not only to statutes throwing such duties upon the Rule Committee.

Lastly, it has been argued that the very elasticity intro. duced into civil procedure by the rule-making system has been the source of tremendous litigation, and that thousands of reported decisions on procedural questions attest the extravagance of constant alterations that require fresh judicial interpretation. Mr. Henderson, in his Development of Code Pleading, makes the following remark, apropos of Mr. Snow's calculation that from 1875 to 1890, over 4,000 decisions were handed down in the English Courts upon questions of procedure1:—

"Ever fruitful of contention and delay, a changeable procedure is a grievous burden to the community, which must pay the price of interpreting all new regulations of procedure, whether by Rules of Court or direct enactments."

But the prospect is not quite so gloomy as all that, as a little inspection of the figures will show. In the 15 years for which Mr. Snow quotes, there were begun annually an average of 80,000 proceedings of all sorts in the several Divisions of the High Court; one sees at a glance how small a proportion of these were involved in an annual average of 275 decisions on procedural questions. To come down to more recent times, the official judicial statistics for the last few years show that of the enormous number of procedural questions decided by the masters, less than one-thirtieth are appealed to the Judge in Chambers. Of those, more than three-fourths go no further and are never heard in Court: the other onefourth form the residue of disputes sufficiently two-sided to be submitted to the Court of Appeal. In actual number they are less than one-half per cent. of the total number of proceedings annually commenced in the High Court-surely not a cause for apprehension.

1 Cincinnati, 1897, p. 198.

From this review it is evident that though some of the objections to the Rule Committee's results are not entirely justified, there are valid reasons for seeking to improve its machinery, and especially to minimise the possibility of its issuing Rules whose meaning is not clear, or whose form is such that they will conflict with other portions of the Code, or prove to be impractical in actual operation. To effect this object, practitioners and others have put forward many suggestions, from which a few selections may be of interest. They are addressed either to changes in the constitution of the Committee or to improvements in its methods of work.

As to the former, the point of attack has always been that judges are either too busy or too far removed from the details of office work and practice to draft rules carefully, or even to know what effects will follow a rule they have taken pains to draft. Parliament acknowledged the force of this contention by adding to the Committee a solicitor and two barristers in 1894 and a second solicitor in 1909. It is still felt, however, that those who are most intimate with the details of practice are unrepresented. The Masters of the Supreme Court are, of course, the persons whose knowledge of the Rules is, by reason of their official duties, most complete, and the natural course would seem to be to place at the service of the Committee the knowledge of at least one of these important officers.1 The present Newfoundland Judicature Act sets up a Rule Committee of which the Registrar of the Supreme Court (being a barrister) is ex officio a member. In India, the present Code of Civil Procedure makes provision for a Rule Committee to be attached to each of the six High Courts, and for a Secretary, with separate remuneration, for each such Committee. In all the High Courts except

1 In the King's Bench Division the Masters are barristers, in the Chancery Division they are solicitors.

2 4 Edw. VII, c. 3, ss. 275-276.

8 Act V of 1908, s. 123 (5).
ΙΟ

that at Calcutta, where no Committee has yet been appointed, the Registrar of the High Court has been made. the Committee's Secretary. There are, therefore, precedents for admitting to the English Rule Committee in some capacity one of the Supreme Court Masters, who fulfil the same functions as the Registrars in the Courts named. In his testimony before the Royal Commission on Delay in the King's Bench Division, Master Chitty made a strong argument for adding one of the Masters to the Committee,1 but the suggestion was not embodied in the Commission's Report.

It is recognised, however, that either a Master or some other officer could act as technical adviser to the Committee without actually being a member of it, and this form of alteration in the personnel of the Committee seems to meet with more support than the other. In reply to Master Chitty, Mr. Charles Henry Morton, of Liverpool, a member of the Royal Commission and also one of the present solicitor members of the Rule Committee, said:

"There is a feeling that the High Court Rule Committee ought not to have Masters there. I know there is such a feeling, but I do not quite know the reason. Would not your suggestion be given effect to if there was a secretary or official in the nature of a secretary, a skilled man who was made a standing secretary to the Committee-whose duty it should be to receive suggestions from the Masters and practitioners and regularly to bring those suggestions before the High Court Rule Committee for consideration?"

In that form the proposal to aid the Committee by some sort of expert assistance has been made more than once. As early as 1890, Mr. Snow, in one of the letters he wrote to the judges to disturb their peace of mind about the R.S.C., suggested that they could avoid the technical difficulties of rule-making by appointing some official, either as permanent adviser or secretary, who not only could keep 1 Parl. Pap., 1913, Cd. 6762, Minutes of Evidence, Vol. I, p. 29.

the revision of the Rules up to date, but would receive suggestions and complaints from the public and from the profession, and formulate them before submission to the Committee, so that only the question of principle need be argued, not that of form. "Clerk of the Rules," he suggested, might be an appropriate title for such an officer.1 Ten years ago the report of a similar suggestion was reproduced in the following item in the Solicitors' Journal.

"The President of the Liverpool Law Society (Mr. F. Marton Hull), in his address at the annual meeting of the society, threw out a suggestion which it is hoped will not be lost sight of. He proposed the appointment as assistant-secretaries to the Rule Committee of a practising barrister and a practising solicitor, to whom suggestions could from time to time be made upon rules and orders, so that due consideration could be given to any proposals before they are brought before the Rule Committee. The idea appears to be an excellent one. . . .

Owing to the coincidence that the present Permanent Secretary to the Lord Chancellor,3 who has acted as Secretary to the Rule Committee for over 30 years, has special professional qualifications which have enabled him to take a most active and invaluable part in the Rule Committee's work, there has been no reason up to the present to regard these suggestions as touching upon a pressing need. But when the time comes for him to resign the duties of his office, the whole subject will be opened for discussion, and some definite policy adopted which will probably extend to the County Courts Rule Committee as well.

A rather more elaborate arrangement is that suggested by Mr. Francis A. Stringer, the head of one of the departments in the Central Office, and one of the present editors of the White Book. In an address delivered before the Solicitors' Managing Clerks' Association in 1902,1 he pointed

1 25

Law Journal, 268 (May 3, 1890).

2 49 Solicitors' Journal, 77 (December 3, 1904).

8 Sir Kenneth Muir Mackenzie, G.C.B., K.C.

Reported in 46 Solicitors' Journal, 412 (April 12, 1902).

out that the Rules of the Supreme Court contain Rules of two distinct types-those in which principles of procedure are embodied, and those which are mere practical directions for giving effect to those principles. He proposed that the Rule Committee of Judges should confine its attention to the Rules embodying principle; as to the Rules of practical direction, he would have them drawn or altered by a body subordinate to the Rule Committee-a body composed of masters, registrars, solicitors' managing clerks, and others, whose daily work consisted in following the practical directions in the Rules. "Actual knowledge of procedure should be the one essential qualification" in making up this subordinate board (to quote from an article on the same subject published by Mr. Stringer in 18991), “and not necessarily professional qualification." Such a board would be in close touch with the actually practising elements of all branches of the profession, and could frame satisfactory rules, either of its own motion or upon the request of the Rule Committee, to be approved by the Committee before they were issued.

One suggestion dealing solely with the methods and not at all with the composition of the Committee is that there should be some fixed plan for periodic revision of the entire Code of Rules. The Irish Rules, first issued in 1877, were revised in 1891, and again in 1905; the Ontario Rules, issued in 1881, were revised in 1888, then again in 1897, and once more in 1913; the English County Court Rules were revised in 1875, 1886, 1889, and 1903, and there is now a fresh revision under way. So also, it is argued, the English Supreme Court Rules ought to be carefully edited, and all redundancies eliminated, at recurrent periods. Certainly the present Code, cumbered by the accretions of 143 Solicitors' Journal, 363 (April 1, 1899).

2 Not to mention three revisions prior to the Judicature Acts: 1851, 1856 and 1868.