To what is it, indeed, but to their wisdom and eloquence, their humanity and zeal, to the long nights of thankless labour they have endured, and to the arguments met, not by reasons but by votes, to the unflinching devotion of that example which they so disinterestedly offered, of Virtutem ex me, fortunam ex aliis, that we owe the present improvement in public opinion upon these solemn questions? Such improvements are at once the service and reward of the benefactors of mankind; though, in the present instance, one which the great champion who led the reformers through the desert, was himself, alas! destined as a service to accomplish, but not to see as a reward. If the lives of men, and the dark and blood-stained pages of our statute-book had not been cruelly made a matter of party politics; if successive divisions in parliament had not disgracefully manifested an obstinate resolution, that ministerial pride and jealousy would not permit any reform to be successful but what originated with themselves, it would not have been left for Mr Peel to hold up in his hand a little book of consolidated statutes, as a code Napoleon of his own. It matters little, indeed, ultimately to the country, by whom the work is done, provided it is done efficiently; or whether in its progress it may serve, in the shape of a toast at election dinners, the double purpose of a display, on one side, of ignorance and servility, and, on the other, of the amusing self-complacency with which a sensible man can be persuaded to take a sort of apotheosis-chair, under such circumstances, among the great legislators of mankind. The real glory of his predecessors was, that through good report and evil report, they brought the mind of the country forward to the point where the necessity must have become clear, almost to Lord Eldon. The credit to which Mr Peel is entitled, would have been something more precise, had he countenanced and aided these early labours: as it is, he has, on this, as on the bullion question, (and we hope to be able soon to add another,) the merit of not having stood out beyond conviction or repentance; and of having ultimately employed, in aid of the public intelligence and service, an influence to which these painful preliminary sacrifices could alone have raised him. The cardinal walked double and kissed the dust,—while looking there for the keys! Meanwhile, when he thinks of the history of these reforms, he must (if as sincere as we believe him) be as much ashamed of the temporizing compliances among which, for a time, he was thus obliged to herd, whilst more straightforward and comprehensive minds were sowing the field into which he has since so quietly and creditably come down at harvest-time, as disgusted at the base and obsequious hypocrisy of the idolators of office who crowd round him, with fulsome compliments upon the very measures which they would be ready to denounce as revolutionary innovations, if proposed by other men. We congratulate both the country and Mr Peel, on the honourable distinction which circumstances have placed within his reach. As respects the objects themselves, he secures an intelligent superintendence, the countenance of government, and the numerical votes necessary for their adoption. But to the special enactments by which they are carried into effect, he must be, from their technical nature, as much a stranger as he has been, in point of fact, to the great preceding discussions by which their general necessity was established. There are two sorts of power; that of mind and that of station. Inventors are one thing,-capitalists another. A man does not become a Watt or an Arkwright, because he has the will and the good fortune to profit by their genius; nor have Rundle and Makepeace yet acquired the fame of Flaxman and Cellini. We have kept our readers too long plunged in the nebula, through which Mr Bentham sweeps in his eccentric orbit. It is a singular contrast to emerge on a sudden out of this turbid atmosphere and scenery of Chaos, anarch old,' and find one's self instantly involved in reasonings high: sitting apart upon the hill retired.' Were a sensible man who knew nothing of the practice of the law, made for the first time acquainted with the object of its several branches, the more he became aware of the necessity for a clear arrangement and definition of rights and offences, and a proper scale of punishments, the greater would he feel the difficulty of anticipating the provisions which so complicated an undertaking might require. Such a task, adequately performed, implies a perfect knowledge of our condition both from within and from without, of morals and statistics, of human nature, and the objects of human desire, together with the changes impressed on each at every step in the progress of civilisation. But when he passed on to consider the remaining and more menial division of the law, (that of Pleading and of Evidence,) just in proportion as he understood the office which each of these was called upon to discharge, he would feel satisfied that a few simple rules, and those of instruction and caution rather than of indispensable obligation, were much sounder securities for justice within their respective departments, than all the distinctions which at present crowd the octavos of either science. Pleading comprises the forms in which the parties are expected to state their case; Evidence the species and amount of proof by which they are expected to prove it. Never did ingenuity more thoroughly overreach itself. The Too judges forgot that the only object for which these subsidiary branches existed, was to feed the trunk and body of the tree, and not to draw away its strength in idle foliage of their own. happy, however, in the opportunity of inventing a new science, in an age when for lack of real ones the kindred subtleties of logic and school divinity were man's principal intellectual enjoyments, they went on constructing an independent system, artificially deduced out of its own technical principles; without inquiring how far any new figment was likely to assist or to impede, in the efficient execution of the superior chapters of the law. With reference to these departments, the pleader's guide is scarcely a fiction. The example thus set by the special pleaders (of whom that tun of sottishness and quibbles, Chief Justice Saunders, is the delight) has been in too many respects followed, in sundry matters connected with evidence, in a later and more enlightened age. Our ancestors had originally entered into few distinctions on this matter beyond certain heads of incompetency; later times (as if to make up for a most judicious tendency to relax some of those positive exclusions) have in another corner of the field raised a structure of arbitrary rules, as well as introduced a general uniformity and unbendingness, formerly quite unknown. No subject could have been worse chosen for this purpose; technical learning could in itself never be more misplaced, nor artificial reasonings more ridiculous, than on the great majority of questions respecting evidence: or, in other words, than when laborious refinements are applied to determine, how far the existence of any given fact proves, or tends to prove, the existence of some other fact. If the legislator must consider the habits of criminals and the motives to crime, before he can hope to make reasonable laws for its prevention, the judges (who with trifling exceptions have invented the whole law of evidence) would have done well to have recollected, that the facts and inferences which come into play in courts of justice, regard average and human conduct; and consequently, that all their dogmata on the probabilities of this conduct should be true,-not merely in the case of some pasteboard man of their own subtle and Promethean construction; but true, most especially, of the beings, on whose actions they are deciding-of the man living in the world, the man who jogs to market, or hurries along London Streets. It is not enough that the Laws of Evidence are capable of being comprehended and colorably explainable by a lawyer; they ought to be such as would readily suggest themselves, and come home to the natural apprehensions of every one VOL. XLVIII. NO. 96. 2 K who may wish to take his share in the concerns of life, and yet have no taste for the perpetual presence of his attorney. When the crane retorted on the fox his spiteful invitation, the supper is said to have been served up in long necked bottles; and a corkscrew, however ingenious, which would only draw its cork under the hand of a professional assistant, would scarcely satisfy a host who intended that his company should make merry. It is accordingly in vain, that the law gives rights and defines offences, if the judges interpose subordinate media of evidence, such as a plain rational person (who in many situations must depend on his own good sense) could never have anticipated; and such, therefore, as must defeat the primary law itself, as often as there is thus created an arbitrary and artificial impossibility of proof. A witness is hardly ever told to stand down, or a piece of documentary evidence rejected, (on any ground save that of irrelevancy, and in certain cases of hearsay,) but every bystander, who knows any thing about the matter, has an awkward feeling come over him, as if the court were throwing into the river, a key, which, though not made on purpose for the door, might nevertheless have opened it, could the lawyers but have agreed to try. He cannot understand why, like the bourgeois gentilhomme, the gentlemen will fence only by book, and let no hits be counted but what are made in carte or tierce, according to their regulations for the game. The divergence from natural equity has here been so complete, that, in comparing Mr Bentham's volumes with our vernacular law books, upon the same subject, there is often almost as much difficulty in recognising an identity of subject matter, as any similarity in the mode of dealing with it. The substance and its incrustation, the plant and its habitat, appear equally unlike. Mr Mill justly observes, that half of our English works on evidence are occupied with the grounds of Title, or what have become so by being made necessary as forms and solemnities rather than proofs. The last volume, for instance, of Mr Phillipps, states, in treating of the respective forms of action, what are the respective points at issue; the first volume having exhausted the general law respecting the securities for trustworthiness, and the rules for weighing the probative force; which together constitute proof, and are the same in all actions. It is the actions themselves which differ in the nature of the facts necessary respectively to be proved. However, whilst in strictness, therefore, the probans, as the matter of evidentiary fact, and the probandum, as the substantive law, proof of which forms the parties' title, are distinct, the two are so mixed up in practice, that, for the convenience of reference, they will naturally accompany each other. After the clouds of his own dust, in which Mr Bentham delights to travel, have been blown away, the portion of his book, that is strictly legal, branches out into the following divisions. They are all treated with a comprehensiveness, and a minuteness, that are more and more astonishing, the more patiently they are observed. 1. Principle of belief-the means of ascertaining trustworthiness of evidence; discriminating between the different securities for truth, both by the sources whence the evidence is derived, and the form in which it is taken; as, for example, by public, oral interrogation on both sides, aided by writing. 2. Rules for extraction of evidence. 3. Preappointed evidence-its objects-principal cases under it, as contracts, wills, recurring events, legally operative facts; in what manner it should be obtained-registration; and authenticity, chiefly of writings; how to be proved, whether original or copy. 4. Circumstantial evidence; whether real, prior, or subsequent inculpative facts-character-cause and effect: improbability. 5. Makeshift evidence; three sorts of written, five of unoriginal, as hearsay, &c.-copies. The hardships and inconsistencies arising from the exclusion of certain kinds of inferior evidence. 6. Authentication; the best modes of authenticating facts, especially writings-the aberrations in English law; especially in not distinguishing between provisional and definitive. 7. Exclusion; with its several causes, forms, and exceptions.' Mr Dumont's recent publication of the papers upon judicial organization is a very valuable supplement to the present work, more especially in connexion with that part which relates to the preservation and extraction of evidence generally, and the admission of that of a secondary class. It seems too clear, from the evidence and the report* of the Chancery Commission, that Among the fifty-three witnesses examined before the Commission, two have been particularly distinguished, Mr Bickerstath and the now Sir Lancelot Shadwell, but in different ways. The answers of the first exhibit the profound knowledge and capacity which mark out a master builder, against the season when this wing, of what Mr Bentham calls the castle of lawyer-craft,' (as great a national object at least as that of Windsor) shall have its turn to be repaired. The second, after stating that the greatest iniquity arose out of the present mode of obtaining, in |