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LORD CHANCELLOR BACON must be remembered that Masters received no salary, and were not therefore twice paid, and their fees were always part of the costs, and paid by the losing and not the winning party. But an examination of a few of the cases as to which Bacon pleaded guilty shows how futile and idle are the ex cuses of his friends. In the 4th, the case of Lady Wharton's charges, Bacon received from her first £100 before decree and after wards £200 more was extorted from her before she could have the decree put in force, thus showing that if, as Bacon con tended, it was a righteous decree, he ob structed and delayed justice until paid for it. In the Egerton case, the 2nd com plaint, he received large fees from both sides, Sir Rowland Egerton and Edward Egerton. . Further, Edward Edgerton to obtain a re hearing was compelled to give a bond to the Bishop of Landaff for 10,000 marks, which was to be shared between the Court officers and certain noble persons. The rehearing was not obtained, but the bond was en forced, and Egerton left remedyless. In the case called the i4th article of the charge, the Chancellor confessed to have received between the date of two decrees made as to the inheritance £500. In the case described in the 27th article of the charge, that of the French merchants against the London vintners, the Lord Chancellor's course was usurping and illegal, as well as corrupt. Without a suit having been brought, he compelled the Vintners by threats, and imprisonment of some of their number, to buy a stock of wines they had refused to purchase. For this inter vention Bacon received from the merchants £1000. His excuse was that the refusal of the vintners to purchase at what he con

sidered a reasonable price would destroy the trade, and that the Vintners really ob tained a fair profit. He was unacquainted with the language and current opinions of the present day, or he would doubtless have said the vintners constituted a trust, and therefore had no rights that any one was bound to respect, but while ignorant of such phraseology, the boldness of his action in compelling the wine dealers to buy at a price he chose to hold reasonable wines they had not contracted for and did not want was certainly very advanced juris prudence, and he considered the general ser vice he did to trade entitled him to his £1000, which certainly the beneficiaries of his action, the French merchants, were very well satisfied to pay. The Lord Chancellor's office even in those days was a very highly paid one, so that the pretense of there being an expectation of the Chancellor obtaining his compensation from the contributions of suitors is as vain as the unfounded assertion that such ex actions were customary. Surely it is only darkening knowledge and obscuring moral principles to allow our eyes to be blinded even by Lord Verulam's transcendant genius to the ignominous deg radation of the Bench by Bacon during the period in which he disgraced it. And we may properly look upon it as a fitting culmination of his career at the Bar, which was marked by an absolutely slavish devo tion to the Royal power, and by selfish greed of personal gain and advancement, untrammeled either by gratitude or kind feeling on the one hand, or sense of duty and jus tice on the other. PHILADELPHIA, PA., June, 1906.