordinary service of the State. He is not merely the servant of the Government. He is the minister of one of the most august and most divine duties that has been entrusted by Providence to man, the administration of justice as between his fellow creatures.

When you come to the next thing and consider whether it be possible that law should be expedited and delays destroyed, surely everyone of us knows that from time to time the procedure with which we get familiar does not accelerate the course of business. We are accustomed to it; we do not like leaving it; it means mental effort

to learn something new, and the old thing has served its purpose so well we think it may go on serving it a little longer. Believe me, that is wrong. One thing that ought to be done is this: Every form of procedure-I am speaking of the conditions at home just as much as I do here, for I don't know your procedure should be from time to time examined for this purpose to see if the conditions are made as simple as they can possibly be. There is no need to hedge the law about with mystery. The common claims and common disputes in ordinary civil actions can be made the subject of perfectly simple and plain language, and they should be. When that is done it ought to be possible to see whether the issue cannot be so clearly defined that it can be brought swiftly and speedily to trial. When tried there should be no obscurity and no ambiguity about the dispute. It should be plain for the Judge to hear, and for counsel to argue. I am not sure that anywhere-I am quite certain that not in England-have we yet reached that goal. It may be a difficult thing to do, but it certainly is one of the things beyond all others which the men upon the Bench and at the Bar ought to devote their attention to secure.

Then, there is the other thing, that the law should be certain. Of course, that is very difficult to ensure, but it does get more certain time by time and day by day. The law is being slowly clarified, and I believe myself it is not expecting too much to find that as the laws get administered, as they are administered today by men who above everything desire to see that the decisions they make are plain for all to read, the law will become more and more certain as time goes on. That it ever can become an exact science is of course impossible.

Finally, there remains the big problem, which I noticed with great pleasure formed one of the matters for consideration at your meetings, and that is what steps are we to take to remove from our profession the reproach that the poor man cannot get the same even-handed justice as the rich? It does not mean that he does not get justice before the Bench. That I have never heard said. But that in the ability to employ clever counsel and clever lawyers, and to spend the money necessary for the preparation of a case, he was at a disadvantage with the rich litigant, and the result of that disadvantage may well be that the scales of justice may be turned against him. It is a well-deserved reproach that we all must remember, because we know within limits that it is true. That the scales of justice are heavily weighted against the poor litigant is not an accurate statement, but nobody can deny that the rich litigant by being able

to get hold of the best men has an advantage. How are we going to meet that? It is something that needs to be met. I believe myself it could be met both here and at home if everybody engaged in the law, either where the branches are divided into counsel and solicitor or where they are one, just simply as lawyers, if every person took a certain number of worthy poor persons' cases in the course of a year and dealt with them exactly as he would with the case of a rich client, we should have gone a long way to remove the reproach. Whether that consideration be worthy of further development or not, at any rate I throw it out to you as one of the things that does at least merit a passing thought, and may lead to the development of a valuable. reform.

When that is done, we even then have not exhausted or approximately exhausted all that is left for us to do. Surely there remains the greatest work of all. We must extend the ambit and area of justice until it embraces in its majestic scope not merely the quarrels between man and man but the quarrels between all the angry warring nations of the earth. We must do something to help forward the day that will come in the end, though the road to it may be marked by bitterness and tears, when justice shall prevail over the earth and the sword shall devour no more.

We also have cast upon us a very grave and serious responsibility. We are not, and we ought not ever to be, people who merely know the law and appear in Courts and plead cases. We ought to be and our historic rôle has always made us far more than that. We are the people who not merely administer the law, but who ought to shape and help to make the law. No lawyer ought to exclude himself utterly and entirely from the great public life of which he forms a part. He beyond all other men is bound to use his energies, because he knows the way in which the law can be altered and framed for the benefit of all mankind.

We live in interesting times. I have no sympathy with people who tell me that the world is old. When they tell you that it means they are old, it does not mean the world is old. The world is as new today as when the sons of the morning shouted for joy. The people who tell you it is old are preaching the outworn creed of decrepitude and decay. The world is new. New forces are daily coming into it, new forces which unless controlled and guided may break up and ruin the civilisation that you know.

You must indeed be dull of sensibility if you have not from time 26 C.B.R. VOL. III.