376 , Court of Chancery. [Ocr. 
ship as a mere subsidiary employment. Indeed, the Court of Basing- 
hall-street seems pretty much considered as an agreeable morning lounge, 
where sinecurists may resort just pour passer le tems, and to fill the 
pocket with sovereigns. Fortescue, speaking of the Judges of the King’s 
Bench in ancient times, says that “they did not sit more than three 
hours in the day, and that, when they had taken their refreshments, they 
spent the rest of the day in the study of the laws, read the Holy Scrip- 
tures, and other innocent amusements at their pleasure. Indeed,’ he 
adds, “ it seems rather a life of contemplation than of much exertion.’ 
We never heard that our Commissioners of Bankrupts were particularly 
addicted either to the reading of the Scriptures, or the study of the laws ; 
but, undoubtedly, in the shortness of their sitting, and their leisure for 
‘contemplation, they might almost be mistaken for these judges of the 
olden time. Be this as it may, Mr. Harvey, the member for Colchester, 
who may be supposed to have some knowledge of the subject, stated, in 
one of the debates on this subject, it to be “his firm belief, that, what 
between capacity with inexperience on the one hand, and experience with 
incapacity on the other, there were not more than five or six commission- 
ers, out of the seventy-two, who were able to discharge their duty as 
they ought.” 
But were the commissioners, deprived of these trifling drawbacks, to 
become ever so sedulous in their office, the system itself, in London, at 
least, has effectually precluded the possibility of the complete and un- 
divided attention of its judges being given to the various matters which 
come before them. Sitting at their various meetings by rotation, the 
same cause becomes liable to an eternal variety of judges in all its various 
stages, and this not only from one meeting to another, but even in the 
same meetings. ‘ We assemble,” says Mr. Cullen, one of them, in his 
evidence before the Committee, “ under a number, sometimes a great 
number, of different commissions at once: our attention is solicited at 
one and the same moment by many suitors, all equally pressing, and 
entitled to despatch and decision upon their respective cases ; and_ these 
often involving many nice questions of fact andj considerations of law. 
One party gains the attention of a commissioner ; he is instantly broken 
in upon bysanother party, perhaps by another commissioner ; the half- 
heard case must be repeated ; and the second judge soon, in like manner, 
gives way to a third; and so the case taken up by one after another 
returns, perhaps, upon its steps, till, after having, as it were, circulated 
through the list amid the eternal interruption of one commission by other 
business—of each other by each other—and of all by the public, it 
remains finally undetermined, unless the suitor, or his counsel or solicitor, 
undertakes the inviduous task of asserting his right to the combined 
attention of three commissioners (if three fortunately happen to be pre- 
sent), or of breaking up the meeting for want of a quorum; in either of 
which cases the functions of the list in all the commissions are imme- 
diately suspended.” The absence of the requisite quantity of commis- 
sioners become not unfrequently a trifling impediment to the constitution 
of any court at all. Pa: ; 
Moreover, the spectacle of judges being paid by fees at the hands of 
the suitors, is an indecency of which this court has the honour of a daily 
exhibition, and while keeping a sharp look out for them occupies no 
inconsiderable part of the attention of the commissioners, the amount 
becomes a subject of eternal squabbling. Indeed, however little may be 
