and distinction, and especially to those who aspired to be justices or legislators, but also aimed to put in palatable and accessible form the laws of England, so that every one who wished might come to a fair and accurate knowledge of the laws of his country. For this laudable and painstaking work thousands of students in England and America have offered and will offer unstinted praise to the author of the "Commentaries."

While England and America are greatly indebted to Blackstone for collecting and presenting in compact and intelligible form the laws of his land, yet the student to-day must not lose sight of the fact that even so great a genius and writer as he, could use his reasoning powers, apt sentences, and ready logic to the bolstering up of laws and institutions which his own best judgment must have told him were not to be justified in law or reason.

Blackstone was not an ideal jurist, he was simply a practical codifier; he had no care for the future of the law, only for the past; it was his task to find out what the law was and set it down, not to speculate what it might or should be to best answer the purposes of mankind. It is true that he commends many things in the common law and finds the origin of certain precepts in reason and natural justice, but nevertheless his vision is confined to the customs and institutions which immediately surround him; he has no light to throw a shadow of the higher and truer State wherein all should be equal in the eye of the law, and the whole people constitute the sovereign power; he finds no inconsistency in trust

ing the administration of justice to the arbitrary instincts of a monarch; and utters not a word of protest against the grinding laws that the hereditary nobility enacted for the mulcting of a helpless people.

The student must bear in mind while perusing the first few chapters of the "Commentaries" that Blackstone was an Englishman, with all of the Englishman's sluggish hate towards new ideas in matters of law or custom, and that he became one of the King's justices and a staunch supporter of royalty, then he may understand the different sentiments expressed by Blackstone in his eulogy of the British Constitution (Com. Sec. 2, Intro.), and his remarks upon the laws governing land tenure (Com. Book II., page 2), from which we quote the following:

"There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few that will give themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this right. Pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our title; or at best we rest satisfied with the decision of the laws in our favour, without examining the reason or authority upon which those laws have been built. We think it enough that our title is derived by the grant of the former proprietor, by descent from our ancestors, or by the last will and testa

ment of the dying owner; not caring to reflect that (accurately and strictly speaking) there is no foundation in nature or natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so before him; or why the occupier of a particular field or of a jewel, when lying on his deathbed, and no longer able to maintain possession, should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him. These inquiries, it must be owned, would be useless and even troublesome in common life. It is well if the mass of mankind will obey the laws when made, without scrutinizing too nicely into the reasons of making them."

NOTE. The italics are the authors. What a commentary on class legislation do these few truthful utterances furnish.

These few lines from the second book of the "Commentaries" make it clear that Blackstone could see that there was no sound reason why a few should own the land and pass it on entailed to certain of their children while the rest should be denied the right to use the natural resources of the earth. But his philosophy was non-resisting; whatever is, is good, and it would make trouble to question it. He may have seen clearly that the laws pertaining to property were radically wrong, but it was not his purpose to raise a dissenting voice, or to advocate a needed reform; he was not of the class of the Roman Gracchi, or of Henry George. As a commentator then, Blackstone was but an apathetic reviewer, seeking simply to set forth the building as

it was, and caring nothing for needful repairs or additions.

Like Blackstone, many law writers, and legislators, and judges, of to-day, seek simply to apply the old rules as they were applied by the forefathers, refusing to consider that laws being for the purpose of governing and regulating the affairs of mankind should keep pace with man's activities and adapt themselves to the circumstances and conditions which surround him. That the laws to-day are lax in the regulation of modern commercial industries and in the controlling of a new type of malefactors which infest and prey upon modern society is evident by a perusal of the following quotation from an excellent article by Prof. Frank Parsons, in the July, 1901, number of the Arena:

"Slavery and serfdom have been abolished. Piracy is dead. The press-gang has vanished and thievery is trying to hide itself. Our principal robbers do not club their victims on the highways, but carry them in street cars and railway trains, or capture their money politely with stocks and trusts. Nothing has improved more than robbery. Instead of a dangerous encounter with pistols, to get the goods and cash that two or three travelers might have with them, the modern highwayman builds a railroad system with other people's money, or a gas or electric plant, or a street railway, or secures a telegraph or telephone franchise, or waters some stock, or gets a rebate on oil, beef, or wheat, or forms a giant trust and robs the population of a continent at a stroke. Then the robber buys a newspaper or caresses it with greenbacks, and has himself entitled a 'Napoleon of

Finance,' while the rudimentary, undeveloped aggressor or peculative survival of more primitive times who steals a bag of flour instead of a grain crop, or takes a few hundred instead of a million, has to put up with the old-time, uncivilized name of 'thief.' Imprisonment for debt has been abolished, and also imprisonment for theft-if it is committed according to the law and by methods approved by the particular variety of 'Napoleon' having control of the government."

Almost every citizen of this great Republic is palpably impressed with the truth of Professor Parson's caustic comments, but a vast number say with Blackstone that it is useless and troublesome to resist the "Napoleons" of finance and their unjust methods. It lies with the students of law, the statesmen and orators to come, to arouse the common people, and then the law will advance as it should. C. E. C.