Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/738

 724 V. BENCH AND BAR had smarted under the attempts to reform his own court of chancery. His long chancellorship had witnessed a great increase in the business of the chancery court. His excessive deliberation clogged the calendar with unheard cases. Many suitors in despair abandoned their cases. Even when a cause had been heard, the decision was long in coming, while the vast expense of chancery proceedings was frightfully op- pressive. Regularly, at the opening of each Parliament, Michael Angelo Taylor made his motion for an investigation of Eldon's court. After Taylor gave up the fight, a bar- rister named John Williams took up the annual motion. In the debates the chancery court was roughly handled, al- though Eldon, as a judge, received every man's praise. Lord Eldon was much annoyed at the complaints, but he resolutely opposed all change in his own court as well as in the common law courts. It perhaps is to his credit that he actually concurred in abolishing trial by battle; but he contested the statute taking away the death penalty for larceny. He opposed all changes in the law of real prop- erty. He lamented the bill abolishing fines and common recoveries, and even Sugden, the great authority on real- estate law, pronounced the new plan impossible. The bill abolishing sinecure offices in the chancery and simplifying certain chancery proceedings caused Eldon such anguish that he wrote that he would not go down to Parliament again. Railroads he denounced as dangerous innovations. The abolishment of rotten boroughs was to him a shocking invasion of vested rights. He exclaimed over the Reform bill : " ' Save my country. Heaven,' is my morning and evening prayer, but that it can be saved, cannot be hoped." The proposal to abolish the difference between wills of real and personal property excited Eldon's greatest alarm. He frustrated the efforts of Romilly to mitigate the penal code. He resented reforms in the common law procedure as encroachments upon equity. In the general domain of politics Eldon was the same sort of obstructionist. He bitterly opposed the repeal of the Test Act, and when it was proposed to remove the disabilities of Roman Catholics, he declared in the House of Lords : " If I had a voice that