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by the profession. "What binds together the lawyers and Judges of the two countries," said Judge Baldwin, "is the common law. England has always been the Mecca for American lawyers. The legal ancestry of the representatives of both countries is the same.

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Wherever the English tongue has gone the English law has gone, and in loving devotion to all that makes the English law really what it is Americans and Englishmen are one, standing, as it were, under the same flag, not the flag of a country, but of a law." The history of the friendship between the two Bars is a very old one, for on no side is the English tradition and the sense of a common inheritance so much appreciated in the States as on the legal. The basis of law is the same in both countries, and the English common law is a joint possession. And, apart from the practical aspect, there has been a feeling of kindliness, even for trivial legal forms, which has made the American Courts preserve certain quaint English archaisms. Sir Frederick Pollock in the dedication of his "Law of Torts" to Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes tells of the experiences of an English lawyer, travelling overland from Montreal to Boston. He leaves Quebec, where the flag is his own but the law is the Code Napoleon, for a country where he has no longer the rights of a natural-born subject. But "when his eye is caught, in the everyday advertisements of the first Boston newspaper he takes up, by these words: 'Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Suffolk to wit,'-no amount of political geography will convince him that he has gone into foreign parts and has not rather come home." And in addition to this joint possession of the English common law, the two Bars are united by their respect for judicial precedents. In no other system of jurisprudence in the world is such force given to judicial decisions, an attitude which is responsible

in the eyes of a Continental jurist for making English and American law an unfeatured wilderness. For a time, it is true, the American method tended to approach the Continental, and some lawyers began to treat the common law as an "ideal system," to quote Sir Frederick Pollock again, "to be worked out with speculative freedom and little regard for positive authority." But of late years the current seems to have turned, and we have the testimony of a distinguished American lawyer, Professor Dillon, that the danger has passed. The great works of Kent and Story and Marshall are to be found in every good English legal library, and a great lawyer in England or the Colonies or the United States writes not only for the use of his own Bar, but for the benefit of all English-speaking people. The English law reports are bought by American lawyers, though it is a common complaint that they have become less useful since the number of decisions upon the construction of statutes has so greatly increased. As Professor Dillon, speaking from the American point of view has said: "In our law libraries we find the learning and labors of Judges administering the system in law reports from India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the West Indies. We have the same legal literature in which we behold Hale and Marshall, Hardwicke and Story, Blackstone and Kent, Ers. kine and Webster."

The value of this bond of union is much increased by the large part which the profession of law plays, and has always played, in American life. As many of Blackstone's Commentaries were sold on publication in America as in England, and Burke long ago declared that "in no country, perhaps, in the world, is the law so general a study." It has even colored the popular vocabulary, and throughout the United States the merest layman

will habitually refer to land as "real estate." The speech of Mr. Chauncey M. Depew at the dinner we have spoken of emphasized this pre-eminence. The Government of the United States, he said, was a lawyers' Government. There have been twenty-one Presidents, of whom seventeen have been lawyers, and of Cabinet Ministers fourfifths have been lawyers. The Constitution was made by lawyers, the Government institutions of every kind were built up by lawyers and in the formation of the Government they have created a judicial power, the Supreme Court, which is superior to the sovereignty of the nation. It is true that this excessive political importance may react unfavorably upon the value of the administration of justice, but it at least proves that the profession of the law is at the very centre of national activity. The American Bar, to be sure, has a few superficial differences from our own. The professions of solicitor and counsel, for example, are not separated, but the same is true of most of our Colonies, and any serious effects of the division are nullified by the habit of forming legal partnerships. If, then, we have in the United States a Bar essentially like our own, professing a law the same in origin as ours and closely related in substance, and at the same time exerting a great influence upon every domain of politics, we have a common interest more strong than any sudden gust of racial sentiment or half-hearted diplomatic alliance. The Spectator.

We have thought it right to call attention to this sign of friendship, partly because it is in itself so desirable, and partly because it illustrates what we should be glad to see carried still further, the decentralization of English law. The law of England is a civilizing agent second only to Christianity, and an Imperial bond of union as strong as any commercial interests. It has gone forth to the ends of the earth, and in spite of its parochial origin, has won conquests as great as any Roman system which was born in the purple. What we desire to see is not the lessening of the importance of the central Courts, but the fostering of legal schools among new conditions and stranger peoples. It is a significant fact that the work on the Government of England by Professor Hearn, of Melbourne, is authoritative on the subject, a book written by a Professor in a Colonial University far from the traditions of law and government which dwell in Westminster. We should be glad to see the freest and friendliest relations of mutual respect between all the Bars of all the English-speaking people, and in particular we should be glad to see American common-law judgments referred to in English arguments as English cases are cited in New York and Washington. For recent experience has shown that English law is no delicate plant which flourishes best among the surroundings which gave it birth.

ALL ABOUT A HAT.*

I sincerely hope they will let the man go! Nay, I do not think it would be altogether amiss for the nation to give him some small testimonial. Nothing • Translated for The Living Age.

splendid of course, but a modest and appropriate gift. Let me tell you he has deserved it.

The affair was a trifling one, and may well have escaped your notice, oc

cupied as you have been with the roller-pavement and other marvels of our divine Exposition. Here, however, is the man's story-very simple, but rather touching.

He was a timid young pickpocket, just setting out in life, and his first attempt was both humble and marked by a certain originality. He stole from a friend, with whom he was lodging, a small three-cornered black felt hat, and made off with his prize pressed exultantly against his breast. No thief upon a splendid scale, no high-andmighty filibustiero, no pirate, no corsair was ever prouder of his capture, or more enamored of his prize. Neither the eagle who bore off Ganymede, nor the crow who sped that eagle, ever regarded more rapturously or embraced with greater fervor the object of his long desire.

This was probably the very circumstance which attracted the attention of those keen-eyed men whose business it is to mar the comfort of malefactors in their unlawful possessions. You cannot carry off a prize under your left arm, occasionally caressing it with the right hand as well, without attracting some attention. In this case the man was stopped, violent hands were laid upon the object of his devotion, he was examined and requested categorically to state why he had appropriated that small, three-cornered hat.

He wept, he shivered, he equivocated, he lapsed into a sullen silence. There is ever a shrinking reserve about your really great passions. But the inevitable reaction succeeded, and he confessed. That little three-cornered hat had belonged to Napoleon I! His friend had told him so for a positive fact. Had belonged, do I say? Nay, more. It was not merely one of the great emperor's hats. It was the hat of the emperor; his own special and peculiar little tricorne.

The young thief had simply been car

ried away by the enthusiasm of an overmastering desire. The act of Prometheus when he reft fire from heaven, has been excused by his exaltation of mind; and our young pickpocket was in a very similar case. He stole sublimely, and by the light of glory.

They tried reasoning with him. His injured friend explained, with a broad grin upon his countenance, that the head-gear in question was just a little hat which he himself had worn at a kind of travesty of a masked ball-but all to no purpose. The young thief had his conviction and he clung to it. A flame of pure patriotism burned within, even if it did not illuminate his mind. He crowned himself with that ideal chapeau, and would not be disabused of his fond error.

Condemn a man for such an illusion! Never! There is nothing so fine as unaffected enthusiasm.

Nevertheless we have here a striking illustration of the havoc wrought in simple souls by the substance known as Napoleonite. It may be taken for granted that our young zealot had never seen L'Aiglon and that he was unacquainted with the researches of M. Masson into the history of the imperial family. I would take my oath on it in fact, and so would you. All the same we may observe in him the effects of Napoleonite. They furnish us with a study in popular psychology, and illustrate the contagious character of fetishism. We get a sort of epidemic of impassioned admiration by which all minds are more or less affected, though not all, I observe, in exactly the same way.

Our young man appears to have been in some sort hypnotized by the contemplation of that mystic triangle. He had been told that it was authentic. The same assertion is made about every work of art, and ordinarily no harm is done. Yet it is a rash thing

to say, and in the present case, the remark germinated, expanded, bore fruit-a great deal too much fruit and of an injurious kind. On ne badine pas avec la gloire.

I do not pretend greatly to blame the friend of the young criminal for his yarn about the authenticity of the hat. If he had said nothing, the result would have been the same. There it was the glorious triangle, with its fine, clear, imperial contours, which took the heart of the young enthusiast by storm. The "psychic evolution”—as the learned say-was inevitable. dreaming youth could by no means escape his destiny. He became a thief through his capacity for disinterested affection.

The

I find it interesting also as a psychological student, to trace the mental processes of this highly sympathetic kleptomaniac. The phenomena resemble those of "crystallization," as described by Stendhal. They begin with simple curiosity.

"What is that hat?" "Oh, nothing."

"What do you mean by nothing?" "Why it is just a Bonaparte-hat. Nothing more." (Reflection. Revery:with a gradual tendency toward the fixed idea.)

"See here! That hat-"

"Well, what of it?"

"Did it belong to Napoleon I?" "What if it did?”

"Ah, ha! You never told me that!" (He never told me that. I had to tear the precious secret out of him. He really has the immortal General's little three-cornered hat!)

And now jealousy comes in—that incalculable aid to love, which imparts to the tender passion invincible force, and insatiable concupiscence. Henceforth a vulgar bit of head-covering will be regarded as the rarest treasure under the sun. Its possessor must of course be perfectly happy; and yet the

idea that it is possessed is frightful, excruciating, a perpetual torment.

And who is the happy man? He is one "aye, there's the rub!"-one who seems not to appreciate in the very least the worth of the beloved object; who treats it with familiarity and even contempt, as an ordinary article of domestic furniture. It is not to be borne!

Rape, under such circumstances, becomes a simple act of justice; or rather of homage richly due and basely withheld. It concerns the honor of the great Napoleon, that his hat should be in the possession of one who esteems it at its true worth.

A duty is to be performed, and no man of true delicacy would hesitate for a moment. O sophistry of passion! This is what "crystallization" comes

to!

Do we

But let us reflect a moment. not all go through the same process of reasoning-or rather of unreasoningwith regard to something? Do we not all, by the terrible help of the imagination, pass from admiration to passion, from passion to an ungovernable desire of possession, and from that desire to a deep conviction that we alone are the true and lawful owners of what we covet? The history of the young pickpocket is the history of mankind.

Mutato nomine de te
Fabula narratur.

Each one of us has always by him his little three-cornered hat. There are degrees, of course, and we do not all go so far as to appropriate it. There are many chapters in the hat-story, and they are not all tragic. But every man who lives has something in common with our culpable young hero.

Herein are to be found many and grave reasons for not being too hard upon one poor earth-worm gone mad about a star. Why should not a head be turned by a hat? It seems peculiarly fitting in a case like this, where the

hat is strong and the head weak! The two may not have been made for one another, but the ascendancy of the one over the other is easily understood. Never before, it may be, was a head so completely taken captive by a hat. Let

Les Annales.

us freely forgive the head thus dominated. All about us, in obedience to perpetual cervical flexions, heads are turning hats, for bows or smiles. It must inevitably happen now and again that a hat turns a head.

Emile Faguet.

THE AVERAGE MAN.*

What has the Master of Balliol to do with the average man? The master of Balliol had very little to do with him. And Dr. Caird, though standing sponsor for him, recommends "The Average Man" precisely because its author was not an average man, but something, as these sermons themselves sufficiently show, very far above him. The preacher in this case was evidently a man of large heart and fine sympathies, which, joined to high intellectual powers, removed him so far from the average man that he simply did not know him, and so was brought by the breadth of his charity to describe him in favorable terms. As is often the case, the greater and therefore the simpler man took the inferior at his own estimate and, doing out of generosity what other writers and talkers do out of self-recommendation, described the average man as the prime mover of everything that happens, the winner of every battle, the pillar of every State, the backbone of every Church, the peculiar object of God's favor. Cæsar is not in the running with him; S. Augustine is of no account beside him. Great men in fact are a trifle; the real thing in the whole world is just the average man. Were it not that the finer souls disdain sarcasm in the pulpit, while

*The Average Man: and other Sermons. By the late Rev. William Granger. With a preface by the Master of Balliol. Paisley and London: Alexander Gardner. 1899.

was.

the ordinary souls are unequal to it, we should unhesitatingly put down all such sermons as these to irony. As such it would be very effective rhetoric, though lost on all but those for whom it was not intended; for every quite ordinary man present would take it as obviously true, and go away from church soothed and comfortable at hearing what fine fellow he The pecular insidiousness of this very favorite sermon (popular alike with congregation and preacher) is that it is truth with a twist. That the average man is the most conspicuous figure of the world in these democratic days is abundantly true, but the preacher's way of stating it suggests that he is so because he deserves to be; and that it is his abiding misfortune that his importance is not recognized. Fancy a spiritual teacher imagining that it is good for a man's soul to be told that he is the special object of Heaven's solicitude, and that the world neglects him only because it has not the Divine intuition to perceive his worth. And yet that is exactly what the "we cannot all be great" sermon amounts to. Its ethics are appalling; its ignorance of human nature astounding.

The average man neglected! The average man unhappy at his lot! Why, in the very nature of things he stands to be of all men the most pleased with himself. Not high enough to "look down upon the hate of those below," no

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