152 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



abolished. It is, however, in cases of civil wrong that 

 individuals find the greatest difficulty (often amounting 

 to an absolute impossibility) of obtaining justice. This 

 arises, not only from the enormously voluminous and 

 intricate mass of enactments and precedents, and the 

 tedious mode of procedure, involving grievous delay and 

 expense to every applicant for justice, but also to the vast 

 accumulation of cases which are allowed to come before the 

 courts, many of which are of such a complex nature as to 

 some extent to justify the strict forms of procedure which 

 bear so hardly on those who seek relief in much simpler 

 cases. The result is, that it is often better for a man to 

 put up with a palpable wTong than to endeavour to obtain 

 redress; and the assertion that in our happy country 

 there is "not one law for the rich and another for the 

 poor," though literally true, is practically the very opposite 

 of truth, since in a large number of cases the wealthy 

 alone can afford to pay for the means of obtaining justice. 



How to Simplify the Law. 



Our system of law is, in great part, the product of times 

 when the security of property was held to be of more 

 importance than protection to the person. The legislators 

 being almost always the great landowners, a large part of 

 the law was adapted to secure them the power of dealing 

 with the land (the most important of all property) in any 

 imaginable way ; and in their bungling attempts to do 

 this, they have produced a system of law of real estate of 

 almost unimaginable intricacy. To interpret and carry 

 out this and other branches of the law^ of property, 

 occupies a large and influential portion of the legal pro- 

 fession. Lawyers exist upon the complexity of the law. 

 It is not to their interest that we should be able to obtain 

 cheap and speedy justice ; nor is it their interest to reduce 

 the number of suitors at the courts. We cannot reason- 

 ably expect them to do either of these things, which are 

 yet of vital importance to us who are not lawyers. They 

 may, indeed, so modify, and to some extent simplify, pro- 

 cedure as to take away a portion of the terrors of " going 



