There is no need to recapitulate all the circumstances of Erskine's rapid rise in his profession—a rise due to his effective brilliance and fervor in political trial: but this chapter on lawyers' fees would be culpably incomplete, if it failed to notice some of its pecuniary consequences. In the eighth month after his call to the bar he thanked Admiral Keppel for a splendid fee of one thousand pounds. A few years later a legal gossip wrote: "Everybody says that Erskine will be Solicitor General, and if he is, and indeed whether he is or not, he will have had the most rapid rise that has been known at the bar. It is four years and a half since he was called, and in that time he has cleared £8000 or £9000, besides paying his debts—got a silk gown, and business of at least £3000 a year—a seat in Parliament—and, over and above, has made his brother Lord Advocate."
Merely to mention large fees without specifying the work by which they were earned would mislead the reader. During the railway mania of 1845, the few leaders of the parliamentary bar received prodigious fees; and in some cases the sums were paid for very little exertion. Frequently it happened that a lawyer took heavy fees in causes, at no stage of which he either made a speech or read a paper in the service of his too liberal employers. During that period of mad speculation the committee-rooms of the two Houses were an El Dorado to certain favored lawyers, who were alternately paid for speech and silence with reckless profusion. But the time was so exceptional, that the fees received and the fortunes made in it by a score of lucky advocates and solicitors cannot be fairly cited as facts illustrating the social condition of legal practitioners. As a general rule, it may be stated that large fortunes are not made at the bar by large fees. Our richest lawyers have made the bulk of their wealth by accumulating sufficient but not exorbitant payments. In most cases the large fee has not been a very liberal remuneration for the work done. Edward Law's retainer for the defence of Warren Hastings brought with it £500—a sum which caused our grandfathers to raise their hands in astonishment at the nabob's munificence; but the sum was in reality the reverse of liberal. In all, Warren Hastings paid his leading advocate considerably less than four thousand pounds; and if Law had not contrived to win the respect of solicitors by his management of the defence, the case could not be said to have paid him for his trouble. So also the eminent advocate, who in the great case of Small v. Attwood received a fee of £6000, was actually underpaid. When he made up the account of the special outlay necessitated by that cause, and the value of business which the burdensome case compelled him to decline, he had small reason to congratulate himself on his remuneration.
A statement of the incomes made by chamber-barristers, and of the sums realized by counsel in departments of the profession that do not invite the attention of the general public, would astonish those uninformed persons who estimate the success of a barrister by the frequency with which his name appears in the newspaper reports of trials and suits. The talkers of the bar enjoy more éclat than the barristers who confine themselves to chamber practice, and their labors lead to the honors of the bench; but a young lawyer, bent only on the acquisition of wealth, is more likely to achieve his ambition by conveyancing or arbitration-business than by court-work. Kenyon was never a popular or successful advocate, but he made £3000 a year by answering cases. Charles Abbott at no time of his life could speak better than a vestryman of average ability; but by drawing informations and indictments, by writing opinions on cases, he made the greater part of the eight thousand pounds which he returned as the amount of his professional receipts in 1807. In our own time, when that popular common law advocate, Mr. Edwin James, was omnipotent with juries, his income never equalled the incomes of certain chamber-practitioners whose names are utterly unknown to the general body of English society.
[12] Lord Campbell observes: "Some say that special retainers began with Erskine; but I doubt the fact." It is strange that there should be uncertainty as to the time when special retainers—unquestionably a comparatively recent innovation in legal practice—came into vogue.
CHAPTER XIV.
JUDICIAL CORRUPTION.
To a young student making his first researches beneath the surface of English history, few facts are more painful and perplexing than the judicial corruption which prevailed in every period of our country's growth until quiet recent times—darkening the brightest pages of our annals, and disfiguring some of the greatest chieftains of our race.
Where he narrates the fall and punishment of De Weyland towards the close of the thirteenth century, Speed observes: "While the Jews by their cruel usuries had in one way eaten up the people, the justiciars, like another kind of Jews, had ruined them with delay in their suits, and enriched themselves with wicked convictions." Of judicial corruption in the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. a vivid picture is given in a political ballad, composed in the time of one or the other of those monarchs. Of this poem Mr. Wright, in his 'Political Songs,' gives a free version, a part of which runs thus:—
"Judges there are whom gifts and favorites control,
Content to serve the devil alone and take from him a toll;
If nature's law forbids the judge from selling his decree,
How dread to those who finger bribes the punishment shall be.
"Such judges have accomplices whom frequently they send
To get at those who claim some land, and whisper as a friend,
''Tis I can help you with the judge, if you would wish to plead,
Give me but half, I'll undertake before him you'll succeed.'
"The clerks who sit beneath the judge are open-mouthed as he,
As if they were half-famished and gaping for a fee;
Of those who give no money they soon pronounce the state,
However early they attend, they shall have long to wait.
"If comes some noble lady, in beauty and in pride,
With golden horns upon her head, her suit he'll soon decide;
But she who has no charms, nor friends, and is for gifts too poor,
Her business all neglected, she's weeping shown the door.
"But worse than all, within the court we some relators meet,
Who take from either side at once, and both their clients cheat;
The ushers, too, to poor men say, 'You labor here in vain,
Unless you tip us all around, you may go back again.'
"The sheriff's hard upon the poor who cannot pay for rest,
Drags them about to every town, on all assizes press'd
Compell'd to take the oath prescrib'd without objection made,
For if they murmur and can't pay, upon their backs they're laid.
"They enter any private house, or abbey that they choose,
Where meat and drink and all things else are given as their dues;
And after dinner jewels too, or this were all in vain,
Bedels and garçons must receive, and all that form the train.
"And next must gallant robes be sent as presents to their wives,
Or from the manor of the host some one his cattle drives;
While he, poor man, is sent to gaol upon some false pretence,
And pays at last at double cost, ere he gets free from thence.
"I can't but laugh to see their clerks, whom once I knew in need,
When to obtain a bailiwick they may at last succeed;
With pride in gait and countenance and with their necks erect
They lands and houses quickly buy and pleasant rents collect.
"Grown rich they soon the poor despise, and new-made laws display,
Oppress their neighbors and become the wise men of their day;
Unsparing of the least offence, when they can have their will,
The hapless country all around with discontent they fill."