Statute Law Revision. 227 



Revision in the United Kingdom. 

 To turn first to the Mother Country, the burden of the 

 rudis indigestague moles of the Statute Book has been 

 for many years felt to be very heavy, and in 1868 Lord 

 Cairns, the then Lord Chancellor, determined to provide 

 a remedy. For this purpose he appointed certain distin- 

 guished lawyers to be a Statute Law Committee. The 

 objeft of the formation of this Committee was to make 

 the necessary arrangements for, and to superintend the 

 publication of, a Revised Edition of the Statutes. The 

 Committee concluded their labours in 1885, with the 

 result that the entire body of statute law in force up to 

 that year was presented to the public in 1 8 well-arranged 

 and well-printed o6lavo volumes. There was also pre- 

 pared and published a volume containing a Chronological 

 Table of the Statutes, as well as a digested Index of 

 the whole of the then existing statute law. But 

 although the publication of these works was an enor- 

 mous benefit to the general community and a still 

 greater one to all persons concerned in the adminis- 

 tration of the law, yet there was the drawback 

 that they were expensive, and, besides, by the time the 

 publication of the revised edition was completed in 1885 

 a large number of ena6lments included in the earlier 

 volumes had been repealed. Accordingly, when Mr. 

 George Howell, M.P., in 1886, pressed upon the 

 Government the expediency of providing a cheap edition 

 of the statutes for the use of the public, and, in particular, 

 for sale to public libraries accessible to working men, it 

 was resolved to issue the revised edition in a cheaper 

 form and embodying all the alterations made in the 

 statutes up to the date of publication. Several volumes 



FP 



