Allow the Registrar’s clerks to fill up for you the prolix and difficult forms in use in the County Court. They are not solicitors, and are therefore less likely to make mistakes in the work. If, however, a mistake is made you can always explain to the Judge how it arose, and you will not be blamed for it. In any case, where the law is really obscure and difficult, agree with your learned friend to leave the matter entirely to His Honour. By this means His Honour—if he makes no objection—will have to hunt up the authorities, and this will save you and your learned friend much useless labour, whilst the decision of the Judge will be far more valuable to your client. If you lose your case and your client loses his temper, blame the Judge, and urge your client to write to one of the Government departments—it does not matter which—to make a formal complaint of the Judge’s conduct. Government departments enjoy correspondence, and will treat your client’s letter with the respect and attention it deserves. On days when county cricket matches are being played in the neighbourhood of the Court, and generally on fine summer afternoons, your arguments will be the more admired if they are brief and occasionally to the point. If the case you have lost is for an amount of over £20, nevertheless ask leave to appeal. You do not want leave, but the Judge may not remember this, and may either grant or refuse it. In any case it gives you what you are probably longing for at that particular moment—an effective exit. Finally, remember that however genuine your contempt for the Court may be, you conceal it until you get outside—otherwise, seven days.
If the law student will peruse these suggestions and act upon them, and assuming him to be, as no doubt he believes he is, a young man of clear, strong, subtle intellect, of sound judgment, quick perceptions and brilliant forensic abilities, I can assure him that there is nothing between him and a very considerable and remunerative practice as an advocate in the County Court in matters which are not of sufficient importance to “stand” Counsel.
THE INSOLVENT POOR.
“Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts are like cannon; of loud noise but little danger.”
—Dr. Johnson.
The average man—the “man in the street,” as the journalist of to-day calls him—has no clear notion of the affairs of the County Court. He reads occasional paragraphs in the evening papers of some amusing incident, in which the humour of the Plaintiff or Defendant is capped by the humour of the playful and learned Judge, and the humour of the reporter, displayed in his dramatic sketch of the litigants, is the chief motive for the record of the case. I have often been told that my work must be very amusing, that I must see a great deal of life, and that County Court cases seem very entertaining, and I have come to the conclusion that those of the public who never enter a County Court, or read any sane record of its everyday work, which is too often dull, wearisome, and painful, and no fit material for paragraphs and headlines, live in the belief that the occupation of a Judge of a County Court is a legal form of small beer and skittles, in which the Judge’s part is to preside with free and easy good humour, and settle disputes with as much wit and readiness as he happens to possess. No one who has any experience of the actual proceedings of the Courts would recognise such a picture as in any way portraying the facts of the case.
In Manchester and Salford I was able to divide the work of the Courts into two classes, and to keep them distinct from each other. One contained an increasing number of Bankruptcy, High Court, and other cases, in which the litigants are of the same class and have the same legal assistance as in the High Court. The main differences between the High Court and the County Court in the conduct of such actions, being the simplicity of the procedure, and the rapidity and punctuality of trial in the inferior Court. The second, and to my mind the more important, if less interesting class of cases, was the large mass of debt collecting cases under £2, which were the original work of Courts created by the legislature for the “better securing the payment of small debts.” The first class of work is a somewhat onerous compliment to the ability with which the County Courts of the country are worked, but the second class ought always, it seems to me, to be the chief interest and care of County Court officials. And in the work connected with this smaller class of cases, the chief result of my experience has been a dull sense of the enormous mass of misery and wretchedness it is one’s duty to cause, and the despondent feeling that of necessity oppresses one in the presence of misfortune, that one can sympathise with, but not to any material extent alleviate. I should like, therefore, if it be possible to bring home to the average citizen the hopeless and almost degrading position of the insolvent poor, and to suggest for his consideration some of the reforms which, with or without legislation, might assist in bringing about a better state of things.
To begin with, one may state that there are over a million cases entered every year in County Courts, to recover debts under £20, and it will give some idea of how few cases are seriously disputed when I state that there are only between eleven and twelve thousand cases in which the Plaintiff fails to succeed, and these latter figures refer to all cases up to and above the £50 limit. Many cases get settled, some plaints never get served, but I have no doubt that one is well within the mark in stating that 98 per cent. of cases under £20 result in judgment for the Plaintiff. It is clear, therefore, that the Court is to this extent a collecting agency rather than a Court for the determination of disputes, and it is, in this respect, that its machinery should be examined. Few who do not know by personal experience, something of the life of the poorer class of working men and women, recognise the enormous extent to which they live and have their being on credit. The extent to which credit is given, and recklessly given, to men, women, and children, by the competing tradesmen who supply the working classes, would be an absurdity if it did not lead to so much misery. As Judge Chalmers put it in an epigram born of his wide experience of the insolvent poor: “They marry on credit to repent on Judgment Summonses.”
Now the two main causes of this reckless system of credit are:—(1) the keen competition among tradesmen; (2) the existence of imprisonment for debt. It is not advisable here to say much of trade competition. If it were a competition to sell the best goods at the most reasonable price it would perhaps be healthy enough, but it seems to be rather a competition to give the longest credit for the most inferior article. The largest classes of competitors are the money lenders, the credit drapers, or “Scotchmen,” the travelling jewellers, the furniture hirers, and all those firms who tout their goods round the streets for sale by small weekly instalments. These of necessity give reckless credit, and, equally of necessity, collect their monies with much suffering to their poorer customers. It seems fairly clear that to a working man on small weekly wages, no credit can be given in any commercial sense. A tradesman, if he gives credit at all to such a man, ought to give it upon the ground that he has reason to believe that he is an honest man who can and will pay his debts. As a matter of fact, the two chief reasons, or rather excuses, for giving credit are both somewhat weak. Tradesmen will tell you that they have given a man credit either because he was in receipt of good wages or because he was out of work. In the first case they ought clearly to insist upon cash, and the workman ought to get the advantage of a cash price, and in the second case they should only give credit if they know the character of the man, unless, of course, they choose to call it charity, with which the County Court has nothing to do. But in truth, credit is given without enquiry, recklessly and equally to those in work and out of work, for necessities, luxuries, and inutilities, and given at a price which includes the profit of the credit giver, his costs of making weekly collections, the costs of his debt collector or solicitor, and ultimately a considerable tribute towards the maintenance of the County Court.