tribunal in the land, the House of Lords,
with its appellate jurisdiction. Before this
last  resort—in the usual shape of two or
three (sometimes in the shape of only two)
old gentlemen who differ in opinion—the
opinion of the other regular, professional judges
may be brought for trial. On the woolsack,
the Lord Chancellor, who, as an equity judge,
is supposed to be ignorant of common law,
is at liberty, with the help of a superannuated
friend, to unsettle and reverse the decision,
say of the fifteen common law judges; who
consider themselves to have already settled
the case in question.

Every Briton knows how the laws are
made; which, after they are made, have to
be thus administered. Governments have
ideas, and private members have ideas. Bills
are brought in by private members upon
special subjects with a pardonable, indeed,
usually with an inevitable, ignorance of the
previous history of legislation on those
subjects. Government thinks it prejudicial to its
interests to refuse leave to introduce such bills;
and they are introduced. Amendments are
proposed wherewith to trip them up, and so
they scramble through the session; some
passing and some passing away; the greater
number living till they perish in the general
massacre of bills, which is the catastrophe
of every legislative season.

How freely, even in spite of yearly
massacres, the crop of legislation springs, another
figure or two will suggest. On the subject
of the qualification and election of a member
of parliament, there exist one hundred and
eighty-five acts. On the subject of Poor Law
there are, in the statute-book, one hundred
and twenty acts. Upon the matter of stamps,
there are one hundred and thirty acts.
Upon the subject of excise, one hundred
and twenty. One act ought to suffice for
each of these matters; yet the statutes still
include four or five thousand pages of dead
revenue law. Even the law concerning
sheriffs and their officers, is published in
no less than fifty-five separate acts of
parliament. The consequence of all this is,
that judge and counsel, when they exercise
their wits on any case, must either put
faith in a fallible digest or manual made by
a private lawyer—if by chance that contains
the information wanted—or they must go
through the whole of the statutes from
Magna Charta to the present day; and, with
the help of an imperfect index, find the bit
of statute they require, as well as make
sure that it has not been affected or modfied
by any other bit of statute bearing
later date. Then, of course, there are also
contradictions in abundance. Public and
general provisions of all sorts, often conflicting
in their principles, are slipped into local
acts.

Some years ago there were appointed two
commissions; one to inquire into the common
law; the other to inquire into the law of real
property. A bill originated by one commission
placed the limitation of payment in
case of arrears of rent, at six years; a
bill originated by the other commission
placed it at twenty years; both bills
became law, and much litigation followed, to
determine which law was the one to be
obeyed. Here, and in a hundred like cases,
we have—as our chief labourer for law
reform, Lord Brougham, has said—" the
legislature in the aspect—not of a doating person
who forgets in old age recent events,—not
recollecting one day or one hour what he had
said the day or the hour before; but of one
who, being in the very last stage of mental
imbecility, forgets at the close of a sentence
what he had said at its commencement."
Even where there is no direct conflict of
meaning, there are great and numerous
obscurities of style; and, let us judge how
much uncertainty arises out of those from
the confusion which arose out of so simple
a thing as the use of the word "may" in
acts of parliament; upon which it was
questioned, whether it gave power and required
such power to be used, or gave power
which might be used, or be suffered to lie
dormant, at discretion.

In this nice splitting of distinctions—a
right strictness unduly strained—lies the
main obstacle to our exchange of the huge,
undigested lump of English law for anything
approaching to the simple clearness of the
Code Napoléon. We need a code of law. The
famous code of Justinian was perfected in less
than four years; fourteen months of which
were spent in winnowing the grain out of the
legal chaff accumulated in a thousand years.
Trebonian, aided by a staff of seventeen
lawyers, in three years reduced three million
sentences to one hundred and fifty thousand;
so perfecting the pandects and institutes. For
the framing of the Code Napoléon a commission
of jurists was appointed on the twelfth
of August in the year eighteen hundred.
In four months it delivered its report,
which was then opened to criticism. The
council of state afterwards completed the
discussion of it in one hundred and two
sittings.

It was recommended chiefly to Napoleon
by the law of inheritance, which broke up
property; and, leaving him the right of
founding a small number of great fortunes
round his throne, destroyed the worldly
power of men who were not the creatures of
his empire. That he held by the code for
this reason, and for this reason desired its
introduction in all subjugated states, he
avowed more than once distinctly and
emphatically in his letters to his brother
Joseph. This being its recommendation to the
despot, to the people it recommended itself
strongly also, as a simple and plain code of
civil justice; and, for the sake of that, most
nations which have once received it, have held
by it gladly and firmly. Is it said that there