OLD ENGLISH LOCAL COURTS AND THE MOVEMENT FOR THEIR REFORM

The first Reform Bill of 1832 was at once a symptom and a further cause of momentous changes in English institutions, political and legal, to say nothing of social and ecclesiastical. Many of these were brought about as the result of patient and competent investigations of royal commissions which, though not unknown before the third decade of the nineteenth century, were active to an extent hitherto unheard of during that notable epoch of reform. While a few men of law were among the forward spirits, the bulk of the advance guard were laymen. As a rule judges, barristers and attorneys were averse to taking the initiative, partly because prospective changes threatened vested privileges involving fat fees, partly because they clung to learning which they had painfully acquired, and partly because of their exclusive pride in the fact that they alone knew their way about in the "deep ungodly jungle of the common law" and in the equally inpenetrable morass of equity.

While the issue was forced from outside the profession, the working out of the details was fortunately left to the trained men who knew their business. As an English historian once shrewdly remarked, many a man is judge of a good dinner who cannot cook one and an amateur lawyer can wreak more damage than a chef in the pupillary stage.