Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/541

 16. BOW EN: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 527 often he had been ruined by the way. Courts where ulti- mate justice is achieved, but where delay and expense reign supreme, became at last a happy hunting-ground for the fraudulent. The hour for reform has struck when the law can be made an instrument of abuse. We must not make a scarecrow of the law. Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch and not their terror. With all its distinction and excellence, the Court of Equity was thus practically closed to the poor. The middle classes were alarmed at its very name, for it swallowed up smaller fortunes with its delays, its fees, its interminable paper processes. The application of such a procedure to the large class of transactions, where no fact was in dispute, and only the careful administration of an estate required, was a cruel burden upon property. A large portion of the cases before the Court of Chancery had " nothing of hostility and very little of contentious litigation in them." Trusts, it may be, had to be administered, obscure wills or deeds to be inter- preted, assets of a deceased person to be got in, classes ascertained, creditors paid. Though nobody wished for war, yet all the forms of war had to be gone through — the plaintiff and the various defendants drew out the pleadings in battle array, interrogated and answered, took evidence upon commission, examined and cross-examined upon paper. " It is a matter of frequent occurrence in court," say the Chancery Commissioners of 1851, "to see, cases encumbered with statements and counter-statements, evidence and counter-evidence, with which the parties have for years been harassing each other, although there has been throughout no substantial dispute as to the facts, and although the real question lies in a very narrow compass, and would probably have been evolved in the first instance if the court had had the power summarily to ascertain and deal with the facts. The judges of the court were the Lord High Chancellor (who then, as now, was a political officer and changed with every change of Ministry) ; the Master of the Rolls stood