652 PRIVATE LAW 



a very broad and practical mind. He must have an eye for the 

 minutest point of grammar or construction. He must have a very 

 simple English style." x When an absolute monarchy is ruled by 

 a man who is anxious to secure a codification of the laws, and is a 

 good judge of human nature, and understands the subject well 

 enough to know what kind of a man can best take it up, then we may 

 expect work of the class of the Code Napoleon. In a republic, par- 

 ticularly a republic based upon the Montesquieu system of checks 

 and balances, where the legislature provides the job but the execu- 

 tive dispenses the patronage, the chances of getting the right man 

 are remote. The ease of finding the wrong man, and the natural 

 results thereof, are illustrated by instances so familiar that they need 

 not be mentioned. Not only is it harder for a republic to find the 

 right man, but it is harder for a republic, when he is once found, 

 to persuade him to take up the work. A Napoleon can assure him 

 that, if his work is on the whole well done, it will have the neces- 

 sary support and will achieve practical results. In a republic, 

 nobody can assure him support. However conspicuously it may 

 deserve enactment, it is very likely to be laid quietly upon the legis- 

 lative shelf, or, if it is enacted in any form, to have its symmetry 

 and its science utterly marred by ill-considered amendments. Not 

 only is it difficult to procure the adoption of any one of the reforms 

 necessary to make the law consistent and reasonable and just upon 

 any subject, but if, as true codification demands, a considerable 

 number of substantial changes in the existing law are introduced, 

 that very fact is likely to result in the failure of the entire work. 

 Almost every effective action of a legislative body changes the exist- 

 ing law, and yet, when a codification is introduced, the cry that " it 

 changes the existing law " is generally enough to kill it. 



I believe that codification will be accomplished within the life- 

 time of men who are already admitted to the practice of the legal 

 profession; and I believe that either it will be accompanied by the 

 avowed abolition of the doctrine of stare decisis and substitution of. 

 the Continental method of treatment of judicial decisions, or else 

 it will be accompanied by some such legislative sifting of the reports 

 as I have outlined by way of suggestion; but I do not believe that it 

 will be done until the present system has become so overloaded 

 that the American bar, with substantial unanimity, will decide that 

 almost any kind of codification would be an improvement. Mean- 

 while the work of the future codifier is being made daily more easy: 

 on the one hand by the multiplication of text-books in which the 

 present law is stated with a considerable degree of terseness and 

 approach to accuracy; and on the other hand by a continual multi- 

 plication of conflicts in authority and a continual weakening of pro- 



1 New York State Bar Association Reports, vol. xxvi, p. 94. 



