The Country Lawyer. if he has sold tea and sugar at retail, no matter how large a fortune he may have made in the business, and no matter how much land he has acquired with the money, there is no place for him on the county bench or in county society. Efforts have repeatedly been made to break down this exclusiveness of the county benches. Three or four bills have been in troduced into the House of Commons by Radical Members to this end. When the Parish and District Councils Act was passed in 1894, the Radicals succeeded in inserting a clause under which chairmen of district councils are, during their year of office, county magistrates; but with this excep tion, the landed gentry, the men who with their wives and daughters are received into the exclusive ranks of county society, are to-day as fully and completely in possession of the county bench as their ancestors were in the days when only freeholders had the Parliamentary vote in the counties, and when the landed families monopolized and controlled the representation of the smaller Parliamentary boroughs, and willed this control, or otherwise passed it from hand to hand, as they would an estate or a country mansion. Each of these magisterial courts has a lawyer for its clerk, and with these courts the word and will of the clerk is law. The small-debt courts also have similar clerk ships, open only to members of the lower branch of the legal profession. These courts are known as county courts, and in name at least, if not in all their functions, they per petuate one of the oldest local institutions in England. The judges of them are all barristers of ten or twelve years' standing at the date of their appointment by the Queen, and receive salaries of £1500 or .£1800 a year. They go a regular circuit, much as do the judges of Queen's Bench, spending a day in this town and a day in the next, hearing suits in which the value involved does not exceed £50. There is a clerk to
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each of these courts. His official title is that of registrar, and when the judge is sit ting in one room, hearing cases of the character described, the registrar sits in another, disposing of the small-debt cases. Sums as low as ninepence may be recovered before the registrar. Solicitors appear to plead before these three courts. With one or two exceptions, presently to be explained, these are the only courts in which a member of the lower branch of the legal profession can appear. When pleading in these courts, solicitors wear their black stuff gowns. The clerks of the magistrates' courts and the registrar of the county court usually sit at their desks, attired in their gowns. The judge of the county court is always in wig and gown. In some of the local police courts the regulations in regard to the wearing of gowns by solicitors are a little lax. Occa sionally a lawyer appears in a morning suit with no gown; but there are few county court judges who will tolerate such laxity. Most of them are as insistent upon the dig nity of their court and upon the dress of the lawyers who appear before them as are the judges in the High Courts in London. In the county courts solicitors plead be fore the juries. Three men form a jury, and these diminutive juries are about the only ones on which a solicitor can try his forensic and oratorical talent. Sometimes solicitors attend coroners' courts, in which twelve men form the jury; but on these oc casions their efforts are directed to watching what goes on the coroners' depositions, which are to go before the grand jury at the assizes, rather to any attempt to con vince the jury. Barristers have the mon opoly of jury practice in England. In a criminal case which is going to the assizes, the solicitor will attend at the court of first instance, and examine and cross-examine witnesses. His publie appearances in con nection with the case, however, end at the local police court. His next step is to
