The Romance of the Law.

tures be made to appear in real force, — such as that the court may call them a part of the pleading and evidence. Nevertheless, in some shape or form we do find out about them, and we know them to be the real parts of men's lives, and that they are largely the things which are in fact won or lost by litigation. So far as the immediate and even the re mote results of delay are concerned, the responsibility for that is not far to seek. It belongs either to the mistaken and inade quate machinery of the law, and whose de fects it behooves the law-makers to repair; or else it belongs to those who run that ma chinery, and who should be made to mend their own ways; or yet it may be (and that surely sometimes is the case) that there are not men enough, with time enough, to do the work as it should be done, or those who have been appointed to the task have not energy enough or skill enough to do it. This, like the other, is a defect that the people, who are the sufferers, must do the mending of. We are struggling with propositions about the reform of our Common Law methods, and we have very zealous advocates pro and con; and yet the Common Law, with all its forms, its robes, and its ceremonies in the shape of the much abused system of special pleading, gives justice with a quicker hand ten times, while Chancery waits and withers the very heart out of subject and suitor. After more than three hundred years, must we still couple "the law's delay" to "the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con tumely, the pangs of despised love, the inso lence of office; " or having found quick remedies in our republican institutions for three out of these four, must we concede the evil of the first, but supinely admit that pro gress and civilization have neither cm nor mitigation for the worst in the list?

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I do not believe that there is no cure, or mitigation at least, for any evil but death. I say again that there never was a great public complaint that was not the expression of some great, real evil; and all history teaches us that as a rule there comes a wild extravagance and a breaking down of images before the cure comes; and that those in whose power it is to provide a remedy, if they wait, may fall the victims. I believe that the senseless outcry against the bar as a profession is largely the wail of those who really suffer from the defects of a system, and who cannot know or find out from whence their torture comes. I do not offer a cure or even a mitigation here; but I be lieve that if we lift up our voices as it be comes those who know these things to do, there will soon or late come out of the knowledge of what the evil is, a remedy, at least in part. Let dreams of perfection be the idle hobby of those who do not work. I recognize that the unattainable lies very far short of that. But I do believe that even in our own little day Truth, to reach the feet of which is at least the theory of every endeavor of our profession, may find a way of touching the things of which it treats with Ithuriel's spear, — a light, an insufficient touch perhaps, — so that disrobed of those torn garments of tech nical and narrow construction, which are so often the refuge of the idle and the unskilled, disfigured and disgraced no longer by ad herence to customs which belong to a time every vestige of whose environment other wise has vanished, the fair form of Justice as administered in Chancery may stand be fore us as naked of such deforming raiment as God Almighty sees her, and we shall neither be afraid nor ashamed to look upon her.