One sometimes hears it said that we have too many judges, and the argument is apt to be urged by the assertion that the number in a large city is as great as in all England. The natural inference is that our judges work less effectively.
No statement could be based upon falser premises. The roll of judges in the High Court is, indeed, a limited one and, as they try small as well as large cases, the impression might follow that they constitute the whole judicial force of England. The fact, however, is quite the reverse.
Taking at random the daily Official Cause List for London there will be found on a given day sitting at the Law Courts in the Strand alone, twenty-one judges of the High Court, eight masters, seven Chancery registrars, twelve masters in Chancery, three official referees, two registrars in bankruptcy and one official presiding over "companies winding up"—exactly fifty-four men simultaneously performing judicial duty in one building. Each of these is holding what is practically a separate court and his title is of no significance. When one remembers that at the same time the House of Lords is sitting at Westminster, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Downing Street, the four Criminal Courts at the Old Bailey, more than twenty police magistrates at Bow Street and elsewhere, and County Courts, at Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell, Edmonton, Marylebone, Shoreditch, Southwark and Westminster, some idea may be formed of the number of judges and courts always at work in the metropolis.
Innumerable courts are also sitting in the provinces, which, if less important, serve to relieve the metropolitan judges. The justices of the peace number in many counties three or four hundred and in one county about eight hundred, although most of them never attend and the work is done by comparatively few. They sit singly as committing magistrates and in groups at petty sessions and at quarter sessions. There are also a large number of borough criminal courts presided over by a recorder. Besides, the county courts are over five hundred in the aggregate, though there are not so many county judges, for the smaller courts are grouped into circuits. Finally, there are the Assizes of the High Court coming down periodically from London to try causes, both criminal and civil, all over England.
Thus the little Island fairly bristles with tribunals and teems with judges and any criticism of American judges or of American judicial methods by such comparison would only be possible in ignorance of the facts.
In America, litigation begins in the court room; in England, it ends there. American proceedings tend to be somewhat formal, conventional, diffuse and dilatory. Pitfalls and traps are occasionally laid by astute practitioners, which embarrass the side really in the right and delay a conclusion upon the merits. Much is incomprehensible to the laymen concerned except the result.
English legal proceedings on the contrary are colloquial, flexible, simple and prompt, thoroughly in touch with the spirit of the times and with the ordinary man's every-day life.
The legal decisions of the two countries are probably of equal value, and are held in mutual respect. Neither, perhaps, could claim any superiority over the other in its legal results, but in methods, England at present is far in advance.
This was not always so. Up to 1875 the English courts were most slow, expensive and unsatisfactory. But in these thirty-five years, reforms in methods have so progressed, step by step, that the most important action can be tried, a judgment given, appeal taken, argued and orally decided as counsel sit down—all in ninety days. The details of these improvements are too technical for the present occasion; suffice it to say that they are characterized by the utmost simplicity, and many of them are capable of adaptation with modifications to American conditions.