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• Scotch Reform; Considered With Reference to the Plan Proposed In the Late Parliament, For the Regulation of the Courts and the Administration of Justice In Scotland: With Illustrations From English Non-reform: In the Course of Which, Divers Imperfectio
• Advertisement.
• Letters to Lord Grenville, On the Proposed Reform In the Administration of Civil Justice In Scotland.
• Letter I.
• Letter II.: Proposed Division of the Court of Session.
• Letter III.: Proposed System of Pleading.
• Letter IV.: Proposed Trial By Jury.
• Letter V.: On the Bill Called Lord Eldon’s.
• Summary View of the Plan of a Judicatory, Under the Name of the Court of Lords’ Delegates, Proposed For the Exercise of Those Judicial Functions, the Adequate Discharge of Which By the Whole House Has, For These Six Or Seven Years, Been Rendered Confe
• The Elements of the Art of Packing, As Applied to Special Juries, Particularly In Cases of Libel Law.
• Advertisement to the First Edition.
• Part I.
• Chapter I.: Occasion of This Work.
• Chapter II.: Juries—their Use As a Check to Judges.
• Chapter III.: The Check How Done Away By Influence.
• Chapter IV.: Special Juries, a Special Engine of Corruption.
• Chapter V.: Jury Unanimity Increases the Corruption.
• Chapter VI.: Purposes to Which Influence On Juries May Be Made Subservient.
• Chapter VII.: Chief Purpose, Crushing the Liberty of the Press.
• Chapter VIII.: The Exchequer Packing Office Suffices.
• Chapter IX.: Instruments For Crushing the Liberty of the Press.
• Chapter X.: Want of Adequate Obsequiousness Morally Impossible.
• Chapter XI.: Such Juries Worse Than None.
• Part II.: State of the Packing System, Anno 1808.
• Chapter I.: Introduction—two Reforming Shrievalties.
• Chapter II.: The Sheriff to the Lord Chief Baron—notices.
• Chapter III.: Lord Chief Baron to Sheriff Sir Richard Phillips—avowries and Defences.
• Chapter IV.: Observations On the Lord Chief Baron’s Defences.
• Chapter V.: Special Jury Corruption—devices By Which It Was Protected.
• Chapter VI.: Learned Advice From the Temple.
• Chapter VII.: Advice From Lincoln’s-inn.
• Chapter VIII.: Maxims Concerning Reform, Deduced From the Above Letter.
• Chapter IX.: Transactions At the Remembrancer’s.
• Part III.: State of the Packing System, Anno 1809.
• Chapter I.: Commons’ Debate, 24 Th April 1809. Packing and Cutting.
• Chapter II.: Double-fee Abuse, Plain and Embroidered.
• Part IV.—: Remedies Proposed. *
• Chapter I.: Humble Proposal For Restoring the Constitution In Regard to Juries.
• Chapter II.: State of Jury Package In Scotland.
• Chapter III.: Humble Proposal For Restoring the Authority of Parliament.
• “swear Not At All:” Containing an Exposure of the Needlessness and Mischievousness, As Well As Anti-christianity of the Ceremony of an Oath: a View of the Parliamentary Recognition of Its Needlessness, Implied In the Practice of Both Houses; a
• Advertisement.
• Editor’s Note
• Swear Not At All. Mat. V. 34.
• Section 1.: Oath. Incongruity of the Assumption, On Which Its Supposed Beneficial Efficiency Is Grounded.
• Section 2.: Mischievousness of This Instrument Considered In a General Point of View.
• Section 3.: Its Inefficiency In the Character of a Security Against Deceptious Incorrectness and Incompleteness In Evidence.
• Section 4.: Recognition of Its Inutility By Lords and Commons.
• Section 5.: Mischiefs —1. Contributing to the Mendacity-licence Granted By Judges.
• Section 6.: Mischief 2— Weakening In Various Ways the Efficiency of the Laws.
• Section 7.: Mischief 3— Bewildering and Enslaving the Consciences of Jurymen.
• Section 8.: Mischief 4— Giving Aid and Force to the Enterprises of Malefactors.
• Section 9.: Mischief 5— Furnishing Pretence For Misrule By Abuse of Prerogative.
• Section 10.: Misrule, How to Perpetuate—coronation Oaths Amended.
• Section 11.: Mischief 6— Corrupting the National Morals and Understanding—oxford University Oaths.
• Section 12.: Mischief 6 Continued. —ii. Cambridge Oaths.
• Section 13.: Practice of Receiving Judicial Oaths, Its Repugnancy to the Precepts of Jesus.
• Section 14.: Succedanea—true Securities Substitutible to This False One.
• Section 15.: Cause and Origin of the Practice In Regard to Oaths.
• Appendix.
• Truth Versus Ashhurst; Or, Law As It Is, Contrasted With What It Is Said to Be.
• The King Against Edmonds and Others: Set Down For Trial, At Warwick, On the 29 Th of March 1820.
• The King Against Sir Charles Wolseley, Baronet, and Joseph Harrison, Schoolmaster, Set Down For Trial, At Chester, On the 4 Th of April 1820.
• Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized: As Shown In the Several Papers Comprised In This Volume.
• Paper I.—
• Paper II.—: Introductory View, &c.
• Paper III.—: Extract From the Proposed Constitutional Code; Entitled, Official Aptitude Maximized—expense Minimized. By Jeremy Bentham, Esq. Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn.
• Paper IV.—: Supplement to the Above Extract.
• Paper V.—: Defence of Economy Against the Right Honourable Edmund Burke.
• Paper VI.—: Defence of Economy Against the Right Honourable George Rose.
• Paper VII.: Observations On Mr. Secretary Peel’s House of Commons Speech, 21 St March 1825, Introducing His Police Magistrates’ Salary Raising Bill, ( Date of Order For Printing, 24 Th March 1825.)
• Paper VIII.: Indications Respecting Lord Eldon, Including History of the Pending Judges’-salary-raising Measure.
• Paper IX.—: On the Militia.
• Paper X.: On Public Account Keeping.
• Paper XI.: Constitutional Code—table of Contents As Shown By Titles of Chapter and Sections.
• Commentary On Mr. Humphreys’ Real Property Code, By Jeremy Bentham. From the Westminster Review, No. XII., For October 1826.
• *∗* the Following Note Was Prefixed to the Article By the Editor of the Westminster Review: —
• Commentary On Humphreys’ Real Property Code.
• I.: Deed of Sale.
• II.: Deed of Mortgage. 1
• III.: Marriage Settlement Deed.
• Outline of a Plan of a General Register of Real Property: Contained In a Communication to the Commissioners Appointed Under Letters Patent, of Date the 6 Th June 1828, to Inquire Into the Law of England Respecting Real Property, and First Printed I
• Justice and Codification Petitions: Being Forms Proposed For Signature By All Persons Whose Desire It Is to See Justice No Longer Sold, Delayed, Or Denied: and to Obtain a Possibility of That Knowledge of the Law, In Proportion to the Want of Which T
• Justice and Codification Petitions.
• Advertisement.
• Preliminary Explanations Necessary to Be First Read.
• Petition For Justice.
• Abridged Petition For Justice.
• More Abridged Petition For Justice.
• Supplement, Which May Be Added Or Not to Any One of the Three Or Any Other Proposed Petition.
• Petition For Codification.
• Lord Brougham Displayed: Including I. Boa Constrictor, Alias Helluo Curiarum; II. Observations On the Bankruptcy Court Bill, Now Ripened Into an Act; III. Extracts From Proposed Constitutional Code.

COMMENTARY ON MR. HUMPHREYS’ REAL PROPERTY CODE, BY JEREMY BENTHAM.

FROM THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW, No. XII., FOR OCTOBER 1826.

being A REVIEW of

“OBSERVATIONS on the ACTUAL STATE of the ENGLISH LAW of REAL PROPERTY, with the OUTLINE of a CODE. By James Humphreys, Esq. of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister.” 8vo. Murray. London.

[We conclude this Number of the Review with a Supplement, in a form unusual in similar periodical publications. In the conduct of this work we may lay more than an ordinary claim to the use of the personal plural, for it is rare that our opinions are not shared by the whole of our corps, and still rarer for any of our articles to reach the public without having previously passed the ordeal of more than one judgment. The following composition is published as it came from the hands of the writer; its merits are as peculiar as its style, and it would be an attempt equally vain as useless, to give to such an article a general uniform; and to attempt to conceal the individuality of the manner, if not of the matter. Holding, as we do, the intellectual qualities of Mr. Bentham in the very highest esteem, and having, during our course, invariably maintained the legislative views of this distinguished juris-consult, whom we regard as the great founder of a new and better system, it may readily be supposed that we were anxious to ascertain his opinion of a work, respecting which, from its nature and subject, he may be justly considered as the highest authority. This opinion has been communicated to us in the following form; and we publish it unchanged in the most trifling particular. If the weight which Mr. Bentham’s name must carry, when thus united with that of Mr. Humphreys, accelerate in the least the progress of that legal reform which is now beginning to be so loudly demanded, we shall be pardoned for having deviated in this especial instance from the approved form of conveying the arguments of a Reviewer.—Ed.]

COMMENTARY ON HUMPHREYS’ REAL PROPERTY CODE.

Of a work such as this, the publication forms an epoch: in law certainly; I had almost said in history. In possession; in expectancy; in prospect; in project—have you any property in the shape thus denominated? Deep, in proportion to the value of it, is the interest you have in this work; signal and unprecedented your obligation to the author of it. Lay even property in this shape out of the question; still, if by those on whose will everything depends, his exertions be but duly seconded, strong will be the ground you will have for felicitating yourself on the appearance of this star in the horizon of jurisprudence: for of all that is valuable to man, nothing is there to which, directly or indirectly, its beneficial influence will not be found to extend. It has, indeed, for its direct object and main subject-matter, that species alone of property to which English lawyers, and they alone, have so absurdly and uncharacteristically, instead of immoveable, given the name of real; but, for everything else, to which it is in the nature of law to afford security,—security, in a proportion as yet unexampled,—will, if his plan be carried into execution, be the effect.

Not less signal is the moral than the intellectual merit manifested by it. A young briefless lawyer, who, on a survey taken of the road to advancement, had been fortunate enough to descry this as yet untrodden track, and bold enough to enter upon it,—this was the sort of character, in which, in my imagination, the author had been pourtrayed. To one who, in the shape of business, had nothing to lose,—distinction, even if that were all—distinction, how barren soever—would of course have its value. Imagine, any one, my astonishment, when the information reached me, that, instead of a young adventurer, the work had for its author a man advanced in years; a conveyancer, at the very head of his profession; a reformist who, by every page written, and every hour thus spent, in an occupation not less laborious than meritorious, had thus been making a sacrifice of pecuniary interest on the altar of public good.

Proportioned to the service he has rendered to all who are not lawyers, is the ill-will which, with few exceptions indeed, if man be man, he cannot but have called forth, in the breasts of all, who, proportioned to the advancement given to the art-and-science, see, as they cannot but see, the defalcation made from the profit of the trade.

Sincere, if ever admiration was, is that which is here expressed: whether it be a blind one, what follows will soon show.

Hale, with all his merits; Hale, like all lawyers who had gone before him, and almost all who have come after him, was no reformer: nothing better than an expounder: everything stated by him was stated as he found it, or conceived it to be: no inquiries as to what it ought to be: in the eyes of lawyers—not to speak of their dupes—that is to say, as yet, the generality of non-lawyers—the is and the ought to be (or, as in Greek it would be so much better—the το ον and the το δεον, from which last, Ethics has received the more expressive name of Deontology,) were one and indivisible. By David Hume, in his Treatise on Human Nature, the universality of this practice of confounding the two so different objects was first held up to view.

As to Blackstone, flagrant as were the abominations, which at every page he had to wade through must have met his eye—not to extirpate them, not to expose them, was his endeavour, but to cover and preserve them; and which of the two quantities has been the greater—the service he has done to the people in the one shape, or the disservice in the other—both being to his narrow mind, probably, alike objects of indifference—is a question easier to propose than solve.

Before this work came out, code and codification were rank theory; theory; and, as such, objects of sincere horror, with as much of pretended contempt as would mix up with it. Now, at length, they are become practice; contempt has been repulsed by its own image, and horror has given way to praise. But now to particulars.

Law of landed property being the field,—follow eight distinguishable heads, under which, it is believed, may be ranked Mr. Humphreys’ proposed improvements; some more, some less, explicitly declared.

1. Substitution of apt, to the present unapt, forms of the instruments by which landed property is disposed of—say, for shortness, of conveyancing instruments, or formulæ.

2. Melioration and extension of the registration system, as applied to conveyances.

3. In the case of freeholds, substitution of the generally prevalent to the anomalous courses of descent, namely, Gavelkind and Borough English.

4. Reduction of copyholds to the state of freeholds.

5. All-comprehensive partition of common lands.

6. Substitution of a really existing code, to the present compound, of a really existing, with an imaginary civil, or say non-penal, code of law, so far as relates to landed property. Codification this, in contradistinction to consolidation.

7. Appropriate addition to the judiciary establishment, in so far as may be necessary to the giving execution and effect to the substantive part of such proposed code.

8. Substitution of an apt, to the present unapt, system of judicial procedure, or say adjective law, in so far as necessary to that same end.

Of the separation thus made, paramount, with a view to practice, is, in my view of the matter at least, the importance. Probability of adoption and dispatch in execution join in the requisition, that, of so vast a whole, the number of separate parts be maximized. 1. Probability of adoption: because, let the whole plan contain, say two parts, both of them beneficial to the universal interest, but opposed respectively by two distinct particular and thence sinister interests,—one of these interests—not by itself, but with the addition of the other, being strong enough to throw the plan out,—one of them may, notwithstanding the opposition, be carried into effect: whereas, if the separation had not been made, both sinister interests would have stood opposed to it, and there would have been an end to it. Thus stands the matter, in the case of two, and no more than two, mutually unconnected sinister interests; but, the greater the number of them, the smaller will, by the supposition, be the number of the individuals united in opposition by each; and the greater, accordingly, the number of universally beneficial arrangements possessing a chance of being carried into effect. For want of such separation,—many are the salutary arrangements which, if separately proposed, would have found no opponent, but which, by being conjointly proposed, have been lost.

Then as to dispatch: if appositely made, the further the separation is carried, the greater the number of appropriately apt hands, or sets of hands, among which it may be distributed.

Then again as to appropriate aptitude: the further the separation is carried, the greater the chance of finding a hand, or set of hands, in a superior degree apt, each of them for one part, though they would not respectively have been equally so for any other.

Now for the application. I. Improvement the first. Substitution of apt to unapt formulæ. To this I allot the first rank. Why? Because least unlikely to be adopted, and most speedily capable of being effected.

Take any one of them, for example. In so far as, for its being employed and carried into effect, it requires not any alteration in the existing tenor of the statute law, or in the course of judicial practice,—it is capable of being carried into practice by the philanthropist himself, by whose ingenuity it has been devised: and, the greater the number of the improvements thus happily circumstanced, the more extensive will be the number of them effected by this most simple of all means.

Unhappily, by this alone, without assistance from statute law, not very extensive, it is feared, can be the effect produced. At any rate, for each distinguishable improvement, the less the assistance needed from that so difficulty-moved machinery, the better the chance.

Of the load of evil in all shapes with which the instruments in question are oppressed,—lengthiness to wit, thence unintelligibility, expensiveness, and dilatoriness—of all this evil the main efficient causes are shown to be composed of the work given to needless and useless trustees, in whom no confidence is reposed, and the addition of the blind agency of judiciary functionaries to the mental labour of professional draughtsmen, in the fabrication of the mendacious and pick-pocket instruments rendered necessary, under the name of fines and recoveries. True it is—this mass of abuse could not be cleared away by any other hand than that of parliament. But, by that of any professional draughtsman, not inconsiderable are the improvements that may be introduced: the endless sentences at present in use may be broken down, and reduced to the scantling of those employed, on the like occasions in every other country, and on all other occasions in all countries:—for the purpose of enabling the most unpractised eye to see its way clearly over the present labyrinth, and take repose wherever it found need,—the several topics, distinguishable in those huge masses of matter, which in the present practice are compressed together into the compass of one sentence, may be presented to view by their already universally known denominations: the matter, belonging to each such topic, may be formed into a separate sentence; and to each such sentence, to save the need of repeating it in terminis, or by a little less lengthy general description, a numerical appellative may be allotted. Of the general indication thus given, exemplification, and thence (it is hoped) elucidation, will be seen in the course of the ensuing pages.

As to the clearing the system of the other more highly morbid symptoms,—I am but too sensible how far, even with these additions, his plan of operation would fall short of meeting the disorder with anything like an all-sufficient remedy. Still, however, I see in it the least unpromising of all his generous enterprises. In respect of the force of the sinister interests it would have to encounter, it stands less unfavourably circumstanced than any other. By rendering conveyances, and the contracts embodied in them, somewhat less unintelligible to parties and other interessees,—it would lessen the mass of suffering in the shape of disputes and disappointments, and in so far lessen the abundance of the lawyer’s harvest: it would reduce, in some degree, the profit of the conveyancers’ company,—and of the firm of Eldon and Co. in Chancery and the House of Lords: but it would not, as any system of procedure capable of fulfilling its professed end would, go to the blowing up the manufactory of factitious litigation at one explosion,—and, at the first proposal of it, call up, in defence of Matchless Constitution, that judiciary system by which, to ninety-nine hundredths of the people, access is denied to so much as a chance for justice.

II. Improvement the second. Giving efficacy and extension to Registration. For this purpose I shall have to treat our artist with a sight of an instrument (a fruit of female ingenuity) suited to this one of his beneficent purposes, in a degree beyond what he can have had any conception of.

III. Improvement the third. Abolition of the anomalous courses of Descent. Absolutely speaking, yes: but comparatively speaking, no great good seems here to be expected: on the other hand, no great resistance to be apprehended.

True it is, that this improvement, the subject-matter of it being an insulated one, is in its nature capable of being carried into effect by itself. But, setting aside the supposition of an all-comprehensive code,—or at any rate an all-comprehensive property code,—the benefit produced by it would be comparatively inconsiderable; its principle, if not only one, being that which it would have in the character of an instrument of simplification.

IV. Improvement the fourth. Reduction of Copyholds to the state of Freeholds. Highly beneficial this: but at the same time unavoidably operose and tedious. The sooner indeed it were begun, the better; but, in no other shape need, or should, the commencement of the course of improvement wait either for the consummation or the commencement of it. Pride would set in array against it the aristocracy of the country, in their character of lords of manors: pecuniary interest, the lawyer-class in the character of stewards: not but that, in the long-run, pecuniary compensation ab intrà, with or without a little of ditto ab extrà,—at the expense of the whole community, to whom the whole rule of action would thereby be rendered so much the more accessible,—might peradventure gain the votes of the one, and quiet the alarms and clamours of the other.

V. Improvement the fifth. Partition of Common Lands. To a certain extent, this improvement is comprised in that which consists in the conversion of copyholds into freeholds: to a certain other extent, that is to say, in so far as the land is already in a state of freehold—or, being copyhold, can be divided into separate parcels, leaving the manorial rights in other respects untouched,—it will require the arrangements, for the effectuation of which the general inclosure act was intended, and the several particular inclosure acts have been, and continue to be intended. As to this matter, true it is, that the greater the degree in which the provisions of the particular acts can be generalized, and those of the general act improved upon, of course so much the better: and propositions for this purpose may of course be expected from the ingenuity, experience, and public spirit of Mr. Humphreys. But, in addition to those efficient causes, others of a peculiar nature, and not quite so prompt in growth, are required; that is to say, capital in proportionate quantity—capital in the appropriate hands—and a state of things such as will admit of the giving to it the direction in question to advantage. Now, as to capital, it cannot be made to accumulate in, or find its way into, these same hands, with quite so much celerity as may be given to the operation of drawing up an act of parliament: and a state of things which affords probability to the opening of the trade in corn to foreign cultivators is but little favourable to increase in the home-production of it. Not that, by these circumstances, any objection is opposed to that part of our learned reformist’s plan which consists in the procurement of the appropriate mass of information subservient to these same purposes. But of that in its place.

VI. VII. VIII. Improvement sixth, seventh, and eighth—Codification. Substitution of really existing law to fictitious: Substitution of an apt to an unapt judiciary establishment and system of procedure: as to these three parts in conjunction, there will be more or less to say before this article is at a close.

Now for a trespass on his patience. The time is come, when the scalpel must be set to work: state of it much rougher than the anatomist could have wished: but neither time nor space admit of that smoothness which would otherwise have been endeavoured to be given to it. More than fifty years ago, I took it up for the first time, with Blackstone lying on the table. The subject being so different, it is with affections correspondently different, and proportionable reluctance, that I take it in hand now. In Blackstone, every abuse has its varnish or its apology: in Humphreys, none. Should the liberties now taken have any such effect as that of calling forth like for like, my gratitude will not be less sincere than my admiration is now.

Observations applying to all three formulæ viewed together, are the following:—

I.Emendandum the first. Subject-matter, length of each one of the three pattern instruments, and symmetry as between the three: Description of the subject-matter of disposition insufficient, and thence, at the same time, by the whole amount redundant and useless. Of the subject-matter of a sale, the number of diversifications being, practically speaking, infinite—no one can, with propriety and safety, be taken for, and thence copied as, the representative of any other: much less of all others. In each instance, what should be given is—in the body of the instrument, a generic designation, as short as possible so as to answer the purpose: in the schedule (a sort of appendage referred to, but not exhibited in the author’s draught,) a description, the particulars of which must, in the nature of the case, be all of them individual. Of a building, for example, the generic description will, of course, be of one sort; of a piece of land, of an altogether different sort. As to the individual description—for the purpose here in question, in addition to other purposes, all habitations should be numbered. For the process of enumeration, an all-comprehensive plan may be seen in my parliamentary reform bill. Of a piece of land, on which there is no building, the description of the site will be given, by giving the name of the nearest road, with the several names of the several fields of which it is composed. In respect of the piece of land, there can be no difficulty: since, in fact and of necessity, in whichever way held, whether in commonalty or in severalty, every field has its name. Of the compound subject-matters, composed of buildings with land annexed, the mode of description is rendered familiar to everybody by those printed papers of particulars which are employed on the occasion of sales, whether made by auction or by hand.

Behold here, then, already drawn, though by an intrusive hand, the proper contents of the schedule: say, rather, the only proper. For, what other description of the subject-matter can be so proper for a deed of sale, as the very one to which, by the agreement to purchase, the purchaser had given his assent?

But, the knot of lawyers must be paid—paid, for doing, in not improbably a bad manner, what has been already done in the best. If, for appropriate accuracy, the scientific eye affords a promise of being of use (and I do not say but that in some instances so it may be,) the proper time for its operation is antecedent, not subsequent, to the adjustment of the subject-matter of the conveyance—the paper of particulars.

If this be so, useless then is every syllable occupied in individualizing the subject-matter in the body of the deed.

Behold now the quantity of surplusage thus employed; employed in giving to conception difficulty, and to expense increase. In the deed of sale, lines 16, whereof surplusage in this form, 5: in the mortgage-deed, lines 19, whereof surplusage in this form, 11: in the marriage-settlement deed, lines 96, surplusage in this form, 11: lines in all three together, 131: whereof surplusage in this, besides other forms, 27.*

Now as to length of sentences, separately considered. The more lengthy the sentence, the greater the fatigue of him whose misfortune it is to be subjected, on one account or other, to the obligation of reading it and lodging the contents in his mind. When the fatigue rises to a certain pitch,—such is the reader’s anxiety to reach the end of his labour,—that, for want of a resting place, he slides over the topics, without dwelling upon any of them the length of time necessary to the impregnating his mind with an adequate conception of it: on the other hand, let it be broken down into its several distinguishable topics,—so many topics, so many sentences; so many sentences, so many resting-places: and whatsoever topic requires particular consideration, will be considered at full leisure: on time wasted in disentangling it from the rest.

What is more, no danger of the draughtsman’s own mind losing itself in the mizmaze. This apprehension—is it a fanciful one? In proof of its well-groundedness, I call two witnesses: one of them, our learned reformist himself, the vast reduction, made by him in the extent of the labyrinth, notwithstanding; the other, no less a personage than a learned lord, the Lord Advocate of Scotland.

1. Enter, first, our learned author.—Evidence of bewilderedness, an offence against the laws of Priscian. Locus delicti, Family Settlement Deed:—Corpus delicti (as the Romanists say,) the words “convey, charge, and settle.” The loves of the parts of speech are no secret to any boy, who, in any one of the royal schools, has been initiated in the gymnastic exercise, of which a poetical grammar is the instrument. Here, so it is, that, to enable them to beget a meaning, the three amorous verbs require, each of them in the shape of a preposition, a different mate: convey, to; charge, with; settle, on. Now, then, as to the fate of these same lovers. After a long and adventureful period of unsatisfied desire, burning, in one instance, through a course of not fewer than 15 out of the 96 lines, convey is at last made happy in the embraces of his dear to; charge, in the arms of with. Not so with the luckless settle. In vain has the wood been hunted over for a mate for him; no such comfort for him is to be found, and he dies childless.

Not that Miss Campbell, for whom the benefit, attached to the burthen conveyed by the verb charge, is intended,—is, at the end of the story, disappointed of it; for, in a recess of the wood (candour requires the confession) the preposition to steps in at last, steps in a second time to her assistance; and her two hundred a-year pin-money, and five hundred a-year jointure, form the result.

2. Enter now Lord Advocate.—If a warrant,—from practice, power, and dignity, in high situations,—can afford consolation under the imputation of a grammatical peccadillo, the learned delinquent needs not be inconsolable.

Opening the House of Commons folio, entituled “Return, Parochial Education, Scotland, Order for Printing, 27th February and 21st May, 1826,” you will find it written in page 3, “Letter from the Lord Advocate of Scotland to Henry Hobhouse, Esq.” Follows here what is relevant to the present purpose; what is not relevant being eliminated.

“I had the honour to receive your letter, stating, that the king, having been pleased to comply with an humble address for” (the letter-press is thus italicized) “an account showing,” (then follows the matter of a folio page) “and desiring” (mark here the king, instead of commanding—Oh! treason! desiring—deprived of all command, and reduced to desire!) “desiring that I would take the necessary steps ‘for procuring, &c. and transmit, &c., that it might, &c. previous to being laid before the House of Commons.’ ” Well—the king having been pleased, what then? Nothing. For at the word Commons ends the paragraph, closed by a full-stop. Then comes the next, beginning with “I beg leave to state that, in obedience to the above order, it had occurred to me,” and so forth.

Now, as to the effect produced on the faculties of the pre-eminently learned composer, by the folio page—the unbegun and unended sentence which, lest the like effect should be produced on the mind of the reader, is here omitted.—Such is its narcotic quality, that while dragging on with it, he falls asleep, and in the course of his sleep dreams of a certain “order,” to which he is rendering obedience. Rubbing his eyes,—“the above order,” cries he.—Order? What order? Look the whole page through, no such thing as an order will you find.

II.Emendandum the second: in the three patterns taken together, another feature of redundance: and the redundance pregnant with error on the part of learners. Of the particulars in question, the tenor different in each species of deed: yet, whatever is capable of being taken for the subject-matter of a marriage settlement, is alike capable of being taken for the subject-matter of a sale, or a mortgage. Evil effects three: 1. Error liable to be produced in the minds of learners, in supposing the general necessity of the difference exhibited in the individual case; 2. and 3. Perplexity, and waste of labour, in examining the three, to ascertain whether such necessity has place. Sharers in these dangers, non-lawyers all: law-students as many, and tyro-lawyers not a few.

Note that, on the author’s own plan,—between the two species of dispositions, there are but two points of difference: one is—that, to which expression is given, by the substitution of the word charge in the deed of mortgage to the word sell in the deed of sale: the other regards the mode and result of the re-payment to be made of the money lent. Had the exhibition been thus confined to the points of difference, would not the aid given to conception have been rather more effectual? Of needless diversity, another bad effect is—the distracting the attention from the needful. “Eadem natura, eadem nomenclatura.” (Same the ideas, same the words should be.) In contemplation of the above inconvenveniences, this rule has been ventured to be delivered elsewhere. If it be worth remembering, the jingle in the Latin, the metre in the English, may have their use. In composition for ordinary purposes, the opposite propensity is in these days prevalent: when the import meant to be conveyed is the same, to find for each occasion a different expression, is the task the writer sets himself. Harmless, when clear and muddy, right and wrong, are matters of indifference: Not altogether so in legal instruments, on which every thing that is dear to man depends.

III.Emendandum the third. Sentences more lengthy than necessary. Lengthiness of the whole of a discourse is one thing: lengthiness of these its component parts, another. Of the lengthiness of the whole, consequences such as have just been seen, are the result. Lengthiness of the parts separately considered is the imperfection now more particularly meant to be brought to view. By the manner of printing, it looks as if the reduction of the apparent, superadded to that of the real, length of the whole, had been among the objects of our learned reformist’s ambition.

As to paragraphs, in no one of the three instruments does the letter-press exhibit the appearance of more than one. True, as to sentences, in the deed of sale, you might, if hard pushed, make any number, from one to five, according as you pointed the paragraph: though by the punctuation one only is there exhibited. But, in the mortgage deed, which in the length of the whole is much the same as that of the other, you cannot make more than one.

As to the marriage-settlement deed, not a single resting place was I able to find, till I came to the word Allen in the second page, line 24:* quantity of matter travelled through, these 24 lines added to the 26 lines in page the first:—total quantity, fifty lines:—more than half of the whole, with its three full pages, and its 96 lines. Here at length it is—that, in breach, as it should seem, of his original plan, as indicated by the letter-press, our learned draughtsman,—so completely had he run himself out of breath,—has, in compassion for self and readers, though it should seem not without reluctance, put down a full stop.

In page 3, line 14, having a proviso to put in, he of necessity begins a fresh sentence: but, as if to make us believe that no addition is thereby made to the number of the sentences, he has done by us (pardon the expression) rather unfairly: putting, instead of a period, no more than a comma, at the close of it. So again, when he comes to line 25 of this same third page, he plays us a similar trick: and, as if the better to disguise it,—at the commencement of this last proviso, he omits the distinctive type employed for the assistance of the eye at the commencement of the first.

Thus it is that, after so much as has been done by our learned reformist in the way of self-purification—purification of his style from the malady of lengthiness, the leprosy of lawyer-craft, still that which has been seen has as yet cleaved to it: to complete the purification, a little sprinkling, such as is here offered, of the cleansing water, remains wanting to it.

IV.Emendandum the fourth. Indication of Topics, none. Horrific, of course, to learned eyes, will be so flagrant an innovation, as the one, the absence of which is thus audaciously made a matter of charge. Lay-gents, however—and for them alone am I of counsel—Lay-gents will, I flatter myself, see a convenience in it. Besides the clearness and promptitude it gives to conception, it performs the function of a Macadamizing hammer, in breaking down the aggregate mass; so many topics, so many denominations; so many denominations, so many sentences.

So much as to lengthiness on the part of the discourse. Now as to the consequences of it on the part of the readers. For my own part, (ex-learned as I am, and therefore, if ever, no longer learned—in the law in general, and in conveyancing law in particular, never learned at all, till I got this smattering at the feet of my Gamaliel;)—for my own part, I confess my perplexity to have been extreme; as (I fear) will, by blunders, in I know not what number, be but too amply testified. Nor can I (for I am a little out of humour, and revenge is sweet;) nor can I (I say) altogether suppress my surprise, that in this perplexity I have had a sharer in my learned master himself:—witness, inter alia, the same exception thrice imbedded, twice repeated, at the expense of four lines out of the 96,† in this one principal paragraph.

Apropos of these same exception clauses, I may, perhaps, take the liberty of submitting to his consideration the course which anybody may take for evolving, and which I always take for avoiding, such involvements; but this, if anywhere, must be in another place. At any rate, examples in abundance may be seen in “Official Aptitude Maximized,” &c. just issuing from the press.

At the present writing, I must not neglect my clients: least of all my fair one, the heroine of the piece, for whose interest,—how ill-soever our learned reformist may think of me for the preference,—I cannot help feeling rather more solicitude than for his:—she having so much more at stake; and, in this her approaching condition, having so many ladies fair to share with her in the exigencies belonging to it. No: I will not think so meanly of her understanding, as not to suppose that,—how happy soever in her Mrs. Allen state,—it might not, on some occasion or other, occur to her, in her anxiety for the dear little ones, to cast an eye over this her magna charta, and, in its pages, as in a horoscope, seek to read their fate. This being supposed,—it cannot, I think, but be more or less matter of accommodation to her, to find in those same pages a possibility of understanding it. This accommodation, in so far as time and space would allow, it has, in the way that has been seen—and will, in another way, be more particularly seen,—been my humble endeavour to supply her with.

To render perceptible to sense the degree of improvement introduced by him in respect of lengthiness, the ingenuity of my learned master has, with happy effect, exhibited, in parallel pages, his proposed instruments, framed upon his reduced scale,—placing them by the side of those which he found in use. By the long succession of vacancies, the attention of the reader is in every two pages drawn anew to the difference; vacancies, in the deed of sale, 20; in the mortgage deed, 10; in the marriage settlement, 23. In the mind of his adventurous pupil, ambition, not altogether unmixed with a dash of envy and jealousy, has inspired a similar course; the dwarf upon the giant’s shoulders is an emblem which the temerity will be apt to present to recollection in the minds of readers. How small the utmost ulterior reduction I have been able to effect, will be obvious to every eye.

By the particular type employed in the re-print here given of author’s draught, indication is given of most of the words regarded as capable of being eliminated, without prejudice either to intelligibility or to certainty, supposing the form exhibited in the reviewer’s draught substituted. In the reviewer’s draught a further liberty is taken, by the insertion of a few additional topics, which, for the reasons given in the notes, afforded a prospect of being of use. By a correspondent sign these also are rendered, in like manner, more readily distinguishable.

I.

Deed of Sale.

Author’s Draught.(No Topics given.)

“Proposed Form of a Conveyance to a Purchaser*

“This deed madeathe 25th day of March 1926, Between Andrew Allen, ofNA of the one part,b and Benedict Butler, of NA of the other part, Witnesseth, that, in consideration of £1,000 sterlingc by the said Benedict Butler, now paid to the said Andrew Allen, for the absolute purchased of the property hereinafter mentioned. The said Andrew Allen Doth selle and conven unto the said Benedict Butler, All thatf message with the out-buildings, garden, and other appurtenancesg thereto belonging, And all those several parcels of arable meadow and pasture land therewith held, which premises contain in the whole five hundred acres, and are situate in the parish of Weston, in the county of Salop, and are now occupied by William Woodrow, And the same do together form a Farm usually called the Hope Farm, All which messuages and lands are particularly described in the Schedule heretoh annext by the names, quantities, qualities situations and other circumstances necessary for the distinction thereof.”

II.

Deed of Mortgage.1

Author’s Draught.(No Topics given.)

“Proposed Charge of a principal Sum with Interest.

“This deed made the 1st day of April 1927, Between Andrew Allen ofNA of the one, and Benedict Butler, ofNA of the other part, witnesseth, that, in consideration of five hundred pounds sterling by the said B. Butler to the said A. Allen, now lent and paid, the said A. Allen doth charge all that Messuage or dwelling-house, with the outhouses and gardens thereto belonging; also the three following parcels of land thereto adjoining and therewith occupied, namely, Blackacre, being meadow, containing ten acres; Greenacre, being pasture, containing four acres two roods; and Whitacre, being arable, containing eight acres; All which said premises are situate in the parish of Stoke, in the county of Hereford, and are now in the occupation of Giles Hall, with the appurtenances thereto belonging, with the payment to the said B. Butler, of the sum of five hundred pounds, with interest at four per cent. per annum, as follows, viz. half a year’s interest of the same sum to be paid on the 1st day of October, now next ensuing, and the said principal sum of five hundred pounds and another half year’s interest,2 for the same to be paid on the 1st day of April, which will be in the year 1928.”

III.

Marriage Settlement Deed.

Author’s Draught.(No Topics given.)

“A Marriage Settlement of Real Estate, under the Proposed Code.1

“This Deed made the First day of April 1926, Between Alfred Allen ofNA of the one part, and Clara Campbell ofNA of the other part, Witnesseth that in consideration of a Marriage agreed upon and about to be solemnized between the said A. Allen, and C. Campbell, He the said A. Allen, doth convey, charge, and settle, in the event of such marriage taking effect, and from and after the same, all and singular the Messuages, Cottages, Farms, and Lands, situate in the parish of Waring, in the county of Lincoln, comprised in the Schedule, to these presents, and therein particularly set forth by the names, quantities, qualities, situations, occupiers, and other circumstances necessary for the distinction thereof respectively, and all other, if any, the Messuages and Lands of or belonging to him the said A. Allen in the parish of Waring aforesaid, with the appurtenances thereto respectively belonging, and also all the impropriate tithes or tenths of corn, grain, and hay, and other great tithes or tenths whatsoever, and all moduses and other compositions for tithes or tenths yearly arising and payable from or in respect of all and singular the aforesaid lands and premises; to the person and persons respectively. With the several yearly and principal sums, and for the purposes following, viz. the said premises to stand and he charged with the clear yearly sum of two hundred pounds sterling to be paid to the said Clara Campbell, for her exclusive and inalienable enjoyment during the said intended intermarriage, and subject thereto, the premises to go to the said A. Allen, during his life, without impeachment of waste, and after his death, the said premises to stand charged with the clear yearly sum of five hundred pounds sterling, to be paid to the said Clara Campbell during her life in lieu of her legal interest in any lands to which the said A. Allen shall die entitled, and subject thereto, the said premises to stand and be charged with the sum of five thousand pounds as a provision for such child and children of the said intended marriage (except an eldest or only son, for the time being, entitled either absolutely or presumptively under the limitations next ensuing) and to vest and become payable at and in such time, or times and manner as hereinafter mentioned; and subject as aforesaid the said premises to go To such son of the said A. Allen, by the said C. Campbell, as shall first or alone attain the age of twenty-one years. or dying under that age shall leave issue of his body living or conceired at his death, and if there shall be no such son, then to all and every the daughter or daughters of the said A. Allen, by the said C. Campbell, who shall attain the age of twenty-one years, or dying under that age shall leave issue of her or their body or respective bodies, living at her or their death or respective deaths, in equal shares if more than one, and if there be but one such daughter, then the whole of the premises to that daughter. And if there shall be no child of the said intended marriage, who shall become absolutely entitled to the premises under the limitations aforesaid, then the said premises to go and revert to the said A. Allen. And as to the said sum of five thousand pounds hereinbefore charged for the benefit of such child or children of the said intended marriage (not being an eldest or only son for the time being entitled either absolutely or presumptively as aforesaid) as hereinafter mentioned. It is hereby declared that the same sum shall vest in and become payable to such child or children (except as aforesaid2 ,) or else in any one or more exclusively of the other or others of them at such age or time or respective ages or times, in such manner and with such dispositions over, to, or for the benefit of the other or others of the same children or any of them, as the said A. Allen shall at any time or times after the said intended marriage direct or appoint, [         ] And for want of such direction or appointment, or so far as the same, if incomplete, may not extend, the said charge, or the unappointed part thereof, shall vest in and go to all and every the children and child of the said intended marriage (other than an eldest or only son for the time being entitled as aforesaid) who shall attain the age of twenty-one years, or in the instance of a daughter or daughters shall marry under it, to be equally divided between such children if more than one, and if there shall be but one such child, then the whole of the said unappointed charge to vest in and go to such one child, and the same charge to be paid to such children or child respectively, at the same ages, or times, or age or time, if the same shall happen after the death of the said A. Allen. But if the same shall happen in his lifetime, then immediately after his death, provided always that after the death of the said A. Allen, and in case he shall have made no direction to the contrary, it shall be lawful for the guardian or guardians of any infant child or children of the said intended marriage presumptively entitled to a portion or portions under the said charge, to levy and raise any part or parts not exceeding in the whole for any such child, a moiety of such his, her, or their then eventful portion or portions, although the same shall not then have become vested, and to apply the money so to be raised for the preferment, advancement, or benefit of such child or children in such manner as such guardian or guardians shall in their or his discretion think fit, provided also that after the death of the said A. Allen, and in case he shall have made no direction to the contrary, it shall be lawful for any such guardian or guardians as aforesaid, to levy and raise3and apply for the maintenance and education of such child or children for the time being of the said intended marriage, as shall be presumptively entitled to a portion or portions under the said charge, in the mean time and until such his, her, or their eventual portion or portions shall become vested, such yearly sum or sums of money not exceeding what the interest of the same portion or portions would amount to at the rate of four pounds per cent. per annum were he, she, or they then absolutely entitled thereto.”

I.

Deed of Sale. AllentoButler,anno 1925.

Reviewer’s Draught,*(with Topics.)

• I. Parties Described.
• No. 1. Seller’s name.aAndrew Allen.
• 2. Seller’s conditions.bEsquire.
• 3. Seller’s habitation.c County, Shropshire; Parish, Weston; Spot, Allen Hall.
• 4. Purchaser’s name. Benedict Butler.
• 5. Purchaser’s condition. Butcher.
• 6. Purchaser’s habitation. County, Shropshire; Parish, Weston; Spot, Fore [Editor: illegible word]

• II. Subject-Matter Described.
• 7. Subject-matter of the sale—its species.dA Farm.
• 8. Subject-matter of the sale—its individual description. See Paper of Particulars hereto annext, marked A, and signed by the parties.

• III. Equivalent given for the Subject-Matter.
• 9. Purchase money.eOne thousand pounds

• IV. Time, Place, and Tokens of Agreement
• 10. Seller’s name in his hand-writing,f in token of agreement. Andrew Allen.
• 11. Dayg on which seller’s name was written. April first 1925.
• 12. Placeh in which seller’s name was written. Allen Hall, near Weston, Shropshire.
• 13. Purchaser’s name in his hand-writing, in token of agreement.iBenedict Butler.
• 14. Day on which purchaser’s name was written. April first 1925.
• 15. Place in which purchaser’s name was written. Weston, Shropshire.

II.

Deed of Mortgage.

AllentoButler,anno 1927.

Reviewer’s Draught(with Topics.)

• I.
• Parties Described.
• N 1. Pledger’s name. Andrew Allen.
• 2. Pledger’s condition. Esquire.
• 3. Pledger’s habitation. County, Shropshire; Parish, Weston; Spot, Allen Hall.
• 4. Lender’s name. Benedict Butler.
• 5. Lender’s condition. Butcher.
• 6. Lender’s habitation. County, Shropshire; Parish. Weston.

• II.
• Subject-matter Described.
• 7. Subject-matter of pledge—its species. A Farm.
• 8. Subject-matter of pledge—its individual description. See Paper of Particulars hereto annext, marked A, and signed by the parties.

• III.
• Sum Lent.
• 9. Sum of money lent. Five hundred pounds.
• 10. Species of money in which paid. Promissory notes of the Bank of Scotland.

• IV.
• Rate of Interest.
• No. 11. Rate of interest. Four pounds per year.

• V.
• Times for Payment.
• 12. Day, for re-payment of principal, unless respited, April first 1929.
• 13. Days, for half-yearly payments of interest. October first 1928; April first, 1929: so on, till repayment of principal.

• VI.
• Time, Place, and Tokens of Agreement.
• 14. Pledger’s name in his hand-writing, in token of agreement, and receipt of the money. Andrew Allen.
• 15. Day, on which pledger’s name was written. April first 1927.
• 16. Place, in which pledger’s name was written. Pledger’s House, Allen Hall, Weston, aforesaid.
• 17. Lender’s name in his hand-writing, in token of agreement. Benedict Butler.
• 18. Day, on which lender’s name was written. April first 1927.
• 19. Place, in which lender’s name was written. Pledger’s House, Allen Hall, Weston, aforesaid.

III.

Marriage Settlement Deed, AllenwithCampbell,anno 1929.

Reviewer’s Draft(with Topics.)

• I.
• Parties Described.
• No. 1. Intended husband’s name. Andrew Allen.
• 2. Intended husband’s condition. Esquire.
• 3. Intended husband’s habitation. County, Shropshire; Parish, Weston; Spot, Allen Hall.
• 4. Intended wife’s name. Clara Campbell.
• 5. Intended wife’s condition. Spinster.
• 6. Intended wife’s habitation. County, Shropshire, Parish, Weston; Spot, Cross Street.

• II.
• Subject-matter Described.
• 7. Subject-matter of Settlement—its species. Farms and Tithes.
• 8. Subject-matter of Settlement—its individual description. See Paper of Particulars hereto annexed, marked A, and signed by the parties.

• III.
• Provision for intended Wife’s Interest during the Marriage.
• 9. During the Marriage, pin-money.1Two Hundred Pounds per year.
• 10. This provision is a rent charge, charged2 upon the estate.
• 11. This rent charge is unalienable.3

• IV.
• Provision for intended Husband during his Life.
• 12. Subject to this charge, the estate remains to Andrew Allen during his life.
• 13. He is not impeachable for waste.4

• V.
• Provision for intended Wife in case of Widowhood.
• 14. On the death of intended husband, intended wife is to receive during life a jointure of Five Hundred Pounds per year.
• 15. This jointure is unalienable.
• 16. It is to be paid clear of all charges.
• 17. In consideration of it, she hereby gives up whatever provision she might otherwise have under the Code.5

• VI.
• Promsion as to Descendants who, subject to this jointure, are to become Heirs to the Estate: say the Estate-takers.
• Cases in which the Estate descends undivided.
• No. 18. Case 1. At the father’s death, a son alive: no nephew or niece of his, by any elder brother of his, alive: sisters or younger brothers of his alive or not in any number. To this son the estate passes undivided.
• 19. Case 2. At the father’s death, a daughter alive: no brother or sister of her’s alive, nor any nephew or niece of her’s, by any brother or sister of her’s. To this daughter the estate passes undivided.
• 20. Case 3. A son alive, daughters or younger sons alive or not: nephews or nieces of the son by an elder brother of his, alive in any number. To the eldest of these nephews,—or, if there be but one, to the only nephew; or, if no nephew, to the niece, if but one, the estate passes undivided.
• Cases in which the Estate descends divided.
• 21. Case 4. No son alive: nor son, or daughter, by any son. Daughters, in any number more than one, alive. To these daughters tho estate passes in equal shares.
• 22. Case 5. No son alive: a daughter or daughters alive: by a deceased sister of theirs, one niece of theirs alive. To the daughter or these daughters, with their niece, the estate passes in equal shares.
• 23. Case 6. No son alive: a daughter or daughters alive: by a deceased sister of theirs, nieces two or more alive. Among the daughters and their nieces, the estate passes divided. But the shares of the daughters are, as above, equal as between each other: so are those of the nieces. But the nieces, in whatever number by one sister, take among them no other share than that which would have been their sister’s had she been alive: so, if daughters more than one are all deceased, each leaving a daughter or daughters.
• 24. Case 7. &c. Upon the same plan, the estate will be divided through any number of generations: the share of each mother passing entire to her daughter, if but one; in equal shares among her daughters, if more than one: whatever be the number of her daughters, to her son, if but one; if sons, more than one, to the eldest.

• VII.
• Money Provision, for Children not taking part in the Estate: say the Money-takers. Apportioner, the father. In this provision, no child, having part in the Estate, has any part. Having the whole includes the having a part.
• 25. Sum total at his disposal, Five Thousand Pounds, charged on the estate, as per No. 10.
• 26. Share of each, whatsoever he appoints: the whole, any part, or no part.*
• 27. By deed, he may bind himself to any such child or children, or to any person on behalf of any such child or children, to charge the estate with any sum not exceeding the total charge, as per No. 25.
• 28. So likewise by last will, in so far as is consistent with what he has done by deed.
• 29. No money, advanced, in his lifetime, to, or for the benefit of, any such child, whether in the way of income, or in the way of capital,—will, unless by deed expressly so declared to be, be understood to be designed to be deducted out of the apportionment made as per Nos. 26, 27, 28.
• 30. No charge, endeavoured to be made by him on the estate, will have effect till after this settlement charge, as per No. 25, has been carried into effect.
• 31. To the receipt of any share of the portion-money, he may annex all such conditions not prohibited by law, as he thinks fit.
• 32.Maintenance. For this purpose, upon the principal of any such child’s portion he may pay, or direct to be paid,—to such child, or to any person on account of, such child,—interest at any rate mentioned by him, for any length of time up to full age or marriage; at which time the principal, or what remains of it, will be to be paid.
• 33. For any payment, as per Nos. 26 or 32, he may assign any time he pleases.
• 34. Of the portion-money obtained under this settlement,—whatsoever part, if any remains undisposed of by the father, is to be divided among the children, and the descendants, if any, of the children, in equal portions, after the several manners mentioned in Nos. 21, 22, 23, 24.

• VIII.
• Subject to father’s direction, powers to Guardian, of children not having part in the estate.
• 35. Out of the principal, he may employ, for the benefit of any such child in the way of advancement, any sum not exceeding the half of his or her portion.
• 36. So yearly for maintenance (education included) any sum not exceeding interest at four per cent. upon the principal.
• 37. On the death of any such child before full age or marriage,—his or her portion, whatsoever part of it remains not disposed of, as per Nos. 35, 36, is to be paid to the surviving child, if one; to the surviving children, in equal portions, if more than one. Hence, before arrival at full age or marriage, the portion of any child may, by his or her own death, have been extinguished altogether, or by the death of others, augmented. But, in the allotments made of advancement-money, as per No. 35, neither of those contingencies is to be taken into account. The sum employable at all times for the benefit of each child, in both ways, is the whole, or the remainder, of the sum belonging to him or her on the day of the father’s decease.6
• 38. For the times of payment in the several cases, and the mode of giving execution and effect to the several provisions, see the Code.
• 39. If, at intended husband’s decease there be no child, or descendant of any child, alive,—the estate, subject to widow’s jointure, as per No. 14, is at his disposal, and failing such disposal, passes to his heirs.7
• 40. Intended husband’s name, in his handwriting, in token of agreement. Andrew Allen.
• 41. Day, on which intended husband’s name was written. May first, 1929.
• 42. Place, in which intended husband’s name was written. Weston, Shropshire.
• 43. Intended wife’s name, in her handwriting, in token of agreement. Clara Campbell.
• 44. Day, on which intended wife’s name was written. May first, 1929.
• 45. Place, in which intended wife’s name was written, Weston, Shropshire.8

[* ]These proportions are printed as in the first edition; in the present, the number of lines in each deed being respectively 24, 27, and 131, the number of surplus lines will be correspondingly increased.—Ed.

[* ]In line 67 of the Draught in this Edition.

[† ]Here 6 out of the 131.

[* ]The words regarded as superfluous are distinguished by the black letter; but in some instances simple elimination may not be sufficient: substitution may be necessary: as to these, see notes on Reviewer’s Draught. The words employable in a blank form are in Roman characters; those which must be different on each individual occasion, in italics. So likewise in the deed of mortgage. To the marriage settlement, for reasons mentioned in note (1) thereto, these differences in the type do not extend, except as to the black letter in a few parts.

[a ]This deed made.] Pregnant—always with ambiguity, frequently with falsehood, sometimes with deception and unexpected loss—loss to the amount of the whole value of the property, is this word made. Made? To which of a number of persons in quality of maker or makers, does this participle make implied reference? The draughtsman by whom preparation, or the parties by whom adoption and authentication are given to it? I say to which:—for, seldom does it happen that the two so different operations, are the work of the same day: not unfrequently days, weeks, or months—not to say years—must, in the nature of the case, intervene between the performance of the draughtsman’s part, and the performance or performances of the part or parts of the party or parties; in particular, on the purchaser’s side. On each side of the transaction, what may happen is—that parties in any number may be separated from each other by any interval in the field of space; and, in consequence, the acts by any interval in the field of time. Moreover, in the case of any one or more of them, payment may be divided amongst times in any number; it may be made, as the phrase is, by instalments.

Here, then, is a gordian knot, which, somewhere or other, and somehow or other, Judge and Co. must have cut by their instrument of all-work—falsehood. Of the statement here in question, the truth has, somewhere or other, been pronounced immaterial. But—in the nature of the case, far indeed is it from being so: it is of no small importance. While without prejudice to the currency of the instrument, a false place of signature or a false time, or both, may be inserted,—a forgerer is comparatively at his ease:—not so where place and time are, each of them, required to be individualized. In, for example, the house asserted in the instrument,—on the day asserted in the instrument,—was the party, in fact, actually present? In these questions may be seen an obvious subject-matter, for an inquiry,—the searchingness of which, a forgery will be in no common degree fortunate, if it abides.

[b ]Part.] In the correspondent place in the mortgage deed, this word is omitted, supposed by error of the press.

[c ]£1000 sterling.] Sums should be expressed rather in words than in figures. Example: draughts on bankers. Reason: in figures, danger of ambiguous delineation, and subsequent falsification: accordingly, in the author’s deed, words are employed. Sterling? In these days, is there any use in this word? Yes; to distinguish English, not only from Scottish pounds, but from the pounds of several other nations: in Ireland and the distant dependencies, to distinguish real money, from fictitious—called currency.

[d ]Absolute purchase.] Of this term,—to render it clear of ambiguity and obscurity,—in the eyes of parties, if lay-gents, not to speak of lawyers,—fixation and explanation,—authoritative, appropriate, and adequate—would be altogether needful. Nowhere at present is any such explanation to be found. No otherwise can it be brought into existence than by a code. Supposing it thus brought into existence, reference to the text of the code is among the references which would require to be made from, and inserted in, the draught. As for judge-made, alias common law,—it fixes nothing; it keeps everything afloat: it explains nothing; it keeps every thing involved in clouds: it is a tissue of self-contradictions: a sage of the law gives no clear view of anything: nemo dat quod non habet; at the head of them sits and rules a judge, who—(as everybody knows)—knows less than any of them how to do what he is employed to do—to decide,—and knows not how to do anything but the reverse of what he is employed to do—anything but how to raise and introduce, instead of dispelling and excluding, doubts.

[e ]Sell.] By this one word sell, reference is made to two distinct topics: 1. The quantity of interest disposed of; 2. The absence or presence of an equivalent: only in so far as regards the quantity of interest, does this topic coincide with that to which reference is made by the words purchase of the absolute property, as per note b:—benefit of transmission, to successors determined by the choice of parties, included.

As to what concerns equivalents,—the transfer may be, as here, with and for an equivalent, or without one: if with and for, the equivalent may be either, as here, of money (call it in this case pecuniary)—or of money’s worth, in any other shape (call it in this case, quasi-pecuniary): if without equivalent,—the transfer is gratuitous; the transaction may be termed a gift; the instrument a deed of gift.*Grantor is a term which—where the transfer is not gratuitous, but for money—our learned draughtsman, I observe, employs on several occasions. It has, however, the inconvenience of presenting to view the idea of gratuitousness. Disposer, a term having for its conjugates the verb to dispose, and the substantive disposition—a term in familiar use—would have the convenience of including the three transactions, sale, mortgage, and marriage-settlement. For a correlative to it, an obvious term is disposee: and this same termination ee is indeed used in the same sense in the word mortgagee, and in many other words. But, it has the disadvantage of presenting to view the subject-matter disposed of; in which case no person is, unless he has the misfortune of being a slave. Accordingly, if it depended on me to choose a word,—a word I would rather employ is receptor: receiver—the word already in use—having the disadvantage of presenting, exclusively, the idea of a person, whose interest in the subject-matter is only that of a trustee. In the case of an immoveable subject-matter of property, as here,—gratuitous transmission, as everybody sees, is not, by a great deal, so frequent as in the case of a moveable; obvious cause of the difference, the difference in respect of value. Nor yet (as everybody knows) is gift of an estate—absolutely without example. This, therefore, is a mode of transfer, or say transmission, for which also provision will require to be made. In the arrangements proper to be made in the code for the two cases,—one difference, there is, which is highly important, and not unobvious. In the case where an equivalent is received,—the eventual obligation designated by the word warranty, presents itself as being prescribed by established principles: not so, in the case where no equivalent is received. In both cases, this word warranty presents itself as an obligation, of which,—either in the draught or in the code, with reference to it from the draught,—express mention should be made: and of which it should accordingly be said, either that it is, or that it is not, intended to have place.

[f ]All that.] As to the insufficiency and consequent inutility and redundancy of the necessarily incomplete particularization, of which these words form the commencement,—see above, in the observations as to all those deeds considered together.

[g ]Appurtenances.] Appurtenances? No, not I: if I were Mr. Benedict Butler, no such things would I have. Needless, useless, and, unless inoperative, mischievous,—would be this word. Look at the books: the only definition of it you will find warranted is—anything, and everything which, in virtue of some other word in the deed, would pass without being mentioned in it: but if so, then to what use mention it? Not to Miss Campbell, not to Mr. Butler, no, not even to Squire Allen—would information in any shape be presented by it: nothing better than appalment and perplexity. Not that imagination could present them with anything like the uncertainty and consequent mischief it is pregnant with. Look for it in the books, though it were no further than Jacob’s dictionary, you will find that outhouses are appurtenances to messuages; messuages to messuages, not. Orchards and gardens are appurtenant to messuages; lands, not: whereby you will learn that orchards and gardens are not lands. See now one effect of it in these same formulæ. In this same deed of sale, mention is made of it; in the mortgage deed, in the family settlement, not. A tyro conveyancer—what might not his sagacity infer from this? that, in the case of a sale, appurtenances, whatever they were, would not pass without express mention made of them; in the two other cases, yes; a tolerably good sample this of the effects of surplusage. If, to any mind, this word presents any idea more definite than the above, it must be that, for giving expression to which, our author employs the Rome-bred law-word, servitude—mention of which may require to be made further on.

[h ]Annext.] This word is here inserted, as having (obviously by error of the press) been, or the equivalent of it, omitted out of the letter press.

[1 ]Mortgage.] Mortgage is the denomination, by which, for the present purpose, I designate this sort of deed: this being the most important and obvious species of the genus for the designation of which our learned author has employed the word charge. Preferable however to mortgage—preferable in every point of view, and to a most important effect—would be land-pledge. Mortgage is understood by nobody; land-pledge would be understood by everybody; by everybody, male and female, who has ever seen or heard what passes at a pawnbroker’s. So much for name.

Behold now how much may depend upon a right name: behold the instruction that may be afforded by it. Give validity and currency to either of these forms—the author’s or the reviewer’s,—and there will be no more need of equity suits, nor any more need of delay, where land is the pledge, than where a pair of ear-rings, worth the same money, or a table-spoon, is the pledge: and the present licensed depredation—in some circumstances, on the part of the lender, in others on the part of the borrower,—is at an end. What is it that should make the difference? Is not a sheet of paper as easily passed from hand to hand as a pair of ear-rings? As to difference, if any there be, it is all of it in favour of the immoveable pledge; for, the jewels may be run off with; the land can not. Secresy—in regard to rents—is that an object? for example, on the borrower’s account, lest the state of his finances should be made known. More effectually can that be provided for in the case of the land, than in the case of the diamonds: the receiver of the rents, whoever he is, being supposed an object of confidence on both sides, the transfer is made to him: made to him, in trust, in case of payment on the appointed day, to deliver the money, or the land to the one party; in case of non-payment, to the other. Here, too, as far as regards the principal, all danger vanishes: trustee can no more run away with the land, than borrower or lender could; and as to the interest, it is no more than what every man, who employs a steward, by so doing trusts him with.

Indulgence to debtors—is that an object? How much better could it not be afforded, how much likelier would it not be to be afforded—by a creditor who had no law-charges to apprehend, than by one who has law-charges to apprehend—especially such as those which hang over his head at present?

Behold now the extent of the benefit which this theory, simple as it is, may be made productive of, if carried into practice: benefit to landlords in general; benefit to tenants in general; benefit to everybody, but to those who are among everybody’s worst enemies, and who will be sufficiently known by that name. Where recovery of rents is the object, in so far as there is property enough of the tenant’s, or anybody else’s upon the premises,—landlords—nor yet altogether without good reason—are by themselves trusted with the power of being themselves judges in their own cause. Well then—where recovery of possession is the object—pledges on the spot being wanting or insufficient—with how much less danger might they not be trusted with the power of being, to the effect in question, judges in the cause of others—meaning of course by others, those with whom they have no connexion? On this plan, in case of appeal—and in that case only—might those judicatories have cognizance, which at present have it in the first instance. Of the essentially and incurably corrupt, and, in every respect, unapt judicatory in question, my opinion is the same as that of the Morning Chronicle: but, so long as the people continue oppressed with it, I see much less danger from this power in its hand, than from most of that which is at present exercised by it.

As to the species of conveyances to which this system would be applicable,—the same principles which would give simplicity to deeds of sale, mortgage and settlement, would give correspondent simplicity to leases.

Turn now to the gaming-table. On a visit to it,—why, in that case, should not a noble lord, or honourable gentleman, put into his pocket a few papers of sales, mortgages, or leases, as well as the correspondent number of rouleaus? This is not a mere jest: for, if ruined, why might he not be so,—for the benefit of a set of companions of his own choice, with whom he was living on convivial terms, and in regard to whom, in conjunction with the chance of being ruined by them, he possessed an equal chance of enriching himself by their ruin, and from whom he might receive more or less of indulgence, why not as well for their benefit alone, as partly for their benefit, partly for the benefit of a set of lawyers whom he knows nothing of,—from whom nothing is to be got,—and from whom, on his part, nothing but ruin, or a more or less near approach towards it, can be expected?

Lawyers, by whom, comparatively speaking, such facility has been left to transfer, in the case of moveables,—whence happens it that they have dealt on so opposite a footing by it in the case of immoveables? Answer, altogether simple. Society could not have held together, and the matter of legal plunderage would either never have come into existence, or, as fast as it had come, would have been swallowed up,—had they thus loaded it in the case of moveables; but, in the case of immoveables, the magnitude of the masses is such as renders it possible for them to bear the load. Sweet, accordingly, is the “savour of the realty,” to learned noses.

[2 ]Another half year’s interest.] But what, if that happens which most commonly does happen? What, if the loan is continued, as it sometimes is, for years by dozens, beyond the twelvemonth? For this case no provision is here made. [See notes on the Reviewer’s Draught.] In any case, on failure of payment, prompt is the remedy needed; and next to instantaneous is the remedy which, as above, the nature of the case affords; yes, and which would be afforded in fact, if those judicatories, which are law and equity courts in name, were not iniquity courts, if not in purpose, in effect.

[1 ]Proposed Code.] Matter, which, for reasons above mentioned, namely, in the observations on the three draughts taken together, is regarded as superfluous,—is, for distinction’s sake, here printed in black-letter. Owing, however, to the want of correspondency between the plan of the Author’s and that of the Reviewer’s draught,—a considerable quantity of matter, regarded as superfluous, is left undistinguished; as not being, without explanation, capable of being disentangled from needful matter. This, however, may, by any person to whomthe restriction presents itself as being worth the trouble, be seen by a comparison between the two draughts.

[2 ]Except as aforesaid.] Three times the same exception—each, all three times, imbedded in the same sentence, and a different set of words employed each time for the expression of it. In the Reviewer’s draught, this and every other instance of involvement is avoided. In his form of locution, an article, out of which an exception is taken, opens with the words, “Exceptions excepted;” and in the next article, next to the words “Exceptions are as follow,” or “Exceptions are the following,” come the exceptions one after another, each for distinction preceded by a numerical figure. See Official Aptitude Maximized: Expense Minimized. On this, as on every such occasion, never is Mrs. Allen (late Miss Campbell,) with her misfortune, in not having had the benefit of Mr. Peel’s lawyer-making dinners, out of his sight.

[3 ]Levy and raise.] Doubts and solutions, the same in this case as in that of Mortgage; which see. If in this case both these correlative expressions are necessary, not less so were they in that.

[* ]What is in Roman type, being of general application, may be in print; that which, being in each instance different, cannot be included in the letter-press, is shown by the italics. So in the mortgage deed and deed of settlement. The numbers, the addition of which is proposed by the reviewer are in smaller type.

[a ]Seller’s name.] Write all names at length: christian names if more than one, as well as surname or surnames. In the case of a non-christian, (Jew, or Mahometan, for example) the equivalent, if any, to the christian name, will be included.

If more than one join in the sale, their names will be written, beginning with that surname which, in the order of the alphabet, stands first.

[b ]Seller’s condition.] In case of dignity, insert the title; of titles more than one, the highest: in the case of a lord, if a peer, the peer’s name, with that of the peerage: in the case of a bishop, his name, with that of the bishoprick: in case of a professional man, his profession: in case of a commercial man, his business, as manufacturer (naming the subject-matter of manufacture,) merchant, shop-keeper, tailor, shoe-maker, carpenter, smith, &c.: in case of a man not following any profit-seeking occupation, say esquire or gentleman.

In the case of a female—if never married, say, in the old accustomed form, spinster: adding the dignity, if any, or the profit-seeking occupation, if any: single woman will not serve, as not including females under age, and as not distinguishing married females from widows. In case of a married woman—concurring, for example, with her husband in the sale,—mention her maiden name, then her husband’s, as directed in note a, and his condition as to occupation, as per note b.

[c ]Seller’s habitation.] If there be no fixed habitation, write the word none. If there be a habitation, express it as in letters brought from the General Post-office. If the habitation be not in a town, insert the name of the county and that of the parish: if in a town, insert, between the name of the county and the name of the parish, the name of the town. If there be fixed habitations in places more than one, insert them all. Add in every case either householder or inmate.

[d ]Subject-matter . . . . it’s species.] For instance, where integral, and uncompounded, say a piece of land, cultivated or not cultivated, or a dwelling-house, or another building, as the case may be: when integral, and compounded, of a dwelling-house (with or without outhouse and garden respectively,) with cultivated land, say house with land annexed, or farm, as the case may be: if the subject-matter be a fractional right, as a right of mine-working under land which belongs to a different proprietor—or right of fishing, or right of drawing water from a mass, current or stagnate—or share in the tolls of a road or canal—mention it accordingly. If subject-matters more than one are included in this deed, mention them accordingly.

[e ]Purchase money.] For certainty, write the sum at full length in words; adding it, for facility of conception, in figures. If in whole or in part, the equivalent transferred consists of specific subject-matters of property, moveable or unmoveable, one or more,—a ship (for instance,) a piece of jewellery, or another piece of land,—mention them.

[f ]In his hand-writing.] If able to write, the person writes it, as above directed; if not, he makes with his pen and ink the mark of a cross +; after, and close to it, some other person writes the name, adding the word witness with his own name, written as directed in note a. In the case of a person of the female sex, a line is to be drawn through the word his, and the word her written over it.

[g ]Day.] The year, month, and day of the month: first in words; then in figures. Properest writer in each case, the seller or purchaser himself. For greater certainty, the day of the week may be added. If (as may happen by mistake) the day of the month and that of the week do not agree, the day of the week will be most likely to be rightly supposed; the days in a week being, in comparison of those in a month, so much fewer.

[h ]Place.] Designate the place as directed in note c.

[i ]Agreement.] This accordingly will, in general, in respect of the payment of the money, be also the day, and the place, the place of performance; and on this account, to avoid carrying the form of the draught to an inconvenient length, the circumstances which here follow are not inserted in the list of topics. But, in possibility, they are susceptible of diversification without limit; and in practice they are accordingly diversified. To prevent mis-statement, with the falsehood involved in it,—the attention is therefore, in the proposed additional Nos. drawn to them, that appropriate provision may be made in the code. In the present practice, falsehood is an instrument ever at hand for the solution of all difficulties: by the practitioner, employment is given to it; by the judge, the desired effect. Here follow the numbers.

• No. 16. Day or days in which the purchase money was made over.
• 17. Place or places, at which the money was at the respective times made over.
• 18. Person or persons, by whose hands respectively the money was made over.
• 19. Day or days, on which the purchase money was received.
• 20. Place or places, at which the money was at the respective times received.
• 21. Person or persons, by whose hands respectively the money was received.
• 22. Form or forms, in which the money was made over.

An additional topic this last, under which, as a preservative against fraud, particularization may have its use. In case of paper money at a discount, as in the instance of currency in a distant dependency,—without this particularization, in conjunction with that of the time of payment, the real value of the alleged equivalent will not be discernible. As to the word sterling, if there be any need of it or use in it, it will be for the purpose of distinguishing metallic money from currency as above. As for pounds Scots, there being no such money either in metal or paper, no actual payment can be made in it.

Note that, on every occasion, on which the money is sent by a public conveyance, the times of receipt may be different from the times of payment. So, when sent by a private hand.

[1 ]Pin-money.] This word, and the succeeding word, jointure, are in the same case. Being the words in common use, and sure of being familiar to every person who is likely to become a party in a conveyance of the sort in question;—here, in a deed of which it so highly imports them to possess, on every occasion, an adequate conception,—here is a perfectly good reason why these terms should be employed; nor is there any why they should not. As to pin-money,—nobody, at the sight of this word, is in any danger of supposing, that the whole £200 a-year is to be laid out in pins; any more than, at the sight of the word spinster, anybody would suppose that the whole life of the lady had been occupied in spinning.

[2 ]A rent charge.] On this occasion, a question or two the reviewer cannot avoid putting, in behalf of the future Mrs. Allen.

1. This same rent charge—from what day is it to be computed?—from the day of her unhappy loss?—from the quarter-day next before it, or from the quarter-day next after it?

2. By whose hands is it to be paid?—on failure of payment, what is it that, to save herself from starving at the end of a few days, she is to do? At the end of a few years or so, Eldon and Co. are ready, in the way that everybody knows, to supply her necessities, provided always that she has—what by the supposition she has not—money enough to satisfy their cravings, as per note on the Mortgage-Deed. Here then comes another demand for prompt judicature: for prompt judicature, even though it were not to end in justice.

To some of these questions, answer is given in the Author’s Code, p. 262; reference to which is made for the present purpose, in a note to the Settlement Deed, p. 399. Not, however, to all; nor, in and from the Deed, is reference made to the document, to wit, the Code, in which an answer to them may be found. In the Reviewer’s Draught, a supply, for this deficiency in the Deed, is provided; to wit, by reference made to the Code.

[3 ]Inalienable.] What does it mean? what ought it to mean? Inalienable to all purposes whatsoever, or with the exception of certain purposes? If with exceptions,—(1) Inalienable for joint benefit by joint consent? (2) Inalienable for husband’s benefit with wife’s consent? (3) Inalienable for wife’s own benefit, at wife’s desire? (4) Inalienable for children’s benefit, on joint desire, at (5) husband’s desire, at (6) wife’s desire, as above? (7) Inalienable at suit of creditors for payment of debts, contracted by husband or by wife?—Matters all these, presenting the same demand for discussion and decision somewhere, but against all which the Author’s draught shuts the door, by the all-comprehensive word inalienable. In the Code, by article 22, under the security for freedom afforded by the wife’s secret examination, he allows the alienation of the whole of the subsistence provided for her by general law during widowhood; also, of any property derived by her during marriage from the bounty of a third person. But, is not the danger to her from fraud or improvident alienation incomparably less, in the case of pin-money, than in the case of jointure?—in the case where superfluities alone are at stake, with her husband’s property as a resource for necessaries, than in the case where necessaries are at stake, and that resource is at an end?

Supposing, for any purpose, alienation with her free consent, allowed,—in that case, for giving the allowance, the words without her free consent would suffice; but, for particulars, in that case, as in so many others, reference should be made from the Deed to the Code.

Rendering this pin-money—rendering the estate itself, alienable for any one or every one of these purposes—would this render the provision ineffectual altogether? Not it, indeed: any more than establishing a general course of succession by law, failing ditto by deed or will, renders the power of transfer by deed or will ineffectual.

Now, as to alienation for payment of debts. Render the property inalienable altogether, you leave, exposed to the risk of disappointment by loss, one set of persons: render it alienable to this or that purpose, you leave, in like manner, exposed to the risk of disappointment by loss, another set of persons. Query: In which case is the evil greatest?

Answer: Render it inalienable altogether, to the number of persons thus exposed, there is no limit: for, all persons who, in the capacity of workmen, for example, or petty traders, have dealings with the parties, are included in it; and among them there may be those, in whose instance, owing to difference in respect of income, the same nominal loss may be productive of a dozen, a score, a hundred, a thousand times the suffering produced in the instance of the parties to the marriage.

Render it alienable for the benefit of creditors,—the suffering is confined to the sometimes indeed blameless, and merely unfortunate, but most commonly imprudent, and thence culpable, parties; with the eventual addition of their children, whom, as well as themselves, they had it in such case in their power, by ordinary prudence, to have secured against such loss.

For other landed property of the same kind—for other landed property of a different kind—for property in any other shape—(government annuities, for example, or life-assurance company annuities,)—it may happen that, to the benefit of the parties, to an unlimited amount, an exchange might be made. Under a rational system of procedure, with a correspondent judiciary establishment,—all parties interested, whether on self-regarding account, or on account of sympathy towards the parties, being allowed to intervene,—exchanges of all sorts might, for these purposes, be made, by any sets of persons, with little or no expense. Even at present, they are not unfrequently made. Yes; but by what authority?—in what way? Instead of judicial authority, in the appropriate and apt way, by legislative authority, in an anomalous and unapt way: and at an expense which not one person out of several thousands is able to defray. And why thus made? Only that a set of placemen and lawyers may, on each occasion, share among them so many hundreds of pounds.

But, the beings who have as yet no existence—the children’s children, one set after another, down to the world’s end—these are the dear possible creatures, by whom, to the exclusion of so many existing and suffering ones, whatever sympathy has place in an aristocratical bosom, is engrossed: nor yet the whole number, but that half of it alone, whose merit and title will have consisted in the having received, from the hand of positive and ungrounded law, the name of their supposed male, in preference to that of their female, and thence more certain, progenitors; and it is for these same possible, that actually existing human beings, in unlimited number, are to be cheated, and to an unlimited amount made sufferers.

If, during the existence of a form of government by which the interest of all besides is sacrificed to the assumed conjunct interest of the one and the few,—it be on any account advisable to provide leading-strings to check aristocrats, in their individual capacity, in their propensity to run into ruin, the recent French institution of majorats would, perhaps, be the best adapted to the purpose: always understood, that in England it be confined to peerages.

In this case, for the preservation—not, indeed, of the spendthrifts themselves from ruining themselves, but of their relatives from suffering disappointments from them,—inalienability would be the sole and tolerably efficient remedy. But, for preservation of all persons besides from being cheated and made sufferers by them,—registration (of which presently) would be an indispensable, and the sole remedy, though unhappily, as will be seen, never more than an imperfect one.

[4 ]Without impeachment of waste.] An odious locution this—relic of antique barbarism, altogether unfit for any honest purpose. In respect of morality, what a lesson! Mischief under its own name expressly authorized by law! By this expression, when made use of, what is it that is really intended? That the estate should be wasted? No: only that, in a particular shape, a fair profit, adapted to the nature of that shape, should be reaped from it. The profit thus intended—what is it?—profit from the sale of timber growing on the estate? This, then, is what should be said;—more demand here for reference to an appropriate section in the appropriate code; a section having for its object, the confining within limits beneficial to all interests concerned, the profit derivable from this source. Is any other fractional right intended to be reserved out of the aggregate right of ownership? If so, in conjunction with the right of cutting and selling timber, it should be designated by some adequately-comprehensive locution, such, for instance, as lifeholder’s profit in the shape of capital: with reference, for explanation, to the codes.

In the Equity books, to the head of waste, under the sub-head permissive waste for contradistinction from positive, is referred omission to keep in repair. Under its ordinary and specific name, in speaking of the correspondent obligation, mention should be made of it in the code, and referred to in the deed. Under both heads, matter proper for the code will be found in those same books.

[5 ]Gives up] More demand for reference to the appropriate Code. The arrangement which Mr. Humphreys, and with incontestible reason, proposes is,—that, in the Code,—to dower, with its uncertainties, be substituted—a provision as clear as may be of uncertainties. This supposed done,—thereupon will come a clause, giving legality to whatever arrangement may, in relation to this provision, be made in a marriage-settlement; for it is not for the legislator, to whom all individuals are alike unknown—it is not for him, on any such occasion, to take upon himself to force upon them an arrangement which does not suit the purpose of the only individuals interested. So far as their interests are alone concerned, and laying out of the question whatever interest the public at large may have in the matter,—what belongs to him is neither more nor less than to provide against fraud, accident, and on their part inadvertence; and, for these purpose alone, to establish such all-comprehensive arrangement as presents a prospect of being well adapted in a greater number of instances than any other all-comprehensive arrangement that the case admits of. But, this supposed done,—here, in the tenor of the code, would come the necessity of a subsidiary arrangement, having for its object the securing to the widow, at all events, and at every point of time, one or other of the two alternative provisions: to wit, that under the general rule, and that under the particular rule agreed upon and laid down in the settlement. Employ the summary plan, as per the note to the Mortgage Deed, this security is established: deny it, you deny justice, and leave the afflicted female in the condition expressed by the proverb of the two stools.

[* ]How many hundred thousand pounds, spent in misery-making litigation, for the benefit of Judge and Co., would not a law to this effect, if enacted in time, have saved? Calculate from the cases alluded to by Mr. Humphreys.

[6 ]Father’s decease.] When arrived at this point, not inconsiderable (it cannot but be acknowledged) would of course be the perplexity of Miss Campbell, if she regarded herself as being under the obligation of obtaining any particular as well as clear conception of the contents. But to no such painful obligation will the lady regard herself as subjected:—so small will be the probability,—and at any rate so great the distance,—of such a state of things, to an imagination occupied by the idea of near-approaching happiness: and, should the desire ever come upon her, of seeing—in what way, in any proposed state of things, the division may come to be made—(a desire not likely to arise till she has marriageable children,) there, in one of her drawers, lie the means of satisfying it.

Miss Campbell throughout—Miss Campbell is the chief object of my care. And why? Even because—whatsoever is either not understood or misunderstood, is in proportion mischievous; mischievous, in the joint proportion of the importance of the matter, and the number of persons interested, from whose minds the true import is in either way excluded. For, from non-understoodness or misunderstoodness comes oppositeness to expectation; from oppositeness to expectation, disappointment; from disappointment, suffering, in proportion to the importance of the consequences.

[7 ]Heirs.] Heirs (coheiresses included.) Inserted here of necessity, and in want of a better, is this word, which none but lawyers can understand; better a word such as successors, which those, whose property is at their disposal, may understand. That which, for this and all other occasions, is wanted, is—a term which shall apply to property at large, whichsoever be the subject-matter—to wit, immoveable or moveable—or (what in law-jargon comes nearest to that expression) say real or personal; to which will require to be added incorporeal; so, whichsoever be the mode of derivation from such its source: to wit, whether simple and immediate, as in the case of genealogical succession, or unimmediate, and with the intervention of individual will, as in the case of transfer, whether by deed or last will; a desideratum this, which may and should be provided for us, instead of our being sent for a meaning to the obscure history of a barbarous state of society, altogether different from the present. This desirable term is presented by the word successors: this, then, if found apt for the purpose, is the word that will naturally be employed, should ever a rule of action be provided, which it is intended that those whose actions are to be determined by it should have the possibility of understanding. On the present occasion, the distinction might, in that case, be expressed by some such words as land-taking successors and money-taking successors. Heirs should, in that case, be, in all its applications, eliminated out of the code, and abandoned to the society of antiquaries.

As to lawyers,—as, in respect of honour as well as profit, it is their interest, so of course is it their desire and endeavour, that the rule of action, more especially in matters of property, be understood by as few, and to that end be as unintelligible, as possible. As for what the rest of the community suffer from this state of things, this is what scarce one in a thousand ever thinks about. As it is with wolves, so is it with lawyers; what sympathy they have, if any, it is sympathy for their own kind, all of it; for their prey, none of it.

Thence comes, in the arrangements themselves, that complicatedness, by which so much complicatedness in the expression given to them is necessitated. Complicated is the description of those persons who, separately or collectively, are to be in the possession of the estate. Correspondently complicated accordingly is the description of those who are not to have any part in the estate. What simplicity of description there is in the case is confined to this, namely, that whoever has the whole of, or any part in, the estate, has not any part in the money; and that whoever has the whole of or any part in the money, has not, at that same time, the whole of, or any part in the estate, unless by the death of some anterior taker of it.

[8 ]Weston, Shropshire.] Between wordiness and sufficiency some difference, it is hoped, will now have been seen exemplified:—every superfluous word is an additional cloud. Of wordiness, in the degree in which it is exemplified by English law practice, so far from sufficiency, deficiency is the result. For, when on this or that occasion, such is the quantity of the heap of particulars inserted, that the draughtsman is not able to bear the whole list continually in mind, the consequence is,—that on this or that other occasion, though exactly parallel to it, and calling for exactly the same list,—some of them are omitted, or other added or substituted: whereupon, in argument, the difference, in legislative or professional expression, is, of course, made use of as a ground for difference in justicial decision. Of this sort of style,—expensiveness and uncertainty, with the profit from both, were the manifest final causes, and never were ends more abundantly accomplished.

Now as to Registration. Uses, as applied to instruments of conveyance and contract relating to property in immoveables, these—

1. Preservation of these documentary evidences from loss and destruction.

2. Preservation of them from falsification.

3. Exclusion of corresponding counterfeit documents.

4. In so far as the document is proof, of incumbrance applying to the property of the possessor of the estate, in relation to which the document registered operates as evidence of title,—affording, to all persons disposed to give him credit for money or money’s worth, the means of guarding themselves against loss by insolvency on his part.

5. Affording, by means of the aggregate of the evidence thus preserved and rendered susceptible of appropriate publication,—information of the statistical kind, capable of being turned to account by government for the benefit of the public in a variety of ways.

Of these five good effects,—the first gives security to the owner of the estate, against accident; the second and third, against fraud and depredation, at his expense, on the part of the rest of mankind; the fourth, to the rest of mankind against fraud on his part; the fifth contributes to form a basis for the exercise of the legislative and administrative functions.

Alive to the importance of this means of security,—Mr. Humphreys, taking it up upon its present footing, affords for the improvement of it a quantity of highly valuable matter, as to which I must content myself with referring the reader to his work. I promised him a treat; I now fulfil that promise; such if it be to him, such will the invention I have to present to view be to every reader, in proportion as in his eyes security, to a degree beyond everything that as yet has been experienced, or can have been so much as anticipated, is an object of regard. By it, if narrow and sinister interest in powerful breasts can but be induced to permit the employment of it—by it, will preservation and appropriate publication be given to documentary evidence, to whatever purpose needed: preservation, and what is of correspondent importance, equally unexampled cheapness. It is an invention of which I can speak my admiration the more freely, as not having in my own person any part in it.

For the description of it, and in a more particular manner, of its uses,—I have but to transcribe a passage of an about-to-be published proposed Constitutional Code, ch. viii. Prime Minister, § 10, Registration System.

“Art. 1. For the more commodious, correct, prompt, uniform, and all-comprehensive performance, of the process and function of registration in all the several departments and sub-departments—as likewise on the part of the Prime Minister, for the correspondent receipt by him of all documents, the receipt, and, as occasion calls, the perusal of which may be necessary to the most apt exercise of the several functions belonging to his own office—he will, as soon as may be, cause to be established, and employed in practice, in the several offices of the several departments and their sub-departments, the sub-legislative included, the mode of writing styled the manifold mode.*

“Art. 2. Particular uses of the manifold mode of writing are as follows:—

By the multitude of exemplars, produced at an expense which, with the exception of that of the paper, is less than the expense of two in the ordinary mode it affords means for furnishing, at that small expense, to parties on both sides, for themselves and assistants, all such documents as they can stand in need of.

“Art. 3. Every exemplar being, to an iota, exactly and necessarily the same as every other, the expense of revision by skilled labour is thereby saved, as well as unintentional aberration rendered impossible.

“Art. 4. An exemplar, kept in the Registrar’s office, will serve as a standard, whereby a security will be afforded against all intentional falsification, on the part of the possessor of any other exemplar.

“Art. 5. By the reduction thus effected in the expense of all judicial writings emanating from the judicatory,—the protection afforded by judication in its best form,—to wit, that which has for its ground orally elicited and immediately minuted evidence,—will be brought within the reach of a vast proportion of the whole number of the people, to whom it could not otherwise be afforded.

“Art. 6. A collateral benefit—a degree of security hitherto unexampled against destruction of judicial documents, by calamity or delinquency—may thus be afforded, by the lodging of exemplars in divers offices in which they would be requisite for other purposes: exemplars of documents from the immediate judicatories being, at the appellate judicatory, requisite for the exercise of its judicial functions; and, in the office of justice-minister, for the exercise of his inspective and melioration-suggestive functions.

“Art 7. To save the expense of custody, and prevent the useful from being drowned in the mass of useless matter,—the legislature will make arrangements for the periodical destruction or elimination of such as shall appear useless: care being at all times taken, for the preservation of all such as can continue to be of use, either eventually for a judicial purpose, or for the exercise of the statistic and melioration-suggestive functions, as per ch. ix. § 11, Ministers collectively: ch. xi. Ministers severally, § 2, Legislative Minister: and ch. xii. Judiciary collectively, § 19, Judge’s contested-interpretation-reporting function: § 20, Judge’s eventually-emendative function: § 21, Judge’s sistitive or execution-staying function: § 22, Judge’s pre-interpretative function: § 23, Judge’s non-contestational-evidence-elicitative function.”

Here, then, of every such conveyance,—without any addition to the expense, the trifling expense of the paper excepted,—we have no fewer than eight copies, and upon occasion as far as twelve, no one differing in a single tittle from any other; and this identity effected, without a particle of that skilled labour, the purchase of which, on the present plan, can never fail to be so seriously expensive. On this plan, unless it were for concealment of particulars, no need would there be for any such inadequate representative of the original, as that which, under the name of a memorial, is employed in present practice.

To each one of the parties, how numerous soever, an exemplar would be given of course. To obviate the case,—at present so pregnant, not only with delay, vexation, and expense, but even with loss of estate, for want of a producible title,—as many exemplars might be had by one party, as there were distinguishable parcels, which he might anticipate an occasion for making disposition of. So, when it happens that one estate, disposed of, the whole of it, by one and the same instrument, is situated in the territories of registration offices more than one,—so many of these offices, as there are, so many exemplars may there be. And finally, if, whether for ulterior security against accidents, or for all-comprehensive government purposes, it were found desirable that, for the whole territory of the state there should be one general office, in which an aggregate of the documents received into the several local offices should be kept—here, is an additional accommodation, that might be afforded with a comparatively inconsiderable addition to the expense.

For, the documents being thus distributed, every syllable of each would thus be made secure—not only against deperition by accidents, but against all possibility of falsification. For, suppose, for example, one of the parties dishonest, and disposed to commit this crime, what possibility of a successful issue could he contemplate? In his own exemplar he makes the requisite alteration: but what can it avail him, when, in case of the slightest degree of suspicion, there lie, in the custody of a public functionary, as well as in that of each of the several parties, so many exemplars, to which, for any such purpose as falsification, all access on his part is perfectly hopeless.

For the application of the registration system to the case of dispositions made of property, the appropriate course might be this: adequately-registered estates, all of them, to the extent allowed by law, secured against eventual as well as against actual alienation: secured against it, no estates not so registered. A charge is an efficient cause of eventual alienation: considered in respect of the subject-matter it applies to, a charge may be termed general, or say generally-applying, or all-comprehensively applying, when it applies to the whole of the property belonging to the charger, as in the case of a judgment or a recognisance; specially-applying, when it is only to one particular parcel of his property, are that expressly mentioned in it, that it applies: as in the case of a mortgage, or a marriage settlement.

The misfortune is that, be the registration and publication system ever so perfect, no lender of a comparatively small sum,—no person supplying goods or labour to a comparatively small value,—can have in his mind at all times a sufficiently correct conception of the solvency of the landholder whom he serves: the consequence is—that every estate non-alienable for debt, is a ready source,—and, at the pleasure of the owner, an instrument, of fraud. But, so long as the fraud is protected and encouraged by law, the impossibility, of doing every thing, that ought to be done, affords not any reason why as much as can be done should not be done; but, on the contrary, it affords a reason why as much as can be done should be done. True it is, that against loss, in comparatively small masses,—or against loss out of income,—small, as above, will be the security thus afforded: but, against loss in large masses; against loss out of capital; against the too frequently happening total losses of capital;—it would, in a tolerable degree, be effectual. Under “Matchless Constitution,” it is true, no regard for the bulk of the community can rationally be expected: but, for the class to which the rulers themselves belong, more or less regard may be expected on the part of each: and the greater the number to which, to whatever classes belonging, the benefit can be made to extend, the more fully will the wishes of a well-wisher to all alike, be accomplished.

My learned master, I observe, makes much and good use of French law; but he seems not to be aware of the pattern of good management afforded by that law in this part of the field.

Under Matchless Constitution, interest being throughout the whole at daggers drawn with duty,—in this case in particular, the same individual being concerned in conveyances and in suits, the right hand adds to its other occupations that of making business for the left. Thus, under English-bred law: not so under Rome-bred law: in particular, in France. There, the class of notaries is a class altogether distinct from that of other lawyers. In that country, the other professional classes cannot indeed but be more or less deeply tinged with the vices inherent in the profession: howsoever less deeply than here, where, in every part of it, the whole chaos—substantive law, procedure law, and judicial establishment—has with such matchless skill and success been adapted to the purpose of unpunishable depredation. But, in the notary class, on the contrary, to such a degree of intimacy is brought, in that instance, the connexion between interest and duty—in the notary class, may be seen an example of a degree of integrity, scarcely to be matched in any other profit-seeking occupation whatsoever; accordingly, in that, above all others, may be seen an object of universal confidence. Hands altogether pure from the waters of strife, the notary adds to the trust of the conveyancer that of the banker: but with this difference—that it is only during short intervals that the money remains in his hands; those intervals, to wit, in which such custody is requisite for the purpose of the negotiation; and that, during those same intervals, he keeps the money without lending it.

Out of this state of things sprung just now an individual occurrence, more forcibly probative than can commonly be afforded of the truth of a general allegation. In France, the notaries form a sort of body corporate. In Paris, an individual of this profession went off, t’other day, with the value of about two or three thousand pounds sterling destined for a purchase. Scarcely had any such act of delinquency been remembered: a commotion, like an electric shock, went through the whole body: on recovery, they made up a common purse, and replaced the loss. In England, Ireland, Scotland (for in Scotland this institution of Rome-bred law has not, to any considerable extent, if at all, been adopted)—in these countries, Diogenes, with his lantern, might trudge on till the last drop of his oil was spent, ere he found the object of his search: in France, where they exist by thousands, he would save his oil, and the labour of laying a trap for his joke.

Apropos of notaries. I will take the liberty of suggesting to my learned master, the adding to his French-law library the standard book on the subject, Le Parfait Notaire, &c. par A. J. Massé, 3 volumes 4to. Paris, 1825, cinquième edition; the precedents in it he would find of a very different complexion from those which have given him so much trouble: much superior in aptitude to those in the Scotch law-book, intituled, The Office of a Notary-Public: in my copy, 4th edition, 1792.

Notaries being on the carpet, a word I must put in, in favour of an humble class of late years brought into notice. Poor man’s notaries they may be styled, or poor notaries, or pure notaries: pure notaries, in contradistinction to attorney notaries, as pure surgeons, as by some styled, in contradistinction to apothecary surgeons. But pure my notaries may be styled in an additional sense—in the moral sense: pure from the sinister interest which the attorney notary and the barrister notary have, in making, with the instruments in question, work for themselves in the field of litigation. They are for the most part (it is said) country school-masters. These, the attorney notaries, have, as is natural, been, for some time labouring to put out of their way. Petitions for this purpose have for years been coming in. Alleged grounds—of course, relative inaptitude of these intruders: alleged consequences—immediate inaptitude, in all imaginable forms, on the part of their instruments; ultimately, increase of litigation on the part of their employers. But, if these same alleged, were the real, ultimate consequence,—with no such petitions would honourable table he encumbered. So says evidentia rei. Now as to evidence ab extrà. That, of the alleged inaptitude, by due search the country over, a body of evidence, larger than could be wished, might be found—the present state of the law is, of itself, sufficient to render but too probable: evidence, of the satisfactoriness of which to an appropriate committee, under the guidance of learned gentlemen, no great doubt need be entertained. But, as in other cases, so in this,—from positive inaptitude no conclusion can be drawn, capable of affording a sufficient warrant for the desired practical result, unless it be also comparative. Unfortunately for the unlearned clients of the unlearned advocate,—on this ground likewise, learned gentlemen are prepared to ride triumphant. Of law-learnedness in this and the higher grade together, tests over and over again established, approved, and incontestably and exclusively probative, two:—the financial, and the convivial, or say manducatory. Financial: clerkship articles duty, £120; admission duty, £25; total, on capital, £145; add, on income, £8. Tests preferred by Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, presumably the financial; by Mr. Secretary Peel, declaredly the convivial; by their humble servant, the examinational.

Be this as it may, for clearing away every shadow of objection on the ground of want of intellectual aptitude,—nothing is wanting but the proposed appropriate code, with an appendix composed of the proposed authorized instruments, adapted to the purpose by the brevity and intelligibility above exemplified. This boon granted, better qualified for the business would be the least learned country schoolmaster, than, under the reign of the present Chaos, the most learned of learned gentlemen can be. In this comparatively halcyon state of things,—in matters of small concern, the instruments of sale and mortgage, together with ordinary leases, wills of personal property, and the most ordinary species of contract, such as apprenticeship articles, hirings,&c. would remain to the humble class of notaries; family settlements and wills of land, to the elevated class. Even thus the business of the unlearned class would naturally be mostly confined within the field marked out by the ready prepared and authorized blank forms: while, for anything special, recourse would be had, by those who could afford it, to the learned class. As to examination,—plans, applicable to this as well as higher purposes, will, before the meeting of parliament, be at every body’s command: title of the work, “Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized.”

Before registration is done with, one word as to the means of enforcement. Speaking of the instrument,—in case of non-observance of enactments, “utterly void,” says page 312. Nor is this (it is feared) the only page. Observe now the effects. In every case, client sinned against; lawyer the sinner: client punished; lawyer unpunished. In the present case, note the situation in which the client is placed. Under the name of a memorial, an instrument, containing matter under no fewer than eight specified heads, is required to be drawn up “in the form or to the effect of” a certain article (Art. 101,) . . . . “but with any alterations or additions which the nature of the case may require: otherwise,” that is to say if, by the draughtsman, in respect of any one of these particulars, anything is done which, by an equity judge, may be pronounced not to be to that same effect—“every such deed” (it is said) “shall be utterly void.” Now, then, as to the effects. Frequently, in the shape of capital, is the whole property of the purchaser of an estate embarked in the purchase: not to speak of the cases where, the purchase money being more than his all, a part of it remains charged on the estate, after the estate has passed into his hands. Think what, with a trap of this sort set for him, the hapless non-lawyer has to do, to save himself from it. At his peril he must turn lawyer: do, what by the supposition he is unable to do: for, if able, no need would he have for the professional assistance. But, in this case, an indemnity is provided for him: return of his money. Indemnity? Oh yes. Source of it a few years of equity suit, against the perhaps ruined man, by whose indigence most commonly the sale was produced. Lawyer ruins client, loses not a sixpence, and perhaps gets for himself a new suit. For, everywhere so it is—as in procedure, so in conveyancing; making flaw in draught, makes more business for draughtsman. But reputation? Oh, as to this, small here is the risk: known uncertainty of the law offers its ready cover to all learned sins. Thus, while in the shape of pain of nullity, punishment is in appearance employed in the prevention of the mischief, reward is in reality employed in the augmentation of it. Punishment? Yes: and what punishment? Punishment, the evil of which rivalizes with those which are inflicted for the most mischievous crimes. Not unfrequently, sooner than subject himself to any such forfeiture, the defendant—simple debtor or criminal—has been known to embrace imprisonment for life.

Then as to time. Thirty days fixed inexorably for all cases. But who shall reckon up all the accidents, by any of which, without a particle of blame to the purchaser, performance of what is required, within that time, may be prevented? Day reckoned from, “the date of the deed:”—a day hereby supposed to be, in all cases one and the same for all parties: but how often, the act in question is of necessity the work of different days, has been seen above.

One instance more, page 185. Transgression, misapplication of any one of the three obscurified terms—trust, use, and confidence: penalty, here too expressed by the words “utterly void,” applied to the “assurances,” whatever they may be. Sin here, in every case exclusively the lawyer’s: client altogether incapable of ever committing it. Author’s design, in this case as in all others, meritorious. But, mode of execution how unfortunate!

Conveyances and contracts, which it is the intention of the law should not take effect—yes, to these, it is true, the effect indicated by the words void and nullity, and their conjugates and quasi-conjugates cannot but be attached. But then these cases ought to be, as without difficulty they might be, made known to all clients: known, by being particularized in the Code; and every lawyer, participating in the formation of such forbidden arrangements, might and should be, made punitionally and compensationally responsible.

As to our Reformist,—in extenuation, with but too much truth, may he plead on this occasion universal practice. But, the dereliction of it is one which he will see the necessity of adding to the list of his so highly-needed innovations. Great, indeed, is the progress he has made, in the shaking off the shackles of habit—result of interest-begotten and authority-begotten prejudice: one effort more, however, the present case demands at his hands.

But, what reasonable expectation can you have (it may be asked) of seeing the force of law given to a means of security so galling to the feelings of those on whom the giving that force to it depends? especially if there be any approach to truth in what is said of the proportionable number of those, the nakedness of whose property would, by such an instrument of exposure, be uncovered? Answer. In the very modesty alluded to, as a certain cause of defeat, I descry a source of success. In nothing but the fear of such exposure could any man find any motive for opposition. On the bringing in the bill, it might, without difficulty, be sufficiently made known, that the Noes will, all of them, be carefully noted down, and rendered universally notorious. In the instance of each opponent, that which would, in this way, be made universally known is—that, by a difference, the amount of which was matter of shame or uneasiness to him, his actual property wanted more or less of being equal to his supposed property; all that would remain concealed would be—the exact amount. But to any man—to what purpose can such concealment be desirable? Two distinguishable ones alone have any application to the case: obtaining money on a false pretence of solvency; or obtaining respect on a false appearance of opulence: cheating creditors alone; or cheating them and everybody else.

Now as to machinery. In his haste to arrive at the essentials of his plan, our reformist seems, on this occasion, to have taken up for his support, without sufficient examination, a broken reed of authority; and the consequence is—a choice such as will be seen. No objection, however, does this oversight make to the essentials: for,other machinery (it will also be seen) the case furnishes:—machinery also in use—machinery simple, well constructed, and adequate.

Sets of Commissioners (so say his “Preliminary Enactments,”) at least two; all of them (it is presumed) ambulatory. Annual expense, what? Amount not less than £624,000 a-year;* duration, of course as long as said commissioners can contrive to render it. Then comes the retired allowance system, and to year substitutes life. For justice, for security for the whole landed property of the kingdom, no such sum could be spared.—Royal amateurs want it for palaces; Lord Liverpool, for churches.

So much for the complicated, the slow-working, the expensive, machinery. Behold now the simple, the quick-working, the unexpensive. Precedents six; latest dates of each as follows:—Poor Returns, first accessible batch, anno 1787; (a prior one of 1777, not accessible;) second batch, 1804; third, and last batch, 1818. Population Returns, first batch, anno 1812; second, and last batch, 1822. Scotch Education Returns, 1826.

Mode of eliciting the information,—author’s the oral; reviewer’s the epistolary. For judiciary purposes, for general purposes,—incomparably the best mode, confessedly the oral; the epistolary being but a make-shift—to save delay, vexation, and expense, on the part of the examinees; for the particular purpose here in question, probable delay being much less; vexation of examinees much less; expense next to 0.

Number of elicitators;—upon author’s plan, as above, 312; upon reviewer’s plan, one. Mr. Rickman, whose appropriate aptitude shines with so steady a lustre in the Population Returns, is at his post. House of Commons’ clerk finds labour; Honourable House, authority and auspices; Mr. Freeling, with his mails, conveyance.

Time, occupied before the information is completed—on author’s plan, what has been seen: on reviewer’s plan, as follows:—Poor Returns, in the case of batch the first, time not apparent; Poor Returns, batch the second, date of the latest matter, 12th April 1803; date of order for printing, 10th July 1804: interval, months 15.—Poor Returns, batch third and last,—date of latest matter, last day of 1815; date of order for printing, 3d March 1818; date of order for elicitation not ascertainable without a search, the result of which would not pay for time and labour.—Population Returns, batch the first,—day appointed for the commencement of the operation in the parishes, 22d May 1811; month in which the digest of them was delivered in, June 1812, as per signature, John Rickman; interval occupied in collecting and digesting, not more than 13 months.—Population Returns, batch the second,—year appointed for the commencement of the inquiry, 1811; day and month not apparent; month in which digest was delivered in, June 1822; presumable interval occupied in collecting and digesting,—as before, 13 months.—Lastly, Scotch Education Returns,—date of the House of Commons’ resolution in which they originated, 30th March 1825; date of Under Secretary of State’s letter to the Lord Advocate in consequence, the very next day, 31st March 1825; date of letter from Lord Advocate, sending the first part of the whole of the information, 14th February 1826. Number of pages in the printed copy, 985: interval thus employed in collecting, not more than ten and a half months; within which time was performed a vibrating system of correspondence, composed of divers vibrations—letters written backwards and forwards.

In the case in question,—would any greater length of time be necessary? any grounds for any apprehension to that effect, can they be assigned? None whatever. Places constituting the local objects of inquiry and sources of information,—in those cases the parishes; in these, the manors. Reluctance as to the communicating the information,—in any greater degree probable in this case than in those? No; nor yet so much. In those cases, indemnities being out of the question, nothing was to be got by furnishing the information, nothing to be lost by not furnishing. On the present occasion, more or less may in general be lost, by omitting to furnish the information; more or less perhaps to be got by furnishing it; for, to each individual from whom the information would be required, the consequence of omission would be, that his interest would be disposed of, and in case of loss on his part, no indemnity would he receive.

Il ne faut pas multiplier les êtres sans necessité, says a well-known French proverb: and, of all multiplicable beings,—among those in whose instance the practice of that rule of arithmetic is most mischievous, are locusts.

As to our author’s machinery for registration and other purposes,—his quarter-sessions chairmanand his clerk of the peace—still more egregiously unapt is it for this than for its present purposes. But, to his plan, this inaptitude forms no objection: only for elucidation (so he expressly declares,) only for elucidation, does he bring it on the carpet. No fault is it of Mr. Humphreys, if, in the whole establishment, there is not a single judicatory that is in any tolerable degree fit for any other purpose than those for which, under Matchless Constitution, all judicatories, with but here and there an exception, have been invented—putting power into the hands, and other people’s money into the pockets, of the inventors. A machinery adapted to his purposes—a judiciary establishment, with a correspondent procedure code,—each of them the first that every really had for its sole object the giving execution and effect, with the minimum of daily vexation and expense, to the enactments of the substantive branch of the law,—is in progress; and the judiciary establishment plan will be in the printer’s hands within a few weeks after the present pages are out of them.

Before concluding, I will take the liberty of suggesting, for his consideration, as briefly as possible, a few supposed improvements, of which his plan presents itself to me as susceptible: to do whatsoever else may be in my power, towards lightening his labour, and promoting his generous designs, would be a sincere pleasure to me. If, for the most part, these same suggestions should be found to apply to every other part of the field of law, as well as to the part on which his beneficent labours have been more particularly employed,—they will not, on that account, be the less excusable.

Distinguishable shapes, which the matter of a proposed code may, throughout the whole texture of it, have occasion to assume, five: the enactive, the expositive, the ratiocinative, the instructional, the exemplificative. Of the exemplifications of them exhibited in this work of our learned author, presently: in English statute law, sole shape exemplified,—the enactive. As to this same enactive shape, with an exclusion put upon all the others—nothing, with a view to rulers’ purposes, could or can be more convenient. Expression of will this, nothing more: talent necessary, none beyond what is manifested by every child as soon as it can speak. Not so any of the four other sorts of matter. Not to speak of Russian, Italian, and Spanish translations—of the expositive and the ratiocinative, the French work, in which samples of them are exhibited, has been before the public ever since 1802, and another there has just been occasion to bring to view. Grades of functionaries, to either or both of which the instructional portion of the matter may be virtually addressed—subordinates, with a view to execution and effect; future legislators, for the better explanation of the designs, with a view to fulfilment.

Case to which the exemplificational more particularly applies, that of an as yet only proposed code. Legal systems, from which the matter two: may be derived, two: the home, and the aggregate of the most approved foreign ones: the home system, for the purpose of exhibiting in detail the disorder for which the code is the proposed remedy, and examples of particular arrangements, in themselves of a beneficial nature, but in respect of which the system, taken in the aggregate, is chargeable,—on account of the narrowness of the application made of them, and, throughout the remainder of the field, the employment of flagrantly-unapt arrangements, to the exclusion of them: the foreign, for the purpose of furnishing, under this other head, in support of what is proposed, the instruction afforded by experience. Note, that this same exemplificational matter must not be confounded with the matter composed of those examples, which there may be found occasion to give as an inseparable part of the enactive, though they may be considered as belonging also to the expositive.

Next to the expositive matter. Purpose of it, exclusion of the several imperfections, which, on every part of the field, and on this in particular, discourse is liable to labour under. These are, on the part of hearers and readers, nonconception and misconception: on the part of the discourse itself, unintelligibility, obscurity, indeterminateness, ambiguity. Against some of them, howsoever well framed the instrument in other respects, appropriate exposition will be an indispensable preventive remedy. But, to none of them, without the aid of another remedy, of the purely negative cast, namely, avoidance of lengthiness, can it be a sufficient one. As to lengthiness,—it applies, not only to the entire discourse, but also, and with different and still worse effect, to its component parts called sentences: and it is in this latter case that it is in a more particular degree productive of these several imperfections.

Efficient causes of lengthiness in sentences,—surplusage and involvedness. Of imperfection in both these shapes in conveyancing instruments, examples have been seen above.

Causes of imperfection in all these shapes, more particularly in that of ambiguity—not only mis-selection and lengthiness as above, but miscollocation likewise; miscollocation, whether applied to words or to phrases. For the avoidance of it, a set of rules will ere long be (it is hoped) at my learned master’s service. For the exemplification of imperfection in all manner of shapes in laws, matter in rich harvest may be found in the English statute book: the most conspicuous repository of every imperfection of which legislative language is susceptible. Towards remediation, a disposition has of late been expressed by those on whom it depends: but, before that is done which the proper end in view requires to be done—before the form in which they are presented is the same with that in use in ordinary discourse, with no other difference than what is necessary to the exclusion of the above-mentioned imperfections—not inconsiderable is the quantity of matter, which, in the form of directive rules, will require to be framed, borne in mind, and for that purpose consigned to black and white.

Collocation—is it a light matter? Is it without effect on practice? Read this one line, and judge: “Parliament,” says the statute (4 Ed. III. c. 14,) “shall be holden every year once, and more often if need be.” Miscollocation that. Proper collocation this: “Parliament shall be holden every year once—and, if need be, more often.” Not that there can be any adequate assurance, that by this or any other form of words, the would-be despot, in whose face this bridle was afterwards held up, would have held himself bound. But, if he had been—think of the effect that might have been produced in the destiny of England; and, through England, of the habitable globe. For general application, take this rule. Imbed,as above, your limitative clause in that one of two principal clauses, to which alone it is designed to be applied: imbed it in that one, instead of putting it at the end of the two, in one of which it is not intended to be applied.

Of exposition-requiring terms,—groupes, which it may be of use to distinguish, these:

I. Terms of universal jurisprudence. Examples: 1. Obligation. 2. Liability. 3. Right. 4. Power. 5. Responsibility. 6. Possession. Original source of exposition to the whole group, the idea of a command.

II. Terms peculiar to English-bred jurisprudence. Examples from the field of property-law: 1. Feoffment. 2. Lien. 3. Trusts. 4. Uses. 5. Springing Uses. 6. Executory Devises. 7. Tenures. 8. Mortmain. In regard to these,—in a code on the new plan, only in respect of the use made of them in such parts of the existing law as remains unabrogated,—will exposition be the proper course. From the enactive part of the new code, these, and all those words which nobody but a lawyer understands, should be carefully excluded:—those alone employed, which, with or without exposition therein given, will be understood,—not by lawyers alone, but by everybody else.

III. Terms belonging to the common stock of the language; but to which, by distortion, lawyers have given an import intelligible to none but themselves. Examples. 1. Applied to the subject-matter of property,—real, instead of the appropriate and Rome-bred denomination immoveable. 2. Personal instead of moveable. 3. Applied to a conveyance, voluntary instead of gratuitous. 4. Servitude, instead of partial ownership rights, with the correspondent obligations. Wanted, for this idea, a more expressive single-worded denomination. Servitude, a word unknown to English law: instead of a particular interest in a thing immoveable, the idea it presents to a non-lawyer is—the condition of a person:—a condition bordering upon slavery. Here I have to turn informer. Smuggled in, by this reformist of ours, has been this same word servitude: introduced, without notice, from continental into our insular language.

IV. Terms belonging to the common stock of the language,—but, by reason of their ambiguity, coupled with frequency of occurrence and importance, with reference to practice,—their import needing distinction and fixation:—terms universally intelligible, but by reason of their ambiguousness, not the less needing to be thus fitted for use. Examples: 1. Land. 2. Modifications of place. 3. Divisions of time. Sub-examples under this head: 1. Day, the portion of the year: day, in contradistinction to night. 2. Month lunar, month calendar. 3. Year ordinary, year bissextile.

V. Words there are, which, notwithstanding the all-comprehensiveness of their extent, and the need there will be of them in an all-comprehensive code, need not any express definition, their import being on each occasion rendered sufficiently determinate. To this head belong divers names of genera generalissima, besides the jurisprudential terms brought to view above. Examples of these terms: 1. Subject-matters of operation: 2. Operations. 3. Correspondent functions. 4. Operators. 5. Instruments. 6. Judicial and other mandates. 7. States of things. 8. Events. 9. Occurrences. A pretty copious collection of them may be seen brought together and applied, on the occasion of the employment given to them in the above-mentioned Constitutional Code, chap. ix. Ministers collectively. § 7, Statistic Function.

In the case of all those more especially influential terms,—an accompaniment, in no small degree beneficial, might be—a list of synonyms: synonyms to single words, equivalents to short phrases. Not very numerous, comparatively speaking, are perhaps the pairs of words, which, on every possible occasion, may be used interconvertibly, each with as much propriety as the other. But, on each occasion, where any difference has place, the context will suffice, for security, against the endeavour, on the part of litigants, to produce, on the ground of the attached synonym, a wrong interpretation of the word employed in the text. By a characteristic feature of the proposed system—the ratiocinative part,—an additional, and hitherto unexampled security will be afforded.

As to our learned Reformist’s Code,—short as it is, candidates in it for the honour of receiving exposition, I have made out a list of, not fewer than 289, belonging to one or other of the above divisions. These, however, in no inconsiderable number, apply not to this alone, but to every other portion of the Pannomion—the All-comprehensive Code. Of the whole stock belonging to that aggregate, the number, of course, cannot be small; but the field they belong to is proportionably extensive. The time for each of them to receive its exposition, is the time when the subject it belongs to, is for the first time brought upon the carpet.

Problems for solution: 1. How to distinguish terms needing, from terms not needing, exposition? 2. How to distinguish terms needing to receive exposition from terms fit to be employed in giving it? Scarcely, even, for statement, can room be found here; for solution, none: purpose of the statement, showing that they have not been, and saying that they ought not to be neglected.

Now as to the ratiocinative matter. For arrangements and correspondent enactments, in that part of the field of law to which the work in question more especially applies—standard of aptitude say, the disappointment preventive, or disappointment prevention principle,—or, more specifically, the unexpected-loss-preventing principle:—a branch this, of the greatest happiness principle, with a special denomination adapted to the matter belonging to this part of the field.—Prevent disappointment? Why? Answer. From disappointment, as everybody knows and feels, springs a pain; magnitude, proportioned to the value set by the individual on the benefit that had been expected. In this pain will be found the only reason, why any subject-matter of ownership should be given to the owner rather than to an usurper: to an usurper, by what denomination soever distinguished: intruder, diffusor, embezzler, thief, robber, and so on: the only reason why, to interests termed vested, more regard should be paid, than to interests not so denominated: the only reason why, for loss,—on any occasion, or from any source,—indemnity should be provided. From the non-possession of the millions of watches existing in other pockets,—you, who read this, do you suffer anything? Not you: and why not? because, not expecting to possess any one of them,—no pain of disappointment do you suffer from the nonpossession of it. But, if by any hand other than your own—a thief’s, an unjust claimant’s, or a judge’s, it were taken from you—yes; in any one of these cases a sufferer you would be:—quantum of suffering, in a ratio, compounded of the marketable value of the watch with the indigency of your pecuniary circumstances, to the purpose of replacing it, and the relative sensibility of your frame.

Here, then, is an intelligible standard, and the only one. Behold now the effects produced by the hitherto universal want of it. Succedaneums, in number infinite; but not one of them expressive of anything, besides the ungrounded sentiment, or say mental sensation, entertained, on the occasion, by him who speaks:—a sentiment of approbation or disapprobation, expressed under the expectation of finding, or producing, the like on the part of hearers, but not suggestive of any ground whatever, for the sentiment so entertained.

Examples deduced from this work of our Author’s are the following:—“1. Natural Justice, p. 118, 119. 2. Equity, 119. 3. Natural Equity, p. 129. 4. Justice, pp. 161, 221. 5. Natural feeling, p. 203. 6. Harsh law . . . . cries feelingly for correction. 7. Our present law violates the first principle of property, p. 220.” First principle of property? What then is its name? None does our author himself give to it: none has any person else ever given to it. Not so much as that given in Rome-bred law, in the quasi-Hibernian style, to the species of contract denominated the undenominated. Yet, for it to have a name—and highly urgent is its need of one—somebody must stand godfather. Well, then, this is done. As to the thing itself, gratifying it is to me to see my learned master already recognising it, and applying it. Witness two passages, § 114; “One claimant ought not to disappoint another:” p. 148, “The lord’s gain is far from commensurate to his tenant’s loss.” Compare this with what, by the courtesy of England, is called reasoning, in judge-made law!

The honest and excellent work in French law on this subject, Le Parfait Notaire, has been already mentioned. In cutting open the leaves of it, no fewer than fourteen of these gaseous standards caught my eye. A list I took of them has unfortunately been mislaid. In addition to those above-mentioned, “Policy, Right Reason, Natural Reason, Law of Nature,” &c. &c. were of the number. In many instances, they were even brought together, and stated as conflicting. Now, then, of these non-entities, suppose eight on one side, six, and no more, on the other,—then indeed should we have a majority. But suppose fourteen of these puissances ranged, seven on one side, seven on the opposite side; if these are to be taken for reasons, the most clear-sighted and decisive judge may avow himself a Lord Eldon without shame.

Now as to our learned author. Expositive matter he has given us a specimen of in 10 out of 118 articles: namely, in Art. 5, Land; 28, Execution of a Deed; 29, Conveyance; 30, Settlement; 31, Charge; 32, Assignment; 33, Release; 35, Execution of a will; 74, Warranty; 88, Trustee.*

His mode of exposition is,—in the case of all but Land, Execution of a Deed, Execution of a Will, and Trustee,—definition per genus et differentiam: in the case of Land, not found referable to any general head: the expression not quite so correct as could have been wished: ground-works and underground-works not found comprised in it. In the case of the remaining three, paraphrasis; of which, elsewhere.

But, with this, or any other incomplete assemblage, we shall not be satisfied: nothing less than an all-comprehensive one does the purpose require. Composed of the two first of these five sorts of matter is his Code, distinguished from the rest of the work by being printed in italics; of the ratiocinative, instructional, and exemplificational indistinguishably blended, the rest of the work; rest, residue, and remainder in the language of learned gentlemen.

At the head of each article, a notice,—affording, by means of one or more of these five denominations, intimation of the nature and design of the articles,—is a document, that has presented itself as having its use, with the exception of the exemplificational, which had not as yet occurred to me; they accordingly exhibit themselves throughout the whole texture of the so often mentioned Constitutional Code.* Unfortunately, so to order matters, as that under no one of the four first of the above-mentioned five heads, shall any matter be inserted, that can be referable to any or others of them,—has not been found practicable. On the contrary, all the changes, of which the number of heads prefixt to the same article is susceptible, will perhaps be found rung upon them.

Nomenclature, for a series, or chain, of any length, of the results of successive divisional operations, performed upon the same integral subject-matter. Principle of denomination, the numerical. Subject-matters, to which, in the character of integers, it is applicable. 1. Our globe, or any portion of it. 2. The three kingdoms metaphorically so called—the mineral, vegetable, and animal. 3. Weights and Measures. 4. A mass of discourse committed to writing—a literary work. In this last instance it is that the idea applies, on the present occasion, to our author’s case.

Denominations, section, bissection, trissection, quadrisection, and so on. Correspondent visible sign for the eye, the present mark employed for designating a section, a double long ff—; between its two lines the figure indicative of the number of divisional operations, to the result of which it is employed to give expression. By the little swelling produced by this pregnancy, no peremptory objection will, it is hoped, be found produced: or, to avoid it, instead of being imbedded between the two ff, the numeral may have a single f, in a fine stroke drawn through it. By these little arrangements, simple as they are, order might, for the first time, be substituted to the as yet universally existing chaos: and, to an inconveniently inadequate, an adequate stock of denominations substituted. Part, Book, Chapter, Section, Article, Title; scarcely beyond this does the list extend; and, as to the order in which they are made to follow one another, the changes are in a manner rung upon it.

Now as to our author and this his work. Denominations employed in the order in which they here follow, these: 1. Part. 2. Title. 3. Chapter. 4. Section. 5. No. At this last stage, his stock of denominations is exhausted: the consequence is,—that for the results of the division made of the aggregate to which he has given the name of No. are employed the words firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, fifthly, all in a state of anarchy, without any common head for keeping them in a state of society.

Of all these denominations, section (from seco, to cut) is the only one completely characteristic. Reason for employing it—its having, as above, an appropriate sign belonging to it. Article followed by No. there may be a convenience in employing,—for the last, whatsoever may be the number of the intervening divisional operations: these being the two denominations most commonly so employed.

Alike applicable to whatever languages are in use in any nation—this mode of designation might form part and parcel of an universal language. In the above-mentioned proposed Constitutional Code, I regret to think it will not be found applied: it had not occurred time enough.

Two other little tasks, at parting, for our Hercules.

I. For the instruction of testators and their draughtsmen,—a paper, exhibiting a picture of the most commonly-exemplified diversifications, which the state of a person’s family connexions admits of, with a view to the provisions desirable, and likely to be desired to be made for them, in a last Will. For such provisions as require to be made by a Deed, this picture is already afforded by the Family Settlement Deed. But in this case the provision goes not beyond a future contingent family. Remain, for the objects of the hereproposed provision, all such families as are already in existence.

II. Provision, against the mischief, liable to be done by the retroactive effects of the proposed new system:—mischief, of the nature of that, by which the name of an ex-postfacto law in English-bred law language (of kin to which is that of privilegium, in Ciceronian and Rome-bred law-language) has with so much justice been rendered a name of reproach. Here, if I mistake not, he will feel the convenience of taking the disappointment-preventing principle for his guide;—and, doing so, will find in it an adequate defence against all objections. What the occasion seems to call for is—a detailed exposition of the arrangements proposed for the exclusion of mischief from this source. Self-regarding prudence presents itself as joining with benevolence in calling for a careful attention to this subject. On this part of the ground, I see the enemy lying in wait for him. His defences, I fear, are not, as yet, in quite so good a condition as the occasion requires.

One passage exhibits a spectacle I was not prepared for: where our author, taking a sudden spring, mounting Pegasus, and from civil, making an excursion—an uncalled-for excursion—into constitutional law. It is in page 206. Libellous the result: “feelings,” not the less acute by being democratic, “hurt” by it. Revenge is sweet: retaliation cheaper than prosecution.

Author.—“The many are a rope of sand.”

Reviewer.—Say, are they so in Yankeeland?

Answers, like Irish Echo, envious Muse.

Was it, to propitiate those on whom every thing depends for success, that this tirade was inserted? If yes, when Sterne’s Accusing Angel goes up with the passage, the Recording Angel shall have my consent for dropping his obliterating tear on it.

To preserve myself from the consciousness, as well as the imputation, of injustice,—one last word more. Bringing to view supposed imperfections and deficiencies has all along been the chief occupation of this Review:—imperfections, for correction; deficiencies, for supply. Of the mass of useful information, for which we are indebted to our philanthropic reformist,—of the ability, as well as honest zeal, displayed in the exposure of the peccant matter of which the existing system is almost exclusively composed,—of the ingenuity, manifested in so large a proportion of the remedies suggested,—no mention has been made but in the most general terms. But, to have conveyed any thing like an adequate idea of the merits of the work, would have required what, in classical editor’s language, is called a perpetual comment on it, including a reprint of the greatest part of it.

As to myself, never, but for my learned master, should I have obtained any tolerable insight into this chaos. No probable further prolongation of my life would have sufficed for enabling me to look into it without the lantern with which he has furnished me—“lucerna pedibus meis:”—to look into it—I mean for the only purpose—the remedial—for which I could have brought myself to look into it.

—Hoping that such rare talent, coupled with such still more rare virtue, may not be lost to the world, or wait long, ere it be employed by those in whom alone is the power of giving effect to it,—I conclude.

[e ]Sell.] By this one word sell, reference is made to two distinct topics: 1. The quantity of interest disposed of; 2. The absence or presence of an equivalent: only in so far as regards the quantity of interest, does this topic coincide with that to which reference is made by the words purchase of the absolute property, as per note b:—benefit of transmission, to successors determined by the choice of parties, included.

As to what concerns equivalents,—the transfer may be, as here, with and for an equivalent, or without one: if with and for, the equivalent may be either, as here, of money (call it in this case pecuniary)—or of money’s worth, in any other shape (call it in this case, quasi-pecuniary): if without equivalent,—the transfer is gratuitous; the transaction may be termed a gift; the instrument a deed of gift.*Grantor is a term which—where the transfer is not gratuitous, but for money—our learned draughtsman, I observe, employs on several occasions. It has, however, the inconvenience of presenting to view the idea of gratuitousness. Disposer, a term having for its conjugates the verb to dispose, and the substantive disposition—a term in familiar use—would have the convenience of including the three transactions, sale, mortgage, and marriage-settlement. For a correlative to it, an obvious term is disposee: and this same termination ee is indeed used in the same sense in the word mortgagee, and in many other words. But, it has the disadvantage of presenting to view the subject-matter disposed of; in which case no person is, unless he has the misfortune of being a slave. Accordingly, if it depended on me to choose a word,—a word I would rather employ is receptor: receiver—the word already in use—having the disadvantage of presenting, exclusively, the idea of a person, whose interest in the subject-matter is only that of a trustee. In the case of an immoveable subject-matter of property, as here,—gratuitous transmission, as everybody sees, is not, by a great deal, so frequent as in the case of a moveable; obvious cause of the difference, the difference in respect of value. Nor yet (as everybody knows) is gift of an estate—absolutely without example. This, therefore, is a mode of transfer, or say transmission, for which also provision will require to be made. In the arrangements proper to be made in the code for the two cases,—one difference, there is, which is highly important, and not unobvious. In the case where an equivalent is received,—the eventual obligation designated by the word warranty, presents itself as being prescribed by established principles: not so, in the case where no equivalent is received. In both cases, this word warranty presents itself as an obligation, of which,—either in the draught or in the code, with reference to it from the draught,—express mention should be made: and of which it should accordingly be said, either that it is, or that it is not, intended to have place.

[8 ]Weston, Shropshire.] Between wordiness and sufficiency some difference, it is hoped, will now have been seen exemplified:—every superfluous word is an additional cloud. Of wordiness, in the degree in which it is exemplified by English law practice, so far from sufficiency, deficiency is the result. For, when on this or that occasion, such is the quantity of the heap of particulars inserted, that the draughtsman is not able to bear the whole list continually in mind, the consequence is,—that on this or that other occasion, though exactly parallel to it, and calling for exactly the same list,—some of them are omitted, or other added or substituted: whereupon, in argument, the difference, in legislative or professional expression, is, of course, made use of as a ground for difference in justicial decision. Of this sort of style,—expensiveness and uncertainty, with the profit from both, were the manifest final causes, and never were ends more abundantly accomplished.

Now as to Registration. Uses, as applied to instruments of conveyance and contract relating to property in immoveables, these—

1. Preservation of these documentary evidences from loss and destruction.

2. Preservation of them from falsification.

3. Exclusion of corresponding counterfeit documents.

4. In so far as the document is proof, of incumbrance applying to the property of the possessor of the estate, in relation to which the document registered operates as evidence of title,—affording, to all persons disposed to give him credit for money or money’s worth, the means of guarding themselves against loss by insolvency on his part.

5. Affording, by means of the aggregate of the evidence thus preserved and rendered susceptible of appropriate publication,—information of the statistical kind, capable of being turned to account by government for the benefit of the public in a variety of ways.

Of these five good effects,—the first gives security to the owner of the estate, against accident; the second and third, against fraud and depredation, at his expense, on the part of the rest of mankind; the fourth, to the rest of mankind against fraud on his part; the fifth contributes to form a basis for the exercise of the legislative and administrative functions.

Alive to the importance of this means of security,—Mr. Humphreys, taking it up upon its present footing, affords for the improvement of it a quantity of highly valuable matter, as to which I must content myself with referring the reader to his work. I promised him a treat; I now fulfil that promise; such if it be to him, such will the invention I have to present to view be to every reader, in proportion as in his eyes security, to a degree beyond everything that as yet has been experienced, or can have been so much as anticipated, is an object of regard. By it, if narrow and sinister interest in powerful breasts can but be induced to permit the employment of it—by it, will preservation and appropriate publication be given to documentary evidence, to whatever purpose needed: preservation, and what is of correspondent importance, equally unexampled cheapness. It is an invention of which I can speak my admiration the more freely, as not having in my own person any part in it.

For the description of it, and in a more particular manner, of its uses,—I have but to transcribe a passage of an about-to-be published proposed Constitutional Code, ch. viii. Prime Minister, § 10, Registration System.

“Art. 1. For the more commodious, correct, prompt, uniform, and all-comprehensive performance, of the process and function of registration in all the several departments and sub-departments—as likewise on the part of the Prime Minister, for the correspondent receipt by him of all documents, the receipt, and, as occasion calls, the perusal of which may be necessary to the most apt exercise of the several functions belonging to his own office—he will, as soon as may be, cause to be established, and employed in practice, in the several offices of the several departments and their sub-departments, the sub-legislative included, the mode of writing styled the manifold mode.*

“Art. 2. Particular uses of the manifold mode of writing are as follows:—

By the multitude of exemplars, produced at an expense which, with the exception of that of the paper, is less than the expense of two in the ordinary mode it affords means for furnishing, at that small expense, to parties on both sides, for themselves and assistants, all such documents as they can stand in need of.

“Art. 3. Every exemplar being, to an iota, exactly and necessarily the same as every other, the expense of revision by skilled labour is thereby saved, as well as unintentional aberration rendered impossible.

“Art. 4. An exemplar, kept in the Registrar’s office, will serve as a standard, whereby a security will be afforded against all intentional falsification, on the part of the possessor of any other exemplar.

“Art. 5. By the reduction thus effected in the expense of all judicial writings emanating from the judicatory,—the protection afforded by judication in its best form,—to wit, that which has for its ground orally elicited and immediately minuted evidence,—will be brought within the reach of a vast proportion of the whole number of the people, to whom it could not otherwise be afforded.

“Art. 6. A collateral benefit—a degree of security hitherto unexampled against destruction of judicial documents, by calamity or delinquency—may thus be afforded, by the lodging of exemplars in divers offices in which they would be requisite for other purposes: exemplars of documents from the immediate judicatories being, at the appellate judicatory, requisite for the exercise of its judicial functions; and, in the office of justice-minister, for the exercise of his inspective and melioration-suggestive functions.

“Art 7. To save the expense of custody, and prevent the useful from being drowned in the mass of useless matter,—the legislature will make arrangements for the periodical destruction or elimination of such as shall appear useless: care being at all times taken, for the preservation of all such as can continue to be of use, either eventually for a judicial purpose, or for the exercise of the statistic and melioration-suggestive functions, as per ch. ix. § 11, Ministers collectively: ch. xi. Ministers severally, § 2, Legislative Minister: and ch. xii. Judiciary collectively, § 19, Judge’s contested-interpretation-reporting function: § 20, Judge’s eventually-emendative function: § 21, Judge’s sistitive or execution-staying function: § 22, Judge’s pre-interpretative function: § 23, Judge’s non-contestational-evidence-elicitative function.”

Here, then, of every such conveyance,—without any addition to the expense, the trifling expense of the paper excepted,—we have no fewer than eight copies, and upon occasion as far as twelve, no one differing in a single tittle from any other; and this identity effected, without a particle of that skilled labour, the purchase of which, on the present plan, can never fail to be so seriously expensive. On this plan, unless it were for concealment of particulars, no need would there be for any such inadequate representative of the original, as that which, under the name of a memorial, is employed in present practice.

To each one of the parties, how numerous soever, an exemplar would be given of course. To obviate the case,—at present so pregnant, not only with delay, vexation, and expense, but even with loss of estate, for want of a producible title,—as many exemplars might be had by one party, as there were distinguishable parcels, which he might anticipate an occasion for making disposition of. So, when it happens that one estate, disposed of, the whole of it, by one and the same instrument, is situated in the territories of registration offices more than one,—so many of these offices, as there are, so many exemplars may there be. And finally, if, whether for ulterior security against accidents, or for all-comprehensive government purposes, it were found desirable that, for the whole territory of the state there should be one general office, in which an aggregate of the documents received into the several local offices should be kept—here, is an additional accommodation, that might be afforded with a comparatively inconsiderable addition to the expense.

For, the documents being thus distributed, every syllable of each would thus be made secure—not only against deperition by accidents, but against all possibility of falsification. For, suppose, for example, one of the parties dishonest, and disposed to commit this crime, what possibility of a successful issue could he contemplate? In his own exemplar he makes the requisite alteration: but what can it avail him, when, in case of the slightest degree of suspicion, there lie, in the custody of a public functionary, as well as in that of each of the several parties, so many exemplars, to which, for any such purpose as falsification, all access on his part is perfectly hopeless.

For the application of the registration system to the case of dispositions made of property, the appropriate course might be this: adequately-registered estates, all of them, to the extent allowed by law, secured against eventual as well as against actual alienation: secured against it, no estates not so registered. A charge is an efficient cause of eventual alienation: considered in respect of the subject-matter it applies to, a charge may be termed general, or say generally-applying, or all-comprehensively applying, when it applies to the whole of the property belonging to the charger, as in the case of a judgment or a recognisance; specially-applying, when it is only to one particular parcel of his property, are that expressly mentioned in it, that it applies: as in the case of a mortgage, or a marriage settlement.

The misfortune is that, be the registration and publication system ever so perfect, no lender of a comparatively small sum,—no person supplying goods or labour to a comparatively small value,—can have in his mind at all times a sufficiently correct conception of the solvency of the landholder whom he serves: the consequence is—that every estate non-alienable for debt, is a ready source,—and, at the pleasure of the owner, an instrument, of fraud. But, so long as the fraud is protected and encouraged by law, the impossibility, of doing every thing, that ought to be done, affords not any reason why as much as can be done should not be done; but, on the contrary, it affords a reason why as much as can be done should be done. True it is, that against loss, in comparatively small masses,—or against loss out of income,—small, as above, will be the security thus afforded: but, against loss in large masses; against loss out of capital; against the too frequently happening total losses of capital;—it would, in a tolerable degree, be effectual. Under “Matchless Constitution,” it is true, no regard for the bulk of the community can rationally be expected: but, for the class to which the rulers themselves belong, more or less regard may be expected on the part of each: and the greater the number to which, to whatever classes belonging, the benefit can be made to extend, the more fully will the wishes of a well-wisher to all alike, be accomplished.

My learned master, I observe, makes much and good use of French law; but he seems not to be aware of the pattern of good management afforded by that law in this part of the field.

Under Matchless Constitution, interest being throughout the whole at daggers drawn with duty,—in this case in particular, the same individual being concerned in conveyances and in suits, the right hand adds to its other occupations that of making business for the left. Thus, under English-bred law: not so under Rome-bred law: in particular, in France. There, the class of notaries is a class altogether distinct from that of other lawyers. In that country, the other professional classes cannot indeed but be more or less deeply tinged with the vices inherent in the profession: howsoever less deeply than here, where, in every part of it, the whole chaos—substantive law, procedure law, and judicial establishment—has with such matchless skill and success been adapted to the purpose of unpunishable depredation. But, in the notary class, on the contrary, to such a degree of intimacy is brought, in that instance, the connexion between interest and duty—in the notary class, may be seen an example of a degree of integrity, scarcely to be matched in any other profit-seeking occupation whatsoever; accordingly, in that, above all others, may be seen an object of universal confidence. Hands altogether pure from the waters of strife, the notary adds to the trust of the conveyancer that of the banker: but with this difference—that it is only during short intervals that the money remains in his hands; those intervals, to wit, in which such custody is requisite for the purpose of the negotiation; and that, during those same intervals, he keeps the money without lending it.

Out of this state of things sprung just now an individual occurrence, more forcibly probative than can commonly be afforded of the truth of a general allegation. In France, the notaries form a sort of body corporate. In Paris, an individual of this profession went off, t’other day, with the value of about two or three thousand pounds sterling destined for a purchase. Scarcely had any such act of delinquency been remembered: a commotion, like an electric shock, went through the whole body: on recovery, they made up a common purse, and replaced the loss. In England, Ireland, Scotland (for in Scotland this institution of Rome-bred law has not, to any considerable extent, if at all, been adopted)—in these countries, Diogenes, with his lantern, might trudge on till the last drop of his oil was spent, ere he found the object of his search: in France, where they exist by thousands, he would save his oil, and the labour of laying a trap for his joke.

Apropos of notaries. I will take the liberty of suggesting to my learned master, the adding to his French-law library the standard book on the subject, Le Parfait Notaire, &c. par A. J. Massé, 3 volumes 4to. Paris, 1825, cinquième edition; the precedents in it he would find of a very different complexion from those which have given him so much trouble: much superior in aptitude to those in the Scotch law-book, intituled, The Office of a Notary-Public: in my copy, 4th edition, 1792.

Notaries being on the carpet, a word I must put in, in favour of an humble class of late years brought into notice. Poor man’s notaries they may be styled, or poor notaries, or pure notaries: pure notaries, in contradistinction to attorney notaries, as pure surgeons, as by some styled, in contradistinction to apothecary surgeons. But pure my notaries may be styled in an additional sense—in the moral sense: pure from the sinister interest which the attorney notary and the barrister notary have, in making, with the instruments in question, work for themselves in the field of litigation. They are for the most part (it is said) country school-masters. These, the attorney notaries, have, as is natural, been, for some time labouring to put out of their way. Petitions for this purpose have for years been coming in. Alleged grounds—of course, relative inaptitude of these intruders: alleged consequences—immediate inaptitude, in all imaginable forms, on the part of their instruments; ultimately, increase of litigation on the part of their employers. But, if these same alleged, were the real, ultimate consequence,—with no such petitions would honourable table he encumbered. So says evidentia rei. Now as to evidence ab extrà. That, of the alleged inaptitude, by due search the country over, a body of evidence, larger than could be wished, might be found—the present state of the law is, of itself, sufficient to render but too probable: evidence, of the satisfactoriness of which to an appropriate committee, under the guidance of learned gentlemen, no great doubt need be entertained. But, as in other cases, so in this,—from positive inaptitude no conclusion can be drawn, capable of affording a sufficient warrant for the desired practical result, unless it be also comparative. Unfortunately for the unlearned clients of the unlearned advocate,—on this ground likewise, learned gentlemen are prepared to ride triumphant. Of law-learnedness in this and the higher grade together, tests over and over again established, approved, and incontestably and exclusively probative, two:—the financial, and the convivial, or say manducatory. Financial: clerkship articles duty, £120; admission duty, £25; total, on capital, £145; add, on income, £8. Tests preferred by Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, presumably the financial; by Mr. Secretary Peel, declaredly the convivial; by their humble servant, the examinational.

Be this as it may, for clearing away every shadow of objection on the ground of want of intellectual aptitude,—nothing is wanting but the proposed appropriate code, with an appendix composed of the proposed authorized instruments, adapted to the purpose by the brevity and intelligibility above exemplified. This boon granted, better qualified for the business would be the least learned country schoolmaster, than, under the reign of the present Chaos, the most learned of learned gentlemen can be. In this comparatively halcyon state of things,—in matters of small concern, the instruments of sale and mortgage, together with ordinary leases, wills of personal property, and the most ordinary species of contract, such as apprenticeship articles, hirings,&c. would remain to the humble class of notaries; family settlements and wills of land, to the elevated class. Even thus the business of the unlearned class would naturally be mostly confined within the field marked out by the ready prepared and authorized blank forms: while, for anything special, recourse would be had, by those who could afford it, to the learned class. As to examination,—plans, applicable to this as well as higher purposes, will, before the meeting of parliament, be at every body’s command: title of the work, “Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized.”

Before registration is done with, one word as to the means of enforcement. Speaking of the instrument,—in case of non-observance of enactments, “utterly void,” says page 312. Nor is this (it is feared) the only page. Observe now the effects. In every case, client sinned against; lawyer the sinner: client punished; lawyer unpunished. In the present case, note the situation in which the client is placed. Under the name of a memorial, an instrument, containing matter under no fewer than eight specified heads, is required to be drawn up “in the form or to the effect of” a certain article (Art. 101,) . . . . “but with any alterations or additions which the nature of the case may require: otherwise,” that is to say if, by the draughtsman, in respect of any one of these particulars, anything is done which, by an equity judge, may be pronounced not to be to that same effect—“every such deed” (it is said) “shall be utterly void.” Now, then, as to the effects. Frequently, in the shape of capital, is the whole property of the purchaser of an estate embarked in the purchase: not to speak of the cases where, the purchase money being more than his all, a part of it remains charged on the estate, after the estate has passed into his hands. Think what, with a trap of this sort set for him, the hapless non-lawyer has to do, to save himself from it. At his peril he must turn lawyer: do, what by the supposition he is unable to do: for, if able, no need would he have for the professional assistance. But, in this case, an indemnity is provided for him: return of his money. Indemnity? Oh yes. Source of it a few years of equity suit, against the perhaps ruined man, by whose indigence most commonly the sale was produced. Lawyer ruins client, loses not a sixpence, and perhaps gets for himself a new suit. For, everywhere so it is—as in procedure, so in conveyancing; making flaw in draught, makes more business for draughtsman. But reputation? Oh, as to this, small here is the risk: known uncertainty of the law offers its ready cover to all learned sins. Thus, while in the shape of pain of nullity, punishment is in appearance employed in the prevention of the mischief, reward is in reality employed in the augmentation of it. Punishment? Yes: and what punishment? Punishment, the evil of which rivalizes with those which are inflicted for the most mischievous crimes. Not unfrequently, sooner than subject himself to any such forfeiture, the defendant—simple debtor or criminal—has been known to embrace imprisonment for life.

Then as to time. Thirty days fixed inexorably for all cases. But who shall reckon up all the accidents, by any of which, without a particle of blame to the purchaser, performance of what is required, within that time, may be prevented? Day reckoned from, “the date of the deed:”—a day hereby supposed to be, in all cases one and the same for all parties: but how often, the act in question is of necessity the work of different days, has been seen above.

One instance more, page 185. Transgression, misapplication of any one of the three obscurified terms—trust, use, and confidence: penalty, here too expressed by the words “utterly void,” applied to the “assurances,” whatever they may be. Sin here, in every case exclusively the lawyer’s: client altogether incapable of ever committing it. Author’s design, in this case as in all others, meritorious. But, mode of execution how unfortunate!

Conveyances and contracts, which it is the intention of the law should not take effect—yes, to these, it is true, the effect indicated by the words void and nullity, and their conjugates and quasi-conjugates cannot but be attached. But then these cases ought to be, as without difficulty they might be, made known to all clients: known, by being particularized in the Code; and every lawyer, participating in the formation of such forbidden arrangements, might and should be, made punitionally and compensationally responsible.

As to our Reformist,—in extenuation, with but too much truth, may he plead on this occasion universal practice. But, the dereliction of it is one which he will see the necessity of adding to the list of his so highly-needed innovations. Great, indeed, is the progress he has made, in the shaking off the shackles of habit—result of interest-begotten and authority-begotten prejudice: one effort more, however, the present case demands at his hands.

But, what reasonable expectation can you have (it may be asked) of seeing the force of law given to a means of security so galling to the feelings of those on whom the giving that force to it depends? especially if there be any approach to truth in what is said of the proportionable number of those, the nakedness of whose property would, by such an instrument of exposure, be uncovered? Answer. In the very modesty alluded to, as a certain cause of defeat, I descry a source of success. In nothing but the fear of such exposure could any man find any motive for opposition. On the bringing in the bill, it might, without difficulty, be sufficiently made known, that the Noes will, all of them, be carefully noted down, and rendered universally notorious. In the instance of each opponent, that which would, in this way, be made universally known is—that, by a difference, the amount of which was matter of shame or uneasiness to him, his actual property wanted more or less of being equal to his supposed property; all that would remain concealed would be—the exact amount. But to any man—to what purpose can such concealment be desirable? Two distinguishable ones alone have any application to the case: obtaining money on a false pretence of solvency; or obtaining respect on a false appearance of opulence: cheating creditors alone; or cheating them and everybody else.

Now as to machinery. In his haste to arrive at the essentials of his plan, our reformist seems, on this occasion, to have taken up for his support, without sufficient examination, a broken reed of authority; and the consequence is—a choice such as will be seen. No objection, however, does this oversight make to the essentials: for,other machinery (it will also be seen) the case furnishes:—machinery also in use—machinery simple, well constructed, and adequate.

Sets of Commissioners (so say his “Preliminary Enactments,”) at least two; all of them (it is presumed) ambulatory. Annual expense, what? Amount not less than £624,000 a-year;* duration, of course as long as said commissioners can contrive to render it. Then comes the retired allowance system, and to year substitutes life. For justice, for security for the whole landed property of the kingdom, no such sum could be spared.—Royal amateurs want it for palaces; Lord Liverpool, for churches.

So much for the complicated, the slow-working, the expensive, machinery. Behold now the simple, the quick-working, the unexpensive. Precedents six; latest dates of each as follows:—Poor Returns, first accessible batch, anno 1787; (a prior one of 1777, not accessible;) second batch, 1804; third, and last batch, 1818. Population Returns, first batch, anno 1812; second, and last batch, 1822. Scotch Education Returns, 1826.

Mode of eliciting the information,—author’s the oral; reviewer’s the epistolary. For judiciary purposes, for general purposes,—incomparably the best mode, confessedly the oral; the epistolary being but a make-shift—to save delay, vexation, and expense, on the part of the examinees; for the particular purpose here in question, probable delay being much less; vexation of examinees much less; expense next to 0.

Number of elicitators;—upon author’s plan, as above, 312; upon reviewer’s plan, one. Mr. Rickman, whose appropriate aptitude shines with so steady a lustre in the Population Returns, is at his post. House of Commons’ clerk finds labour; Honourable House, authority and auspices; Mr. Freeling, with his mails, conveyance.

Time, occupied before the information is completed—on author’s plan, what has been seen: on reviewer’s plan, as follows:—Poor Returns, in the case of batch the first, time not apparent; Poor Returns, batch the second, date of the latest matter, 12th April 1803; date of order for printing, 10th July 1804: interval, months 15.—Poor Returns, batch third and last,—date of latest matter, last day of 1815; date of order for printing, 3d March 1818; date of order for elicitation not ascertainable without a search, the result of which would not pay for time and labour.—Population Returns, batch the first,—day appointed for the commencement of the operation in the parishes, 22d May 1811; month in which the digest of them was delivered in, June 1812, as per signature, John Rickman; interval occupied in collecting and digesting, not more than 13 months.—Population Returns, batch the second,—year appointed for the commencement of the inquiry, 1811; day and month not apparent; month in which digest was delivered in, June 1822; presumable interval occupied in collecting and digesting,—as before, 13 months.—Lastly, Scotch Education Returns,—date of the House of Commons’ resolution in which they originated, 30th March 1825; date of Under Secretary of State’s letter to the Lord Advocate in consequence, the very next day, 31st March 1825; date of letter from Lord Advocate, sending the first part of the whole of the information, 14th February 1826. Number of pages in the printed copy, 985: interval thus employed in collecting, not more than ten and a half months; within which time was performed a vibrating system of correspondence, composed of divers vibrations—letters written backwards and forwards.

In the case in question,—would any greater length of time be necessary? any grounds for any apprehension to that effect, can they be assigned? None whatever. Places constituting the local objects of inquiry and sources of information,—in those cases the parishes; in these, the manors. Reluctance as to the communicating the information,—in any greater degree probable in this case than in those? No; nor yet so much. In those cases, indemnities being out of the question, nothing was to be got by furnishing the information, nothing to be lost by not furnishing. On the present occasion, more or less may in general be lost, by omitting to furnish the information; more or less perhaps to be got by furnishing it; for, to each individual from whom the information would be required, the consequence of omission would be, that his interest would be disposed of, and in case of loss on his part, no indemnity would he receive.

Il ne faut pas multiplier les êtres sans necessité, says a well-known French proverb: and, of all multiplicable beings,—among those in whose instance the practice of that rule of arithmetic is most mischievous, are locusts.

As to our author’s machinery for registration and other purposes,—his quarter-sessions chairmanand his clerk of the peace—still more egregiously unapt is it for this than for its present purposes. But, to his plan, this inaptitude forms no objection: only for elucidation (so he expressly declares,) only for elucidation, does he bring it on the carpet. No fault is it of Mr. Humphreys, if, in the whole establishment, there is not a single judicatory that is in any tolerable degree fit for any other purpose than those for which, under Matchless Constitution, all judicatories, with but here and there an exception, have been invented—putting power into the hands, and other people’s money into the pockets, of the inventors. A machinery adapted to his purposes—a judiciary establishment, with a correspondent procedure code,—each of them the first that every really had for its sole object the giving execution and effect, with the minimum of daily vexation and expense, to the enactments of the substantive branch of the law,—is in progress; and the judiciary establishment plan will be in the printer’s hands within a few weeks after the present pages are out of them.

Before concluding, I will take the liberty of suggesting, for his consideration, as briefly as possible, a few supposed improvements, of which his plan presents itself to me as susceptible: to do whatsoever else may be in my power, towards lightening his labour, and promoting his generous designs, would be a sincere pleasure to me. If, for the most part, these same suggestions should be found to apply to every other part of the field of law, as well as to the part on which his beneficent labours have been more particularly employed,—they will not, on that account, be the less excusable.

Distinguishable shapes, which the matter of a proposed code may, throughout the whole texture of it, have occasion to assume, five: the enactive, the expositive, the ratiocinative, the instructional, the exemplificative. Of the exemplifications of them exhibited in this work of our learned author, presently: in English statute law, sole shape exemplified,—the enactive. As to this same enactive shape, with an exclusion put upon all the others—nothing, with a view to rulers’ purposes, could or can be more convenient. Expression of will this, nothing more: talent necessary, none beyond what is manifested by every child as soon as it can speak. Not so any of the four other sorts of matter. Not to speak of Russian, Italian, and Spanish translations—of the expositive and the ratiocinative, the French work, in which samples of them are exhibited, has been before the public ever since 1802, and another there has just been occasion to bring to view. Grades of functionaries, to either or both of which the instructional portion of the matter may be virtually addressed—subordinates, with a view to execution and effect; future legislators, for the better explanation of the designs, with a view to fulfilment.

Case to which the exemplificational more particularly applies, that of an as yet only proposed code. Legal systems, from which the matter two: may be derived, two: the home, and the aggregate of the most approved foreign ones: the home system, for the purpose of exhibiting in detail the disorder for which the code is the proposed remedy, and examples of particular arrangements, in themselves of a beneficial nature, but in respect of which the system, taken in the aggregate, is chargeable,—on account of the narrowness of the application made of them, and, throughout the remainder of the field, the employment of flagrantly-unapt arrangements, to the exclusion of them: the foreign, for the purpose of furnishing, under this other head, in support of what is proposed, the instruction afforded by experience. Note, that this same exemplificational matter must not be confounded with the matter composed of those examples, which there may be found occasion to give as an inseparable part of the enactive, though they may be considered as belonging also to the expositive.

Next to the expositive matter. Purpose of it, exclusion of the several imperfections, which, on every part of the field, and on this in particular, discourse is liable to labour under. These are, on the part of hearers and readers, nonconception and misconception: on the part of the discourse itself, unintelligibility, obscurity, indeterminateness, ambiguity. Against some of them, howsoever well framed the instrument in other respects, appropriate exposition will be an indispensable preventive remedy. But, to none of them, without the aid of another remedy, of the purely negative cast, namely, avoidance of lengthiness, can it be a sufficient one. As to lengthiness,—it applies, not only to the entire discourse, but also, and with different and still worse effect, to its component parts called sentences: and it is in this latter case that it is in a more particular degree productive of these several imperfections.

Efficient causes of lengthiness in sentences,—surplusage and involvedness. Of imperfection in both these shapes in conveyancing instruments, examples have been seen above.

Causes of imperfection in all these shapes, more particularly in that of ambiguity—not only mis-selection and lengthiness as above, but miscollocation likewise; miscollocation, whether applied to words or to phrases. For the avoidance of it, a set of rules will ere long be (it is hoped) at my learned master’s service. For the exemplification of imperfection in all manner of shapes in laws, matter in rich harvest may be found in the English statute book: the most conspicuous repository of every imperfection of which legislative language is susceptible. Towards remediation, a disposition has of late been expressed by those on whom it depends: but, before that is done which the proper end in view requires to be done—before the form in which they are presented is the same with that in use in ordinary discourse, with no other difference than what is necessary to the exclusion of the above-mentioned imperfections—not inconsiderable is the quantity of matter, which, in the form of directive rules, will require to be framed, borne in mind, and for that purpose consigned to black and white.

Collocation—is it a light matter? Is it without effect on practice? Read this one line, and judge: “Parliament,” says the statute (4 Ed. III. c. 14,) “shall be holden every year once, and more often if need be.” Miscollocation that. Proper collocation this: “Parliament shall be holden every year once—and, if need be, more often.” Not that there can be any adequate assurance, that by this or any other form of words, the would-be despot, in whose face this bridle was afterwards held up, would have held himself bound. But, if he had been—think of the effect that might have been produced in the destiny of England; and, through England, of the habitable globe. For general application, take this rule. Imbed,as above, your limitative clause in that one of two principal clauses, to which alone it is designed to be applied: imbed it in that one, instead of putting it at the end of the two, in one of which it is not intended to be applied.

Of exposition-requiring terms,—groupes, which it may be of use to distinguish, these:

I. Terms of universal jurisprudence. Examples: 1. Obligation. 2. Liability. 3. Right. 4. Power. 5. Responsibility. 6. Possession. Original source of exposition to the whole group, the idea of a command.

II. Terms peculiar to English-bred jurisprudence. Examples from the field of property-law: 1. Feoffment. 2. Lien. 3. Trusts. 4. Uses. 5. Springing Uses. 6. Executory Devises. 7. Tenures. 8. Mortmain. In regard to these,—in a code on the new plan, only in respect of the use made of them in such parts of the existing law as remains unabrogated,—will exposition be the proper course. From the enactive part of the new code, these, and all those words which nobody but a lawyer understands, should be carefully excluded:—those alone employed, which, with or without exposition therein given, will be understood,—not by lawyers alone, but by everybody else.

III. Terms belonging to the common stock of the language; but to which, by distortion, lawyers have given an import intelligible to none but themselves. Examples. 1. Applied to the subject-matter of property,—real, instead of the appropriate and Rome-bred denomination immoveable. 2. Personal instead of moveable. 3. Applied to a conveyance, voluntary instead of gratuitous. 4. Servitude, instead of partial ownership rights, with the correspondent obligations. Wanted, for this idea, a more expressive single-worded denomination. Servitude, a word unknown to English law: instead of a particular interest in a thing immoveable, the idea it presents to a non-lawyer is—the condition of a person:—a condition bordering upon slavery. Here I have to turn informer. Smuggled in, by this reformist of ours, has been this same word servitude: introduced, without notice, from continental into our insular language.

IV. Terms belonging to the common stock of the language,—but, by reason of their ambiguity, coupled with frequency of occurrence and importance, with reference to practice,—their import needing distinction and fixation:—terms universally intelligible, but by reason of their ambiguousness, not the less needing to be thus fitted for use. Examples: 1. Land. 2. Modifications of place. 3. Divisions of time. Sub-examples under this head: 1. Day, the portion of the year: day, in contradistinction to night. 2. Month lunar, month calendar. 3. Year ordinary, year bissextile.

V. Words there are, which, notwithstanding the all-comprehensiveness of their extent, and the need there will be of them in an all-comprehensive code, need not any express definition, their import being on each occasion rendered sufficiently determinate. To this head belong divers names of genera generalissima, besides the jurisprudential terms brought to view above. Examples of these terms: 1. Subject-matters of operation: 2. Operations. 3. Correspondent functions. 4. Operators. 5. Instruments. 6. Judicial and other mandates. 7. States of things. 8. Events. 9. Occurrences. A pretty copious collection of them may be seen brought together and applied, on the occasion of the employment given to them in the above-mentioned Constitutional Code, chap. ix. Ministers collectively. § 7, Statistic Function.

In the case of all those more especially influential terms,—an accompaniment, in no small degree beneficial, might be—a list of synonyms: synonyms to single words, equivalents to short phrases. Not very numerous, comparatively speaking, are perhaps the pairs of words, which, on every possible occasion, may be used interconvertibly, each with as much propriety as the other. But, on each occasion, where any difference has place, the context will suffice, for security, against the endeavour, on the part of litigants, to produce, on the ground of the attached synonym, a wrong interpretation of the word employed in the text. By a characteristic feature of the proposed system—the ratiocinative part,—an additional, and hitherto unexampled security will be afforded.

As to our learned Reformist’s Code,—short as it is, candidates in it for the honour of receiving exposition, I have made out a list of, not fewer than 289, belonging to one or other of the above divisions. These, however, in no inconsiderable number, apply not to this alone, but to every other portion of the Pannomion—the All-comprehensive Code. Of the whole stock belonging to that aggregate, the number, of course, cannot be small; but the field they belong to is proportionably extensive. The time for each of them to receive its exposition, is the time when the subject it belongs to, is for the first time brought upon the carpet.

Problems for solution: 1. How to distinguish terms needing, from terms not needing, exposition? 2. How to distinguish terms needing to receive exposition from terms fit to be employed in giving it? Scarcely, even, for statement, can room be found here; for solution, none: purpose of the statement, showing that they have not been, and saying that they ought not to be neglected.

Now as to the ratiocinative matter. For arrangements and correspondent enactments, in that part of the field of law to which the work in question more especially applies—standard of aptitude say, the disappointment preventive, or disappointment prevention principle,—or, more specifically, the unexpected-loss-preventing principle:—a branch this, of the greatest happiness principle, with a special denomination adapted to the matter belonging to this part of the field.—Prevent disappointment? Why? Answer. From disappointment, as everybody knows and feels, springs a pain; magnitude, proportioned to the value set by the individual on the benefit that had been expected. In this pain will be found the only reason, why any subject-matter of ownership should be given to the owner rather than to an usurper: to an usurper, by what denomination soever distinguished: intruder, diffusor, embezzler, thief, robber, and so on: the only reason why, to interests termed vested, more regard should be paid, than to interests not so denominated: the only reason why, for loss,—on any occasion, or from any source,—indemnity should be provided. From the non-possession of the millions of watches existing in other pockets,—you, who read this, do you suffer anything? Not you: and why not? because, not expecting to possess any one of them,—no pain of disappointment do you suffer from the nonpossession of it. But, if by any hand other than your own—a thief’s, an unjust claimant’s, or a judge’s, it were taken from you—yes; in any one of these cases a sufferer you would be:—quantum of suffering, in a ratio, compounded of the marketable value of the watch with the indigency of your pecuniary circumstances, to the purpose of replacing it, and the relative sensibility of your frame.

Here, then, is an intelligible standard, and the only one. Behold now the effects produced by the hitherto universal want of it. Succedaneums, in number infinite; but not one of them expressive of anything, besides the ungrounded sentiment, or say mental sensation, entertained, on the occasion, by him who speaks:—a sentiment of approbation or disapprobation, expressed under the expectation of finding, or producing, the like on the part of hearers, but not suggestive of any ground whatever, for the sentiment so entertained.

Examples deduced from this work of our Author’s are the following:—“1. Natural Justice, p. 118, 119. 2. Equity, 119. 3. Natural Equity, p. 129. 4. Justice, pp. 161, 221. 5. Natural feeling, p. 203. 6. Harsh law . . . . cries feelingly for correction. 7. Our present law violates the first principle of property, p. 220.” First principle of property? What then is its name? None does our author himself give to it: none has any person else ever given to it. Not so much as that given in Rome-bred law, in the quasi-Hibernian style, to the species of contract denominated the undenominated. Yet, for it to have a name—and highly urgent is its need of one—somebody must stand godfather. Well, then, this is done. As to the thing itself, gratifying it is to me to see my learned master already recognising it, and applying it. Witness two passages, § 114; “One claimant ought not to disappoint another:” p. 148, “The lord’s gain is far from commensurate to his tenant’s loss.” Compare this with what, by the courtesy of England, is called reasoning, in judge-made law!

The honest and excellent work in French law on this subject, Le Parfait Notaire, has been already mentioned. In cutting open the leaves of it, no fewer than fourteen of these gaseous standards caught my eye. A list I took of them has unfortunately been mislaid. In addition to those above-mentioned, “Policy, Right Reason, Natural Reason, Law of Nature,” &c. &c. were of the number. In many instances, they were even brought together, and stated as conflicting. Now, then, of these non-entities, suppose eight on one side, six, and no more, on the other,—then indeed should we have a majority. But suppose fourteen of these puissances ranged, seven on one side, seven on the opposite side; if these are to be taken for reasons, the most clear-sighted and decisive judge may avow himself a Lord Eldon without shame.

Now as to our learned author. Expositive matter he has given us a specimen of in 10 out of 118 articles: namely, in Art. 5, Land; 28, Execution of a Deed; 29, Conveyance; 30, Settlement; 31, Charge; 32, Assignment; 33, Release; 35, Execution of a will; 74, Warranty; 88, Trustee.*

His mode of exposition is,—in the case of all but Land, Execution of a Deed, Execution of a Will, and Trustee,—definition per genus et differentiam: in the case of Land, not found referable to any general head: the expression not quite so correct as could have been wished: ground-works and underground-works not found comprised in it. In the case of the remaining three, paraphrasis; of which, elsewhere.

But, with this, or any other incomplete assemblage, we shall not be satisfied: nothing less than an all-comprehensive one does the purpose require. Composed of the two first of these five sorts of matter is his Code, distinguished from the rest of the work by being printed in italics; of the ratiocinative, instructional, and exemplificational indistinguishably blended, the rest of the work; rest, residue, and remainder in the language of learned gentlemen.

At the head of each article, a notice,—affording, by means of one or more of these five denominations, intimation of the nature and design of the articles,—is a document, that has presented itself as having its use, with the exception of the exemplificational, which had not as yet occurred to me; they accordingly exhibit themselves throughout the whole texture of the so often mentioned Constitutional Code.* Unfortunately, so to order matters, as that under no one of the four first of the above-mentioned five heads, shall any matter be inserted, that can be referable to any or others of them,—has not been found practicable. On the contrary, all the changes, of which the number of heads prefixt to the same article is susceptible, will perhaps be found rung upon them.

Nomenclature, for a series, or chain, of any length, of the results of successive divisional operations, performed upon the same integral subject-matter. Principle of denomination, the numerical. Subject-matters, to which, in the character of integers, it is applicable. 1. Our globe, or any portion of it. 2. The three kingdoms metaphorically so called—the mineral, vegetable, and animal. 3. Weights and Measures. 4. A mass of discourse committed to writing—a literary work. In this last instance it is that the idea applies, on the present occasion, to our author’s case.

Denominations, section, bissection, trissection, quadrisection, and so on. Correspondent visible sign for the eye, the present mark employed for designating a section, a double long ff—; between its two lines the figure indicative of the number of divisional operations, to the result of which it is employed to give expression. By the little swelling produced by this pregnancy, no peremptory objection will, it is hoped, be found produced: or, to avoid it, instead of being imbedded between the two ff, the numeral may have a single f, in a fine stroke drawn through it. By these little arrangements, simple as they are, order might, for the first time, be substituted to the as yet universally existing chaos: and, to an inconveniently inadequate, an adequate stock of denominations substituted. Part, Book, Chapter, Section, Article, Title; scarcely beyond this does the list extend; and, as to the order in which they are made to follow one another, the changes are in a manner rung upon it.

Now as to our author and this his work. Denominations employed in the order in which they here follow, these: 1. Part. 2. Title. 3. Chapter. 4. Section. 5. No. At this last stage, his stock of denominations is exhausted: the consequence is,—that for the results of the division made of the aggregate to which he has given the name of No. are employed the words firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, fifthly, all in a state of anarchy, without any common head for keeping them in a state of society.

Of all these denominations, section (from seco, to cut) is the only one completely characteristic. Reason for employing it—its having, as above, an appropriate sign belonging to it. Article followed by No. there may be a convenience in employing,—for the last, whatsoever may be the number of the intervening divisional operations: these being the two denominations most commonly so employed.

Alike applicable to whatever languages are in use in any nation—this mode of designation might form part and parcel of an universal language. In the above-mentioned proposed Constitutional Code, I regret to think it will not be found applied: it had not occurred time enough.

Two other little tasks, at parting, for our Hercules.

I. For the instruction of testators and their draughtsmen,—a paper, exhibiting a picture of the most commonly-exemplified diversifications, which the state of a person’s family connexions admits of, with a view to the provisions desirable, and likely to be desired to be made for them, in a last Will. For such provisions as require to be made by a Deed, this picture is already afforded by the Family Settlement Deed. But in this case the provision goes not beyond a future contingent family. Remain, for the objects of the hereproposed provision, all such families as are already in existence.

II. Provision, against the mischief, liable to be done by the retroactive effects of the proposed new system:—mischief, of the nature of that, by which the name of an ex-postfacto law in English-bred law language (of kin to which is that of privilegium, in Ciceronian and Rome-bred law-language) has with so much justice been rendered a name of reproach. Here, if I mistake not, he will feel the convenience of taking the disappointment-preventing principle for his guide;—and, doing so, will find in it an adequate defence against all objections. What the occasion seems to call for is—a detailed exposition of the arrangements proposed for the exclusion of mischief from this source. Self-regarding prudence presents itself as joining with benevolence in calling for a careful attention to this subject. On this part of the ground, I see the enemy lying in wait for him. His defences, I fear, are not, as yet, in quite so good a condition as the occasion requires.

One passage exhibits a spectacle I was not prepared for: where our author, taking a sudden spring, mounting Pegasus, and from civil, making an excursion—an uncalled-for excursion—into constitutional law. It is in page 206. Libellous the result: “feelings,” not the less acute by being democratic, “hurt” by it. Revenge is sweet: retaliation cheaper than prosecution.

Author.—“The many are a rope of sand.”

Reviewer.—Say, are they so in Yankeeland?

Answers, like Irish Echo, envious Muse.

Was it, to propitiate those on whom every thing depends for success, that this tirade was inserted? If yes, when Sterne’s Accusing Angel goes up with the passage, the Recording Angel shall have my consent for dropping his obliterating tear on it.

To preserve myself from the consciousness, as well as the imputation, of injustice,—one last word more. Bringing to view supposed imperfections and deficiencies has all along been the chief occupation of this Review:—imperfections, for correction; deficiencies, for supply. Of the mass of useful information, for which we are indebted to our philanthropic reformist,—of the ability, as well as honest zeal, displayed in the exposure of the peccant matter of which the existing system is almost exclusively composed,—of the ingenuity, manifested in so large a proportion of the remedies suggested,—no mention has been made but in the most general terms. But, to have conveyed any thing like an adequate idea of the merits of the work, would have required what, in classical editor’s language, is called a perpetual comment on it, including a reprint of the greatest part of it.

As to myself, never, but for my learned master, should I have obtained any tolerable insight into this chaos. No probable further prolongation of my life would have sufficed for enabling me to look into it without the lantern with which he has furnished me—“lucerna pedibus meis:”—to look into it—I mean for the only purpose—the remedial—for which I could have brought myself to look into it.

—Hoping that such rare talent, coupled with such still more rare virtue, may not be lost to the world, or wait long, ere it be employed by those in whom alone is the power of giving effect to it,—I conclude.

[* ]Gift.]—To obviate ambiguity, the use made of this word in the technical sense, should, in the Code, be abolished.

[* ]“Manifold Writing.—1. Mode of Execution.“In the manifold way, the mode of writing is as follows:—“Instead of a pen, a style of the hardest and strongest metal, without ink, is employed. Under the style, as under a pen, are laid, one under another, in number the same as that of the exemplars required, sheets of appropriate thin paper, alternating with the correspondent number of thin sheets of silk, into each of which has been worked all over some of the black matter used in printing, and called printer’s ink. In this way, by one and the same course taken, at one and the same time by the style, may exemplars be produced, in any number not exceeding twelve, with not much more expense of time and labour, than is commonly employed in the production of a single exemplar by pen and ink. Eight exemplars at once, all of them perfectly legible, have thus been habitually produced. In London this mode of writing has for about twenty years been regularly applied to the purpose of conveying simultaneous information to a number of newspapers. To other purposes it has also been employed under the eye of the author of this work.“For the performance of the operation, the stronger the hand the better.“To perform in perfection requires some practice in addition to that which has been applied to the art of writing with pen and ink.“If there be a difference in the exemplars, that which is furthest from the style, not that which is the nearest, gives the most perfect and clearest impression.“Silk, when a good deal worn, answers much better than when new.“Supposing this mode of writing employed to any considerable extent, the silk would require to be smoothed by some appropriate means; for example, by being passed through rollers.“The thinner the silk the better. That which has been mostly employed is that which, in English, is called sarsenet.“As to the paper, that which is at present employed is called fine single crown tissue paper: price 19s. 6d. per bundle, containing two reams.“In strength, by reason of its thinness, it cannot be expected to be altogether equal to what is most commonly in use in England; nor in whiteness, nor thence in respect of beauty and legibility are all the exemplars, by reason of the oil, which is an indispensable ingredient. They are nevertheless perfectly apt for these its intended purposes. No more than half of the number wanted need be, or ought to be taken on the oiled paper; to wit, every other one; the paper of the others will remain in primitive whiteness, except a slight extravasation of the oil of the ink round the edges of the letters. The effect might even be produced by a single oiled paper; to wit, the one to which the style is immediately applied. But in this case the labour necessary to produce the effect will be greater.”

[* ]Counties in England (Wales included) 52; in each, sets of Commissioners two; one for enfranchisement of copyholds, the other for partition of lands, freehold and copyhold; all (it is presumed) circumambulatory; together, 104. Number in each set, at least three; total 312. Of each set, clerical suite and et cæteras included, annual expense, say in round numbers £6,000; (charge for expense of commission for inquiry into the state of instruction in Ireland, was £7,000; ditto for ditto into the revenue of Ireland, £5,675.) First commissioner, say £2,000; puisnes, £1,000 each, (Mr. Peel, if they knew how to eat and drink, would, upon proof from Lincoln’s Inn or the Temple, give them twice as much.) If, at a few years’ end, they had performed their business—all well, or all ill, or all well and ill at the same time, or some well and some ill,—he would, unless he has repented, add to their salaries, whatsoever they were, a third more. Nominees, of course, the persons most interested in maximizing abuses and indemnities: Lord Eldon, with or without the assistance of Lord Melville and Mr. Wallace, would take care of the abuses; Mr. Peel, unless he repents, of the indemnities.

[* ]A few words àpropos of this word trustee. In every trust there are three characters essentially and indispensably concerned—trustor, trustee, and intended benefitee: distinguishable characters on every occasion these three: though on some occasions, two of them, as if by Mr. Matthews, are played by the same person: on some occasions, trustor being at the same time intended benefitee, or one of a number of intended benefitees; so, on other occasions, trustee. But, be this as it may, without an intended benefitee, a trust can no more have existence than without a trustor or a trustee. In the Code, Art. 4, p. 184, mention is indeed made of “the beneficial owner” as a person for whom a nominee is supposed to be “in trust.” But, this same beneficial owner—no where is he mentioned, as being, like trustor, one of the company: and as often as, and in proportion as, a breach of trust has place, the intended benefitee fails of being beneficial owner. Add to this, that, under a trust, a benefit may be intended and received, where there is nothing that it would be easy to fix upon as being owned. Exposition, proposed in form of paraphrasis—(definition, in the ordinary sense of the word not being obtainable for want of a superior genus.)—Breach of trust has place, when, and so far as, through the fault of a trustee, a benefit, intended for the intended benefitee, fails of being received.

[* ]An extract from it is already in-print, composed of four sections, belonging to Chap. IX., intituled Ministers Collectively. With the addition of other tracts belonging to the same subject, it forms an 8vo volume, under the title of Official Aptitude Maximized, Expense Minimized. The volume will appear in the course of a few weeks.