10 MAY 1873, Page 2

The Judicature Bill was read a third time in the

House of Lords on Monday night, and goes down to the House of Com- mons practically the same measure that was introduced by Lord Selborne in the first week of the Session. It would be hazardous- to forecast its fate. To be sure, it has been pushed through its later stages with more expedition than the Lord Chancellor's. dignified dilatoriness during the early months of the Parlia- mentary year gave us reason to hope for. But although Lord. Cairns carried by a considerable majority in Committee of the whole House the amendment retaining the Lord Chancellor's authority as a judge of first instance which he failed to carry in the Select Committee, the objections taken by the Equity Bar to the measure have not been met at all. This is- the more remarkable, because Lord Cairns admitted the com- parative weakness of the Equity Judges on the bench of the proposed High Court, and even urged it as a reason for retaining the Chancellor as president of the Equity division. But the remedy, objectionable on other grounds, is certainly inadequate as an answer to the Lincoln's Inn memorialists. The gist of their criticism was that the Equity or Second Division of the High Court would be fully occupied with the administrative business, and that the litigious business of Chancery would go to the other three Divisions,—that is, to the common-law judges, who now preside in the Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer. To add the Lord Chancellor to the Equity division will not in the least contribute to secure a proper interpretation of Equitable principles in the other divisions. Nothing will give this guarantee for the maintenance of our Equity jurisprudence but an addition to the number of the Equity Judges, and their distribu- tion among the four divisions, if this unnecessary partition be retained, of the High Court. But the Lord Chancellor refuses as vehemently as Lord Hatherley himself to be a party to what he calls—begging the question, by the wo.,7--" an unnecessary multiplication of judges." It remains to be seen what the lawyers in the House of Commons will do with a measure that, as far as we can see, leaves us no security whatever for those principles of a higher and more generous jurisprudence by which hitherto our common law has been rendered tolerable.