LEGAL WIGGERY.

Daily Southern Cross, Volume XXIII, Issue 3094, 17 June 1867, Page 4

LEGAL WIGGERY.

To tte EcUia* of the BAtt, 1 ? SouTHTUIN CROB3. SIR, — In the fashionable world new modes are received with the greatest avidity, whether convenient, reasonable, or otherwise. So long as a thing is new it' is received with pleasure, and is sure to be thought becoming, though it may violate all the rules of good tasfce. But the legal world in the city of Auckland, instead of encouraging new fashion", revert, with laudable dullness, to antiquated customs which excite anything but a feeling of pleasure and are anything but becoming. Indeed, innovations at anytime arenot received with especial favour by the leeal tribe, and especiallyjfchose which reduce their six-and-eight-penny feelingof importance. Going up the other day the steep incline which leads to the place of judicial wisdom in Auckland, the mud caused me to reflect that the w»ys which lead to the seat of justice are exceedingly slippery, and how many fall down by the wayside ere they can obtain what equity and good laws should render to suitors. Not having visited for some time the place where justice sits enshrined, imagine my astonishment at beholding the elders of the bar of Auckland, with horse or wire hair monstrosities clapped upon each legal pate, 'where before they were cbntent with the hair which Nature gave them. What could have bewitched our legal fraternity to have imported these hideously ugly things from England ? It is going, likecrabs, back to the dark ages with a vengeance. Is it to be supposed that these wigs will gjve the appearance of having a great store of legal lore in those that wear them ? Have the lawyers of this place an idea that it will procure them increased respecb for their honourable fraternity ? lam afraid it will neither do the one nor the other. If our lawyers really want to copy the good old fashions in all their completeness, it will be necessary for the bar to be clean-shaved. Our ancestors were great shavers. They denuded their heads of their natural thatch, and for a judge or counsel to wear grisly hair-oovered lips, and long beards, would have created a revolution. Shades of Blackstone and Mansfield, what would ye say to our colonial lawyers ! In England, legal customs are somewhat like the laws of the Medes and Persions— not to be altered. Is this wig fashion of our legal fry to be handed down to the posterity of Auckland as a thing to be venerated, and to be a lasting monument of legal dullness and stupidity ? Or is it to be the beginning of legal extortions to pay for the expense of importing; these said ■wigs to Auckland ? If so, the sooner this legal wiggery is knocked cff the better, and the best way to put the wigs down is to tax them.— l am, &0., Jem Bakk. Auckland, June 13, 1867.