The subdivision of courts into those of equity and common law had long been found mischievous, inasmuch as it in some cases doubled the expense to the suitor, by sending him from one court to another for instalments of the justice which be sought. For many years this anomalous arrangement had been given up as indefensible; and bills from time to time were introduced into parliament, in order to rearrange the courts, so as to administer entire justice in every case. Great changes were necessary in this department of the law, and the only question was at last reduced to the best mode of settling the details of the high court of justice, which was to supersede the previously existing courts. For the changes ultimately carried through under the judicature acts of 1873–'76, and the constitution of the new high court of justice, see COMMON LAws. The C. court is now the chancery division of the reconstituted high court.
In various colonies of the British empire, local courts have been established in imita tion of the high court of C. an institution which, from its cumbrous, anomalous, and unscientific character, scarcely merited imitation; but in America, though the distinction between law and equity was at first adopted and long adhered to with the tenacity with which Englishmen cling to their native customs, it has been abolished in the state of New York, and law and equity there, as elsewhere in the world, now constitute one sys tem, administered in one series of tribunals of original and appellate jurisdiction. On
the continent, the English court of C. has always been a subject of ridicule; and a recent French writer, in speaking of it, says. " Nothing ever comes to an end in it; and the unhappy man who has a process there, can be sure of but one thing—viz., that whether he gains it or loses it, his ruin is certain." The acts by which evils which were insep arable from the constitution of the court of C.—and which spring from the distinction between law and equity, on which its very existence depended—had been mitigated, were the following: 15 and 16 Vict. cc. 80, 86, and 87, 21 and 22 Viet. c. 27, 23 and 24 Viet. cc. 38, 128, and 26 Vict. c. 2.