ng decisions, placing
the simplest legal processes wholly beyond the competence of any but
trained experts, giving endless facilities for fraud and for the evasion
or defeat of justice, turning a law case into a game in which chance and
skill had often vastly greater influence than substantial merits. Lord
Brougham probably in no degree exaggerated when he described great
portions of the English law as 'a two-edged sword in the hands of craft
and of oppression,' and a great authority on chancery law declared in
1839 that 'no man, as things now stand, can enter into a chancery suit
with any reasonable hope of being alive at its termination if he has a
determined adversary.'[41]

The moral difficulties of administering such a system were very great,
and in many cases English juries, in dealing with it, adopted a rough
and ready code of morals of their own. Though they had sworn to decide
every case according to the law as it was stated to them, and according
to the evidence that was laid before them, they frequently refused to
follow legal technicalities which would lead to substantial injustice,
and they still more frequently refused to bring in verdicts according to
evidence when by doing so they would consign a prisoner to a savage,
excessive, or unjust punishment. Some of the worst abuses of the English
law were mitigated by the perjuries of juries who refused to put them in
force.

The great legal reforms of the past half-century have removed most of
these abuses, and have at the same time introduced a wider and juster
spirit into the practical administration of the law. Yet even now
different judges sometimes differ widely in the importance they attach
to substantial justice and to legal technicalities; and even now one of
the advantages of trial by jury is that it brings the masculine common
sense and the unsophisticated sense of justice of unprofessional men
into fields that would otherwise be often distorted by ingenious
subtleties. It is, however, far less in the position of the judge than
in the position of an advocate that the most difficult moral questions
of the legal profession arise. The difference between an unscrupulous
advocate and an advocate who is governed by a high sense of honour and
morality is very manifest, but at best there must be many things in the
profession from which a very sensitive conscience would recoil, and
things must be said and done which can hardly be justified except on the
gro