Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/544

 530 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY informed Chancery lawyers of that day recorded it as his opinion, in the year 1839, that, with proper regulations in those offices, nearly double the quantity of business might be done and with greater promptitude. The Chancery judges at this period only sat in open court, and did not despatch business at chambers, and the great pressure of arrears and the want of a chamber jurisdiction caused a good deal to be shunted upon the master's office with which the judge himself would have been the best person to deal. Much legal literature during the beginning of the reign was devoted to attacking and defending the institution of the masters in Chancery ; but when at a later period it fell, it fell with the general assent of the legal world. A system of payment of officials by fees is often synony- mous with a system of sinecures, of monopolies, of work done by deputy, as well as of work protracted and delayed. To such an epoch of administrative laxity belonged the origin of the institution of the " the six clerks," whose places were worth about 1,600Z. a year, and who were in theory at the head of a body of officers called the " clerks in court." Mr. Edwin Field, a well-known solicitor of position, in a pamphlet published in 1840, tells us, that although he had been almost daily in the " six clerks " office during a con- siderable part of twenty years, he had never to his knowl- edge seen any one of the " six clerks," nor could he conceive of a solicitor or a solicitor's clerk having any occasion to see one officially. He believed that most of the " clerks in court " did not know even by sight the " six clerks " to whom they were nominally attached. The " clerks in court " were officers who were supposed to be irpo^evoi of the suitor and of the suitor's solicitor. They were twenty-eight or thirty in number, and presided over the copying of records, the issue of writs, the signing of consents, the service of notices — for notices were served upon them by proxy, which they then sent on by post or by messenger to the solicitor in the cause. They also acted as mediators in taxing costs, for which they were paid by fees in proportion to the length of the bills to be taxed. Most of this work, however dili- gently performed, was useless, for it might have been done