“You don’t know what a trial at the Old Bailey or Quarter Sessions is. I don’t mean at the Old Bailey before a real Common Law judge, but a Chancery judge. I once heard a counsel, who was prosecuting a man for passing bad money, interrupt a recorder in his summing up, and ask him to tell the jury there was evidence of seven bad florins having been found in the prisoner’s boot. As guilty knowledge was the gist of the offence, this seemed somewhat important. The learned young judge, turning to the jury, said, in a hesitating manner, ‘Well, really, gentlemen, I don’t know whether that will affect your judgment in any way; there is the evidence, and you may consider it if you please.’”
“Why can’t they get Mr. Bumpkin’s case tried?”
“Because there is no system. In the County Court, where a judge tries three times as many cases in a day as any Superior judge, cases are tried nearly always on the day they are set down for. At the Criminal Courts, where every case is at least as important as any Civil case, everyone gets tried without unnecessary delay. In the Common Law Courts it’s very much like hunt the slipper—you hardly ever know which Court the case is in for five minutes together. Then they sit one day and not another, to the incalculable expense of the suitors, who may come up from Devonshire to-night, and, after waiting a week, go back and return again to town at the end of the following month.”
“But, now that O’Rapley has taken the matter up, is there not some hope?”
“Well, he seems to have as much power as anyone.”
“Then I hope he’ll exert it; for it’s a shame that this poor man should be kept waiting about so long. I quite feel for him: there really ought not to be so much delay in the administration of justice.”
“A dilatory administration of justice amounts too often to a denial of it altogether. It always increases the expense, and often results in absolute ruin.”
“I wonder men don’t appoint someone when they fell out to arbitrate between them.”
“They often do, and too frequently, after all the expense of getting ready for trial has been incurred, the case is at last sent to the still more costly tribunal called a reference. Many matters cannot be tried by a jury, but many can be that are not; one side clamouring for a reference in order to postpone the inevitable result; the other often obliged to submit and be defeated by mere lapse of time.”