taking likenesses in the houses of their sitters; and the sitter's gain in personal comfort will be duly registered in the improved expression of the picture.

These are the improvements in the art, the possibility of which is in immediate prospect. They consist merely in carrying farther what has been done before, and developing principles which are known. There is one discovery for which every lover of photography has long been looking, but the chance of which unhappily does not seem to draw nearer. No one can look upon the beautiful outline and exquisite gradation of a photograph without feeling the one great want which keeps the art still far back from perfection as an instrument for bringing past or distant scenes before the mind. The absence of colour is a drawback, which no excellence in other respects can even approximately replace. All that can be said with regard to our hopes of a chromatic photography is that the possibility has been indicated, and nothing more. Various experimentalists have met with traces of the natural colours upon their negatives; but no one has detected the determining cause of their appearance with sufficient certainty to be able to reproduce them at will. M. Niepce de St. Victor, who bears a name well known in connexion with photographic discovery, has proceeded in his experiments more systematically; and he has succeeded in producing results which, though for the present they are of no practical value, still furnish encou ragement for further efforts. He has employed a heated plate of silver, with the surface chloridized, and covered with a varnish of chloride of lead. The latter salt has the property of causing chloride of silver to turn white under the influence of white light, instead of assuming the ordinary violet hue. Plates thus prepared have reproduced colours corresponding to those of the objects before which they were exposed, and have retained those colours in daylight for several hours. But these colours can hardly be described as adequate representations of natural colours; and no attempt to make them permanent has hitherto succeeded. ever the possibility indicated by these experiments should become a reality, there may be ground for the apprehension attributed to Sir William Beechey, when Boulton's early experiments were brought to his knowledge, that the new art would shut up the painters' shops.' There can be little doubt that in such a case the camera would have undisputed possession of all actual scenes and existing objects, and the easel and canvas would be restricted exclusively to imaginative painting. Till that day arrives, photographers must be content with a secondary rank. They will probably, as their art grows in recognition every year,

do

do the good service of exterminating bad painters, of aiding good ones, and of forcing upon their somewhat jealous rivals a more worthy appreciation of the value of truthfulness. But so long as the vast interval that separates colour from monochrome distinguishes the two arts, there is no danger that one will encroach upon the province of the other.

ART. VIII. The Times, Saturday, September 24th, 1864: Address of the Right Honourable Sir J. P. Wilde, Chairman of the Jurisprudence Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, delivered September 23rd, 1864.

SINCE

INCE the great oration of Mr. Brougham in 1828 stirred up the English nation to reform their laws, incessant efforts have been made to improve our legal procedure, and the administration of the Law has unquestionably been rendered simpler and more expeditious. But little-we do not say, nothing-has yet been done for the Law itself. Two things are desirable for the substantive Law of any country,— that is to say, for the rules which determine rights, and which are enforced, when necessary, by what we call Procedure. The doctrines of the substantive Law should be reasonable in themselves, and they should exist in an accessible and intelligible form. Under the first of these heads England has much to do: for she allows many doctrines to prevail in her Courts which are not advantageous to society and are condemned by her most enlightened lawyers, and she suffers many points to remain undetermined which might be settled at once by legislation. But the form in which the English Law exists is indeed terrible to the laity and wearisome to the initiated. So far as the Law has been formally enacted by the Legislature, attempts have been made and are still in progress to harmonise and arrange it. But the greater part, by far, of our legal system has never been reduced into the form of an enactment. It constitutes an unwritten custom of the nation, supposed to be known to the Judges, who deduce it as they best may from the decisions of their predecessors, and, failing these, from their own notions of justice. Our Laws have never undergone any general revision. With the exception of the Statute of Frauds, the Statute of Limitations, and a few Acts directed to very limited purposes, the Legislature has laid no hand on the body of the Common Law. It has been left to the tribunals themselves so to mould old principles into new forms as to make them subserve modern uses. Thus the Law has grown: pro

fessedly,

fessedly, indeed, drawing its decisions from its own inexhaustible stores, but in reality framing, adapting, creating, as it went along. It falls into shape as each new subject becomes familiar. One consequence of this system is that each year now calls into being a number of decided cases so large that no study can enable a man to keep up with them. This vast agglomeration breeds not only confusion in those who are to be bound by the Law, but inconsistency in those who administer it. But the worst feature attending a law purely traditional is its incapacity to obliterate. Tradition is the expression of permanence: if it preserves truth, it also perpetuates error. There is no power practically available for expelling from our legal system erroneous doctrine which has once become 'settled law.' Is this system to last for ever? Or is it prescribed by some inevitable necessity that England should be satisfied with a law whose principles wander at large through the pages of many hundred volumes? Are those principles capable of no exposition?

Nearly to this effect spoke Sir James Wilde, the Judge of the Court of Probate and Divorce, in his eloquent address at York; and few indeed can they be who will not cordially agree with him in wishing that our Law may be rendered more simple and compendious in form, and that means may be found to counteract the tendency of our present legal machinery to perpetuate erroneous or inconvenient doctrines.

Now for the remedy. His suggestions are as follows:

The law as already settled, and to the extent to which it has already been actually applied, might surely be bound together and epitomised for the practical use of mankind. Is not this what in fact and in practice every well-read lawyer more or less does for himself? When a case presents itself to his mind for legal solution, does he instantly recur to some specific case forming a precedent, or does he not rather fall back upon the general legal principles with which his mind is imbued? Now, I cannot resist the belief that within the bounds of reasonable labour and time the general principles and broad bases on which our common law reposes, and which tacitly guide the decisions of our Courts, might be brought to the surface, grouped together, subordinated in their several relations, and contrasted in their differences. An attempt of the kind, and not without great success, was made by the late Mr. Smith in his Leading Cases. And those who have studied the notes of that book will not fail to perceive how easily and with what success large groups of cases treated and handled together have been made to yield up short and succinct propositions of law. What I desire to see is a similar attempt made with authority, and on a much larger scale, to be finally confirmed by Act of Parliament; but I do not conceal from myself that the first judicial minds of the country are alone adequate to the task; at least, in its ultimate stages,

and

and that it is far beyond the reach of the unpaid services of occupied men. If such a result could be obtained, the benefits are not doubtful: to the student and the general public the vast area covered by the law would present a district set out in order, in place of a tangled thicket. The true bearing of each abstract proposition would stand out plainly, because side by side with others of a similar nature. Here, too, another great advantage would be reaped. As the decisions which have radiated from some central case came to be classed together, and their common principles with its qualifications and limitations extracted, all those of a questionable soundness would come to be suppressed. That our books abound with such cannot be denied ; and their expurgation by authority is an end of great importance. For, once entangled in them, the Courts are either led astray or only escape to the doing of justice by some refined distinction, which, in its turn, becomes a snare for the future. It is thus that error once committed under our present system is perpetuated. And decisions whose soundness is doubted for years continue for years to be the rule of judgment and the source of endless distinctions and refinements, until at last they are either trampled out by the reiterated dicta of the tribunals, or reversed in regular form by the Courts of Appeal. Many, too, are the instances of discordant decisions on identically the same subject, and it is not an uncommon remark" That all the cases upon this subject cannot be reconciled." Any classification by authority must decide between them, and thus remove, pro tanto, one of the worst evils of the law-uncertainty. But the great gain that would accrue to the law would be the reduction of its bulk. We possess in our legal records accumulated instances of exact justice, in individual cases, series after series of social duties and relative rights, set forth in every variety and combination and pursued into the minutest details, and to all of which, each in their turn, the law has been applied and adjusted with a precision and laborious rectitude such as the legal annals of no other country can, I believe, produce. But they exist in a scattered, inconvenient, and unmanageable form. Instances in place of precepts, examples in the place of rules, our recorded decisions stand thick together like a fair field of grain-full of wealth and worth, but waiting the hand that shall gather it into sheaves and store it to the use of man. And here I would observe that the method I propose is properly a digest, and not a code; and a digest has this advantage -that it permits of gradual formation. Unlike a code, which is the offspring of large and comprehensive views-and should deal with all subjects as a whole-a_digest, with narrower aim, may properly be worked out piecemeal. In past times the "Digest of Comyn" and the "Abridgment of Bacon" did much in this direction, though they owned no authority but that of their intrinsic merit. And in modern times the law would be almost unapproachable but for the text-books, some of them executed with admirable talent,* with which the labours

There is no recent work of this class to which this compliment can with so much propriety be applied as Mr. Vaughan Hawkins's Treatise on the Construction of Wills (London, 1863).

of

of the Bar have enriched us. If there be those who fear to handle a body of laws which, on the whole, work so well, I would observe to them that I propose to displace nothing. I would not that the authority of the cases should necessarily be extinguished by the authority of the digest. Unless expressly set aside, and inconsistent with other decisions better approved, I would have all decisions remain of authority, content to await the time when the life shall have passed into their offspring, and they fall away of themselves, and pass into a sure decay.'

It appears, then, that text-books have been produced, and are constantly coming into existence, in which the cases are examined, arranged, and discriminated; and that Digests owning no authority save that of their intrinsic merit, are received with favour, and prove very useful. The only thing wanting is an authority to decide between doctrines that cannot be reconciled, and to reject unsound cases; and the only difference between the Digest and a well-written text-book would be, that such decision and rejection would be authoritatively pronounced in the Digest, and could only be indicated and supported by argument in a text-book. It would certainly be a great advantage to the country to have such an authoritative decision and rejection; but could not the task be performed equally well without engaging our highest judicial mind in the composition of a text-book? Then, although the Digest might overrule some cases, and record them as overruled, yet in a great proportion of cases there is more than one point involved, so that a case might be overruled as to one point, and not as to others, and so it would still be necessary to refer to it. And as to cases not overruled, that is, as to the whole of the cases on which the Digest is to be founded, Sir James Wilde proposes not to extinguish their authority. It would, therefore, be requisite for the judge still to be acquainted with them, still to listen to the arguments by which counsel would contend that the case he advocates differs in circumstances, and therefore is not ruled by the case sanctioned by the Digest. Or his argument might be the converse of this. In either case the ore must still be dug up and smelted, in order to see whether a grain of metal can be extracted from it. Thus the highest legal talent of the country would be engaged in a work that would (except in respect of the settlement of doubtful points, which might be done separately) be no more than 'an epitomising and binding together of the Law as already settled, and to the extent to which it has been already applied;' for the very notion of a Digest, or arrangement, excludes the idea of any act of legislation, unless the deciding between irreconcileable cases be so called.

But