Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/555

 16. BOWEN: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 541 ened by the creation of law lords, and to which the appeal business of the Privy Council (at present the court of appeal from the colonies and the ecclesiastical courts) is destined in a few years to be virtually, though not perhaps nominally, transferred. A complete body of rules — which possesses the great merit of elasticity, and which (subject to the veto of Par- liament) is altered from time to time by the judges to meet defects as they appear — governs the procedure of the Su- preme Court and all its branches. In every cause, whatever its character, every possible relief can be given with or with- out pleadings, with or without a formal trial, with or with- out discovery of documents and interrogatories, as the nature of the case prescribes — upon oral evidence or upon affi- davits, as is most convenient. Every amendment can be made at all times and all stages in any record, pleading, or pro- ceeding that is requisite for the purpose of deciding the real matter in controversy. It may be asserted without fear of contradiction that it is not possible in the year 1887 for an honest litigant in her Majesty's Supreme Court to be defeated by any mere technicality, any slip, any mistaken step in his litigation. The expenses of the law are still too heavy, and have not diminished pari passu with other abuses. But law has ceased to be a scientific game that may be won or lost by playing some particular move. Simultaneously with this culminating measure of reform, we have seen the creation of one central Palace of Justice for the trial of all civil causes. On December 4, 1882, the judges of the land, with the Chancellor at their head, bade good-bye, in long procession, to Westminster Hall, and followed in her Maj- esty's train as she opened in State the present Royal Courts of Justice. The old order was over and the new had begun. Taking farewell of a profession which he long adorned, the late Vice-Chancellor Bacon — who has himself been a par- taker in the great movement we have endeavoured to narrate — thus summed up in last November his own experience of the legal achievements of the reign. " I have seen," he said, fying and perfecting the administration of the law, to the
 * ' many changes, all of which have had the effect of simpli-