must treat with contempt; then in spite of all prepossessions in its favour, the ridicule against which his honourable and learned friend protested might blamelessly or rather must infallibly attach to it. The bill said, that whereas great arrears had been accumulated, it was necessary to do so and so. The diminution of this accumulation might, to be sure, be accomplished in either of two ways; by clearing the reservoir at once, or by impeding the channel whence it was constantly supplied with so rapid a current. The bill appeared to follow the latter of those two courses. Its most obvious and certain effect was to occasion all the causes in Chancery to be tried twice over, a process which must necessarily delay the proceedings of that court, and so check the vicious rapidity of the stream of appeals which flowed from it into the House of Lords. If the tried wisdom, the high legal attainments, and pre-eminent authority of that great magistrate who had been used to speak from the bench from which he (Mr Canning) had now risen (Sir William Grant) did not prevent constant appeals to the Lord Chancellor from his decisions as Master of the Rolls, it was idle to suppose that from the new Vice-chancellor, new in office, new and unsettled in authority, and (be he who he may) probably far inferior to the present Master of the Rolls in legal knowledge and abilities, there would not be appeals to the Lord Chancellor in a far greater number. It was indeed attempted to be shewn, that this new creation would be similar to the mastership of the rolls; but there was this essential difference between the two magistracies; there was a choice allowed to the suitor to have his cause carried before the Master of the Rolls or the Lord Chancellor, and therefore it was the less likely that he should de

VOL. VI. PART I.

sire it to be reheard: but this bill gave the Chancellor power to refuse hearing a case, and to send it to the Vice-chancellor and in every case which was thus delegated from the Lord High Chancellor to his deputy, against the will and choice of the suitor, it was surely most natural to suppose that the suitor would desire a hearing. Thus, therefore, the accumulation before the lords might indeed be prevented from increasing so fast as at present, since every cause heard by the new magistrate would probably be heard again by the Lord Chancellor; and the suitor perhaps might be sickened by his first appeal, and deterred from prosecuting a second to the House of Lords. But how would the device tend to the accomplishment of the professed object of the bill, the allowing the Lord Chancellor more time for attendance in the House of Lords? After all, if the accumulation of appeals in that house be the evil to be cured, why was not some remedy applied distinctly and at once to the seat of the evil? It was surely a derogation from the dignity of the House of Lords to suppose that they could not discharge the business before them; that their noble natures could not rise at nine o'clock to adjudge the causes at their bar; that, with privileges so far surpassing those of other senates, they could not make an exertion for the discharge of those important duties which were annexed to such high privileges, and which justified and ennobled them in the eyes of their country and the world. Why should such reasonings apply to them more than to the Commons? The Lords admitted a delay amounting to a denial of justice. What degradation or shame could it be to the Lords to adopt with respect to their own proceedings some such coercive regulations as the Commons had adopted to secure the +

C

discharge of their own duty in causes of contested elections? The shame seemed to lie in stopping short between the removal of abuse and the adoption of a remedy. Was it a problem so obscure, knotty, and difficult to devise the means of securing a sufficient attendance in the other house, whatever skill it might have required to produce such a bill as this? No! let the House reject this bill, and a better measure would be proposed in a very short time. An appeal had been made to their compassion in behalf of this unhappy scrap of paper, as if it were the offspring of some infant member, who was employing his untried hand, in his first and crude attempt to remedy some acknowledged evil, hoping that a committee would lick his unformed abortion into some sort of decent shape. Another learned gentleman thought they were treading on a sort of hallowed ground, and that they could not presume even to alter and amend the bill, such as it was sent down to them, without a species of scandalum magnatum against the legislative wisdom of the House of Lords! The bill in fact was all it could be. A committee was useless. It would offend the Lords more to send it back so changed, as it must necessarily be, if it was to be made useful to any good purpose whatever, than it would to reject it altogether; abstaining, however, at the same time, with the utmost deference, from presuming to suggest any other method of proceeding in a case which appeared to be claimed as the peculiar province of their lordships, and leaving their lordships to go to work again upon a new plan better calculated for their own credit and the public satisfaction. He begged pardon for any seeming levity, if he were guilty of any in speaking with freedom of this strange project: but there were different moods in which

different men viewed the same subjects: some might indulge in harmless merriment; while others (he did not see the learned gentleman, Mr Stephen, present) might view this mouse which the mountain had brought forth with feelings quite "melancholy and gentlemanlike," like Master Stephen in "Every Man in his Humour." For his own part he thought there could not be a graver subject than the due and speedy administration of justice: but on the other hand there could not be a more ludicrous association than that of high magisterial functions, and great official trust, with all the circumstances of degradation and disparagement with which the new magistrate procreated by this bill is to be invested. It was pretend ed indeed, that the power of the Lord Chancellor to devolve business upon this new deputy, was to be no other than that which he now has, to call to his assistance any one of the judges, or masters in Chancery, named in the commission, empowering them to sit for the Chancellor. Nothing could be more unlike. Compare the language of that commission with that of this bill by which the Chancellor was to ring for his deputy. It would appear that the judges, when called upon, were really to sit for the Chancellor, to sit as the Chancellor; to do his business; to execute his functions, and the result was to be of as great validity, force, efficacy, and virtue, as if from the Chancellor himself. The new gentleman to be created was to have full power, &c. but in such a manner nevertheless, and under such regulations and restrictions, as the Lord Chancellor himself shall from time to time order and direct. If this was to be freedom, he wished to know what was servitude? If this was volition, what was coercion? What was such a judge, but a man sitting on the judgment seat fettered hand and foot?

And was it possible to conceive that any decision of such a magistrate could be received as satisfactory and acquiesced in as final? Conceive a melancholy client coming into court, and directing his solicitor to take care that his cause is set down for hearing, not before that tedious indecisive judge the Master of the Rolls, but before the Lord High Chancellor himself. Soon afterwards he hears that his cause is, according to his direction, before his lordship himself. So much the better. At least the hearing will be final. Some time afterwards he is informed that his cause is decided against him-by whom? By the Lord Chancellor himself? No such thing; but by a judge under the constant direction and superintendance of the Chancellor, subject to his interference and controul, to his revisal, and reversal or alteration,-What consolation could this be to the suitor, who had chosen the Lord Chancellor for his judge in preference to the Master of the Rolls, for the express purpose of avoiding the necessity of an appeal, which would now be his only refuge? Was not this the meaning of the bill? He heard some murmurs near him as if he was misrepresenting its tenor and purport. He certainly did not mean to misrepresent it. The advocates of the bill had particularly praised it for its clearness. It was indeed overloaded with perspicuity, full of qualifications and limitations, and exemptions, and provisoes, patching up one hole and making another to patch up in turn; and involved in inexplicable explanations. But after all, was not the result as he had stated it, that the Lord Chancellor might send causes he did not like to his Vice-Chancellor as he pleased, just as he would order away a corked bottle; was not the ViceChancellor to take whatever was sent to him—to abstain from whatever was

not thus sent to him? To begin or to leave off exactly when and where the Lord Chancellor pleased, at the beginning, or the middle, or the end of a cause just as might suit the Chancellor's fancy? Had he, or was he, intended to have any regular, known, fixed, intelligible substantive province or authority? Scrub in the play, Mungo in the farce, Sancho in his island, were in a state of settled jurisdiction compared with this new officer! If the form of his tribunal were copied from any thing at all, it must have been from Sancho in his little island! It was to be a delega tion by fits and snatches the off. spring of the humours and leisures of the Chancellor, dealt out in bits and scraps of jurisdiction. It really required more credulity than the authors of the bill had a right to expect, to imagine that the bill, even though it should receive the polishing hand of any learned serjeant, could ever answer the purposes for which it was intended. As an unlearned member of parlia ment, his vote should be against the introduction of a magistracy which it was not fit to create. It was not his fault that the proposition was so objectionable. They had a right to take time to consider this bill, as the Lords had paused for eleven years before they hit upon this mode of remedying an inconvenience of such great and growing mischief. If indeed it was contended, that they were not entitled to object to this mode, without having some other more perfect plan to propose, he would answer, that he had no doubt another plan might easily be devised, but he denied the necessity, or even the propriety, of originating it in the House of Commons. The onus was on the Lords, but not on them. The evil was with the Lords, who pleaded their own fault, and applied for the remedy. The evils he believed

were exaggerated, and must vanish at the touch of a reforming hand. Let the Lords adopt an efficient measure, and the mass of evil would soon sink to a manageable size. He was unable to follow the reasonings of Chancery lawyers; but was such an office as a Vice-Chancellor ever recognised in England before? He felt the highest respect for the present Lord Chancellor, but he must consider that he was called upon to legislate, not only for the present times, but for posterity. He wished to preserve the office of Lord Chancellor in this country in all the plenitude of its powers and splendour of its authority. He believed in his conscience that it was most essentially important to the constitution that it should be so preserved. He thought that it was one of the highest prerogatives of the sovereign, that he could take a man from the profession of the bar, and place him at once by an act of power in a situation giving rank and precedence above ducal coronets. This high prerogative, however, like all others, would be exercised with a responsibility to public opinion; and although the crown might make whom it would Lord Chancellor, yet it would never will to make any man a Chancellor who in the public eye was not conceived to be fit for that high situation. He was not imputing any negligence to Lord Eldon, when he said, that if this bill should pass, a time might come when all the business of the court of Chancery might be thrown upon this new officer, and the Master of the Rolls, and that in future times a Lord Chancellor might be chosen chiefly from other considerations unconnected with his legal knowledge or ability to preside in the Court of Chancery. This bill might therefore lead to the destruction of the office of Lord Chancellor, which he conceived to be, as it now

stood, an office of the greatest importance as well in a constitutional point of view as with regard to the administration of the important duties of the court of Chancery. He, therefore, could not support a bill which appeared to him to do things utterly unwise; to create a magistracy unfit to be created, and to endanger, by innovation upon its character and duties, a magistracy which it was of the highest importance to maintain unaltered and unimpaired; a bill not calculated to remedy the evil which it professed to obviate, and risking the introduction of other evils which it might be difficult hereafter to cure; a bill directed to the removal of an obstruction in the course of justice avowedly of a temporary nature; and effecting (or rather not effecting) that object by a permanent dismemberment of the highest judicial office of the constitution."The measure, notwithstanding this opposition, received the sanction of the legislature.

It has been frequently remarked, that revolutions in the civil or criminal laws of a country are of all others the most difficult to be accomplished. It is a salutary prejudice, no doubt, which resists innovations so extremely hazardous; yet when we consider what was the character of those remote ages in which the foundations of our jurisprudence were laid,-how rude and savage were their manners, how limited their information, and how unsettled was the whole form of society, it may with some reason be presumed, that there is scarcely a subject on which a sober and rational spirit of improvement may with more advantage be employed. The English have been more remarkable, perhaps, than any of their neighbours for a sacred, and, in some cases, a superstitious veneration of their ancient constitution; and their laws may therefore be supposed to offer as strong a temptation

to the genius of reform as those of any other country. It cannot be disguised, indeed, that notwithstanding the general strength and solidity of the fabric of their jurisprudence, and the distinguished talent and integrity with which their laws have long been administer ed, there are some parts of their system which bear visible marks of the barbarism and folly of a ruder age. Those who complain of such absurdities in the letter of the law, are told, indeed, that every thing is well managed in practice, and that in the criminal code nothing can differ more than the punishments denounced, and those which are actually put in execution against offenders. Yet even this apo logy seems, in a great measure, to admit the justice of the complaint. The statute-book is disgraced by laws which are not executed; the advantages of a precise and written code are needlessly relinquished, and a strong encouragement is held out to the most arbitrary proceedings. Among the eminent English lawyers of the present day, Sir Samuel Romilly has honour ably distinguished himself by his exertions to improve the criminal code; and as he made another effort during the present session of parliament, it may not be improper to present the reader with the substance of the debate which occurred with reference to this important subject.

On the 7th February, Sir Samuel Romilly rose and said, "he hoped that in again drawing the attention of the House to a part of the general laws of the country, which he had already on a former occasion brought under their notice, he should not be considered guilty of any impropriety. The bill which he at present meant to introduce was one which had twice passed that House; but had been rejected in the House of Lords. No person had more respect for the quarLer from which opposition had come

than himself, and if he imagined, by again introducing a measure which had been considered impolitic, he should be supposed to act from the least disrespect to that quarter, no person could feel more concern than he would. But from all that he had observed since the last consideration of the subject, he felt he should not be doing his duty if he did not bring the subject under the attention of a new parliament. It would be in the recollection of the House that in 1810 he had proposed to bring in three bills; one of which was to repeal the act of King William, which rendered it a capital offence to steal property to the amount of five shillings privately in a shop; another to repeal the act of Queen Anne, which pronounced it a capital offence to steal to the value of forty shillings in a dwelling-house; and the third to repeal the act of George II. rendering it a capital offence to steal property to the same amount from on board a vessel in a navigable river. These bills were all passed in 1811 by that House, but were rejected by the Lords. At the present moment he should only move for leave to bring in that one which, in the former discussions, was considered least objectionable; he alluded to that which related to stealing property to the value of five shillings in a dwelling-house; and the principle on which he should propose to introduce this bill, was precisely the same as that which he had before stated, namely, the inexpediency of penal laws existing which were not intended to be executed. This inexpediency was strongly demonstrated by the returns of the criminal courts for London and Middlesex during the years 1805, 6, 7, 8, and 9. He could not help here expressing his surprise that these returns had not, in compliance with the order of the House, been made to a later period. During these few years it