The Sun.
London, England, 1829-11-25 00:00:00

fifth pat of an acre of ground, a silver bpooll,
a pair of sheets, and a little loose money, afte,
paying the bier at the fuoeral of her husband,
did ,not trouble herself with administering to
tht deceased. However, that trouble, with which
she Would willingly have dispensed, was kind))
attended to by a professional gentleman, Mr.
Charles teake, an attorney, at Witney ; who,
according to the statement of ,the Solicitor.
General, prevailed on Nicholas Carter, a pauper,
who had married Jane, title of the eight children
of Draper, to take out letters of administration.
,rst fruits of this was the serving the widow
Draper with a writ of ejectment, which taught
her that she enjoyed the inestimable blessing of
living under a Government of law, and that the
lavv was not to he despised with impunity. This
brought another attorney into the field, a Mr.
Lee, of Whitey, who, in a very unprofessional
manner, brought this suit to a premature end,
by agreeing to take the cottages himself, and
paying Mr. Carter, the administrator, 51., as
his share of the value of the property. But let
no man in this country -say sit finis denique
Mr. Leake was too well grounded in the
law not to be aware of the wonder-working
power of the Court of Chancery, and, after a
lapse of eight years, in 1822 the admirable ma-
chinery of that Court was put in force to esta-
blish the value of the defunct Draper's pro-
perty, and ascertain the extent of the various in-
terests in it, in order that the pauper Carter and
his wife, and the young Drapers who bad been
sheltered in the cottage, might receive no injury
through the arrangement of Mr. Lee. The
widow is entitled to onohird of the leasehold
property, and the plaintiff is entitled to one-
eighth of the two remaining thirds. Moreover,
he is entitled to one-eighth of the personal pro-
perty. The extent of the plaintiff's claim, taken
I at the highest, would stand thus:—
. _

One-eighth part of two-thirds of 701.
Persotudities at the highest

£5 16 8

£lO 0 0

estimate
Balance of Cash in Dra-

per's Repositories after
paying the Funeral Ex-
pences

£1 5 S

Xll 5 3

One-eih‘h of which ie £o 13 9i
£6 15 5,-t
Ded'•uct the sum paid to plaintiff by Mr. Lee 5 0 0

Highest ralue of the claim under litigation 113 51
4
However, this was the representation of the
plaintiff. Mr. Lee, who purchased the pro-
perty, produced abundance of evidence to shew
that it was not worth more than the sum he had
agreed to pay. The Vice-Chancellor considered
the evidence that Mr. Lee had acted fairly in
this respect was abundant and satisfactory, and
that all the charges on that head were utterly
false and -groundless. His Honour dismissed
the bill with costs. Those who know the crea-
tive powers of the Court of Chancery, will rea-
dily give credit to the Solicitor-General, who
stated that the costs already exceeded 8001.—
But who requires to be told that the decision of
the Vice-Chancellor is not final ? The profes-
sional gentlemen may consider their honour con-
cerned in shz.wing how much more may be made
of one-eighth part of two-thirds of an old cot-
tage. Mr. Bentham suggests as a reason why
criminal justice proceeds more rapidly than
civil, that Judges, " whether they have bowels
or no, have bodies ; Judges have houses and
goods. A year or two at common law, 10 or 20
years in equity, would be too long to wait
before the criminal could be apprehended." This
admirable case might have been settled by any
man possessed of sufficient brains to keep him-
self from falling into the fire in five minutes. The
bare statement was enough. But under the
glorious system of this country, eight hundred
pounds can be spent on it before it attracts the
notice of the Judge. The atrocious character
of the English Law is evidenced in this, that
any man who is indifferent to public opinion
may at once, under the mask of legal proceedings,
so manage matters as to place a man possessed
of a small property in an utter impossibility of
preserving it without the aid of a rich man. Our
readers may remember a singular case of oppres-
sion of two poor women in a county bordering
on Wales, who, in consequence of the tranceu-
vres of ..an attorney to lay hold of some free-
hold property they possessed, were forced into
law by him, and beggared and thrown into
prison. Mr. Bentham has favoured- the world
with another valuable volume, under the title of
a " Petition
.for Justice," of which we shall give
some account on a future day. We cannot,
however, here avoid quoting a passage, illustra-
tive of the peculiarity in English judicature, by
which thousands may he socnt before the cause
comes before the Judge :
" How to cause (he says) the suit to be carried
on down to the last stage, without the Judges
knowing anything of the matter, this was the pro-
blem to be solved, and solved it was :—Fruit of the
contrivance profit gained : all trouble, all time, all
labour, all responsibility saved."
" By the parties in conjunction—that is to say,
not the parties, but their respective agents, with the
Judges' subordinates, all impregnated with . interest
repugnant to the interests of parties, every thing re-
quired to be done was to be done—agent fighting
against agent, with arms respectively bought by
then at the shop kept. by the Judge for the purpose.
•••* • • •
" An attorney, along with a fee, puts a written
paper into a box, the Judge knowing nothing about
the matter. This done, into the same or another
bag another fee is dropped, with another written
paper, of which the Judge has the same knowledge.
" By each fee, the agent on one side purchases of
the Judge the faculty and benefit of plundering,
impoverishing, and vexing at the same time, his own
client and the suitor on the other side ; whereupon
the agent of the. party on the other side does the
like ; and thus the compliment, as the phrase is, is
returned."
Well might Thomson call " dark insidious
men" the inventors and improvers of this system.
—lbid.

'There have some accounts appeared in our
Paper of a Police Association in Whitechapel,
established for the purpose of giving the parish
the benefit of an efficient nightly watch, and
thereby superseding the necessity of haying re-
course to the arbitrary system of the new police.
We have always ad►nitted that nothing could be
more ineffective, either as a protectio►i to pro-
perty or a prevention of crime, than the old
nightly watch ; b►►t we took a distinction be-
tween the principle and the practice. The
principle was not of a military origin or of
French extraction ; but it was strictly and purely
English and constitutional. The system of pa-
rochial police grew out of the same spirit of po-
pular Government which established Juries and
created representative Legislatures. The local
,oyernment of parishes was liable to abuse, as
all human institutions are ; but, if liable to
abuse, it was also susceptible of reformation.
Where abuse was proved to exist under the pa-
rochial authorities, we would have the principle
retained, but the practice altered.. 'We would
have reform, not revolution. The advocates of