, that "_multi litigant in foro, non ut aliquid lucrentur, sed ut
vexant alios_." (Many litigate in court, not that they may gain
anything, but that they may harass others.) Many men, from motives of
revenge and oppression, are willing to spend their own money in
prosecuting a groundless suit, if they can thereby compel their victims,
who are less able than themselves to bear the loss, to spend money in
the defence. Under the prevailing system, in which the parties pay the
expenses of their suits, nothing but money is necessary to enable any
malicious man to commence and prosecute a groundless suit, to the
terror, injury, and perhaps ruin, of another man. In this way, a court
of justice, into which none but a conscientious _plaintiff_ certainly
should ever be allowed to enter, becomes an arena into which any rich
and revengeful oppressor may drag any man poorer than himself, and
harass, terrify, and impoverish him, to almost any extent. It is a
scandal and an outrage, that government should suffer itself to be made
an instrument, in this way, for the gratification of private malice. We
might nearly as well have no courts of justice, as to throw them open,
as we do, for such flagitious uses. Yet the evil probably admits of no
remedy except a free administration of justice. Under a free system,
plaintiffs could rarely be influenced by motives of this kind; because
they could put their victim to little or no expense, _neither pending
the suit_, (which it is the object of the oppressor to do,) nor at its
termination. Besides, if the ancient common law practice should be
adopted, of amercing a party for troubling the courts with groundless
suits, the prosecutor himself would, in the end, be likely to be amerced
by the jury, in such a manner as to make courts of justice a very
unprofitable place for a man to go to seek revenge.

In estimating the evils of this kind, resulting from the present system,
we are to consider that they are not, by any means, confined to the
actual suits in which this kind of oppression is practised; but we are
to include all those cases in which the fear of such oppression is used
as a weapon to compel men into a surrender of their rights.

[Footnote 99: _2 Sullivan Lectures_, 234-5. _3 Blackstone_, 274-5, 376.
Sullivan says that both plaintiffs and defendants were liable to
amercement. Blackstone speaks of plaintiffs being liable, without saying
whether defendants were so or not. What the rule real