Christianity, to administer charity, to teach children their lessons, to adjust prices of food, to inspect coal-mines, to regulate railways, to superintend house-building, to arrange cab-fares, to look into people’s stink-traps, to vaccinate their children, to send out emigrants, to prescribe hours of labour, to examine lodging-houses, to test the knowledge of mercantile captains, to provide public libraries, to read and authorize dramas, to inspect passenger-ships, to see that small dwellings are supplied with water, to regulate endless things from a banker’s issues down to the boat-fares on the Serpentine—is it not manifest that its primary duty must be ill-discharged in proportion to the multiplicity of affairs it busies itself with? Must not its time and energies be frittered away in schemes, and inquiries, and amendments, in discussions, and divisions, to the neglect of its essential business? And does not a glance over the debates make it clear that this is the fact? and that, while parliament and public are alike occupied with these mischievous interferences, these Utopian hopes, the one thing needful is left almost undone? [34] _Edinburgh Review_, April, 1839. See here, then, the proximate cause of our legal abominations. We drop the substance in our efforts to catch shadows. While our firesides, and clubs, and taverns are {272} filled with talk about corn-law questions, and church questions, and education questions, and poor-law questions—all of them raised by over-legislation—the justice question gets scarcely any attention; and we daily submit to be oppressed, cheated, robbed. This institution which should succour the man who has fallen among thieves, turns him over to solicitors, barristers, and a legion of law-officers; drains his purse for writs, briefs, affidavits, subpœnas, fees of all kinds and expenses innumerable; involves him in the intricacies of common courts, chancery courts, suits, counter-suits, and appeals; and often ruins where it should aid. Meanwhile, meetings are called, and leading articles written, and votes asked, and societies formed, and agitations carried on, not to rectify these gigantic evils, but partly to abolish our ancestors’ mischievous meddlings and partly to establish meddlings of our own. Is it not obvious that this fatal neglect is a result of this mistaken officiousness? Suppose that external and internal protection had been the sole recognized functions of the ruling powers. Is it conceivable that our administration of justice would have been as corrupt as now? Can any one believe that had parliamentary elections been habitually contested on questions of legal reform, our judicial system would still have been what Sir John Romilly calls it,—“a technical system invented for the creation of costs?” Does any one suppose that, if the efficient defence of person and property had been the constant subject-matter of hustings pledges, we should yet be waylaid by a