Among those curious corners of London life which anyone may go to see
but nobody does, one of the most curious, and (for about five minutes)
interesting, is the House of Lords sitting as the Supreme Court of
Appeal. It is one of the ordinary things which go on and on unnoticed
for a lifetime because they have gone on so long, till one day one
begins to think about them and realizes suddenly that they were really
extraordinary all the time--just as one pronounces sometimes with a
startling sense of its absurdity some common English word. But no
sight-seer, no student of our institutions, and particularly no one who
is interested in the ways and customs of individual trades, should fail
to visit the Supreme Appellate Tribunal of this great country.
The funny thing about the House of Lords sitting as a court is that it
actually sits in the House of Lords. Entering the great red chamber--as
anybody may do if he can find the way--one receives the impression
that it is perfectly empty, save for the knot of barristers’ clerks,
solicitors’ clerks, pressmen and casual onlookers who are huddled
round the entrance. Beyond them are miles, and miles, and miles of red
leather benches, silent, mournful, untenanted, dead. But no! A low
monotonous drone reaches you--like the voice of a priest intoning at
the other end of a cathedral. Guided by this sound you discover faint
traces of life on one of the vast red benches. There is an old man
sitting on the bench, a pleasant, bearded old man; he does not look at
all legal, and he is dressed in every-day clothes, huddled up in front
of a sort of small card-table covered with huge tomes. He is speaking
apparently into space--in a kind of squeaky hum, if you can imagine the
sound--fumbling all the time with the large brown tomes.
Look again. Beyond him, a very long way off, is another old man, a
very, very jolly old man, with another beard, another card-table,
and more tomes. He is staring with profundity at the bench opposite.
Following his gaze, you detect with amazement another old man, all
alone on the great red bench. No, not alone. With something of the
sensations of a man who stands by a stagnant pond or looks at a drop
of drinking water through a microscope to discover that it is teeming
with life, you detect yet a fourth old man on the very same bench,
though, of course, a long way away. Both of them are equipped as the
others, though one of them, for some reason which does not appear, has
no beard. You are ready for anything now, so quite quickly you find the
fifth old man, far, far away in the distance, all alone on an island
in the emptiness, so far off that he seems to be cut off from all
communication with the other old men, or anyone else. Yet suddenly his
lips move, and it is seen that he is speaking. He is the presiding old
man, and he begins speaking while the first old man is still droning.
From the faint movement of his head and the far gleam of his eyes you
draw the conclusion that he is speaking to some living creature in your
own neighborhood; and, sure enough, you find that close to you, but
curtained off, there are seven or eight men shut up in a wooden pen
about seven feet square. These must be the prisoners, and that is the
dock, you think. But no, it is the barristers; as the House of Lords
is very holy they are only allowed to huddle on the doorstep. One of
them is standing in front of the pen at a sort of lectern, wearing a
big wig (the special House of Lords wig), and waiting patiently till
the old men have stopped squeaking. Most of the other men in the pen
are asleep, but two of them are crouching intently behind the other
one, and they keep tugging at his gown, or poking him in the back,
and whispering suggestions at him. When they do this he whispers back
with an aspect of calm, “Yes, yes--I follow,” but you know he does not
follow, and you know he is really in a great rage, because he is trying
to hear with the other ear what the old man is saying, and the old man
is so far away and his voice is so gentle, and his sentences are so
long and so full of parentheses, very often in Latin, that it is hard
enough to have to follow him, without being whispered at from the rear.
At last the old man shuts his mouth very firmly in a legal manner, and
it is clear that he has stopped speaking. It is the barrister’s turn.
He starts off with a huge sentence about “the presumption of intent
under the Drains and Mortgages (Consolidation) Act, 1892,” but when
he is right in the middle of it the fourth old man, whom everybody
supposed to be fast asleep, wakes up and asks the barrister an awkward
question about the Amending Act of 1899, just to show that he has got a
grip of the whole thing. The barrister has not the faintest idea what
the answer is, but he begins one immediately, as if it was quite easy,
for that is the game. While he is groping about in the middle of a huge
remark which means nothing at present but may very likely lead him to
the right answer in the end, the third old man, in order to confuse
the barrister, makes an interjection which he pretends is on the same
point, but is really on a totally different point, which the barrister
did not propose to deal with for days and days to come. When I say
“interjection” I mean that he delivers extremely slowly a sentence of
inconceivable duration, a sentence so long that it seems really as if
it would never end. Finally, the presiding old man decides that it is
time it did end, so he interrupts rather testily. Then all the old
men frankly abandon the pretence that the barrister has got anything
to do with it, and they just argue quietly with each other across the
vast red spaces. Meanwhile, the poor men in the pen try to stretch
their legs, and mutter fiercely at each other. Four or five of them
are immensely distinguished K.C.’s, earning thousands and thousands a
year, the very first men in their profession. Yet they tamely submit to
being confined in a tiny space where there is no room for their papers,
or their tomes, let alone their legs, for days and days and sometimes
weeks, with the whole of the House of Lords empty in front of them
except for the five old men who spend the day badgering them at ease
from comfortable sofas.
To argue a case in the House of Lords must be one of the severest
strains to which middle-aged men are ever subjected; it requires
tremendous qualities of concentration and patience and intellectual
quickness (not to speak of the labour of preparing the cases
beforehand). At half-past one, when they have endured this for three
hours, they dash out to lunch; they are lucky if they get anything to
eat before twenty minutes to two, but at two (presumably because the
House of Lords is required for legislative purposes when they have done
with it) they have to dash back to the pen again, where digestion must
be quite impossible, even if you are not required to argue with the old
men. No manual labourer in the world would tolerate such conditions
for a day. Either he would break out of the pen and put up his feet on
the red benches, or, very sensibly, he would insist that the House of
Lords, when sitting as a court, must sit in a place which was suitable
for a court, if it was only a committee-room in the upper purlieus of
the House.
I cannot imagine why the barristers do not say that. It is not as if
there was any impressive pomp or ceremony connected with this archaic
survival; if there were, it might be worth it. But nothing could be
less impressive than these old men mumbling desolately in everyday
clothes and beards at rows and rows of empty red sofas. I am told that
when the Lord Chancellor presides he does wear robes, but the other
Lords still wear mufti. That must be a great sight, but not, I should
think, extravagantly solemn.
But perhaps that is the real secret of the British Constitution--our
capacity to extract solemnity from the incongruous or the merely dull.
I once heard the House of Lords deliver judgment--after days and days
of argument--in a case of the highest constitutional importance,
involving the rights of the Crown, and what remain of the rights of
the subject. All England was waiting with real interest for the issue.
One by one the old men read out their long opinions, opinions of great
profundity and learning and care, opinions of the greatest judges in
the land, universally and rightly respected, opinions that will be
quoted in every history and text-book, in every constitutional case,
for hundreds of years to come. It took nearly a day to read them. While
they were being read, the old men who were not reading, the barristers,
the odd dozen of “the public,” the clerks, everybody--sat or stood in a
sort of coma of stupefied boredom, gazing at nothing. No one stirred.
Only, very far away, the gentle voice of the old man might have been
heard rolling up to the roof, and squeaking about in the corners, and
buzzing about like a sleepy bee under the benches--and always with a
faint note of querulous amazement, as if the old man could not believe
that anyone was listening to what he was saying. And he was right--for
nobody was.
We are a marvellous nation.