364 MY LIFE [Chap. 



more than the contract price, and when it was finished I sent 

 him word he could have his ladders, scaffold -poles, boards, 

 etc., though, according to the agreement, they were to be my 

 property on his failure to finish the building. 



I soon found, however, that he had not paid for a large 

 portion of the materials, and bills kept coming in for months 

 afterwards for bricks, timber, stone, iron-work, etc., etc. The 

 merchants who had trusted him found that he had no effects 

 whatever, as he lived as a lodger with his father ; and from all 

 I heard, was accustomed to take contracts in different places 

 round London, and by not paying for any materials that he 

 could get on credit, make a handsome profit. But the height 

 of his impudence was to come. About five years after the 

 house was finished, I received a demand through a lawyer for 

 (I think) between £800 and ^"900 damages for not allowing 

 this man to finish the house ! I wrote, refusing to pay a 

 penny. Then came a notice of an action at law ; and I was 

 obliged to put it in a lawyer's hands. All the usual pre- 

 liminaries of interrogatories, affidavits, statements of claim, 

 replies, objections, etc., etc., were gone through, and on every 

 point argued we were successful, with costs, which we never 

 got. The case was lengthened out for two or three years, and 

 then ceased, the result being that I had to pay about ;£ioo law 

 costs for what was merely an attempt to extort money. That 

 was my experience of English law, which leaves the honest 

 man in the power of the dishonest one, mulcts the former 

 in heavy expenses, and is thus the very antithesis of justice. 



The next matter was a much more serious one, and cost 

 me fifteen years of continued worry, litigation, and persecution, 

 with the final loss of several hundred pounds. And it was all 

 brought upon me by my own ignorance and my own fault — 

 ignorance of the fact so well shown by the late Professor de 

 Morgan — that " paradoxers," as he termed them, can never 

 be convinced, and my fault in wishing to get money by any 

 kind of wager. It constitutes, therefore, the most regrettable 

 incident in my life. As many inaccurate accounts have been 

 published, I will now state the facts, as briefly as possible, from 

 documents still in my possession. 



