judges. No English judge had ever received a bribe within living
memory.[426] But this, he urges, is only because the judges find it more
profitable as well as safer to carry out a radically corrupt system. A
synonym for 'technical' is 'fee-gathering.' Lawyers of all classes had a
common interest in multiplying suits and complicating procedure: and
thus a tacit partnership had grown up which he describes as 'Judge and
Co.' He gives statistics showing that in the year 1797 five hundred and
forty-three out of five hundred and fifty 'writs of error' were 'shams,'
or simply vexatious contrivances for delay, and brought a profit to the
Chief Justice of over L1400.[427] Lord Eldon was always before him as
the typical representative of obstruction and obscurantism. In his
_Indications respecting Lord Eldon_ (1825) he goes into details which it
must have required some courage to publish. Under Eldon, he says,
'equity has become an instrument of fraud and extortion.'[428] He
details the proceedings by which Eldon obtained the sanction of
parliament for a system of fee-taking, which he had admitted to be
illegal, and which had been denounced by an eminent solicitor as leading
to gross corruption. Bentham intimates that the Masters in Chancery were
'swindlers,'[429] and that Eldon was knowingly the protector and sharer
of their profits. Romilly, who had called the Court of Chancery 'a
disgrace to a civilised nation,' had said that Eldon was the cause of
many of the abuses, and could have reformed most of the others. Erskine
had declared that if there was a hell, the Court of Chancery was
hell.[430] Eldon, as Bentham himself thought, was worse than Jeffreys.
Eldon's victims had died a lingering death, and the persecutor had made
money out of their sufferings. Jeffreys was openly brutal; while Eldon
covered his tyranny under the 'most accomplished indifference.'[431]

Yet Eldon was but the head of a band. Judges, barristers, and solicitors
were alike. The most hopeless of reforms would be to raise a
'thorough-paced English lawyer' to the moral level of an average
man.[432] To attack legal abuses was to attack a class combined under
its chiefs, capable of hoodwinking parliament and suppressing open
criticism. The slave-traders whom Wilberforce attacked were
comparatively a powerless excrescence. The legal profession was in the
closest relations to the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the whole
privileged and wealthy class. They were we