Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/813

 ^G. VEEDER: A CENTURY OF JUDICATURE 799 that you did. You should have instructed your attorney to bring an action against the seducer of your wife for damages. That would have cost you about £100. Having proceeded thus far, you should have employed a proctor and instituted a suit in the ecclesiastical courts for a divorce a mensa et thoro. That would have cost you £200 or £300 more. When you had obtained a divorce a mensa et thoro you had only to obtain a private act of Parliament for a divorce a vinculo matrimonii. This bill might possibly have been opposed in all its stages in both Houses of Parliament, and altogether these proceedings would have cost you £1,000. You will probably tell me that you never had a tenth of that sum, but that makes no difference. Sitting here as an English judge, it is my duty to tell you that this is not a country where there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. ^You will be imprisoned for one day," Finally, in 1857, this anomalous condition of affairs came to an end. The ecclesiastical courts were by statute divested of all power to entertain suits relating to probate of wills and grants of administration, to declare the validity of marriages, and pronounce divorces a mensa et thoro, and such jurisdic- tion was conferred upon a new ci^urt of common law, which was to sit in Westminster Hall in two divisions, called respect- ively the Court of Probate and the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. The success of the change depended largely upon the judge who should first exercise the new jurisdiction. Fortunately, Cresswell was transferred from the Common Pleas. He was a strong, able and experienced judge, and a man of the world, and justified every reasonable expectation. Under his guidance the procedure of the court was adapted to modern ideas, witnesses were examined viva voce in open court, a concise form of pleading was introduced, and parties could, upon application, have any disputed matter of fact tried by a jury. The reports of Swabey and Tris- tram, which contain his clear and concise opinions and charges to juries, are monuments of learning and common sense; and so skilfully, and with such foresight, were the modern foundations of this jurisdiction laid that his judg-