1826.] Chancer 1/ Report. 451 



with the penalties annexed. He has nothing to do but to prove his 

 wrong, tliat is, advance competent evidence, and receive satisfaction. 

 By and bye, however, he hears of distinctions between statute and 

 common law, which, by degrees, he discovers to mean written and 

 unwritten law — a discovery which staggers his confidence a little, till the 

 lawyers endeavour to steady it again by the assurance that, though un- 

 written, the common law is yet well defined and engraven — in the breast 

 of the judges ; and besides, what seems to approximate to the stability of 

 the statute-book, tliat the decisions of the judges, built on the faith of the 

 common law, are carefully recorded, and now serve as ever-burning 

 lights to secure the courts against all possible deviations. With these 

 assurances his confidence becomes firm again, till unluckily, as his 

 experience advances, he learns that different judges have given different 

 and even contradictory dicta — that in criminal cases, the same offence 

 is punished sometimes with one sort of penalty and sometimes with 

 another ; in one court a man is sentenced to be hanged — in another, to 

 be transported ; in one to be transported — and in anotlier, to be imprisoned 

 a few months, or whipped, or discharged on paying a fine of a shilling 

 or two. In civil causes he finds the fact to be ten times worse: justice 

 is a conflict and war of precedents, and the result depends more on the 

 research, readiness, and quibble of counsel, than on any known and 

 established rules of court. His sense of justice is shocked, and his 

 confidence in these best of all possible laws gradually fails him. But to 

 complete his distrust, he learns at last there exists such a thing as 

 Equity — a most exhilarating conmiunication to one who has just been 

 defeated by the treacherous unsteadiness of the law — Equity I it is the 

 very thing he is in search of. It is an appeal from injustice to justice 

 herself. He consults his lawyers — they advise Equity; he has lost his 

 cause, they tell him, solely from want of that evidence which lurks in 

 the bosom of his opponent, and which may be pressed out of him by the 

 thumb-screw of a court of Equity. \Vliat, can a man after all, be made 

 to criminate himself? Not criminate himself, but merely to supply you 

 with the testimony your cause requires. Why that's the same thing. It 

 may be so, but it has not the same name, and, in many things, names 

 are all in all. And thus is the conviction finally forced upon us, that 

 the laws of our native country — of happy England, are not what we had 

 so long believed them, the very perfection of reason ; that they do not 

 supply a remedy for every wrong, and that their deficiencies must be 

 supplied by a court, under the auspicious and attractive name of Equity, 

 which compels a man to give evidence against himself through the 

 ' medium of his conscience.' 



We trust our country readers will give us credit for the accuracy of 

 this statement. We assure them it is strictly a correct representation 

 of the principle of forensic equity. Their honest hearts, we know, will 

 swell with indignation at the palpable oppression ; and, for our own parts, 

 old and worn as we are in the world, we incline to think that if redress 

 cannot be obtained without breaking into the sanctuaries of the 

 ' conscience,' and wrenching away those last securities, it is better to go 

 without it. We see hands and eyes lifted up at the audacity of the 

 declaration, but we are prepared, at a proper time, to defend it. Our 

 present object, however, is the Report ; and we proceed with our pro- 

 posed description of a Chancery-suit, gathered chiefly from the Report 

 itself, to afford our readers some notion of what is technically called the 

 practice of the court. 



