JUSTICE AND LAV/. 
503 
JUSTICE AND LAW. 
ABSTRACT OF MR. R. COLLIER^ PAPER. 
(Read 30th March, 1876.) 
The lecturer, after congratulating his audience that law reform 
had at last been taken up in earnest by the judicial bench, said 
that for a good example of a thoroughly vicious system of law it 
was unnecessary to go back further than the time of Blackstone. 
He then gave an outline of the state of the law a hundred years 
ago, noticing some of the reforms since effected, and observed that 
most people who had considered the subject- were now pretty well 
agreed that up to a tolerably recent period the laws of England, 
so far from being, as its eulogists asserted, the perfection of 
human wisdom, savoured very strongly of pedantic folly. The 
lecturer adopted the view of Sir H. Maine, that there are three 
stages in the progress of law reform, the means employed to alter 
the law in primitive societies being usually fictions, while in more 
advanced societies equity steps in, and lastly the legislature 
interferes. He gave instances of law reforms effected through 
the instrumentality of (1) fictions and (2) equity. He discussed 
the jurisdiction of equity in relieving against penalties, and 
observed that although some jurisdiction of the kind was rendered 
necessary owing to the extremely defective state of the law, the 
equity judges had in some instances allowed zeal to outrun dis- 
cretion. " The judges," said the lecturer, "have gone the length 
of deciding that certain kinds of agreement must be deemed to 
mean what the judges think ought to have been the intention of 
the parties, rather than what the parties themselves have declared 
to be their meaning. This high-handed interference on the part 
of the judges would never have been sanctioned but for the 
remarkable circumstance that persons were actually in the habit 
of putting their hands to written contracts which did not, in point 
of fact, express the real intention of the parties. This childish 
