ably both parties or at least one of them, are ruined utterly in prosecuting the suit, want of his stock, and following his calling."
Chancellor, Masters, clerks, all were in the same boat. The Chancellor sold the offices in his court, or gave them to his friends. The Masters took bribes, and the clerks forced unnecessary attendances of suitors, for which the suitors had to pay. The proceedings in "Jarndyce v. Jarndyce" exactly represent what the procedure of Chancery came to. In 1653, in a debate in Parliament, the Chancery was described as the greatest grievance of the nation. It was said that, for dilatoriness, chargeableness, "and a facility of bleeding the people in the purse vein," that court might compare with, if not surpass, any court in the world. "It was confidently affirmed, by knowing gentlemen of worth, that there were depending in that court twenty-three thousand cases, some of which had been there depending five, some ten, some twenty, some thirty years, and more; that there had been spent therein many thousand pounds, to the ruin nay, utter undoing, of many families; that no ship almost that sailed in the sea of the law but first or last put into that port, and if they made any considerable stay there, they suffered so much loss, that the remedy was as bad as the disease; that what was ordered one day was contradicted the next, so as in some cases there had been five hundred orders and more; that when the purse of the clients began to empty, and their spirits were a little cooled, then by a reference to some gentlemen in the country, the cause so long depending at so great a charge, came to be ended ; so that some members did not stick to term the Chancery a mystery of wickedness, and a standing cheat, and that, in short, so many horrible things were affirmed of it, that those who were, or had a mind to be advocates for it, had little to say on the behalf of it, and so, at the end of one day's debate, the question being out, it was voted down."
But Chancery was not thus ended. A pamphlet entitled "The Honest Lawyer," printed in 1676, says that a Chancery suit is one "where one order shall beget another, and the poor client be swung round (like a cat before execution) from decree to re-hearing, and from report to
