At one time the decider has confined himself to the strictest letter of the law, at another time he has strained it to breaking; sometimes he has read the laws one with another; sometimes he has taken one and left the other out in the cold; sometimes he appears arbitrarily to give his decision out of his own head, quite irrespective of any law whatever; and finally, and worst of all, after consistently maintaining one position for years and years, until—rightly or wrongly—some doubtful point is settled, he suddenly turns round, with his tail where his head always used to be, flatly contradicts himself, and throws it once more into confusion.
The usual excuse for a volte face of this kind is, “that this is a free country, where every man has a right to change his opinions;” and I never hear that dreadful exordium without instinctively making for the door, knowing from bitter experience that mischief is brewing. “That judges themselves differ, and the judgment of one court is often over-ruled by another,” this also is, I am afraid, true, though it has no bearing on the matter in hand; for here we have a judge who, on his appointment to the bench—granting, what is strongly disputed, that a Whist arbitrator is a judge and has a bench—having found a well-established precedent and taken it for his guide in numerous judgments, one fine day reverses it without notice and without leave to appeal.
To show that I am not making random accusations, I give three examples—there are others in stock, but these appear sufficient for my immediate purpose:—
I. “The cards are cut. In taking up the packs, I join the two packs, but leave one card on the table; this card would have been the middle, not the bottom card. I claim a fresh cut; my adversaries claim that it is a misdeal. Am I entitled to a new cut or not?” Answer, No. 1. “We think you cannot make your adversary cut a second time. We do not think that when you left a card on the table it could be said that there was any confusion in the cutting, and unless you can make out that what you did amounted to confusion in the cutting, it is a misdeal.”
Answer, No. 2. “The claim is void. There is nothing in the laws or the custom of the table to make this a misdeal.” Both these decisions are by the same authority. A more recent authority says, “According to the old rules, a misdeal might have been claimed; but not now, under Law 34.” The explanation is ingenious, if not ingenuous; but it is open to the objection that, as the first decision is dated December, 1873, nine years after the present laws came into force, it is scarcely water-tight.
II. If A asked B whether he had any of a suit in which B had renounced, and B, instead of replying, turned and quitted the trick, and was subsequently brought to bed of one or more, his silence, combined with turning and quitting the trick, was ruled to be an answer in the negative within the meaning of the Law and he had revoked.
This is a decision of Clay’s; and though disputed at the time, was the settled practice of Whist for fourteen or fifteen years.
Three or four years ago this decision was reversed, and authority has now taken its stand upon the literal interpretation of Law 74.
III. Some little time since my opinion was asked on this point. It was sent to me by a friend in Australia. “A and B v. Y and Z. Eleven tricks have been played. At the twelfth trick A leads a Heart, Y plays a Club, B plays a Spade. Before Z has played, Y throws down his last card, which turns out to be a Heart. Has he revoked?”
Being mortally afraid of putting my foot in it, I much prefer to leave the mysterious borderland between sanity and insanity to experts in lunacy; however, in the sacred cause of friendship, I screwed up my courage, and, with considerable trepidation, gave an opinion to this effect. “It appears to me that Y certainly—this sounds unpleasantly like slang, but such is not my intention—revoked if the club was a trump, and, probably, if it was a card of a plain suit, for in playing his last card he either led or abandoned his hand, which has always been held to be an act of play establishing the revoke.”