The fact is that it is not a very hopeful thing to go to lawyers and committees of lawyers for reforms unless you have the driving power of the business man behind them. Nothing was to be more disastrous according to legal prophecy than the institution of the Public Trustee. No reform has done more to mitigate domestic worries and anxiety than this beneficent institution. Lawyers and laymen nowadays concur in casting their troubles upon him and sheltering themselves and their clients beneath his protecting wing. If we are ever to have a proper system of legal advice for the poor it will, I think, have to be made an official department with a business head of affairs and attached lawyers. It might perhaps be added to the duties of Labour Exchanges, but in any case it should be a department of the Board of Trade, and it should have branches throughout the country and power to help the poor in all the Courts of the country. A device for suing _in forma pauperis_ working only in London, such as is set up by the new rules, cannot be of much avail in tackling the problem of placing legal advice and assistance at the call of the poor. I wish some experiments of a voluntary nature could be made of a more extended character than the poor man's lawyer societies that are attached to University settlements, and do good work in advising the poor. It is really in Court that a poor man wants assistance. I often think that a poor man or woman coming into a Court for the first time is like the average middle-class Englishman when he finds himself on Calais Pier without a word of French speech at his command and entire ignorance of the ways of the _douane_. How he clings to a friendly interpreter with a gold band round his hat. How extravagantly he rewards him when he and all his luggage are at length safely in the train. And why should not we encourage an amateur legal interpreter in our County Courts just as we welcome missionaries in our police Courts. I should like to see practising in each Court an official friend of the poor, ready to state the case of a poor man or woman who sought his assistance. There is an existing section of the County Courts Act allowing a friend to appear for anyone by leave of the judge if he does not do it for fee or reward, and on that foundation something might be built. I remember a clergyman, Father Gething, appearing for an old army pensioner against an insurance society with complicated rules, and asking to be allowed to address me, and conduct the old man's case. Sir William Cobbett, not having in his mind for the moment the section I refer to, objected. I asked Father Gething whether he was going to recover any "fee or reward" for acting in the case. "Certainly not," replied the reverend gentleman. "But perhaps," I continued--somewhat mischievously--"Sir William is going to contend that the word 'reward' in the statute means not only reward in this world, but the next."