Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/531

 16. BOWEN: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 517 and the kind of imperfection that existed in their constitu- tion and their practice. The ancient barrier which separated the several Courts of the Common Law from the Court of Chancery still subsisted in the year 1837. Two systems of judicature, in many re- spects at variance with each other, flourished side by side under the famous roof of Westminster Hall. The principle of a division of labour by which distinct machinery can be accommodated to special subject-matter is based upon reason and convenience. A large portion of the law business of the country is made up of litigation in the result of which no one is directly interested but the rival combatants. But there are many matters of which the law takes cognisance that necessitate a special and a more complicated mechanism for their adjustment. The property of infants, for exam- ple, requires to be protected — trusts to be managed day by day during a long period of years — the estates of de- ceased persons to be dealt with for the benefit of creditors, the assets to be collected and distributed, accounts to be taken, directions to be given, questions to be settled once for all that affect the interests of many. It is desirable that special tribunals should be armed with the particular organi- sation requisite for purposes such as these. The distinction between law and equity went, however, far beyond what was needed to carry out this natural division of labour. The two jurisdictions had no common historical origin, and the prin- ciples on which they administered justice were unlike. The remedies they afforded to the suitor were different; their procedure was irreconcilable; they applied diverse rules of right and wrong to the same matters. The common law treated as untenable claims and defences which equity allowed, and one side of Westminster Hall gave judgments which the other restrained a successful party from enforcing. The law had always cherished as its central principle the idea that all questions of fact could best be decided by a jury. Except in cases relating to the possession of land, the relief it gave took, as a rule, the shape of money compensation, in the nature either of debt or of damages. The procedure of the Court of Chancery, on the other hand, was little adapted