ELL v HARPER.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 9669, 6 March 1897, Page 9

ELL v HARPER.

♦ : — ' JUDGMENT OF THE SUPREME COURT, T His Honor Mr .lustice Denniston gave judgment, yesterday in Chambers in Ell v Harper. The following is a brief precis, the judgment itself being exceedingly lengthy— After stating the circumstances under which these proceedings were instituted, and that by arrangement between.the parties the question in dispute had been reduced to certain items, some individual and some representing a class, which it had been agreed should be referred to the Judge under tbe rules, and the decision, as to which would determine all matters of account in dispute,' his Honour dealt with a preliminary objection as to what was the proper interpretation of the order of the Court of Appeal ordering a review of the certificate, and said that, in his opinion, the Registrar and accountant had taken the proper view of the judgment in considering that the whole matter was at large. His Honour then dealt with the individual items, and as to the claim of £100 stated by plaintiff to be erroneously debited in both accounts, the plaintiff's claim would be allowed. Other items claimed by plaintiff as improperly debited in the present action were disallowed. As to the claim of £250, and which plaintiff alleged he had paid, hia Honour went exhaustively into the accounts between the parties, and said that the result of a very careful examination of the material before him hod led him, as it hod the Registrar and accountant, to an absolute con* victiou that no such payments as alleged were made by the plaintiff, On the allegation by plait-tiff that the Registrar and accountant were' in error in openingsettled accounts, his Honour held that the plaintiff had ignored any such settlement, and made and proved claims inconsistent with it as to the order of the Court of December, 1884, and stated his opinion and conclusion that there had been no settled accounts in the terms of the order. As to the other accounts one claim for £50 would be allowed, but on two other itemsitwas impossible from - the lapse of time sinco the accounts were taken to review the former proceedings. The defendant had been appealing, not to the Courts but to public meetings, the Executive, and Parliament. He had had more that one Parliamentary Committee, a special enquiry, two Royal Commissions, and a special Act of Parliament, and at the end he made, in 1896, the exact application which he could and should have made in 1886. His grievances were complaints of misconduct and mistakes on the part of officers of the Court. The charges of misconduct—which his Honour mentioned only in order to say that he had in the course of a very careful examination of the whole of the proceedings and documents in this case found no evidence to support them—have been dismissed as frivolous and unfounded by the extraneous tribunals set up to hear them. It might be added also, his Honour said, that they were cognisable also by the Court on proper proceedings. The complaints of mistakes were simply allegations of errors of judgment in the course of a suit. For such allegations (which were of a kind that arise in every case of appeal) the rules in this case provided tbe simple remedy of a reference to a Judge, It would not, his Honour ventured to think, tend to support the efficiency of the Courts and respect for the administration of justice that a litigant in a suit may substitute for a step in that suit in respect of claims actually pending before the Court an appeal to extra judicial and non-judicial tribunals. It is not, his Honour thought, too much to ask that, before such litigant receives special investigations and grants oi publio moneys, it should be asked whether he has availed himself of his ordinary remedies as a liti- . gant. Had the question been asked in the. present instance it would have been found, as his Honour had said, that tbe plaintiff had throughout open to him the simple and ine_pe*-sive recourse, at which, by the circuitous course he had mentioned, he had tan yaew afterwawls arrived.