THE LONG VACATION. Ll'o THE EDITOR OF TRH "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—In
an article on "The Long Vacation," in your last number, you say,—" It is only the Judges of the High Court
who need this lengthy repose. The County-Court Judges, who are made of the same stuff and work even harder, do not get more than a month or six weeks."
Permit me to say that this is a complete mistake. The High. Court Judges have in all about sixteen weeks' holiday in the year, which the recent change will reduce to about fourteen
The County-Court Judges have more than six months' holiday. They go circuit eleven times in the year, each circuit occupying about a fortnight, which gives them twenty-two weeks' work.
They need not go circuit at all in September, and by taking their August circuit in the first and their October circuit in the last half of those months, they may give themselves a vacation from August 15th to October 15th, which is a day or two short of nine weeks. The holidays of the Metropolitan Police Magis-
trates are very nearly as long. They sit only three days a
week. The High-Court Judges thus work very much harder than either the County-Court Judges or the Metropolitan Magistrates, yet the work of the latter has been regulated by very modern statutes, which presumably proceed upon the prin- ciple of getting a fair amount of work in return for a fair salary.
[" Judea" has greatly overstated his case. The statutable Long Vacation of County-Court Judges is a month. By judi- cious arrangements, such as "Judea" describes, it may be true that some of them who have country circuits with little work to do manage to get a good deal more. But the Judges who are stationed in great centres, like London, or Liverpool, or Bir- mingham, certainly do not pass such an intermittent existence as he suggests. To sit five days a week, often till six or seven o'clock, and to get at the utmost eleven weeks' holiday a year, may fairly be called working harder than to sit five and a half days a week, rising punctually at four o'clock, and getting sixteen weeks' holiday, even if no account were taken of the difference in the work. But on the easiest circuits, the racket of travelling for a fortnight every month would more than make up for the gain of days ; and there can be little doubt that while on the Bench, the County-Court Judge is much harder worked than his High-Court brother. He gets little or no help on legal points from counsel; he has himself often to act as counsel for both sides, and seize the real points at issue out of torrents of irrelevant talk; and has to skip from common law to equity, and equity to bankruptcy, and in some cases, Admiralty law, with a ready omniscience which no one thinks of demanding from a High-Court Judge. Nor does it often fall to his lot to be able to write his letters during the long-winded addresses o' counsel to a jury, or to sit in the happiness of divided responsi- bility in Banc. Take it all round, we submit that our statement is correct, and that the County-Court Judges work harder and get a very much shorter Long Vacation than those of the High Court. —En. Spectator.]
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