COURT OF CHANCERY BILL. (Hansard, 20 July 1854)

LORD BROUGHAM

desired to state for their comfort and encouragement, a circum- 444 stance which had taken place in the morning, at the time of the transaction of judicial business. His noble and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor, himself, and a noble Lord whom he did not see in his place, had before them a cause which illustrated the bad state of the law as to the Court of Chancery before the recent amendments were made in it, and they were thus enabled to judge of the salutary effects likely to be produced by them. It appeared that a Bill was filed in 1803, and now, at the end of fifty-one years, the suit was not finished; for whatever might be the result of the appeal in hearing which their Lordships had been engaged that morning, the suit must go back to the Court of Chancery for some, he hoped but a short, time. In the course of this suit persons bad gone to India, and had come into existence, and had ceased to exist. It appeared that two persons had been born into the suit, and that one, at least, of them had died. Though debts had been paid, yet their Lordships had been unable to discover that during the fifty-one years any of the parties to the suit had ever received a farthing, while 7,000l. or 8,000l. had been paid to professional persons engaged in the proceedings. If the late improvements of the law had not been so long delayed, a great portion of this protraction of litigation would have been avoided. If the Masters' Office had been abolished, and other improvements made concurrently with that abolition had been effected, he would not say that the whole mischief would have been prevented, but a considerable mitigation would have taken place. The Bill now before their Lordships had for one of its objects the prevention of delays, arising from the abatement of suits. Had its provisions been in force, much of the delay in the suit to which he was referring, and in many other suits, would have been avoided. He thought his noble and learned Friend on the bench behind (Lord Lyndhurst) would be ready to state, that in his second Chancellorship, he had to deal with an order which had been made by his predecessor, Lord Hardwicke, and he (Lord Brougham) had himself to deal with an order made by Lord Kenyon when Master of the Rolls. He thought, in what he had stated, their Lordships would see reason for proceeding with the amendment of the law; but he should not deal fairly with them, did he not state that he was firmly convinced that there could be no effectual remedy for the evils 445 incident to the Court of Chancery until the practice of taking evidence vivâ voce was introduced into that Court, in which we had at present a most inauspicious division of labour. Political economists had doubted whether a division of labour had the effect of producing the amount of goods produced; but no one had ever doubted that it improved the quality of the work. The division of labour in the courts of equity, however, which gave to one man the office of hearing and seeing the witnesses, and to another that of deciding upon their testimony, might increase the quantity of work done, but it made its quality essentially bad—it made it absolutely very nearly worthless.