THE EDUCATION OF OUR COUNTY COURTS.
THERE is a general notion about, of course not without some element of truth, that anything which checks the litigating spirit is wholesome, and anything which encourages it bad. And not only so, but that the cheap justice of our County Courts, —and it is very cheap, and substantial justice too,—is, because it encourages litigation, an evil. We do not deny that the passion for litigation,—as it seems to be developed in some countries,—as it was developed in Hungary, for instance, before every tribunal associated with the Government became so unpopular, —becomes a gigantic evil, simply because directly the passion grows up for litigation as an end, its value as an education ceases ; the mind becomes blinded to the lessons with which it abounds, sees nothing beyond the partizan game, and rebels vehemently against the tenability of any case on the opposite side. But in spite of this admitted mischief, we maintain that to the mass of the English poor and lower middle-class the County Courts are most valuable and cheap schools,---very well attended, on the whole,—in which the majority of the scholars receive absolutely gratuitous instruction, while those who pay more or less dearly for what they learn, if they have not the plague of contentiousness in their blood, frequently find, whether they win or lose, that they have ultimately bought what was quite worth their money.
A session of the County Court is rare enough in most country towns to be an object of interest to the whole town. It occurs probably
once a month, when an experienced judge disposes of some twenty or thirty defended cases in a single day, hearing the plaintiffs and defendants themselves and their witnesses, if they can't employ solicitors,—and if they can, then hearing the solicitors, or some_ times barristers, on their behalf. The Court is usually quite fall of lookers-on, including, probably, a number of the friends of the various parties to the cases, but also a large number of other country bumpkins, for whom the spectacle of contention and judgment always has an interest. The most trivial matters of daily life are opened up before the Judge,—probably an acute, perfectly equitable man, of trained decision of character, whose first effort it is to sift away the extraneous evidence with which the ignorant litigant loads his statement, and who, therefore, puts sharp and telling gam_ tions if the parties or their lawyers miss the true points, and who insists on the witnesses answering the very questions put to them in the directest possible way,—an unspeakable intellectual suffering to those witnesses themselves, though of the most salutary kind. Two shopkeepers' wives who have had some intricate arrangements as to the transfer from one to the other of a cradle, or a chignon, or some cheap lace, quarrel perhaps on other grounds,—and immediately take advantage of the little transaction in which they were engaged to implead each other in the County Court. One demands 13s. of the other as the balance due on the above transactions. The judge hears both with a swift sort of patience, that shunts off the infinite irrelevancies of "says I,' and "says she," but penetrates behind the drapery of the cheap lace, gets the husband's view of the chignon and its worth, discovers the element of feminine jealousy lurking in the case which has marvellously enhanced the value claimed, and sends away both the good women, not loving each other any better certainly, but each decidedly lower in her own estimation, in consequence of the lameness and poverty of the brilliant story she thought she had to tell, and with a verdict for 4s. out of the 13s., depressing to the defiant spirit of each. The good women themselves, as they carry their brilliant bonnets out of Court, are sadder and wiser, but probably not better women as yet. But the lookers-on on both sides have had a most valuable lesson. They have seen to what proportions a story will shrink when acutely investigated ; how important and difficult it is to know what bears on the point and what does not ; how exceedingly irrelevant it is that the chignon or lace did or did not make the woman who wore it look "quite a fright "; how much there was, after all, to be said for Martha though Julia had been so triumphant before the trial ; and how very much there is which aggravated the grievance which has absolutely no bearing at all on the justice of the case ;—that is, they have learnt in some degree to distrust the onesided view of the case, to carry away in their imagination a keen, dignified-looking gentleman who has the art of crumbling away the considerations on which they most relied, in one word, they have apprehended dimly the fact that there is a grave distinction between an impartial view and a partial. We doubt if the value of this kind of teaching, closely associated as it is with all the various small details of everyday life, can be greatly exaggerated. In the course of an hour's sitting they perhaps see a crafty tradesman who had tempted a customer with an offer that seemed to mean one thing and really meant another, humiliatingly defeated, though quite sure of his own triumph ; a contentious wedding bell-ringer who wouldn't fetch his own share of the fees, is. 8d., pay 2s. for the pleasure of extorting his debt from the leader of the belfry through a court of justice; a farmer who had charged his labourer with selling his straw at a false weight, confronted with the labourer not much to his own advantage ; two or three cases of assault put in very different lights indeed by the opposite sides,—and in most of such cases something very different coming from the Bench, from what either party had expected. Then, again, they would see dimly how impatient the one side was of the evidence given by the other side,—how each tried to interrupt, and had to be suppressed ; how little either side took by having the popular feeling with it ; how much difference there was between having a witness on your side, and having witness in your favour ; how very much more frequently each side damaged itself than incurred damage from the other ; in a word, how moderation and self-control were of the essence of success, and partizanship or violence, of failure. But besides the mere training of the judgment which the Count,' Courts afford to the audience, even more perhaps than to those too deeply interested parties whose bias may be too strong to admit of their learning the lesson, there is a good deal of training for the mere imagination in being compelled to realize how very small the popular sympathy seems to be with personal grievances on either. side,—how inevitably the man who nurses and makes much of Ws grievance is laughed at by the audience, while he who makes coin
paratively light of his, and only expects a moderate redress, is sure to command the respect both of judge and audience. There is a wonderful lesson in the exaggerating power of self-love, to be derived from listening to case after case in which men and women who have been brooding over their wrongs for weeks, find them dwindling, even beneath the mere attempt to expound them adequately in open Court, and dwindling still more beneath the reducing process of counter-evidence and the calm indifference of the spectators. The matters which command the deepest interest of the "externs" are not the wrongs of individuals, on either side, but any incidental question that may be raised affecting (say) the price of land or the right of way in the neighbourhood. Then,
indeed, you become aware that there is a public opinion in the
Court. If a witness gives evidence that the land near a disputed right of way is worth 1100 an acre, an enthusiast on the other side who thinks that the public interest will be served by revealing the excessive worthlessness of land in that vicinity, will call out from the body of the Court, "Just /10 an acre, your honour !" or "Quite a mistake, Judge !" amidst the plaudits of
his partizans, while the outraged usher has to charge the explosive quarter of the Court and threaten committal to prison. But the public opinion thus excited about the small public interests of the neighbourhood is painfully apathetic to the individual wrongs and rights which constitute the great majority of the dis
puted cases. There is no place like a County Court for teaching the people at large that their private feelings are, after all, only of moderate interest to their fellow-creatures, that the indignation they import into a case, is a mistake as far as any prospect of success is concerned, and, so far as it is excessive, rather an amusement to their fellow-men than otherwise. They are too likely to learn, too, that there is something faintly ludicrous in the high -colour sufferers are apt to give to their own sufferings,—that they may have the laugh against them, not merely if they exaggerate their wrongs, but if they do not very much tone down their own natural warmth of feeling. Public feeling, for instance, is always An favour of the timid and aggrieved view of sufferers from aggres sive dogs ; the popular mind is timid about dogs,—of that there is no question,—and earnestly demands legal protection against them. But if the defendant, even in a dog case, is reasonable and anxious to give a compensation which the majority of man kind who have seen the dog only in imagination, think so adequate that they might even fancy themselves willing to undergo the injury at each a price, and if the prosecutor is unduly vindictive, and so unwise as to enlarge on his own mental sufferings in consequence of imaginary fears, public opinion will be apt to become a little cruel, especially if rent under-garments are made too much the theme of elaborate disquisition. There is no tenderness at all in the public for exaggerated feelings, and -the mere sign of them is sure to be the occasion for a turn of the tide against any oge who shows them, and for a tendency to fix on the ludicrous side of his anger or panic.
The habit of seeing County-Court practice is, we are quite -sure, a sobering influence for the people. The poorer class are, no doubt, even more litigious than those who have more to spend upon litigation ;—we know a solicitor in one of -these Courts who says that he never has any difficulty in extracting a guinea fee for the prosecution of a claim amount ing only to 10s. 6d. ; but that is, we maintain, a danger not produced by the facility and cheapness of justice, but very much -diminished by it. No doubt, a poor man bent on litigation may be deterred by a great expense,—must be deterred, if he cannot find enough to set the law in action. But that is a mere repres sive influence,—a shutting-down of the safety-valve. The reason the poorer are comparatively so much more litigious than the wellto-do, is that they are much more wrapped up in their own little world, and much less able to apprehend the view that will be taken of it by others, and still less the justice of such a view. The spectacle -of the cheap, rapid, and substantial justice dealt out in our County Courts is an immensely powerful antidote to this narrowness of mind. The poor see with their own eyes how very often neither -side obtains exactly what it hopes ; how differently the case comes
.out from what it goes in ; how small the wrong appears which -when poured into their private ear was so immeasurable; how much
self-control it takes to do yourself justice ; in a word, they get a tangible notion that it is quite possible that even they themselves -might possibly misapprehend the equity of their own quarrels, and must do so, if they do not try to get out of themselves in their view thereof. This is a far sounder and truer remedy for the litigious spirit than what looks like a fine on poverty, imposed in order to deny it justice.
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