But if during the prolonged pursuit of pleasure—which after her careful education your daughter ought now to be able to plan and carry out for herself—no son-in-law solvent or insolvent appears, then when you have departed to another sphere leaving behind assets insufficient to meet your worldly liabilities, or—as we may hope will be your case, dear reader,—when you have called together the callous creditors into an upper chamber of some persuasive accountant who can explain to them cheerily the true inwardness of your estate, and tender, with fitting apology, the pence that now represent the pound that was,—think not with the austere moralist that this costly education of your daughter has been a rash and hazardous speculation. Let us be thankful that the world is not at one with the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy with his sallow views of the possibilities of life. True your daughter will know nothing, and be fit for nothing, true it will take her years of misery to make herself capable of the meanest employment. She has eaten dinners she cannot cook, she has worn dresses she cannot make, she has lived in rooms she cannot sweep, and she has grumbled at the service of others she could not herself perform, but at least you can say that she has been brought up as other gentlewomen are, and that shall be your boast.
THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTY COURT.
“Had I God’s leave, how I would alter things!”
—Robert Browning.
The County Court like the poor in whose interests it was invented is always with you if you have one of those perverted minds that wastes its moments on dreams of legal reform. Seventeen years ago I studied the question with earnest enthusiasm under the strange hallucination that it was a real business question ripe for a business solution. It seemed to me nearer to the lives of people than the Veto, or Tariff Reform or the Ornaments Rubric. That is the result of leading a narrow self-centred life. In a word, without knowing it, I must have been a Whig, for, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, “Whigs will live and die in the heresy that the world is ruled by little pamphlets and speeches, and that if you can sufficiently demonstrate that a line of conduct is most consistent with men’s interest you have therefore and thereby demonstrated that they will at length after a few speeches adopt it of course.” Thus for many years I have pegged away with papers and speeches and like a true Whig find myself still hopefully at it, playing the same game perhaps but with slightly increased handicap. To-day I have learned by experience that the future of the County Court is not to come in my time and to doubt if I shall ever climb into some sufficiently high place to see the promised land that I shall certainly never enter.
I have come to regard the question with the same child-like affection and belief in its possibility, but also in a sense archæologically, as becomes one whose first childhood is but a dream and who feels himself pausing on the threshold of a second. Had I any political foresight seventeen years ago I should have recognised that the reform of the County Court system is not a party matter, it is eminently a matter of greater interest to the poor than to the rich, to the business man than to the man of leisure. Now, more and more, Parliament has become a machine for registering the decrees of the prevailing party and one cannot find that the poor are in any way directly represented in Parliament and business men only in a small degree, whilst the interests of the rich and of men of leisure have an overwhelming representation. Moreover Legal Reform has to fight for its hand against that band of brothers, the lawyers in Parliament, who from generation to generation we find stalwart and faithful in their clear-sighted optimism that all is well with the law—and lawyers.
The story of the evolution of the County Court is not without entertainment for those who are interested in the practical affairs of the community. In its struggle for existence we find a warfare being carried on between the business man and the lawyer in which, foot by foot, the business man gains and places his pet tribunal in a more secure position whilst he takes breath for a new encounter. Still, although the building up of the County Court to its present story of usefulness has been the work in the main of business men, yet few realise that the County Court of to-day with its £100 jurisdiction is only a belated attainment of the ideals of Lord Brougham in 1830. It was in that year that Brougham brought in a Bill in the Commons—he was then member for Yorkshire—to establish “Local District Courts,” with a jurisdiction limited to £100 in contract, £50 in injury to person or property, and an unlimited jurisdiction by consent. It has taken us seventy-five years to arrive at the position that was thought practicable by a great reforming Chancellor in 1830. And yet there are many Englishmen in daily terror lest we should reform anything too hurriedly. Lord Brougham’s ruling idea was free law. He was in a sense a legal socialist. Law to him was one of those things that every member of an ideal community should have without paying for it individually, like fresh air and sunshine, and the Church of England and the British Museum, and gaslight (in urban streets), and roads, and the police, and the education of your children—all which things an English citizen is entitled to have to-day without the payment of any fees. He admitted the over-ruling necessity of fees in his day, owing to the poverty of the Exchequer, but he said, “he must enter his protest against the principle, and insist that any tax no matter what, for the purpose of drawing the payment from the public rather than from the suitor would be better than fixing it on legal proceedings.” Free law is, of course, a grand ideal, and may again attract legal reformers; but, without attaining that ideal, it might be possible to abandon in a great measure the fees collected from poor suitors. Law, like medicine and surgery, might be free to the poor—not merely to paupers, but to all who are unable to pay fees and costs without running into debt. It will take a Savonarola to convert the Treasury to this view, but it is an enticing subject for a youthful legal missionary full of ardent zeal and possessed of what the insurance world calls “a good life.”
The dramatic duel between Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst over the former’s Bill in 1833 is full of historical interest, but Lord Brougham was unsuccessful, and it remained for Lord Cottenham in 1847 to establish County Courts with a jurisdiction of £20. These are the Courts that we use to-day, with an enlarged jurisdiction up to £100 in common law, £500 in equity matters, and the added jurisdictions given by the Workmen’s Compensation Acts and many other statutes which have chosen for their tribunal the County Court.
Throughout the country we are face to face with two statistical facts which, if our reforms were moved by scientific considerations, would lead the legal reformer to turn his serious consideration to the County Court. We find in the great centres of population in the north and the midlands, firstly, that there is a slight shrinkage or perhaps only stagnation in the world of the High Court, and secondly, that there is a continuous increase of business keeping pace with the growth of population in the County Courts. I am far from saying that all the expansion of County Court work is progress—much of it is the reverse and in order to understand how far it is good and how far it is bad, it is worth while trying to understand what the County Courts do.