counsel and solicitors and protect their titles if they could, for there was a rude shock given to them all, and it might prove fatal. Yet the change thus demanded directly and inevitably tended to make all titles much more clear and much more secure. Now the consequence of this was the delay of all improvement in our laws during the long incumbency of this great lawyer and powerful minister of justice. How the system should ever have attained its present dimensions, which it had only done through ages of continual change, he never stopped to inquire. As he found it, so was he resolved to leave it; and all improvement was stopped, all removal of the most glaring and pernicious abuses was suspended, all getting rid not only of ancient mischiefs, the growth of a barbarous age, and of things which, being fitted for those times that gave them birth, had become for that very reason wholly unsuited to our wholly different times; but also all the abuses which had crept in by departure from the better policy of older days, and which disfigured the system, were now to be regarded with veneration, and perpetuated with a preserving and a pious care. But meanwhile the world was not standing still like the Chancellor: while he continued moored to the rock of his faith, and plunged into the deep stream of legal learning, the tide was flowing on even the tide of legal notions and learning in jurisprudence was flowing on-and while he remained fixed, its stream dashing and breaking against him, his stationary position served to measure the rapidity of its course, which, had he moved on with it, would have been less perceptible. What has been the consequence? It has, since he ceased to reign, carried all before it, borne away many barriers which more timely and judicious yielding to its force would have saved, by giving these obstacles a more slanting position. In a word, the progress of legal change has been beyond all dispute accelerated prodigiously since his time, and has become much more swift than it ever could have been, had he betimes bent to its power. What might have been only a stream, now wears the aspect of a torrent, when the waters pent up by Lord Eldon were, on his removal from office, suffered to burst forth. We take it to be extremely probable that no such vast and sweeping changes would ever have been contemplated, and hold it quite certain that they never could have been effected, but for the impatience, the ungovernable impatience excited by Lord Eldon's strenuous and uniform resistance to all improvement continued for so many long years. Only let us look back to Sir Samuel Romilly's modest and cautious attempts to amend the law in the earlier part of Lord Eldon's reign. A bill to make freehold estates liable to the payment of simple contract debts, to make every man do what every man of common honesty does as a matter of course, to prevent a country banker from buying 100,000l. worth of land with his customers' money, and then die and leave it to his children, or his mistress, or his bastards, was opposed by Lord Eldon and his party so stoutly, so vehemently, even so sentimentally, that it was on this occasion they brought forward (Mr. Canning, that great master of jurisprudence, and grave authority in matters of legislation, being their mouthpiece) the celebrated phrase, soon made the anti-reform watchword "the Wisdom of our Ancestors." Yet a person about as correct as Mr. Canning, or any of his Anti-Jacobin associates, though perhaps less ready at a squib and a parody, a certain Lord Chancellor Bacon, had long ago treated this topic as the very grossest of all blunders, as a practical bull, so to speak, a confounding the age of the world with the age of men, and ascribing to those who were our juniors that wisdom which we only can possess who have gleaned it from an experience much larger because much longer than theirs. Well; Sir S. Romilly was all his life unable to carry that one scanty measure. He was equally unable to obtain a relaxation of the law which punished with death the stealing of five shillings in a shop and the robbing of a bleach-ground. He passed from the scene of his useful labours, though it was also the scene of his fruitless attempts to amend the criminal law, which he left as he did the civil, in the state he found it in. Lord Eldon survived him twenty years; but these are to be divided into two periods, his official life and his retirement from power. During the nine former, he kept the law as Sir S. Romilly had in vain endeavoured to improve it; and like him he left it as he had found it. But on quitting the world he left it as completely changed as if some great moral wave had come over the whole, and left a new world of jurisprudence in the place of the old which it had overwhelmed. That freehold estates should have been, and without even a single remark in either House of Parliament, subjected to legal process for payment of simple contract debts, was little indeed, though it was the change which some twenty years before had made those enlightened statesmen, the Cannings, and Percivals, and Liverpools, stand aghast the men whose glory it was to live a century or two behind their age. Not only this was carried through all its stages without the Cannings having found any successor in raising the cry of danger to the many, and appealing to ancestral wisdom-appealing from reform and experience and knowledge, to rudeness and ignorance and childhood but in two or three years time, and long before Lord Eldon descended to the tomb, resting from his labours to retard all improvement, the whole law of real property was so changed, that it is nothing like an exaggeration to say, had Mr. Fearne, or Lord Mansfield, or even Lord Kenyon been permitted to revisit the scene of their former glories, they would have believed they were in a country newly planted, and fresh peopled, living under an unknown law. But not only was such a reverse experienced by all attempts to uphold the ancient law of property; all that related to pleadings, and to actions, and much of the Law of Evidence, was within the same eleven years wholly swept away. The Mercantile Law had kept pace with the other branches of our system in its advances; Bankruptcy was placed upon an entirely new footing; and arrest on mesne process being wholly abolished, it was plain that imprisonment for debt was doomed to a certain and speedy destruction. Nor had the Criminal Law fared better than the Civil. Instead of it being any longer found possible to resist the abrogation of capital punishment for the petty offences of stealing to a small amount, or robbing certain much exposed articles of commerce, the punishment of death had ceased to disfigure the Statute Book in any but two or three excepted cases, and the more sanguinary species of inflictions had wholly vanished from our laws. So large a change had never been effected upon the jurisprudence of any country in a century as had now in the course of seven or eight years been effected on the English law; and a foundation was further laid on which it was manifest a superstructure would almost immediately be reared, for rooting out all the remaining abuses in our system, and for finally digesting it in a general, accessible form, a Code of Civil and Criminal Jurisprudence. It may further be affirmed that no such wholesale changes had ever before been accomplished in tranquil times; they resembled rather a revolutionary movement of legislation than the progress of legislation during a period of peace, and in the ordinary course of an unchanged constitution. Such was the real and the final operation of the course pursued by Lord Eldon in resisting all improvement; in rejecting with horror all change regardless of its motive, its nature, its tendency, -in shrinking from all innovation as revolutionary, worshipping whatever had been done in less enlightened ages, and attempting, vainly attempting, to stop the march of Time, whom the wisest of men, the most illustrious of Lord Eldon's predecessors, had sagely described as the greatest innovator of all. But Lord Eldon must not be regarded as the only one of those shallow persons who thus by their unreflecting and ignorant efforts to combat nature, gave so striking an example of men frustrating their own designs, and bringing about, by their resistance, far more sweeping changes than any they set themselves to oppose. The fears excited by the excesses, the most guilty and most lamentable excesses, of the French Revolution, had so possessed the minds of men for some time in this country, that they had become averse to all improvement in our polity, and regarded every alteration of any established institution as a step towards anarchy. Instead of endeavouring wisely and honestly to moderate a feeling which had a real foundation and a rational origin, but was carried to an excess nearly as wild as the lust of change to which it was opposed, a party among us deemed it the wiser and the more honest course to use every means in their power for working upon it, exciting it to still greater extremes, and making it spurn all those bounds of temperate caution within which their duty clearly was to have confined it. Splendid parliamentary declamation, eloquent popular writing, gorgeous pulpit rhetoric, were all employed in boundless profusion, and with perfect success, to Lighter missiles same design and influence the public mind and make all ears deaf towards the more still voice of reason and common sense. were showered upon the people with the from similar magazines and allied batteries. Then began to flourish the Canning school, shining in the false glare of a sparkling, a clever, a pointed, a witty, but a meretricious eloquence; abounding in brilliancy, in solid wisdom as defective as in sound knowledge or pure and honest and conscientious principle. It was their rule to laugh at all improvement as childish and needless, to point the finger of contempt at all speculation as pedantry, to deride as vulgar all the refinements of science which were far above their comprehension; and, sitting in the scorner's chair, to cry down all genius which was not in the hire and service of their patrons. The progress of the age in which they lived, these men never would deign to observe. At a time when every art and every science was making such rapid strides onward that the masters of one year had become the pupils of the next, it pleased them to fancy that the science of all others the most important to mankind's interests, the art of all others most calculated to be their blessing or their bane, the Science of Jurisprudence, the Art of Government, were to stand stock still amidst the rapid tide of universal improvement. They were made merry with those who, wiser than themselves, and content with a true philosophy as well as gifted with a more poetic fancy, foretold, strongly foretold, the future progress of the arts of life, and they have left upon record their elaborate ridicule of a great writer whose vaticinations they found it easier to parody than to warm themselves at the fire of his genius. Darwin1 was 1 It may safely be affirmed that after all their laughing at Darwin these wits would have found it more difficult to write the magnificent passage of Cambyses' march, than he to write the sapphics upon Knifegrinders, or even the new Morality, with its reverent parodies on the Canticles. But we are now only referring to the fine and truly prophetic verses on Steam. Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam, afar Botanic Garden, vol. i. p. 289., published in 1788. |