live by Oliver. (A laugh, and applause.) For example, it was found by his Parliament, called “Barebones”—­the most zealous of all Parliaments probably—­the Court of Chancery in England was in a state that was really capable of no apology—­no man could get up and say that that was a right court.  There were, I think, fifteen thousand or fifteen hundred—­(laughter)—­I don’t really remember which, but we shall call it by the last (renewed laughter)—­there were fifteen hundred cases lying in it undecided; and one of them, I remember, for a large amount of money, was eighty-three years old, and it was going on still.  Wigs were waving over it, and lawyers were taking their fees, and there was no end of it, upon which the Barebones people, after deliberation about it, thought it was expedient, and commanded by the Author of Man and the Fountain of Justice, and for the true and right, to abolish the court.  Really, I don’t know who could have dissented from that opinion.  At the same time, it was thought by those who were wiser, and had more experience of the world, that it was a very dangerous thing, and would never suit at all.  The lawyers began to make an immense noise about it. (Laughter.) All the public, the great mass of solid and well-disposed people who had got no deep insight into such matters, were very adverse to it, and the president of it, old Sir Francis Rous, who translated the Psalms—­those that we sing every Sunday in the church yet—­a very good man and a wise man—­the Provost of Eton—­he got the minority, or I don’t know whether or no he did not persuade the majority—­he, at any rate, got a great number of the Parliament to go to Oliver the Dictator, and lay down their functions altogether, and declare officially with their signature on Monday morning that the Parliament was dissolved.

The thing was passed on Saturday night, and on Monday morning Rous came and said, “We cannot carry on the affair any longer, and we remit it into the hands of your Highness.”  Oliver in that way became Protector a second time.

I give you this as an instance that Oliver felt that the Parliament that had been dismissed had been perfectly right with regard to Chancery, and that there was no doubt of the propriety of abolishing Chancery, or reforming it in some kind of way.  He considered it, and this is what he did.  He assembled sixty of the wisest lawyers to be found in England.  Happily, there were men great in the law—­men who valued the laws as much as anybody does now, I suppose. (A laugh.) Oliver said to them, “Go and examine this thing, and in the name of God inform me what is necessary to be done with regard to it.  You will see how we may clean out the foul things in it that render it poison to everybody.”  Well, they sat down then, and in the course of six weeks—­there was no public speaking then, no reporting of speeches, and no trouble of any kind; there was just the business in hand—­they got sixty propositions fixed in their minds of the things that required to be done.  And upon these sixty propositions Chancery was reconstituted and remodelled, and so it has lasted to our time.  It had become a nuisance, and could not have continued much longer.