1828. - Court of Chancery. 377 
thought of mal-administration in its other departments, dexterity in this 
appears held in no slight estimation among the commissioners. Mr. 
Cooper states, “ Some of the commissioners plume themselves on pos- 
sessing in greater perfection than their brethren, the faculty of gaining a 
very large amount of fees in a very small space of time. One of them 
has boasted of having received thirty sovereigns one Saturday morning — 
Thirty meetings in a few hours!!! I had this from an acting commis- 
sioner ; and who did not scruple, five minutes afterwards, to assure me, 
that no branch of our law was better administered than that which falls 
under the superintendence of the London commissioners of bankrupt.” 
These fees are dependent upon the number of meetings held in each 
bankruptcy, and the time for sitting not exceeding, upon an average, two 
hours in the morning, it has given birth to the suspicion, that meetings 
have been unnecessarily multiplied for the purpose of bringing with 
them a multiplication of fees. Of course we, who are such staunch 
believers in the universal disinterestedness of human nature, would not 
for a moment indulge in so improbable a conjecture. It certainly, how- 
ever, strikes us as a little strange, that between the Ist of April 1824, 
and the Ist of April 1827, “there have been held in London alone, 
fifteen thousand public meetings of the commissioners of bankrupt, and 
six thousand one hundred and thirty-two private ones.”* From the 
petition of exparte Grimstead, in the bankruptcy of Howard and Gibbs; 
it appeared that up to a certain stage in the proceedings there had been 
literally twenty-three private meetings, the expence of which, to the 
petitioner alone, amounted at the least to the sum of 500/. 
In addition to this the greatest fluctuation pervades all the decisions 
of the court. Each different list of conmissioners has its own little code 
of laws—its own little formulary of practice. The proceedings of the 
whole exhibit a motley record of contradictory decisions ; and the lawyer 
who is consulted by a suitor as to the bearing of the law on his case, has 
no other criterion on which to form his judgment, than a knowledge of 
the list before which the case is to be heard. 
To crown the whole, this system which, be it remembered ought, from 
its peculiar nature, to exhibit the extreme of economy, is arranged upon 
a scale somewhere about the acme of extravagance. Nor does the cost 
rest with the positive sums lavished on its support. The losses to the 
estate, from the nature of its management, are to be taken into the 
account ; and when it is considered that this is committed to individuals 
who have frequently an interest in delaying a distribution of the estate, 
or whose share in the produce is relatively too small to secure its prudent 
administration—that there are brokers and managers who, doing very 
little, must, upon all the sound principles of the court, receive very 
much—and that the whole is conducted under the superintendence of a 
body constituted like the commissioners, themselves forming no incon- 
siderable item in the account, it may be readily conceived that Mr. 
Montague does not exaggerate (indeed he has solid data for much of his 
calculation) when in estimating 
* Parkes’ History of the Court of Chancery, p. 422. 
M.M. New Series.—Vou. VI. No. 34. 3 ¢ 
