examples above given of previous similar changes, by the longcontinued existence of similar provisions in many foreign countries, by their ten years' trial in the State of Louisiana, and by the thorough discussion which the question has received for many years in many countries. VICTOR P. LEOVY.

New Orleans, La.

THE ENGLISH LAW OF 1847.

I began my legal life in 1847, and at that time the common law rested mainly, though not exclusively, upon special pleading, and truth was investigated by rules of evidence so carefully framed to exclude falsehood, that very often truth was quite unable to force its way through the barriers erected against its opposite. Plaintiff and defendant, husband and wife, persons, excepting Quakers, who objected to an oath, those with an interest, direct or indirect, immediate or contingent, in the issue to be tried, were all absolutely excluded from giving evidence. Non-suits were constant, not because there was no cause of action, but because the law refused the evidence of the only persons who could prove it. I do not speak of Chancery, which had defects of its own, because I pretend to no more knowledge of Chancery practice than is picked up by a common lawyer who, as he rises in his profession, is taken into courts of equity to examine a witness or to argue a case upon conflicting facts. Questións as to marriage, and as to wills, so far as they related to personal property, were under the jurisdiction of courts called ecclesiastical, with a procedure and principles happily of their own, and presided over by judges not appointed by the Crown. The admiralty jurisdiction, at all times of great, in time of war of enormous, importance, was in practice committed to an ecclesiastical judge. Criminals, except in high treason and in misdemeanor, could be defended by counsel only through the medium of cross-examination. Speeches could be delivered, with the above exceptions, only by the prisoners themselves, and the system of writing speeches for the parties themselves to deliver, a system of which, in questions of real property, the orations of Isæus, and, in other matters, those of Lysias, Isocrates, and many even of Demosthenes himself, are examples, this system never, I know not why, obtained in this country.

Then, too, during large portions of the year, the common law courts were, from necessity, altogether closed. The circuits occupied, not quite, but nearly, at the same time, the services of fourteen judges; and while the circuits went on there was no work for

common lawyers in London except at the Privy Council and in the House of Lords. The circuits were great schools of professional conduct and professional ethics; and the lessons learned upon them were to receptive minds of unspeakable value. The friendships formed on circuit were sometimes the closest and most enduring that men can form with one another; the cheery society, the frank manners, the pride in the body we belonged to, the discipline of the mess, the friendly mingling together on equal terms of older and younger men, the lessons to be learned both from leaders who were good and leaders who were bad, by the constant attendance in court which was the invariable custom, the large amount of important and profitable business which was transacted, all these things gave the circuits a prominent and useful place in the life of a common lawyer, which I am afraid they are ceasing to have, except in a few of the largest and most populous counties.

Such, in rude outline, was the Bar when I joined it forty-two years ago. The system had its great virtues, but it had it's great and crying evils; and they were aggravated by the powerful men who at that time dominated Westminster. Hall, and whose spirit guided its administration. The majestic presence of Lord Lyndhurst, a luminous, masculine, simple yet most powerful mind, the very incarnation to an outward observer of courtesy and justice, was departing from the Bench; Lord Denman, high-bred, scholar-like, with a noble scorn of the base and the tricky, was just about to follow. The ruling power in the courts in 1847 was Baron Parke, a man of great and wide legal learning, an admirable scholar, a kind-hearted and amiable man, and of remarkable force of mind. These great qualities he devoted to heightening all the absurdities, and contracting to the very utmost the narrowness of the system of special pleading. The client was unthought of. Conceive a judge rejoicing, as I have myself heard Baron Parke rejoice, at non-suiting a plaintiff in an undefended cause, saying, with a sort of triumphant air, that "those who drew loose declarations brought scandal on the law." The right was nothing, the mode of stating everything. When it was proposed to give power to amend the statement, "Good Heavens!" exclaimed the Baron, "think of the state of the record!"-i. c., the sacred parchment, which it was proposed to defile by erasures and alterations. He bent the whole powers of his great intellect to defeat the Act of Parliament which had allowed of equitable defenses in a common law action. He laid down all but impossible conditions, and said, with an air of intense satisfaction, in my

across.

hearing, "I think we settled the new act to-day, we shall hear no more of equitable defenses !" And as Baron Parke piped, the Court of Exchequer followed, and dragged after it, with more or less, reluctance, the other common law courts of Westminster Hall. Sir William Maule and Sir Cresswell Cresswell did their best to resist the current. Cresswell was a man of strong will, of clear, sagacious, sensible mind, and a sound lawyer; Sir William Maule seems to me, on reflection, and toward the close of a long life, on the whole, the most extraordinary intellect I ever came He could split a hair into twenty filaments at one time, and at another could come crushing down, like a huge steam hammer of good sense, through a web of subtlety which disappeared under his blow. A great scholar, a very great mathematician, who extorted, as I have been told by Cambridge men, a Senior Wranglership from examiners wedded to the synthetic method, in spite of his persistent and indeed defiant use of the analytic; a great linguist, an accomplished lawyer, and overflowing with humor, generally grotesque and cynical, but sometimes alive with a rich humanity. He was a somewhat disappointed man; his life was said hardly to court inspection; he was certainly, with all his great gifts, personally indolent. He was not a great judge, not because he could not, but because he would not be. He played with his office. An utter disbeliever in the virtue of women, he was cruel to them in court; but, with this large exception, there was nothing mean about him, nothing unjust; and anything like brutality or fraud roused his indignation, and brought out all the nobler qualities of his strangely compounded character. Baron Parke was, in a legal view, his favorite aversion. "Well," I have heard him say, "that seems a horror in morals and a monster in reasoning. Now, give us the judgment of Baron Parke which lays it down as law." With the advent of Lord Campbell to the Chief Justiceship, a great lawyer, not wedded to the narrow technicalities which he thoroughly understood, but did not admire, came to the assistance of good sense and justice. But for some time he struggled in vain against the idolatry of Baron Parke to which the whole of the common law at that time was devoted. Even so very great a lawyer and so independent a man as Sir James Willes dedicated a book to him as the judge "to whom the law was under greater obligations than to any judge within legal memory." One of the obligations he was very near conferring on it was its absolute extinction. "I have aided in building up sixteen volumes of Meeson & Welsby," said he proudly, to Charles Austin, "and that is a

great thing for any man to say." "I dare say it is," said Austin, "but in the Palace of Truth, Baron, do you think it would have made the slightest difference to mankind, or even to England, if all the cases in all the volumes of Meeson & Welsby had been decided the other way?" He repeated his boast to Sir William Erle. "It's a lucky thing," said Sir William, as he told me himself, "that there was not a seventeenth volume, for if there had been the common law itself would have disappeared altogether, amidst the jeers and hisses of mankind; and," he added, "Parke didn't seem to like it."-Lord Coleridge, in Contemporary Review.

NATURAL gifts are to be found here and there in both sexes alike; and so far as her nature is concerned the woman is admissible to all pursuits as well as the man; though in all of them the woman is weaker than the man.-Repub. Plato, V. 455.

AND let no one ever presume to be at once accuser and judge or witness; for in every judicial investigation there must always be four persons present; that is the judges elected, and the accusers, and the defenders, and the witnesses.-Pseudo-Fabian.

WHAT IS TO "TIDDLY-WINK?"-We do not know, says the Pall Mall Gazette, but whatever it is, at any rate the Supreme Court of Victoria has decided that it is not libellous. A colonial newspaper charged a shire counselor with having "tiddly-winked the shire funds." Litigation ensued, and the matter was carried on appeal to the highest tribunal in the colony, with the aforesaid result. Some fifty English dictionaries were brought into court to enable the judges to ascertain what was the real meaning of the word, but "tiddly-winking" was not discoverable in any of them. So they accepted the definition of a witness, that the phrase conveyed to his mind the idea of "using little dodges to obtain one's own ends." An imputation of that sort, the court decided, was not necessarily libellous.-Argus, Albany, N. Y.

NOTHING is opposed to itself-an opposite being by nature opposed to something.—Maximus. [A. D. 185.]

THE FIRST COLORED man admitted to practice in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, was sworn in, October 20th, 1890. His name is Richard E. King. He is a native of St. Mary's County in that State, aged 34, and studied law at the Boston University.

FORCIBLE ENTRY.

The report of the case of Com'th v. Trimble in the Public Ledger of November 20th, warrants the inference that the facts were these: The defendant having a stable and horses in it, hired a coachman and gave him apartments in the stable for himself and his wife, who occupied the same as their dwelling-place. The coachman, having been guilty of misconduct, was discharged, and refusing to leave the premises, he and his wife were forcibly ejected by order of the master. For this, the agent of the master was indicted for forcible entry, convicted and sentenced. The correctness of this inference and statement is confirmed upon inquiry.

It is evident that the court treated the servant as a tenant, or entitled to the rights of a tenant, so far as the forcible eviction was concerned. It is a very practical question, for it involves the right to turn a servant out of one's house by force, when dismissed from the service. If it is entirely immaterial whether the place occupied by the servant to dwell in is an apartment in the master's own dwelling or is a distinct house or if it is not at all material that the dwelling-place should be part of the same establishment as is occupied by the master, there apparently was a mistake here, a slip in the application of the law; and it arose from not adverting to the meaning of the word possession. The rule is perfectly settled in this State that the possession of the prosecutor must be actual, not constructive (the authorities are cited in the foot-note to Purdon), but it seems to have been overlooked that if the relation was that of master and servant, if the dwelling was furnished by the master to the servant because he was a servant and as part of, or in lieu of part of the wages, the possession was that of the master, and the servant had none. Such a person has no more possession, nor a different kind of possession than has the assistant in a shop or a customer who enters by consent or invitation. This subject is so elaborately discussed in Mahew v. Steele, 4 Ellis and Black 347, and so pointedly for the present purpose decided by Baron Parke in Hughes v. Derry, 9 C. & P. 494, that nothing can usefully be added to show that there is no difference whatever in the nature or character of the possession of a servant as such occupying a room or apartments or a distinct dwelling, and his possession of the key of the china closet or wine room, put in his charge while a servant.

If it is supposed that the fact the thing possessed is a dwelling