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accomplish little good. The people get the law they desire only after years of effort. This has been the history of law reform not only in Rome and France, but also in England, where at the beginning of the nineteenth century the common law had become uncertain, confused, anachronistic and out-of-joint with prevailing conditions of life. Jeremy Bentham, writing at that time, did not overstate the fact when he said that the practice of law in the courts of England had become "completely and radically inconducive and repugnant to the professed and supposed ends of their (the courts') institution, the ends of justice." (Rationale of Judicial Evidence, p. 54).

In the year 1800 there were in England 200 crimes, many of them now mere misdemeanors, that were punishable with the death penalty. Before 1836 counsel could not address a jury in behalf of a client on trial for a crime. Sir Henry Fowler, President of the Incorporated Law Society of England, speaking on the subject of law reform said that the mode of applying principles of equity in 1800 "were a disgrace to the law and the courts which allowed them. A chancery court was regarded as a social civil war—a terrible calamity, to be avoided like plague or pestilence." Lord Eldon's docket was three years behind and appeals in the House of Lords had been waiting ten years to be heard. On the common law side of the courts abuses were no less flagrant. In 1800 there existed in the substantive law numerous anachronisms and uncertainties, while in its administration the delays and complicated procedure constituted abuses far more oppressive than anything that now prevails in the state or federal courts of the United States.

Dickens summed up the condition in the Court of Chancery in these words:

"This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire. which has its worn-out lunatics in every madhouse. and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearing out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give, who does not often give the warning-suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here.'"

Sir Henry Fowler describes the condition as a "horrible and disgraceful mockery of justice and equity;" and it is probable that in some ways England was at the time more backwards than any other civilized nation.

It is true that under the influence of Lord Mansfield there was a remarkable development of the rules of law affecting modern commercial transactions, but the procedure remained archaic and inadequate. It

"cumbersome, antiquated, and oppressive-legal fictions, pedantic technicalities, forms of action, rules of evidence, endless delay, and all the intricacies of pleading appeared to be a combination to arrest, if not to defeat the progress of justice."

It is well for those who are discouraged about the conditions prevailing in this country to ponder these facts and then to recall that the obstacles to obtaining justice in the English courts were largely removed. But

the reform was effected only after three quarters of a century of agitation and effort.

In the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, Blackstone delivered those remarkable lectures which were published as his commentaries on the law of England. So far from stimulating an interest in the improvement of the jurisprudence of England, by their quaint learning, their conservatism, amounting to extreme Toryism, their comprehensiveness, and their attractive literary quality, they had and continue to have a subtle influence to maintain the old order. But even at a time when the influence of Blackstone was most potent, Jeremy Bentham, the greatest of all law reformers, began his thunderous attacks upon some of the most sacred principles of English jurisprudence and upon the machinery by which it was administered in the courts. He did not hesitate to attack the most cherished principles of the common law and of equity, but he argued from the standpoint of reason. His assaults on contemporaneous conservatism was so vigorous and unsparing that his influence was not felt for many years because he was regarded as more or less of a choleric extremist; and his literary style, quaint and original though it was, was not always lucid, while his classifications were sometimes so minute, and his nomenclature so unusual and difficult to master, that he became himself justly chargeable with attempting to erect a technique quite as objectionable as that which he so vigorously attacked. Dumont, who gathered together in a book some of Bentham's papers on legislation, attributed its failure as a publication to "forms too scientific, subdivisions too multifarious and analyses too abstract." But there was so much of truth in Bentham's criticisms of existing abuses, and so much

of substance in the arguments he adduced in support of them, that there is little doubt that his works were among the most potent factors leading to the great English law reforms of the Nineteenth Century. In 1838, John Stuart Mill wrote of him: "He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science; he found the practice of an Augean stable, he turned the river into it which is mining and sweeping away mound after mound of its rubbish." And Sir Henry Maine adds this testimony: "I do not know a single law reform effected since Bentham's day which cannot be traced to his influence."

Legislation which, when it was enacted, almost revolutionized the administration of justice, did not follow for nearly half a century after Bentham's attacks. Henry Brougham, before he was elevated to the peerage, was the first statesman to bring forcibly to the attention of the English people the defects in their judicial system. In 1828 in a speech in the House of Commons of remarkable power and comprehensiveness, he went far along the path blazed by Bentham, but, of course, with a more definite hope of securing practical reforms. It was in that speech that he said:

"It was the boast of Augustus that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. How much nobler will be the Sovereign's boast when he shall have to say that he found law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book, left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich, left it the inheritance of the poor; found it a two-edged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!"

This speech was followed by the appointment of a Royal Commission; and subsequently the investigations

and reports of other Royal Commissions led to the enactment of the Common Law Procedure Acts in 1852, 1854 and 1860, and these were followed by the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875 which substantially completed the reform as a result of which delay, complicated procedure, confusing pleadings and technical rules of evidence were largely eliminated.

I have spoken thus far principally of reforms of court procedure. In spite of the encomiums pronounced upon the merits of the "Lady of the Common Law,' the searching analysis of Bentham disclosed that substantive law, that is, the law fixing rights and wrongs as distinguished from regulations affecting procedure, was also far from being a useful instrument to secure justice under modern conditions. Striking proof of the soundness of Bentham's strictures is afforded by the legislation which followed. In the Nineteenth Century Parliament passed 10,500 acts, many of them of a permanent character, changing rules of law which had prevailed for centuries. Fourteen out of sixteen octavo volumes of the Revised Statutes in force in 1900 contained laws passed between 1800 and 1886; and most of these effected changes in the substantive law. The mass of law based on the feudal system, which was of a highly technical character, having nothing to recommend it except the reverence due to its antiquity, was largely swept away. Many phases of commercial law were similarly dealt with. In addition to elaborate treatment of such subjects as local government, police regulations, public health, employers' liability and workmen's compensation, the law of corporations was formulated, while the rights of infants, lunatics, married women, marriage and divorce, were fixed by

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