A Century of English Judicature. A
CENTURY
OF
ENGLISH
479
JUDICATURE.
VIII. BY VAN VECHTEN VEEDER. COURT FOR DIVORCE AND MATRIMONIAL CAUSES. THE outcry against the ecclesiastical administration of probate and matri monial affairs at length became too strong to be resisted. The inefficiency of most of the judges, the variations of practice and procedure, the expense, the delay, the fre quently inconsistent^ and mistaken views of law and of fact adopted by the different authorities, the anachronism of a system which permitted civil rights to be decided by judges not appointed by nor responsible to the crown, rendered its fall inevitable. The humorous absurdity of many of their abuses have been preserved in lasting carica ture by the pen of Dickens. In "David Copperfield the characteristics and ad vantages of The Commons" are fully described. The practical objection to the jurisdiction was that, in the absence of its power to bind the heir in relation to land, there might be a decision one way in the ecclesiastical courts as to personal property, and another at common law as to real estate, with respect to the same document. It seems incredible that such a state of affairs could have lasted for centuries. With respect to matrimonial affairs the conditions were quite as unsatisfactory. The abuses of the procedure of the ec clesiastical courts had affected the trial of these causes to such an extent that redress was practically denied to persons of mod erate means. To obtain an absolute divorce resort must be had to Parliament, and the cost of carrying a bill through both Houses made such relief unattainable except by very wealthy persons. Justice Maule brought out the incongruities of the law with charac teristic irony in passing sentence in a bigamy case. "I will tell you," he said, addressing
the prisoner, "what you ought to have done under the circumstances, and if you say you did not know, I must tell you that the law conclusively presumes that you did. You should have instructed your attorney to bring an action against the seducer of your wife for damages. That would have cost you about £100. Having proceeded thus far, you should have employed a proctor and instituted a suit in the ecclesiastical courts for a divorce a mensa et thoro. That would have cost you ¿200 or ¿300 more. When you had obtained a divorce a mensa et thoro you had only to obtain a private act of Parliament for a divorce a vinculo matrinwnii. This bill might possibly have been opposed in all its stages in both Houses of Parlia ment, and altogether these proceedings would have cost you £1,000. You will probably tell me that you never had a tenth of that sum, but that makes no difference. Sitting here as an English judge it is my duty to tell you that this is not a country where there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. You will be imprisoned for one day." Finally, in 1857. this anomalous 'con dition of affairs came to an end. The ecclesiastical courts were by statute divested of all power to entertain suits relating to probate of wills and grants of administration, to declare the validity of marriages and pro nounce divorces o mensa et thoro, and such jurisdiction was conferred upon a new court of common law. which was to sit in West minister Hall and to be held in two divisions, called respectively the Court of Probate and the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. The success of the change depended largely
