Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/556

 542 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY great advantage of our ever-increasing community, to the protection of civil rights, to the encouragement of arts and commerce, and the general prosperity of the realm." The name of one happily still living, and the name of one who is deplored in more than one department of the State, will always be connected with the final consolidation of the Eng- lish judicature. To the co-operation for the public weal of Lord Selborne and of the late Lord Cairns — rivals in politics, but fellow-workers in the reform of the law — is chiefly due the completeness of the contrast between the Eng- lish judicial systems of 1887 and of 1837. Justice would fail in one of her chief attributes if she concentrated all her attention upon the superior courts and made no effort to bring English law within the reach, so to speak, of every subject of the Crown. It is a striking reflection, that the system of county courts, which now forms so essential a part of our institutions under the man- agement of a body of judges whose merits it would be pre- sumptuous to praise, is entirely a growth of the present reign. The ancient county court of the common law (per- haps the oldest tribunal of the country) had long since fallen for all practical purposes into complete disuse. Since the time of James I, local " courts of request," designed for the recovery of trifling debts and created by local Acts of Par- liament, with a limited jurisdiction only, had gradually become common, but were wholly inadequate to the wants of the public. At her Majesty's accession there was no tribunal in existence that discharged the duties or possessed the ju- risdiction of the present county court. The year 1846 sounded the knell of the old-fashioned and comparatively useless courts of request. In their place was built up slowly, by a dozen or more successive statutes, the county court of to-day. Five hundred districts have been formed, with about fifty-nine circuits — a single judge, as a rule, being annexed to each circuit. Every judge in the matters submitted to his cognisance administers law and equity concurrently — is a judge of bankruptcy outside the jurisdiction of the London Bankruptcy Court, and in certain selected districts an Ad- miralty judge as well. The procedure has been rendered