If there is no quarrel, they can make one, always finding some quibble in the law itself to set people against each other. They drag cases out so long—“several five-year periods,” I do not know how many years—before a hearing; and even after judgement, some manoeuvre or error makes the case as ready to begin again, sometimes after fourteen years, as it was at first. So they stretch out time and delay suits until they have enriched themselves and beggared their clients.

And just as Cato attacked Isocrates’ pupils, we may rightly accuse our wrangling lawyers: they “grow old in lawsuits,” and are so quarrelsome and busy here on earth that I think some will go on pleading their clients’ cases in hell. Simler complains of the advocates among the Swiss in his day: “When they should end disputes, they begin them and prolong their clients’ cases for years, persuading them that their claim is sound until their inherited estates are consumed, and they have spent more pursuing the thing than it is worth or than they will gain by recovering it.”

So anyone who goes to law, as the proverb says, holds a wolf by the ears, or is like a sheep running to a briar for shelter in a storm. If he pursues his case he is ruined; if he abandons it he loses everything. What difference is there? In former times, says Augustine, people used to settle matters “through arbitrators agreed upon by both sides.”

And so in Switzerland, Simler tells us, “they had public arbitrators, or mediators, in every town, who made an amicable settlement between one person and another.” He greatly admires their honest simplicity, which could preserve peace so well and settle such substantial cases in this way.

At Fez in Africa they have neither lawyers nor advocates; if a dispute arises, both parties, plaintiff and defendant, come before their Alfakins, or chief judge, “and the case is heard and settled at once, without further appeals or distressing delays.”

Our forefathers, as a distinguished writer on our country observes, used to make all transfers of property and guarantees with “a few small golden crosses”—a few golden crosses and lines of verse. Such was the honesty and integrity of succeeding ages that a deed conveying an entire manor—as I have often seen—was comprised in some twenty lines or thereabouts.

Like that written slip, or “Laconian scytale,” so celebrated of old in agreements, which Cicero so warmly commends to Atticus. Plutarch in his Lysander, Aristotle in his Politics, Thucydides in book 1, Diodorus, and Suidas praise and extol it for its Spartan brevity in such matters; and well they might, for, as Tertullian says, “Certainties lie in few words”: there is much greater certainty in fewer words.

And that was formerly the practice everywhere. Now many skins of parchment scarcely suffice: anyone buying or selling a house must have a houseful of documents. There are so many qualifications, so many words, such repetitive restatements of every detail—to prevent quibbling, they say. Yet we find to our cost that for ingenious minds this causes far more dispute and disagreement. Hardly any deed is drafted so precisely by one person that another cannot find a flaw or pick a quarrel with it. One misplaced word, one tiny error, and the whole thing is annulled.

What is law today is no law tomorrow; what one person thinks sound another considers deeply flawed. The result is that we have nothing among us but contention and confusion, each taking sides against the other.

What Plutarch long ago lamented about the people of Asia holds true in our time: “These men assembled here have not come to sacrifice to their gods, offer Jupiter their first fruits, or hold revels for Bacchus. An annual disease tormenting Asia has brought them here to conclude their disputes and lawsuits.” It is “a multitude destroying and being destroyed,” a destructive mob seeking one another’s ruin.

Such, for the most part, are our ordinary litigants, court-term attenders, and clients: fresh disturbances every day, mistakes, errors, quibbles, and, at this very moment, I hear, who knows how many thousand cases in a single court. No person is free of it, scarcely any title to property secure. Cases are pursued with such bitterness, so many tricks, postponements, delays, forgeries, such expense—for enormous sums are spent without thought—such violence and malice. Whose fault it is I do not know: the lawyers’, the clients’, the laws’, both parties’, or everyone’s.

But the rebuke Paul gave the Corinthians long ago applies still more aptly now: “There is a fault among you, and I say it to your shame: is there no wise man among you to judge between his brothers, instead of one brother going to law against another?” And Christ’s counsel on lawsuits never needed repeating more than in this age: “Come to terms quickly with your adversary,” and so on, Matthew 5:25.

I could list many more particular grievances that must disturb a political community. To sum it all up briefly: where there is good government and prudent, wise rulers, everything thrives and prospers; that land enjoys peace and happiness. Where it is otherwise, everything is ugly to behold, uncultivated, barbarous, uncivilised: a paradise is turned into a wilderness.

This island, among others, and our near neighbours France and Germany, bear sufficient witness: Roman prudence in government brought them out of barbarism in a short time. Just read what Caesar reports of us, and Tacitus of the ancient Germans: they were once as uncivilised as the people of Virginia. Yet through the establishment of colonies and good laws, they passed from a condition of barbarous lawlessness to countries full of rich and populous cities, as they are now, and became flourishing kingdoms.

In the same way, Virginia and those wild Irish might have been civilised long ago, if the policy now beginning—of establishing colonies, and so on—had been adopted earlier. I have read a discourse printed in 1612, Discovering the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued, or Brought under Obedience to the Crown of England, until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign. Yet if a discerning political thinker thoroughly examined the author’s reasons, I fear they would not meet with complete approval: allowing Ireland to lie waste for so long would instead bring dishonour upon our nation.

Indeed, to come nearer home, if travellers saw those wealthy United Provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and the rest, across the sea from us; their neat cities and populous towns, full of hardworking craftspeople; so much land reclaimed from the sea and maintained with such labour by ingenious devices, so wonderfully successful—as at Beemster in Holland, “so that you could find nothing equal or similar to it in the whole world,” says the geographer Bertius: the whole world cannot match it;

so many navigable canals made by human hands from place to place; and, on our side, so many thousands of acres of fenland lying flooded; our cities sparsely populated, and mean, poor, and ugly beside theirs; our trades decayed; our ever-flowing rivers obstructed and their useful role in transport wholly neglected; so many harbours without ships or towns, so many parks and forests kept for pleasure, barren heaths, and depopulated villages—I think such a traveller would certainly find something to criticise.

I cannot deny that our nation “has a good reputation abroad”: by the common consent of geographers, historians, and political writers, it is a most noble and flourishing kingdom, “like a single fortress.” What Quinctius says in Livy about the inhabitants of the Peloponnese applies well to us: we are “tortoises enclosed in their own shells,” like so many tortoises in our shells, safely defended by an angry sea that forms a wall on every side.

Our island has received many such honourable tributes. As a learned countryman of ours puts it very well: “Ever since the Normans first came into England, this country, in military matters and every other aspect of civil life, has stood alongside the most flourishing kingdoms of Europe and our Christian world.” It is a blessed and wealthy country, one of the Fortunate Isles.