to £600 a year. These salaries may appear small to American readers; but, it must be remembered that a house such as a lawyer in good practice in an English town would occupy can be rented for from £35 to £40 a year. The wages of his cook and house maid are seldom more than £15 and £Z z. year; and if he keeps a horse and carriage, he can have them and his garden attended to by a coachman whose wages do not exceed a pound a week. It frequently hap pens, too, that a lawyer who holds one of these official positions is allowed to take private practice. Sometimes, also, a lawyer is clerk to the school-board as well as to the town council, or he may hold in addition the position of coroner, an appointment which nowadays almost invariably falls into the hands of a lawyer. Pluralists abound in these old English cities. The Socialistic element on the town councils and the school boards in the man ufacturing towns has of recent years sought to throw some obstacles in the way of the pluralist in official public life. So far, how ever, with little result. When new appoint ments are made, the socialists and labor representatives can make their protest. Occasionally in these cases, the protests are effective, and a lawyer is frustrated when seeking to add to his public appointments. But, as has been explained, all the public offices which fall to the lot of the English public provincial lawyer are practically life tenures, and so long as a pluralist remains in quiet possession of what he has, his posi tion is unassailable. The mode in which summary justice is administered in England gives the local lawyer other opportunities in the way of. legal clerkships. The local magistrates, like the members of the town council and the school-board, serve without pay. They are not lawyers. They are men in trade, or of landed property, who have time to give to public work, and apart from thus having time at their disposal, the only requirements
of the magisterial office are common-sense, some elementary knowledge of the princi ples of law, and an acquaintance with the customs and habits of the people among whom they live. The clerk acts as the lawyer to the entire bench. He sits below the magistrates, and advises on all points of law. When all the evidence is in, he turns to the bench for a consultation, and then the chairman pronounces the judgment of the court. In a city there are two of these magis terial benches, each with its own clerk and its own court-house. One serves for the borough and the other for the petty ses sional division of the hundred of the county in which the city is situated. Offences oc curring within the city limits are tried in the city court; those occurring outside in the country adjacent to the city are tried in the county divisional court. The work of the two courts is practically the same. Each disposes of cases coming under the Summary Jurisdiction Acts, and serves as a court of first instance for cases of a more serious character, which are going either to the quarter sessions or the assizes. The duties of a county bench are no more re sponsible or onerous than the duties of a borough bench; yet, there is a marked dif ference in the constitution of the two. Any man of good standing and known integrity may be a magistrate in a borough; but to be a county magistrate a man must be a land-owner. The law settles that point; and custom, tradition, and the etiquette of county social life have set up another quali fication of a negative character. To be of the county bench, a man must not have en gaged in retail trade. He may have followed the gentlemanly occupation of a brewer, in the days before the large limited liability companies made such a great business of brewing in England; his drummers and draymen may have peddled beer in casks to innumerable dirty little beer-shops in the back alleys of a manufacturing town; but
