68 TRANSACTION'S. 1901-2 



law," says Lord Avebury (i), "is one of the most important 

 sections of human history." And Paterson, in his fine 

 work on the ' Liberty of the Subject ' (2), observes that law 

 is 



the greatest and most potent bady of knowledge which concerns the children of men 

 — a knowledge which reaches, directly or indirectly,' all stations and classes, and chal- 

 lenges the attention of governors and governed alike, searching the roots of social 

 life far and wide. 



Then let us understand at this stage what ' Ihe Law ' is, for 

 until we have a clear apprehension of the province of the 

 science as a whole we cannot expect to examine intelligently 

 that portion Ol it which is our present theme. 



In the first place, let me say that many are the uses of the 

 word 'L iw.' 'There is liardlv another term in our language 

 around which centres such a confusion of ideas. A mere glance 

 at one of the stand ird dictionaries will verify my statement. 

 It is a far cry from the point where the word means the con- 

 stant mode or order of operation which pervades the inanim- 

 ate universe to that where it denotes a system of rules govern- 

 ing the players in a game of cards. Yet we commonly speak, 

 without any sense of incongruity, of Kepler's laws of motion 

 and Dalton's law of gases, on the one hand, and, on the other 

 hand, of the laws of whist. Strange to say, no class of thinkers 

 have done so much to promote this ambiguity of meaning as 

 the lawyers themselves. They seem almost wilful in their 

 neglect to limit it to the government of rational and volitional 

 beings. Biackstone, in his well known declaration of the 

 unity of law (3), merely affirms for the English school what 

 Montesquieti (4) had already said for the Continental jurists. 

 Both adopted the theory, everywhere current up to the 

 great renascence of legal study in the nineteenth century, 

 which predicated all the phenomena of order and har- 

 mony both in the physical and political world, as the 



(1) Lubbock's Orig. of Civ p. 300. 



(2) Vol. I. p 7. 



(3) Comm . I. Introd. 66. 



(4) Esprit des Lois I., e.i., p.i. 



