Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/538

 524 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY lawsuit. In its judicial capacity the Court of Chancery gave effect to rights beyond the reach of the common law, corrected the evils that flowed from the imperfect jurisdic- tion and remedies of the Common Law Courts, and dealt with whole classes of transactions over which it had ac- quired a special cognisance. The code of ethics which it administered was searching and precise — academical, per- haps, rather than worldly, the growth of the brains of great masters of learning and of subtlety, whose maxims and refinements had crystallised into a system. But its practice was as dilatory and vexatious as its standard of right and wrong was noble and accurate. For deciding matters of conflicting testimony it was but little fitted. It tossed about as hopelessly in such cases as a ship in the trough of the sea, for want of oral testimony — a simple and elementary method of arriving at the truth, which no acuteness can replace. It had no effective machinery at all for the examination or the cross-examination of witnesses, and (as we have seen) fell back upon the Common Law Courts whenever questions of pure law were raised, or as soon as depositions and affidavits became hopelessly irrecon- cilable. Oral evidence had always been at common law the basis of the entire system, although the common law per- versely excluded from the witness-box the parties to the cause who naturally knew most about the truth. The Court of Chancery, on the other hand, allowed a plaintiff to search the conscience of the defendants, and the defendants, by a cross bill, to perform a similar operation upon their antag- onist, but only permitted the inquiry to be on paper. A bill in a Chancery suit was a marvellous document, which stated the plaintiff's case at full length and three times over. There was first the part in which the story was circum- stantially set forth. Then came the part which " charged " its truth against the defendant — or, in other words, which set it forth all over again in an aggrieved tone. Lastly came the interrogating part, which converted the original alle- gations into a chain of subtly framed inquiries addressed to the defendant, minutely dovetailed and circuitously arranged SO as to surround a slippery conscience and to stop up