The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.