And though shot and bullets were forbidden fruit, yet something might be done with hard wadding. A good deal of classical literature disappeared in this way, which by one who valued no classics very highly might be called the way of all flesh. The best of authors, he contended, had better perish by this warlike consummation than by the inglorious enmity of bookworms and moths--honeycombed, as most of the books had been which had gone out to India with our two uncles. Even wadding, however, was declared to be inadmissible as too dangerous, after wounds had been inflicted more than once.
De Quincey, in his autobiographic sketch headed 'Laxton,' tells of the fortune of Miss Watson, who afterwards became Lady Carbery, and also of the legacy left to her in the form of a lawsuit by her father against the East India Company; and among his papers we find the following passage either overlooked or omitted, for some undiscoverable reason, from that paper, though it has a value in its own way as expressing some of De Quincey's views on law and equity; and it is sufficiently characteristic to be included here:
In consequence of her long minority, Miss Watson must have succeeded at once to six thousand a year on completing her twenty-first year; and she also inherited a Chancery-suit, which sort of property is _now_ (1853) rather at a discount in public estimation; but let the reader assure himself that even the Court of Chancery is not quite so black as it is painted; that the true ground for the delays and ruinous expenses in ninety-nine out of one hundred instances is not legal chicanery, still less the wilful circuitousness and wordiness of law processes, but the great eternal fact that, what through lapse of time, decays of memory, and loss of documents, and what through interested suppressions of truth, and the dispersions of witnesses, and causes by the score beside, the ultimate truth and equity of human disputes is a matter of prodigious perplexity; neither is there any possibility that the mass of litigations as to property ever _can_ be made cheap except in proportion as it is made dismally imperfect.
No power that ever yet was lodged in senates or in councils _could_ avail, ever _has_ availed, ever _will_ avail, to intercept the immeasurable expansion of that law which grows out of social expansion. Fast as the relations of man multiply, and the modifications of property extend, must the corresponding adaptations of the law run alongside. The pretended arrests applied to this heaving volcanic system of forces by codifications, like those of Justinian or Napoleon, had not lasted for a year before all had broke loose from its moorings, and was again going ahead with redoubling impetus. Equally delusive are the prospects held out that the new system of cheap provincial justice will be a change unconditionally for the better. Already the complaints against it are such in bitterness and extent as to show that in very many cases it must be regarded as a failure; and, where it is not, that it must be regarded as a compromise: once you had 8 degrees of the advantage X, 4 of Y; now you have 7 of X, 5 of Y.