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I had the honour once of serving an old gentleman whose profession it was to give legal advice, and excellent legal advice he always gave. In common with most men who know the law, he had little respect for it. I have heard him say to a would-be litigant "My dear sir, if a villain stopped me in the street and demanded of me my watch and chain, I should refuse to give it to him.

He was only once shot at by a free-handed judge, and twice assaulted by an over-sensitive litigant.

It is not fair that the private litigant should be obliged to set up and establish again the facts which the Government has proved. He cannot afford, he has not the power, to make use of such processes of inquiry as the Government has command of. Thus shall individual justice be done while the processes of business are rectified and squared with the general conscience.

Henceforth let every unsuccessful litigant have the right to pronounce the verdict of a jury sectional, and to quash all proceedings and retain the property in controversy by seceding from the court-room. Let the planting of hemp be made penal, because it squints toward coercion.

Hastings should show that he always mistakes his situation; he has totally mistaken it: he was a servant, bound to give a satisfactory account of his conduct to his masters, and, instead of that, he considers himself and the Court of Directors as litigant parties, them as the accusers, and himself as the culprit.

He drew his hanger as he spoke, and although Joshua, who had in vain endeavoured to interrupt the dialogue to which he foresaw a violent termination, now threw himself between Nanty and the old litigant, he could not prevent the latter from receiving two or three sound slaps over the shoulder with the flat side of the weapon.

His nature was of that essentially wrangling quality to which a life without enemies seems dull and objectless, the nature, in short, of a litigant, or a policeman. If it had not been for the presence of the sheriff's officer, he would have seized Tonsard and the bundle of wood at the Grand-I-Vert, snapping his fingers at the law on the inviolability of a man's domicile.

In such instances the judges were governed by precedent or by a strict interpretation of the law, while in the days of French dominion the intendants were generally influenced by principles of equity in the disputes that came before them, and by a desire to help the weaker litigant, the censitaire.

The litigant public seemed to feel that every moment of this accomplished and distinguished advocate's waking hours was their own, and they were restricting his sleeping hours within the very narrowest limits. Every one would have had Sir William every where, in every thing, at once!

I have been inclined to think that there was an unnecessarily slow and expensive ceremonial among us in the employment of barristers through a third party; it has seemed that the man of learning, on whose efforts the litigant really depends, is divided off from his client and employer by an unfair barrier, used only to enhance his own dignity and give an unnecessary grandeur to his position.