are famous instances of codes put in the place
of complex law by despots; that it is not
possible to effect any like change in the case
of a self-governing community? There is, to
reassure us, the New York codification of the
statute law; by which it is reduced into the
limits of three volumes, out of which codification
no difficulty at all has sprung. There
is also the code of Louisiana.

But it is to be conceded that the prospect
of an English corle of statute law is, in these
days, very remote. Many efforts have been
made during the last thirty years by our best
lawyers to condense our mass of law, and,
whenever the efforts have assumed the form
of code-making, there has been a spell that
bound them fast. A criminal bill—which was
a first attempt at a criminal code—was
brought into the House of Lords four years
ago, and referred to a select committee. At the
outset, the terms used in it had to be defined;
and the select committee—which included the
Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice of the
Queen's Bench, and four law-lords who had
filled the office of Lord Chancellor—met
eleven times, consulted for five or six hours
every time, and finally abandoned the
attempt to come to an agreement on the
meaning of such terms as " malice
aforethought," " wilfully," and the like, in
despair. At this rate, how long would it take
to reduce thousands of statutes to a single
code?

In this state of the question, the proposal
made is to avoid occasion for debate, by
postponing the effort to recast the laws,—to
unsay them and say them again,—but to
be satisfied with weeding out of them every
dead part, fusing together iterations, and
combining carefully into a single statute all
the scattered sentences relating to a single
subject.

As we have said, on the subject of
revenue only, five or six volumes of statutes
may, at a single throw, be tossed away; the
one hundred and eighty-five acts on the
constitution and privileges of a member of the
House of Commons maybe digested into one.
Over such consolidation of the laws—if it
were founded upon the pruning and collection
of men able enough to be trusted—very little
breath of controversy need be wasted; and,
when that work is finished—when the fifty
thousand pages of law have, by a strict, legal,
and literary pruning, been reduced to five
thousand or ten thousand—it will be easier, by
the subtlest process of digestion, to produce a
code that shall be creditable to us as a
civilised community.

There have been several efforts made with
various success in the way of law amendment.
Thirty years ago, Sir Robert Peel, in three
statutes, consolidated a large mass of the old
criminal law. Five years afterwards, Lord
Melbourne consolidated the whole law
relating to offences against the person. The
Chief Baron of the Exchequer procured the
passing of a law which brought together all
the regulations scattered among many local
acts with reference to notices of action,
statutes of limitation, and double and treble
costs. Better still in the way of superseding
old, bad law, with better; two acts of Parliament
—the act which established County
Courts and that which regulated a fresh
Common Law Procedure, for which we have
Mr. Baron Martin, Mr. Baron Bramwell,
and Mr. Justice Willes to thank—have
saved a million a-year to the law-needing
part of the community.

So much out of two simplifications only.
What would we save if we could have,
in England, any court resembling that in
France and other continental countries, before
which litigants can have their causes heard
previous to trial, by an impartial and
practised man able to give them proper counsel?
In some countries, where such counsel exists,
four-fifths of the causes that arise are
quashed by a summary and wholesome
reconcilement; the eyes of the litigants having
been opened by a trustworthy and impartial
umpire, all the heart-burning and
demoralisation of the law-suit is, in four cases
out of five, avoided. In France, there are
settled in this manner three causes out of
four. However, let us not hope anything
too wild in the way of British law. It
will be time enough for our great
grandchildren to dream of getting anything so
sensible as courts like these. We go back
to the much quieter topics of consolidation
and reform.

For it should be known that upon these
topics we have encouragement to speak; inasmuch
as they have been frequently discussed
during the present session of parliament.
We have legal authority for what we state.
Reforms suggested by Lord Brougham
eight-and-tweuty years ago, and declared
visionary then, have since been adopted,
one by one, each one generally after the
iterated impulse of suggestion, year by
year. Good deeds are always long a-doing
in our legislature. The question of County
Courts was under consideration for not less
than half a century. The Charitable Trusts
Bill, though, one might think, of very manifest
use and justice, was under consideration
thirty years. It took Lord Brougham six
years and a half to get acceptance for the law
which allows parties to a suit to tell the
court themselves what they are fighting
over; it took the same law reformer ten years
to pass his bill for abolishing the Master's
Office. When, in eighteen hundred and
thirty-three, Lord Brougham, being
Chancellor, issued a commission to consider the
amendment of the statute law, the report of
that commission obtained no serious and
practical attention from the legislature.
Only three years ago the present Lord
Chancellor proposed a step towards consolidation
of the statute law. That has not been taken;