356 HISTORY OF COMMON LAW 



Professor Hepburn and others. But in the older states, such as 

 Massachusetts and Connecticut, which still do not use the name of 

 code, much history has been made which deserves to be chronicled, 

 but as yet has not been systematically described in its causes and 

 circumstances. Such a history must begin with Bentham at one 

 extreme and with the American judicial organization at the other, 

 and will have much ground to cover. 



(4) The land system of the United States Government titles has 

 affected all the Southern, Central, and Western states in general, and 

 the Spanish system in particular has affected those of California, 

 Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The historical 

 aspects of this, which are interesting, have still to be depicted. 



II. Our second inquiry is: What are the methods by which the 

 further investigation of our history can be encouraged, and its hitherto 

 attained results be made broadly known and influential in the legal 

 profession ? Our inquiry may be stated in two questions : (A) How 

 can we get more history written? and (B) How can we make known 

 what is written? 



(A) The first question is a necessary one for us to face for two chief 

 reasons: One is that our bar as a whole does not demand historical 

 books, and therefore there are few investigators and fewer books. 

 The other reason is that our universities in the United States do 

 not in general exist (as those of the European Continent do) for the 

 main purpose of providing learned men with a comfortable living 

 while engaged in research; they are, primarily, teaching, not inves- 

 tigating bodies. Consequently the pursuit of historical research 

 tends to receive less than its relative share of activity. It is our 

 duty to canvass and to encourage all feasible means of increasing 

 this activity. What practical means are there? 



(1) First of all, those who have vindicated their right to possess 

 this field should be urged and stimulated to continue its fruitful 

 tillage; and not to abandon it for other fields tempting to their 

 versatile sympathies. The greatest loss which English legal history, 

 in the strict sense, has ever suffered is marked by Professor Maitland's 

 excursus into the economic region of Domesday Book and the 

 minutiae of the primitive English land system, and by Professor 

 Ames's varied trips into the modern realms of commercial paper, 

 admiralty, and partnership. This Congress here assembled should 

 issue to those scholars a peremptory writ of Ne exeat regno Angliae 

 juris historiae. Let us appeal to them in the most urgent tones to 

 continue the cultivation of those peculiar fields whose fruits no one 

 else, in default of them, is either competent or likely to gather for 

 a generation or more to come. 1 



1 The motive, it may be supposed, for these great scholars' temporary abandon- 

 ment of the field of later medieval and early modern history is the scantiness of 



