464 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Lord Cran worth in the House of Peers, 16th February, 1853, the 

 judges were supposed to he acquainted with all these laws, but, in fact, 

 no human mind could master them, and ignorance had ceased to be a 

 disgrace. 1 To this has to be added the accumulation of civil laws, 

 similarly multitudinous, involved, unclassified, and to this, again, the 

 enormous mass of "case law," filling over 1,200 volumes, and rapidly 

 increasing, before there can be formed an idea of the chaos. And 

 then consider how there has come this chaos, out of which not even 

 the highest legal functionaries, much less the lower functionaries, much 

 less the ordinary citizens, can educe definite conclusions. Session 

 after session the confusion has been worse confounded by the passing 

 of separate Acts, and successive amendments of Acts, which are left 

 unconnected with the multitudinous kindred Acts and amendments 

 that lie scattered through the accumulated records of centuries. Sup- 

 pose a trader should make, day by day, separate memoranda of his 

 transactions with A, B, C, and the rest of his debtors and creditors. 

 Suppose he should stick these on a file one after the other as they were 

 made, never even putting them in order, much less entering them in 

 his ledger. Suppose he should thus go on throughout his life, and 

 that, to learn the state of his account with A, B, or C, his clerks had 

 to search through this enormous confused file of memoranda, being 

 helped only by their memories and by certain private note-books which 

 preceding clerks had made for their own guidance, and left behind 

 them. What would be the state of the business ? What chance would 

 A, B, and C, have of being rightly dealt with ? Yet this, which, as a 

 method of conducting private business, is almost too ludicrous for 

 fiction, is in public business nothing more than grave fact. And the 

 result of the method is exactly the one to be anticipated. At the pres- 

 ent time we have two ex-Chancellors giving conflicting judgments in 

 assurance-arbitrations. The conflict may be taken as typical of the 

 system from top to bottom. Every day's law-reports remind us that 

 each decision given is so uncertain that the probability of appeal 

 depends chiefly on the courage or pecuniary ability of the beaten 

 litigant not on the nature of the verdict ; and, if the appeal is made, 

 a reversal of the verdict is looked for as by no means unlikely. And 

 then, on contemplating the ultimate result, we find it to be the mul- 

 tiplication of aggressions. Were the law clear, were the verdicts cer- 

 tain to be in conformity with it, and did asking for its protection entail 

 no chance of great loss or of ruin, very many of the causes that come 

 before our courts would never be heard of, for the reason that the 

 wrongs they disclose would not be committed ; and there would not 

 be committed those yet more numerous wrongs to which the bad are 

 prompted by the belief that the persons wronged will not dare to seek 

 rediess. Here, where State-agency has had centuries upon centuries 

 in which to develop its appliances and show its efficiency, it is so 

 1 Fischel's " English Constitution," translated by Sb.ee, p. 487. 



