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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 86

(The Editor Poverty Bay Herald.)

(The Editor Poverty Bay Herald.)

Sir,—Your leader last night tempts me to say that you hardly do the "Devil's Brigade" justice. That brigade, regarded as a whole, is a fair reflex of the community, to my mind, because unquestionably the objectionable ones exist on the ordinary principle of demand and supply, and there must be at least a section of the community which requires them. My only complaint as to the profession, in the letter referred to, was the opposition almost always shown by it to anything like simplification. A recentwriter says that it is more difficult to get a new idea into the mind of an Englishman than it is to get the proverbial joke into the head of a Scotchman; and that, I think, is eminently true of the English lawyer. He is mentally saturated, as it were, with musty precedents, and it is quite natural to him to refuse to sec any advantage in moving out of the beaten track. Hence he needs to be driven by lay pressure into reformation of any kind. No better illustration of this can well be got than the fact that a young community like New Zealand, full of energy and push, can sit down and patiently acquiesce in the existence of such an incubus as our half-yearly itinerant Supreme Court, with its delays and expense, and general cumbrousness, all the fruit, specially, of the legal mind. One would expect that the settlement of disputes quickly and cheaply by a good local Court, with an appeal on facts, is a thing such a community requires. No doubt it is so. Yet we are all content to leave things alone. Why? Just because we have it. The same thing is applicable to Native legislation. But it is only fair to the devil's own to add that, if Native legislation had always been shaped finally by the lawyers, it would have been at any rate consistent, or fairly consistent, as a whole. It was never so though, for after a Bill came out of the legal draftsman's hands, it was invariably tossed about in Committee by all sorts of people, particularly by the "expert" members who looked at it in some particular interest, or with some special object to be served, until the draftsman's work was hardly recognisable. Of course a tangled maze of legislation was the result. Why should you accuse the lawyers of having "a double sin to answer for in this Native 'business?'" They have no doubt enough to answer for; but Parliament alone is answerable for the making of the laws; and it must be admitted that it hss always been an extremely difficult business to interpret the laws so made. Editors, I believe, are more or less given to dogmatise, and they can always construct a telling paragraph by making a scrapegoat of the lawyers. You might now give the wily Native land purchaser a turn, he who needs and uses the lawyer. Fair play is a jewel. Jay Gould, you know, never came to the front when he had any big public robbery on hand; he always accomplished his nefarious work by using weaker men. So does the wily Native land purchaser. All Native land purchasers are not wily of course.—I am, &c.,

W. Sievwright.

Gisborne,

Printed at the "Poverty Bay Herald" Office Gisborne.