on the back of a brief, and may at length give up in despair; but when once a man of learning and eloquence does get a start his rise may be very rapid, and the income of an eminent counse.' is larger than that of the most "respectable" solicitor. There are probably a score of men now at the English bar whose incomes exceed £10,000 ($50,000) a year. I don't know more than one or two solicitors who have any such income, although I know scores who have half of it. £3000 a year is a large income for a solicitor, but double that is not very large for a barrister, especially a Queen's Counsel, who has been long at the bar.

I ought to explain, for I am repeatedly asked how counsel attain the rank of Queen's Counsel, and what are its advantages. Every young man "called" to the bar looks forward to this promotion-alalthough to many it proves ruinous, a mere shelving of themselves for life, and I have known dozens of men who have bitterly rued the day on which the stuff gown was exchanged for silk, and the charmed letters Q. C. were added to their names. After a man has been a number of years, usually about fifteen as a minimum, at the bar, and has acquired a considerable amount of work, he may apply to the Lord Chancellor for "silk," i. e. to be advanced to the honor of a Queen's Counsel. It does not follow that he will get it at once, or indeed ever. The Lord Chancellor consults the judges, who are better acquainted with the merits of counsel, and then he from time to time creates a new batch of men, selected from among the applicants, who then don their silk gowns and furbelows, put on new or newly powdered wigs, and are formally "called within the bar" of the several courts. Thenceforward they occupy the front bench of the bar (the seats and desks assigned to counsel) and become "leaders" instead of "juniors." But a man should well weigh his chances before seeking this advancement; for a large, the larger, part

of his work must be forever relinquished as soon as the change is made. Henceforth he can no longer draw or settle pleadings (which forms so large a part of the work of a junior), or advise on evidence except in rare cases in consultation with a junior— or do very many things which brought him abundance of fees before. Henceforward he is a leader, and all men who are not Queen's Counsel, however much his senior in years, are his juniors. In most cases there are two or three counsel on each side of a trial. There may be two Queen's Counsel on one side, but this is rare (and in such case the "senior by call" leads), but in all cases a Queen's Counsel leads a stuff gownsman whatever their respective ages, and a Queen's Counsel almost invariably has a stuff gownsman briefed with him as his junior, and few Queen's Counsel will accept a brief of any kind without a junior. If, perchance, a Queen's Counsel for a plaintiff happens to be without one, the judge assigns to him the youngest counsel in the court, and he opens the pleadings, that duty being below the dignity of a Queen's Counsel. There are very many men, even at the bar, who are splendid lawyers and admirably equipped for junior work who are not at all adapted to the work of leadership; splendid as pleaders (that is, in settling pleadings), writing opinions on evidence, prompting leaders, searching for precedents, or even arguing questions of law in banc, who are quite unfit to cross-examine witnesses or address juries; and so it happens that with many men of enviable position as juniors, the silk gown has proved to be the professional shroud. The distinguished man who has become the Lord Chief-Justice of England, and a recent visitor to our shores, was full of fear as to whether such might not be his fate if he took silk, and ultimately left it to two or three chosen friends at the bar to determine the question for him. The judges are usually, but not always, selected and "raised to the bench" from among

No parliamentary inquiry in recent years can have had a greater personal interest for English lawyers, solicitors as well as barristers, than that in the present session concerning the trial of parliamentary election petitions. The inquiry has its value also for students of constitutional history; for to them the determining of contested elections forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the House of Commons, and in that of our English parliamentary franchises.

As is of course well known, English election petition cases, since 1868, have been tried before judges of the High Court, without juries, who hold their inquiries in the constituencies concerned. After an election, a defeated candidate who is dissatisfied with the result, and conceives that it has been obtained by means which contravene the Corrupt Practice Act, files a petition in the courts. In the meantime the member returned by the sheriff or the mayor takes his seat in the House of Commons, and sits there until the petition has been adjudicated upon.

The judges report to the speaker. When their decision vacates a seat, a new writ is moved for in the House by the whip of the political party to which the unseated member belongs. In the United States, when a seat in Congress is contested, the costs attending the hearing of the case by a committee of the House are defrayed by the government. In England, except so far as the judges' salaries and the expenses of the Public Prosecutor are concerned, the government is at no expense. Costs follow the suit, as in ordinary trials in the law courts. In most cases costs are exceedingly heavy. Barristers appear for the petitioner and the respondent; solicitors and inquiry agents of the detective class are kept busy for months

with the preliminaries; numerous witnesses are examined, and the trials are often very protracted. It is chiefly the cost of the trials, and the length of some recent petition cases, which have given rise to the present parliamentary inquiry.

Successive elections since the Reform Act of 1867 have seen a marked diminution in the number of election petitions. There was, of course, some falling off in the number after the first Reform of the House of Commons in 1832. But it was not so great as might have been expected; for, sweeping as the Reform Act was considered sixty years ago, it permitted scores of miserably small boroughs to escape. These continued to send members to the House of Commons, and although the act of 1832 had set up a uniform ten-pound franchise, most of them were really little less corrupt than in the two centuries between the reign of James I and that of William IV. During that period the parliamentary elections in the boroughs were controlled by self-elected corporations; by freemen; by the burgage holders; and in some places by the old-fashioned forty-shilling freeholders. After 1832 the electoral corruption and squalor which had so long characterized these municipalities became more widely extended as the number of voters slightly increased. The Act of 1867, which set up household suffrage in the boroughs and enfranchised the working classes living in them, tended in a measure to diminish bribery and corruption, out of which election petitions mostly spring. But for some years after the Reform of 1867, the judges on the rota for election cases usually had their hands full for months after a general election; and there was from 1832 to 1884 seldom a period when several boroughs were not undergoing punishment for