CORINTHIAN LAW-SUITS. 385 the noticeable man with large gray eyes, uttered this deprecatory protest in after days: "I never said that the vox populi was of course vox Dei. It may be ; but it may be, and with equal probability, vox Diaboli. That the voice of 10,000,000 of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will." ST LITIGIOUS. I CORINTHIANS vi. 7. T. PAUL accounts it utterly a fault among the Corinthian Christians that they have a habit of going to law one with another. A habit so bad, as he regards the matter, that he even puts the question, why do they not rather take wrong? why not rather suffer themselves to be defrauded? He was conversant with the letter and spirit of the Sermon on the Mount; and in the spirit of it, and to the letter of it, he denounced the practice of going to law between brethren. "It is an honour for a man," saith the Wise Man, "to cease from strife; but every fool will be meddling." The beginning of strife, as another proverb has it, "is as when one letteth out water; therefore leave off contention before it be meddled with." The apostle would have argued out the injunction on higher ground than these worldly-wise reasons may suggest, and would have made a particular appeal to Christian principle where the Wise King makes a general one to arguments of expediency; but into the speciality of his stand-point there is no present occasion to enter; enough that he is stringent against the litigious spirit, and would manifestly be as stern as Racine is satirical against les plaideurs. It has been truly said of the litigious quibbling nature of the Greeks, that it was the soil on which an art like that of the Sophists was made to flourish. "This excessive love of lawsuits is familiar to all versed in Grecian history. The almost farmcal representation of a levs pret by Eschylus in his otherwise awful frame. The Exneria, shows with what keen and lely interest the audience witnessed even the very details of litigation The English rightly or wrongly, have the repute abroad of being equally food of going to law. The Marchese Scampa in one of Landor's Imaginary Comersatioes-and that author has furnished ample corroborative evidence in his own practice declares law to be to an Englishman like his native air: he flies to it as he flies to his ship; he loses his appetite if he misses it: and he never thinks he has enough of it until it has fairly stripped him and begins to He heavy on his stomach. "It is his tea, his plum-pudding, his punch, his nightcap." Happy! if he can throw it off so easily as the last, when he wakens. For, as Plautus words the warning, Nescis tu quam meticulosa res sit ire ad judicem, You can little tell what a ticklish thing it is to go to law. Swift supports his Scheme to make an Hospital for Incurables, by alleging the vast supplies it would receive "from contentious people of all conditions, who are content to waste the greatest part of their own fortunes at law, to be the instrument of impoverishing others." There is a familiar process of quarrelling without anger, of pursuing claims which it is not intended to enforce, (the last war in China was described as analogous with this style of litigation,) of finding that every fresh step renders it more difficult to abandon the suit, and of accumulating costs which bear a constantly increasing proportion to the value of the subject-matter; in many instances there being not even the miserable satisfaction of throwing the blame on the attorney, for it seems as if every stage in the proceedings had been justified by prudence or necessity. "The perplexed client can only attribute his troubles to an overruling destiny, or, in other words, to the imperfection of human foresight, and to the mutual inability of different persons to understand one another's motives and intentions." The robes of lawyers are lined with the obstinacy of suitors, is an Italian adage which, laid to heart, is proposed by Archbishop Trench as a means of keeping men out of lawsuits, or, being in them, from refusing to accept tolerable terms of accom A SAGE ORDINANCE. 387 modation. Diedrich Knickerbocker may well be enthusiastic in praise of the exalted wisdom of Charondas, the Locrian legislator, whose was the "sage ordinance," that whoever proposed a new law, should do it with a halter round his neck; so that, in case his proposition was rejected, they just hung him up, and there the matter ended; the alleged effect of which salutary institution was, that for more than two hundred years there was only one trifling alteration in the criminal code, and the whole race of lawyers starved to death for want of employment. "Depuis qu'il est des lois, l'homme, pour ses péchés, Se condamne à plaider la moitié de sa vie : La moitié les trois quarts, et bien souvent le tout." The Locrians enjoy the credit of having, in consequence of the Charondan canon, lived very lovingly together, and of being such a happy people, that they scarce make any figure throughout the whole Grecian history. They found no sustenance for the pettifoggers, who crowd the law-courts they infest, as the mythical historian of New York puts it, by tampering with the passions of the lower and more ignorant classes; who, as if poverty were not a sufficient misery in itself, are always ready to heighten it by the bitterness of litigation. The pettifoggers are charged with being in law what quacks are in medicine-exciting the malady for the purpose of profiting by the cure; and retarding the cure for the purpose of augmenting the fees. "Where one destroys the constitution, the other impoverishes the purse;" and it is also observable, that as a patient, who has once been under the hands of a quack, is ever after dabbling in drugs, and poisoning himself with infallible remedies, so an ignorant man, who has once meddled with the law, under the auspices of one of these empirics, is for ever after embroiling himself with his neighbours, and impoverishing himself with successful lawsuits. An unsuccessful one is reward enough for some litigants, for in the dear delight of litigation itself they have their reward. When the Abbé Fragueir lost a suit that had been going on for twenty years, he was reminded of all the costs and troubles it must have inflicted on him first and last. "Oh !" buoyantly replied the Abbé "je l'ai gagné tous les soirs pendant vingt ans." Chamfort professes to admire the mot, as très-philosophique. Beaumarchais has been described as spending his life between lawsuits and playwriting; every lawsuit of his took the form of a play, and every play afforded matter for a lawsuit. He had to plaider to save his goods and his reputation; he had to plaider to get his plays acted; and when they had been acted, he found himself still compelled to plaider, in order to assert their success or to show cause why they ought not to have failed; in short he plaida sans cesse, and the accepted motto for his collected works was, "Ma vie est un combat." What a salient contrast to Montaigne, who declares himseif to have over and over again put up with manifest injustice, to avoid the hazard of worse at the hands of the judges, after an age of vexations, vile and dirty practices, harassing contingencies, and incalculable costs. Sir David Lyndsay's carman gives an account of his lawsuit that tells a tale and points a moral for all time : "Marry, I lent my gossip my mare, to fetch hame coals, And I ran to the consistory, for to pleinyie, And there I happenit amang ane greedie meinyie.* Within aucht days I gat but libellandum ; And syne I gat-how call ye it ?—ad replicandum; Thus they postponed me twa year with their train, Of pronunciandum they made me wonder fain, But I gat never my gude grey mare again." That young French nobleman was no fool, though neighbours * Company. INVETERATE LITIGANTS. 389 accounted it foolish of him, who "very innocently" rejoiced and boasted that his mother had lost her suit, as if it had been a cough, or a fever, or some equally bad liability and good riddance. The only possible gainers in the long run he would assume to be those learned lawyers, who, as Luttrell versifies it, For years, leave matters more entangled.” Sir Roger de Coverley has painted for us the character of his neighbour, Tom Touchy, a fellow famous for taking the law of everybody. There is not one in the town where he lives that he has not sued at a quarter-sessions. His head is full of costs, damages, and ejectments. "He plagued a couple of honest gentlemen so long for a trespass in breaking one of his hedges, till he was forced to sell the ground it enclosed to defray the charges of the prosecution. His father left him fourscore pounds a year; but he has cast and been cast so often, that he is not now worth thirty." Addison, we may be sure, liked Doctor Sacheverell none the better for the noise he made in the world by his quarrels and lawsuits with his parish ioners. It is on the occasion of Mr. Spectator being made acquainted by Sir Roger with the person and disposition of Tom Touchy, that the latter and Will Wimble are at loggerheads, and the old knight, J.P., appealed to in the cause, utters the memorable judgment that much might be said on both sides. In his book on Italy, Addison had commented on the litigious temper of the Neapolitans, declaring that very few persons among them of any consideration had not a cause depending; for when a Neapolitan cavalier had nothing else to do, it seems he gravely shut himself up in his closet, and fell a tumbling over his papers to see if he could start a lawsuit, and plague any of his neighbours. So much were the people changed since Statius said of them (Nulla foro rabies, etc.): "By love of right and native justice led, In the straight paths of equity they tread; |