new industrial and commercial England was no longer to be hoped for from the courts. A thoroughgoing reconstruction was needed. In this situation it would have been natural to turn to Parliament, for legislation is the source of law which is best adapted to clear the field by root-and-branch eradication of old legal rules. But an entirely unrepresentative Parliament, and the stubborn, even reactionary conservatism into which the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had frightened Englishmen-lawyers, landowners, manufacturers, and merchants alike-held back the reform a quarter of a century. But the way was being prepared by the ability and devotion of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who for over fifty years with unwearying zeal waged war on the legal system as he found it. To him it was, in his own words, "a fathomless and boundless chaos, made up of fiction, tautology, technicality, and inconsistency; and the administrative part of it a system of exquisitely contrived chicanery which maximizes delay and denial of justice.

Bentham was an extremist, but he was a man of extraordinary intellectual endowment; and his work of criticism, especially of the criminal law and of the rules of evidence and procedure generally, was marvelously well done. Himself a firm believer in the possibility of reform through legislation, he taught as one of his cardinal doctrines that legislation is the ideal form of law. He founded by his writings and teaching a school of legislation; his disciples gradually achieved positions of influence in Parliament; and when the cause of reform in representa

tion triumphed in 1832 the cause of legal reform triumphed with it. Even before that time the brutal harshness of the criminal law and its administration had been much mitigated, especially by the work of ' one of the noblest figures in English legal history, Sir Samuel Romilly (1757-1818).

From 1832 on, legislation was active in very many fields of law, and the recommendations of successive Parliamentary commissions, composed of able and in general progressive lawyers and judges, were enacted into statutes which simplified and modernized much of the common law, especially the law of real property and conveyancing, and the law of procedure. By successive advances the jurisdictional confusion, caused in large part by a multiplicity of courts, was conquered, and at last the great Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875 completed the work of simplification by merging the courts which still remained in one single Supreme Court of Judicature, with all the powers of both a court of law and a court of equity. Legislation still continues to be the most active source of law, and much attention has been given to improving its methods and forms. Special branches of the law, particularly in commercial law, have been codified with good results. Of late years the social legislation in England has been noteworthy not only for its amount and range but also for the introduction into it of principles, especially of responsibility and liability, widely at variance with the general tendency of the legislation and of the common law itself during the past century. A rec

ognition both by Parliament and by the courts of the protection of social interests as the paramount object of the law seems portended by these recent developments, which have also their parallels in America. Social justice bids fair to replace a purely individualistic conception of the justice the regular administration of which it is the supreme end of the law to secure.

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CHAPTER IX.

THE AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW.

70. The adoption of the common law-The colonial period.3o—America inherited from the mother country a developed legal system. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, who, under the British system of colonial government prevailing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had control of the American colonies, had in 1722 laid it down as a rule of English law "that if there be a new and uninhabited country found out by English subjects, as the law is the birthright of every subject, so wherever they go they carry that law with them, and hence such new-found country is to be governed by the laws of England; though after such country is inhabited by the English, acts of Parliament made in England without naming the foreign plantations will not bind them." This ruling, which was indeed only a practical application of a generally recognized principle of international law, states clearly the prevailing doctrine as to the relation of the American to the English common law.

Even before this doctrine had been thus definitely enunciated, the charters under which the colonists were living were all based on the common law, and

30 See Richard C. Dale, The Adoption of the Common Law by the American Colonies, 21 American Law Register, 554-574.

in general recognized its sway in the new land. But the Puritan colonists of the North, with unpleasant memories of courts cruel to them and often sycophantic to their oppressors, at first repudiated the law of England administered in the courts of law, and especially in the court of chancery, and avowed themselves to be governed only by the law of God, as revealed in the Bible. But so thoroughly imbued were both people and magistrates with the common law ideas, and so exclusively accustomed to the common law institutions, that the actual result in practice was not easily distinguishable from a regime of common law.

Again, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was given the power to act as a court of appeal from the courts set up in the colonies under their charters, and also to veto the enactments of colonial legislation. Through this revisory jurisdiction not only was the law of the colonies kept in substantial conformity with that of the mother country, but a general uniformity was preserved between the laws of the various colonies themselves. The 'Americans early disclosed the legal bent which has been frequently noted by students of the national mind. The colonial bar boasted some able and learned lawyers. But the literature of the law was, of course, exclusively English, and the law reports, and even more the widely studied commentaries of Blackstone, gave a thoroughly English content to the law of the preRevolutionary period.

71. The Revolution and the common law. In the contest with the mother country which culminated