THE INTOLERABLE BURDEN OF COSTS. [To TIM EDITOR OP THE
" SPECrATOR."]
Sin,—With reference to your comments on the costs in the Russell case I may offer a few remarks, as I have been nearly fifty years in the profession. In the last few years the fees paid to counsel have gone up enormously. I have no hesitation in saying that the fees of leading counsel have quadrupled in the last forty years. If the costs you say in the Russell ease were £20,000, I think you will find that at least £15,000 of this amount would be for counsel's fees. The ridiculous statement In Magna Charts that justice will not be sold to anyone is still thought by some people to be a great bulwark to liberty, the fact being that if a person has to purchase justice, what he purchases is not justice.
The Bar is a profession which enjoys enormous privileges and is practically subject to no discipline, as the members seem only to be pulled up by their Benchers for breaches of etiquette. What is wanted is that counsel's fees should be subject to taxation in the same way that an agreement between a solicitor and his client is subject to revision by a Taxing Master, and if this were done the costs of litigation would go down by a half in all big cases, assuming, as I do, that fees in excess of say twenty guineas to fifty guineas a day were always disallowed. A solicitor is allowed £5 5s. per day and no more. If counsel stipulated for £525 a day that should not be enforceable, and if paid should be recoverable. As it is, at present litigants are held to ransom by a small body of men who serve, so far as the State is concerned, no useful purpose, seeing that they can be hired by anyone regardless of the merits of the dispute in which they are engaged, and if any man be supremely pre-eminent and gains judgments he ought not to win then he is a danger to the State.—I am, Sir, &c., 80 Coleman Street, London, E.C. 2. E. T. HARGRAVES.
[We cannot think our correspondent's plan would work. People who are intensely eager to win a case cannot be pre- vented bidding against each other for the advocacy of a par- ticular counsel. Further, we are very strongly opposed to the view that by hiring a specially able advocate a man is defeating the ends of justice. A free market in advocacy is essential. How else are we to decide who is to have the silver-tongued Mr. Jones as his eounselP On the whole, our system of advocacy does much more to secure justice than the Cadi under the Palm Tree and a strictly rationed Bar—the ideal of so many critics of our courte.—ED. Spectator.]
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