What the Judge Saw: Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

power to do so, and gradually becoming more and more unfit. And the cause of the bulk of this is litigation. When a man is getting better and his mind should be turned towards work he has at his elbow a lawyer and a doctor, who, being human, have their scientific opinions biassed perhaps by the thought that only by carrying the case into Court can they hope to get any fees. The man is told it would be unwise to work both legally and physically. What is he to do? Is he to throw over his scientific advisers—​why should he? Would you or I settle a case or abandon a claim against the advice of our lawyers? Nor do I blame the lawyer. He is there to advise, and often without his advice the man could not recover his rights, and certainly could not maintain his rights in the Court of Appeal and on to the House of Lords.

The lawyers are a necessary part of the scheme as it exists, and so are the doctors. They hinder the man from getting well and going back to work, but that is all part of the machine. The machine is not a bad one, and no one wants to see it scrapped. We want to return to the Chamberlain ideal and wheel our machine out of the Law Courts into the yard, and work it under the power of common sense. Only in that way can we escape some dishonourable responsibility for that half-malingerer, that weak, insincere invalid, the miserable remains of what was once a good workman, which is such a common object of the County Court.

I have no hesitation in saying that by a system

of conciliation 75 per cent. of the present litigation under the Workmen’s Compensation Act might be stopped, to the great benefit of the community. I would allow no Workmen’s Compensation Act case to go forward to litigation until employer and workman had come in person—​or by lay deputy on the employer’s behalf—​to discuss a way out. Many a workman would go back and try work again if he could go into a room and talk his affair over with a judge, and was assured that his interests would be cared for whilst he made the experiment.

The scheme of workmen’s compensation was intended by Mr. Chamberlain to be a businesslike and statesmanlike scheme of accident insurance to be administered by a County Court judge, acting as an arbitrator, with the assistance of a medical referee. There were, as I have said, to be no lawyers and no appeals, which to his business mind were merely things leading to “expense, annoyance, and irritation.” The statesman desired and intended a scheme for the benefit of employer and workman based on peace and conciliation, but the lawyers have been too many for him, and to-day the Workmen’s Compensation Act litigation is little better than a wild-cat legal gamble. To diagnose whether an accident arises out of or in the course of a workman’s employment you want a legal mind combining the subtlety of a Jesuit with the discrimination of a laboratory professor. And even then you may fail if your mind is anything but an exact replica of two out of the three of those who

will ultimately sit to hear the appeal. Nor is there indeed always safety in that, for there is the House of Lords to come—​and if you think the word “gamble” is too strong a word for the existing state of things, ring them up at Lloyds and ask for the current rate of odds against any Workmen’s Compensation Act appeal on its voyage from the Strand to Westminster.

But it will be said, is not all this rather an attack on the writer’s own profession? I do not think so. I have tried to make it clear that I blame the system, and not the individuals who have to work it. And though I believe that any sort of Court of Reconcilement or Conciliation must in time do away with much litigation, I do not necessarily think that a bad thing for the profession. How often to-day do lawyers try and keep their clients from litigation and promote compromise to their own cost, to satisfy their high ideals of right action. I am far from thinking it desirable that we should keep alive a system of litigation that we believe harmful to the community because it brings in fees to ourselves. The spectacle in “Jarndyce v. Jarndyce,” where “eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity,” may have pleased the unthinking lawyer of the day, but Dickens, with prophetic foresight, knew more about it than the Bar. It had to be swept away. And has it ruined the Chancery Bar?—​ask them in

Lincoln’s Inn. The fact is that if we are to maintain in the face of better-educated and more thoughtful citizens the privileges and traditions of the Bar, we must satisfy ourselves and the world that the work we are doing is worthy, useful work beneficial to the community. When it fails to come up to that standard, it ought to be joyfully surrendered.

Nor do I think that my suggestions would, even if they were carried out by a stroke of the pen, injure any practitioner to any serious extent. New problems are arising daily and new work is waiting to be done. But whether the results of conciliation would be to the injury of the profession or not, before anything is done the lawyers will have their say on it in the Houses of Parliament, where their number is legion, and where, as far as I can make out, the poor litigant, the client whose interests I am saying a word for to-day, is wholly unknown and unrepresented.