posed upon them, it is impossible to award sufficient praise; and the measure now before your Lordships has arisen out of their reports. As another reason why I should interfere to bring forward this subject, I may state, that in the motion I made in the other House of Parliament in February, 1828, have originated all the alterations and improvements of the law which have been subsequently by degrees carried into effect, and to which the then Government, with the Noble Duke at its head, was not opposed. The Chancellor of the day joined me in this great work, and issued the commission which my motion, adopted by the Commons, required. The result has been a series of measures, adopting nearly nine-tenths of the reforms which my speech of February, 1828, propounded. The whole system of our law has undergone a change in consequence. The Law of Real Property, the Law of Actions, the Law of Procedure, the Law of Evidence, the structure and Jurisdiction of Courts, the Law of Pleading and Process all have suffered so vast a change, that were those great lawyers who adorned the profession, and who thirty years ago flourished in it, and faded from it, to lift their heads from the honoured tomb to which they then descended, they would not believe that they were restored to the country which had gloried in them-would be wholly incredulous that the law of England which they had cultivated, was the system which they now contemplated-and would imagine that their eyes had opened not upon

England, living under the laws which they had familiarly known, but rather that they had awakened from the sleep of the grave upon a new land governed by a foreign law. The Criminal Law was, at the period I am alluding to, left untouched by my motion, and purposely. I reserved its consideration to a future period. That period, I fervently hope, is now come; and I trust that this most important branch of all our jurisprudence may be fated, through my humble ministration, to receive a similar change, and undergo an adequate improve

ment.

I now proceed at once to the vast subject which I have undertaken to bring before your Lordships, and I begin by asking how much longer will Parliament be content to let the Criminal Law lie scattered over so many books-locked up in so many statutes-floating, as it were, in the air of Westminster Hall, and to be sought from men who have never written on the subject, but are nevertheless held to be oracles of law as regards criminal matters, ordering as it does every one of the subjects at his peril to neglect, at his peril to be ignorant of, and, being ignorant of, at his peril to disobey? Lord Mansfield when at the bar said, with his usual felicity of expression, speaking of the common law, that "while it remains unwritten, it works itself pure by rules drawn from the fountains of justice." I now approach those fountainsthe streams from which make the Law work itself

pure—to quaff their waters, and pluck the flowers that spangle their margin-I would let your Lordships taste with me the source in its whole purityJuvat integros accedere fontes,

Atque haurire; juvatque novos decerpere flores." Those flowers I now draw nigh to pluck, and some of them will prove new to those whom I ask to join me in the draught. Where are those streams--those fountains of justice, to be found? Those fountains are contained in thirty-two quarto volumes of statutes, filling in all 30,000 quarto printed pages, to say nothing of thrice as many private acts rendered necessary by the defects of the general law. But these, perhaps, are not the fountains to which Lord Mansfield referred; he was rather talking of the common law; he was warning his hearers against reducing that law to a written text, because he said "undigested it works itself pure." Will your Lordships now look with me into this process of working pure? The operation of the working pure lies in the decisions of the judges, who have no rules to guide them but such as they can make out by looking partly to the textbooks, and partly to their own sense of what is known generally in the profession to be the law, but which has not yet been reduced into shape by text writers any more than by lawgivers. What do your Lordships think is the number of the volumes of these decisions? I will speak only of the courts of Common law, of the court over which my noble and learned friend. (Lord Denman) presides, namely, the Court of Queen's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the

Court of Exchequer, and excluding the Courts of Equity altogether. The following statement of the tomes of records of judicial legislation or decision -that mass which has been accumulating, not from the time that Mr. Murray used the words at the bar which I have cited-not from the time that Lord Mansfield ascended the bench, in 1756—but from the year 1786, when he left the bench which he adorned-will be found pretty correct. There are 160 closely printed bulky volumes of the decisions; to which, if I add the Nisi Prius cases, it will make up 170 volumes of decisions only of the three courts of common law at Westminster, without reckoning the courts of equity here, or the courts of law in Ireland-that is 150,000 pages of print, with all of which it becomes, and not only becomes, but behoves the judges and practitioners to be familiar. In truth, it is å mass of matter painful to mention and frightful to contemplate. What do your Lordships think is the volume I hold in my hand (the Noble and Learned Lord held up an unbound broad octavo about an inch and a third in thickness), which is so closely printed, that at my time of life I cannot read it with my naked eye_it consists of about 300 pages, a bulk equal to that of the Code Napoleon. Perhaps your Lordships may think that it is a code or digest of the common law? It is no such thing. Peradventure you may conclude it to be a digest or index to the 160 volumes of reports? Not at all. Peradventure you may conjecture it to be a digest of the decisions of

the last few years since the beginning of this century. Nothing of the kind; the volume is merely the index of the reports of cases decided in Westminsterhall in the one year 1843! The general index from 1752 fills four huge volumes of 8000 pages closely printed. The expense, it must be obvious, of purchasing such a mass of books must be enormous; in fact, it is an expense which the student of law cannot compass, and which the practitioner, if he enters on it at all, must defray out of his professional gains. Yet all this mass it becomes, and not becomes only, but behoves, the judges to learn and inwardly digest, because they must administer the law and deliver their decisions exhibiting an outward knowledge and acquaintance with its contents. Then the books are continually on the increase; in fact, they increase at compound interest, each decision begetting others, and each volume being the ground of more. Your Lordships will have some idea of the extent of production in this line that is going on, by learning that no fewer than fifty-nine learned lawyers are occupied in preparing reports, who send out, in the shape of reports, every year twelve or fourteen large volumes, which each barrister ought to possess, and each judge be familiar with, but which, continually increasing as the stream of time rolls on, defy any but a large fortune to purchase-any industry to master-any memory to retain-any perspicacity to disentangle. This is the character of that fountain whose waters Lord Mansfield said worked themselves