De Quincey, in his autobiographic sketch headed 'Laxton,' tells of the
fortune of Miss Watson, who afterwards became Lady Carbery, and also of
the legacy left to her in the form of a lawsuit by her father against
the East India Company; and among his papers we find the following
passage either overlooked or omitted, for some undiscoverable reason,
from that paper, though it has a value in its own way as expressing some
of De Quincey's views on law and equity; and it is sufficiently
characteristic to be included here:
In consequence of her long minority, Miss Watson must have succeeded at
once to six thousand a year on completing her twenty-first year; and she
also inherited a Chancery-suit, which sort of property is _now_ (1853)
rather at a discount in public estimation; but let the reader assure
himself that even the Court of Chancery is not quite so black as it is
painted; that the true ground for the delays and ruinous expenses in
ninety-nine out of one hundred instances is not legal chicanery, still
less the wilful circuitousness and wordiness of law processes, but the
great eternal fact that, what through lapse of time, decays of memory,
and loss of documents, and what through interested suppressions of
truth, and the dispersions of witnesses, and causes by the score
beside, the ultimate truth and equity of human disputes is a matter of
prodigious perplexity; neither is there any possibility that the mass of
litigations as to property ever _can_ be made cheap except in proportion
as it is made dismally imperfect.
No power that ever yet was lodged in senates or in councils _could_
avail, ever _has_ availed, ever _will_ avail, to intercept the
immeasurable expansion of that law which grows out of social expansion.
Fast as the relations of man multiply, and the modifications of property
extend, must the corresponding adaptations of the law run alongside. The
pretended arrests applied to this heaving volcanic system of forces by
codifications, like those of Justinian or Napoleon, had not lasted for a
year before all had broke loose from its moorings, and was again going
ahead with redoubling impetus. Equally delusive are the prospects held
out that the new system of cheap provincial justice will be a change
unconditionally for the better. Already the complaints against it are
such in bitterness and extent as to show that in very many cases it must
be regarded as a failure; and, where it is not, that it must be regarded
as a compromise: once you had 8 degrees of the advantage X, 4 of Y; now
you have 7 of X, 5 of Y.