Besides the numerous, worse than useless, idlers (Lawyers) who fatten upon the industry of others, and the loss inflicted by their voracity and by the other expenses, this Court devastates upon a scale beyond belief. I was told by an English Barbarian that he once tried to obtain one thousand of money from the Court, which the lawyers said there would be no difficulty in getting, as it was clearly _his_; it would be only a matter of form, possibly _some_ delay. "Well," said he to me, "I instructed my lawyer to go to the Court and get the money. He demanded fifty pounds to cover fees [tin]. To make a short story, he went to the Court, _but I never got any money_! After I had actually paid in fees more than half of the one thousand, the obstacles had grown to be so insurmountable that I merely dropped the matter." "But," I said, "the thousand--who has that?" "Oh, it is in the Court of Chancery!" Another honest Barbarian told me that he had spent all his life (he was sixty) studying and endeavouring to awaken attention to the abuses of this Court--but in vain. The attempt seemed hopeless. The Court was entrenched in the very frame of the body politic, and nothing but _reconstruction_ would answer; and that reconstruction is probably only possible after first _demolishing_! This man said that a prodigious sum--sixty millions of English money--was _directly_ locked up; and that of property of all sorts, subject to the _clutch_ or injured by the processes of the Court it was incalculable, and, very likely, would represent a tenth of all the valuables in the whole Kingdom! In my walks and in my travels, sometimes in the city, I would notice many houses, with windows smashed out, the walls tottering, the doors hanging loosely, or wholly gone, the approaches filthy, the whole place a _nuisance_, injuring and depopulating all about it, or filling the ever-spreading mischief with the vilest population. I have asked an explanation--"Oh, it is in Chancery." In the midst of a village, suddenly one comes upon a vacant space; it is an abomination; everything near catches the infection, all that portion of an otherwise pretty place becomes a _nuisance_. The character of the village at length suffers; it becomes known as a place ruined by the Court of Chancery. In fine, whenever one sees a wrecked building, or any property marked by neglect and verging to total destruction, the explanation is: "It is in Chancery." And the same thing is often said of ruined men and women: "Oh, they have lost everything in the Court of Chancery!"