The Sun.
London, England, 1826-05-02 00:00:00

matters, let us cTose the public purse-strings till we
haVe ; or, if there• is some counteracting principle,
miscalled taste, which confines add mars the efforts of
genius, let those who have the power consign its pos-
sessors to those realms of dulness and of darkness
from which it never should have emerged.

Perhaps there is no greater or more. obvious evil
existing in the country than the inequality of Church
preferment.. There are few men mixing in the world
who do not themselves know instances of indolent,
useless persons of that profession, enjoying thousands
a year, and laborious and exemplary parish Priests,
who have scarcely: the means: of providing a decent
maintenance. Yet no man has been found absurd
enough to attribute this to the Archbishop of Can-
terbury. In fact, nothing can be more preposterous
than to attribute to the head of any profession exclu-
sively the errors of the system over which it may be
his lot to preside. But when party feelings can be
gratified, the means are generally overlooked ; and in
the case of the • Lord Chancellor we have a striking
instance of that kind of party virulence which would
attribute to an individual all the faults which are, in
fact, the accumulation of ages, and which have grown
up and, existed long before he `was in any way con-
nected with them.. No one can deny that the Court
of Chancery has in its practice become a source of
great expence, vexation, and delay, amounting, in too
many instances, to an absolute denial of justice ; but
it is no less a denial of justice to say that an indi-
vidual, who in his, own person presents the most
striking instance of learning, patience, and labour,
that has ever presided in any Court, is the cause of
that which he is, at the worst, himself .only the un-
willing instrument. The Archbishop of Canterbury
probably sees as forcibly as any man the mischief which
results from the gross inequality in the distribution of
our Ecclesiastical Revenues; and would, probably, if
the truth could be known, hail a reform in that respect
as warmly as any man. But he knows, and so do the
public in
.general, that there are vested interests, and
political interests, over which he has no manner of
control'', and that to lay to his door the errors of the
system can only be done by those who are really ig-
norant or wilfully blind to the actual state of things.
So it is in a great degree with the Lord Chancellor.
He presides over a system which litigant and worthless
suitors, which hungry barristers and solicitors, abuse
to their own advantage ; and because they so abuse it,,
the whole blame is laid to the door of the Judge, who
is himself, in no small degree, the victim of the system
of which he is
„unjustly made the cause. No man
can spend an hour in the Chancellor's Court, and not
witness, on the one hand, his anxiety to do right, and
the way in which that wish, is thwarted by the liberal
wigs and: gowns, and the still more liberal solicitors
who,profit by their own avarice and inattention. That
the system of this Court, which has becothe a scourge
to the community; ought and must be reformed, we
do not for a moment deny ; but we do deny4bat there
is anv thing like
,justice in the vituperation which is
heaped upon the Lord Chancellor, who at the close'
of a long professional life, is entitled to receive rather
the gratitude than the condemnation of his country.
Where, we would ask, is there to be found the man
fit to succeed him ? The course of nature, or, the love
of case and retirement, may call for a new Chancellor
—and party feeling may thus be gratified but when
the vacancy has' been made, where, we would ask, is it
to be supplied from ? We have never vet found any
professional man who could tell us. Had Sir Samuel
Roinilly lived, he was the man who combined all the
requisites of a great Judge ; but neither his mantle,
nor that of Lord Eldon, seems likely to devolve upon
any present Member of the Chancery Bar,—(/bid.)