470 Welsh Jurisprudence. [Nov. 
of no more than nine years, actually amounted to thirteen thousand nine 
hundred and thirty-six (and this, be it remembered, independent of those 
tried in the Court of Great Session), which was just about ten’ thousand 
more than the county of Monmouth (a county of very similar area and 
population) could muster during the same period. ‘That these courts, 
however, are anything but “ modern instances” of the saw, we believe 
no very elaborately-wrought chain of evidence will be required to prove. 
The goodness of a commodity is indeed apt to be measured by its cost, 
and courts in which the attorney of one year becomes the judge of the 
next—and a judge paid by thefees of the suitors—are not like to have 
the scale of their expence reduced to a degrading minimum. Beyond 
this, however, they appear to possess but few recommendations. They 
are characterized as vortexes for dragging the unwary into litigation, 
rather than as sanctuaries of justice ; and we dismiss them with Lord 
Cawdor’s sweeping observation—“ Instead of a simple and expeditious 
manner of recovering small demands, intelligible to those who would 
generally be amenable to their jurisdiction, suits for the most trifling 
amount are protracted from year to year, and all the intricacies of special 
pleading, and legal chicanery resorted to, for no other purpose than to 
swell the costs of suit, and delay the administration of justice.” —page 26. 
The judicial apparatus of the Court of Great Session most assuredly 
does not suffer from any narrowness or contraction in its scale. Actuated, 
we suppose, by the love of Philosopher Square’s “ eternal fitness of 
things,” our legislature must not only erect the principality into a 
separate jurisdiction, but must actually subdivide into four independent 
and original judicatures, each the subject of a separate circuit, with its chief 
judge and second judge, its attorney-general, and corresponding grada- 
tions of officers—its judges receiving salaries to the tune of eleven hun- 
dred and fifty pounds each: indeed, the chief justice of Chester pockets 
sixteen hundred and fifty pounds per annum, and the second judge. 
twelve hundred and fifty pounds; but as they have the additional busi- 
ness of that county to transact, we set the difference down to that account. 
Only conceive it, ye people, “who put your trust in princes,” twelve 
judges are thought sufficient for holding assizes for the whole of Eng- 
land—trom John-o’-Groat even unto the Land’s End—but for this little 
nook of the kingdom, these “barren regions of Venedotia,” which, in 
the year 1811, did not, according to census, contain altogether a popula- 
tion equal to that of the West Riding of Yorkshire, nothing short of a 
judicial establishment of eight dignitaries, and minor officers in propor- 
tion, will content the rapacity of aristocratical patronage. Now when 
we see a vast number of powdered lacqueys forming the establishment of 
some small residence, and receiving exorbitant wages to boot, if we 
speculate at all in the matter, we generally come to two conclusions—. 
first, that there is but little work in that house to be done ; and secondly, , 
that that little will be badly performed. Of the manner in which the. 
work is done in the judicial establishment of Wales, we shall presently 
present our readers with the materials of judging. Of the quantity, 
and of its cost, they may form an idea from an amusing calcu-- 
lation we have made for their instruction. Now it appears from the 
parliamentary returns, that the number of bills filed in the various Courts : 
of Great Session during the preceding eleven years, ending in 1823,. 
amounted to no more than six hundred and eighty-nine, the number of 
common law causes to thirteen hundred and seventeex, and the criminal » 
