LEGAL SINECURES.
THE golden days of the Law Courts came to an end about thirty years ago, but there is still, as Lord Frederick Caven- dish pointed out last week, a number of legal offices—not large, but why should there be any ?—with high pay and little or no work. A process of reform begun in 1832, and extending over the following twenty years, made a pretty complete clearance of the sinecure places and useless offices which had not merely added greatly to the cost of our judicial system, but had most seriously interfered with its efficiency. The clearance, however, has been followed by an after-growth, exhibiting, though on a much smaller area and in a mitigated form, the same features as that which preceded it,—a growth of offices which are not quite sinecures, but which give little work for much pay, three men doing less than one man's work, three offices doing work which one of the three could easily and with convenience to the public get through with its present staff ; which are not altogether useless, but are inconvenient or inefficient enough to be a source of perpetual irritation to the men of business who must resort to them. As, moreover, the Legislature, in abolishing useless places, was influenced as much by the obstruction which such places offered to the despatch of business as by economy, certain offices of little or no utility, but which had the negative merit of doing no harm, were left untouched ; and these, as we now have them, while, fortunately, as harmless as ever, present nearly every note of the genuine sinecure. In a very few cases there is an official with nothing to do, the duties of his office, if any, having slipped away from it ; in the other cases, there is work—though not much of it—which the official may do if he pleases,—work for which he is in some sort responsible, but which another man is also paid for doing, and with which therefore, as a rule, the principal does not concern himself. There are besides one or two officers who are doing unnecessary work—work which at one time was useful and important, but which, owing to changes in the management of business, need not now be done. The new quasi-sinecures were created by Parliament, in lieu of offices which had been suppressed, and were intended to be working offices, not over-paid ; they have mostly grown to be what they are under the fostering of one of the Judges to whom the supervision of them was by Parliament committed. Supplied with clerks to do nearly all the work there was to do—over-supplied with clerks, it would rather seem—the office-holders came to have little duty remaining for themselves, and this little, changes in the conduct of business have helped still further to diminish. The Commissioners who reported on the Legal Departments last year have marked these offices, and also the offices whidh are without duties, for abolition. Those of them who have had duties to perform are pretty sure of getting two-thirds of their salaries, and those who occupy the higher position of having no duties, or no duties which they are not entitled to perform by deputy, will, if precedent be followed, get the whole. To unreflecting persons it may appear strange that on the abolition of an office a person should be better treated if he has never had anything to do than if he has been a hard-worked servant of the public. What they overlook is that the public has made a bargain with the sinecurist, that it promised him a certain income for life without stipulating for any return, and that as the abolition of his office will relieve him of no duty, it can afford no pretext for diminishing his allowance.
About the best specimens of the useless offices now remaining are to be found at the lowest steps of our legal system, pre- served, perhaps, by their lowly station from the ruin which long ago befell the sinecures of higher rank and greater emolument. There are, for example the Tipstaves of the Courts of Common Law. These officers have long been absolutely useless, and there are two of them attached to the Queen's Bench, whose whereabouts and nominal functions the Commissioners only discovered after a great deal of inquiry. Higher up on the Common-law side there is a group of charm- ing offices, which to the admirers of sinecures, if there be any still remaining, must seem nearly everything which sinecures ought to be. The Clerkships of Assize are eight in number, and the emoluments of five of them range from £900 to £1,100 a year, the income of the three others being only £500 each. There are duties, if the Clerks choose to perform them,—not too onerous, for they only extend over three months of the year ; and five of the Assize Clerks are provided with deputies paid by the State, by whom, as of course is natural and reasonable, what duties there are are in fact dis- charged. Another pleasant place on the Common-law side is that of the Registrar of the acknowledgments of the deeds of married women, who, being supplied with rather more clerical assistance than needed for his office, finds himself in the happy position of having no duties and an income of £700 a year. The Commissioners allowed themselves to reflect somewhat upon Lord Coleridge for having appointed to this office, after their inquiry began, a gentleman of his own name ; but if such offices are put into a man's gift, it is not in human nature not to fill them up, besides that it may fairly be considered- no man being bound to think himself wiser than the Legis- lature—obligatory to do so ; and, moreover, as Lord Coleridge wrote in answer to a remonstrance from the Treasury, the whole cost of such offices now existing is not enormous, and in each case is insignificant. Places like those of the Associates of the Common-law Courts, which are necessary and of unquestion- able utility, though the holders of them, with £1,000 a year each, have five or six months' holiday in the year, obviously belong to a different category ; but these, though there is one Associate at least who would prefer more work and more pay, are places which in the days of sinecures would not have been altogether despised, and which allow their occupants rather more leisure than modern notions deem expedient. Among the Chancery offices we find a group of four which have long been noted as unnecessary, and one of which was actually abolished, while two others were marked out for abolition by an Act of last Session. The Messenger of the Great Seal is gone, superseded by the Post Office ; the Clerk of the Patents and the Clerk of the Petty Bag are to follow ; and when the holders of offices so ancient are doomed, the clerks in the Attorney-General's Patent Office cannot hope for a prolonged existence. Parting with the Petty - bag Office, indeed, seems like cutting ourselves off altogether from the past, and is a sort of challenge to all offices which remain to show cause why they should be permitted to sur- vive. The four offices which have been mentioned have not been very expensive, but it is long since they have been of much use to the public, and the Commission on Legal Depart- ments thought that such duties as they discharged might serve to keep up occupation for the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery, or, at any rate, for his present staff. This officer (who is paid £1,200 a year) has never been over-burdened, and the duties of Clerk of the Hanaper, on account of which he receives £200 of his salary, having been entirely put an end to some time ago by the simple expedient of making certain fees payable in stamps, he may fairly be asked to undertake some additional duty of a kind analogous to that which his office already dis- charges. This officer is clearly necessary, and he cannot be blamed if, with the fair salary which Parliament has given him, he has a good deal of leisure. For the Clerk of Enrol- ments and the three Clerks of Records and Writs there is not so much to be said, since nobody defends them ; it is evident that one of them, with the salary of £1,200 a year which they each have at present, could with the greatest ease do the work of the four. The Clerk of Enrolments very candidly admitted that his office could conveniently be united with that of Records and Writs ; and the heads of the latter office seem to have nothing personally to do beyond taking affidavits, while the number of affidavits has for years been diminishing. "I never saw them," one eminent solicitor told the Commission on Legal Depart- ments, "do anything. There are frequently difficult and pmzling questions upon points upon which I am not conversant sufficiently to be able to speak to them, but I know that in all questions of difficulty you go to Mr. Braithwaite (one of the upper clerks), who is the gentleman there who puts everybody right, and knows the business." By a fortunate provision, the most inefficient of public offices has its Mr. Braithwaite, who is so constituted that he cannot help making himself acquainted with all the office should do. The Clerks of Records and Writs and the Clerk of Enrolments must, we fear, feel time hang heavy on their hands, and to gentlemen fit for useful work the irksome- ness of this is perhaps not overpaid at £1,200 a year ; but it must be best, both for them and for the public, that three of them should as soon as possible be freed from duty.
Small as the number of supererogatory offices connected with the Law Courts is, and though the cost of them is far from great, there should be no delay in getting rid of them. There are no offices whatever which are less likely to be given away upon considerations of merit, and it is not well that the Judges with whom the patronage rests should have such places at their disposal. Where an office involving important duties is in his gift, a Judge, we have no doubt, feels absolutely pre- cluded from appointing a person who is not competent ; but where he has an office to fill with slight or no duty, he is sure to have a son, or nephew, or cousin whom the place will exactly suit, and though it would be an abuse of language to call the ap- pointment of such arelative a job, it has something of the look of a job, and makes an impression that had better not be made. It would, indeed, be of advantage to relieve the Judges of their patronage altogether ; there can be no difficulty about distri- buting it through other hands ; and they are functionaries who should be placed as far as possible in circumstances which in- vite no suspicion. Their recommendation that the patronage of the Judges should not be taken away from them is almost the only one of the recommendations of the Commissioners on Legal Departments with which we do not entirely agree. The greater number of those recommendations, it need scarcely be said, deals with matters of vastly greater importance than the abolition of unnecessary offices. The consolidation and rearrangement of Legal Departments which they have advised is a sort of natural sequel to the Judicature Act, and it would greatly lessen the cost ol those departments, while increasing their efficiency. The statement that clerks in the Common-law offices do not work more than the equivalent of 190 days of six hours each in the year, and that clerks in the Chancery offices work rather less, may be somewhat too strong ; but the Commissioners have clearly shown that from the lowest rank to the highest there is a great waste of power in these offices, and that it is by consolidation and a redistri- bution of duties only that the waste can be prevented. The performance of this task will severely strain the administrative capacity of the Minister to whom it falls to discharge it, but it must be attempted, and it is earnestly to be hoped that it will be attempted soon.
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