Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/546

 532 IV, THE NINETEENTH CENTURY of the courts to be promptly and expeditiously obtained, without useless preliminaries, whether they took the shape of pleadings, or commissions, or trial. The staff of Chan- cery judges was moreover hopelessly inadequate, and as every Chancery judge sits singly, a satisfactory system of appeal in Chancery was essential. The offices of the masters in Chancery and of the clerks wanted to be overhauled, the progress of references and accounts brought more directly under the eye and supervision of the judge, arrears dealt with, delays minimised. Law reformers looked forward, but not with too sanguine anticipations, to some coming time, when a sovereign of the land might say, in the language of Lord Brougham, that " he found law dear and left it cheap, found it a two-edged sword in the hands of craft and of oppres- sion, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence." All of these evils, most of the requisite remedies — both for common law and for Chancery — were pointed out by the legal profession fifty years ago. But it was then the habit in England to advance slowly in the direction even of neces- sary change. By degrees, however, the horizon brightened, and improvement upon improvement became law. Six years after her Majesty's accession. Lord Denman — Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench and father of the present Mr. Justice Denman — carried an Act removing the archaic fetter by which persons interested in the result of an action or suit were disabled from becoming witnesses. Eight years later still, another statute rendered the parties to almost all civil proceedings competent and compellable to give evidence. Commissions sat to inquire into the procedure of the com- mon law. Three Procedure Acts, the fruit of their labours, cleared it of its technicalities, improved its machinery, ex- tended its remedies, and laid finally to rest most of the abuses above described. In connection with this invaluable work — which deserves from its Importance to be called the Reformation of the English Common Law — a grateful country ought not to forget the names of Sir John Jervis (from 1850 to 1856 Chief Justice of the Common Pleas); of Mr. Baron Martin, with whom law was synonymous with shrewd common sense; of the late Sir Alexander Cockbum,