Pleadings are the programs of the performance. They are printed beforehand and everybody gets a copy. Preparation consists in the rehearsal and the carpentry of setting the scene. Any lawyer knows how important the pleadings are, but nobody else does. The judge does not pay any more attention to them than he has to. Juries hardly ever see them; if they did, they could not understand them. The witnesses never hear of them, the clients have sworn they have read them and have sworn that they are true. Yet not one client in a thousand could give an explanation of them other than, "My lawyer told me to sign it, so I did." Whenever anyone gets anxious to understand a pleading, there are so many volumes about the subject and so many bookcases of decisions they would furnish a house. All this may appear flippant, but the subject is so absurd, abstruse, and abnormal to a man of business, that it is almost impossible to make it understandable. A partial list of authorities on the subject sounds like a chapter from _Alice in Wonderland_: Pepper on Pleading; Perry on Pleading; Pollock on Pleading; Pound on Pleading; Puterbaugh on Pleading; Phillips on Pleading; Pomeroy on Pleading. The number of court decisions in which this branch of the proceeding has been reverently and gravely dealt with reads like a metaphysical discussion in the dark ages. The names formerly used were superb. Complaint, demurrer, confession and avoidance, traverse, replication, dilatory pleas, peremptory pleas, rejoinder, rebutter, and sur-rebutter. On the other hand the clear, concise technical statement of a case is not a matter to be laughed at; no clear thinking is possible without it. No plain understanding of what the drama is about, nor what the issues of the battle are, can be grasped. Good lawyers are good thinkers and usually plain talkers. The present-day revolt against the confused pleadings may go to the opposite extreme and abolish them all, leaving the case to be presented as formless and loose. The vexed question of the proper form of a pleading may delay justice until it is determined on appeal from the City Court to the Supreme Court, then to the Appellate Division, then to the Court of Appeals. In the meanwhile the clients may die, the money in suit may be lost, while the audience is waiting merely for the programs to be printed. In Perry on _Common Law Pleading_, reprinted in 1897, chapter thirteen is devoted to rules which tend to prevent obscurity and confusion in pleading.