Firstly. That the Inner Bar is not necessary to train

advocates for the office of judge.

Secondly. That there is no sound principle on which exclusive forensic privileges can be granted.

Thirdly. That it is unnecessary for State purposes, that the Crown should have the power of granting such privileges.

Fourthly. That the existence of the two Bars restricts the

suitor in his choice of counsel, and thereby largely and unnecessarily increases the expenses of litigation. In conclusion, I will remark that the subject is one in which every member of the Bar, and especially every young Barrister, has a very material interest. The pursuit of truth has induced me to prepare and read this lecture, which expresses the deliberate conviction arising from the experience and observation of many years, and which would, if it had not been read before this learned Society, have been in some other manner brought to the notice of the legal profession, under any circumstances not rendering the publication of it impossible.

If it should directly or indirectly attract the attention of the public to the manner in which law expenses are largely and unnecessarily increased, and of the Bar to its own best interests, my labour will not be vain.

Gentlemen, I thank you for your patient attention. I have now finished.

APPENDIX A.

NAMES OF OUTER BARRISTERS GAZETTED AS QUEEN'S COUNSEL ON THE 22nd FEBRUARY, 1861.

496

XXV. CODIFICATION. BY WALKER MARSHALL, Esq. (Read June 10, 1861.)

THE Law of England labours under an incubus, which for the last two hundred years she has, with efforts waxing still feebler as the burden increased, vainly attempted to throw off. The creature of necessity and the growth of accident, our system of common law, if it never possessed much symmetry, contained attributes of a more precious character; but it has laboured under the peculiar misfortune of being overlaid with a massan incomprehensible, indeed an undiscoverable mass-of legislation. So huge, so complex, so unintelligible, so intricate and perplexed, that commissions without end, and commissioners without number, directed to its reduction, have effected nothing towards that end, but rather have piled still higher its shapeless dimensions; and have not even, after years of labour, succeeded in discovering which of all these statutes express the living letter of the law, and which of them are of no force or vitality. Suppose it were written in history of some ancient kingdom, that "her laws were so numerous no one could tell their number; neither could any of her sages say which of them were in force and which of them were obsolete," would not every commentator exclaim, "What an intolerable state of affairs!"

The ill or indifferent success which has hitherto attended such efforts as have been made towards an abatement of this evil, ought not, however, to discourage further attempts. The enterprise is still open, the question is yet unsolved, the work remains to be done. What has been effected has scarcely touched the matter; a few germane statutes here and there have been collected together, and consolidated into one; the superseded or repealed statutes still remain in the statute book, and in several instances the consolidated statute does not contain all the prior enactments which, to fulfil its object, it ought to comprehend. These partial and isolated measures are unequal to cope with the emergency. A wider kind of consolidation is necessary, which, for want of a more apt word, I shall call "Codification."

Codification, as I understand the word, does not represent the result of the labour of a dictionary-maker or an encyclopædist. The codifier is to be armed, not with scissors and paste, but with the pen of a ripe lawyer. He is not to dovetail kindred sections, and tabulate germane statutes; but he is to cast into the crucible of matured experience, and sound sense, and good English, and the best of grammar, the confused, the inconsistent, the redundant, the awkward verbose materials of our statute law; and out of these chaotic ingredients to extract the pure ore of sense and truth.

Year by year, session by session, the legislative chaos has grown, increasing in confusion. It is curious to mark its growth. All the statutes passed in the long reign of Queen Elizabeth, occupy but 244 pages of the statutes at large. The labour of any ten years of the Georges is included in a volume of no greater bulk than is produced by each busy session of our present sovereign. When Lord Bacon recommended some sort of digestion of the statutes, they formed in mass not a twentieth part of that large bulk which they have now attained. If it were a work of expediency then, it is now one of absolute necessity. How much of matter, of real living substance, is there in all these weary wastes of words? Nine parts mere verbiage, mere tautology and surplusage,-repealed, obsolete, superseded, conflicting, repugnant paragraphs, which remain in the statutebook as so many false guides, destructive shoals and quicksands, declaring that to be which is no longer.

A cause may be damaged by an exaggerated estimate of the advantages to accrue from an adoption of a particular measure. The cause of codification has received no little detriment from the high-coloured eulogiums in which its great advocate Jeremy Bentham indulged: penetrated with the truth of his deductions, like all original thinkers he was an enthusiast when advancing his discoveries, and glowed with the fervour of his argumentation. Now, I at once avow that I do not agree with him in thinking that by any process of codification the science of law can ever be so simplified that he who runs may read, or be rendered intelligible to the uninstructed mind. It must, after codification as before, be an art; it must have its professors

it will ever require much study and experience to become versed in its principles, to master its language, and be familiar with its rules. But if the reduction of that heterogeneous mass of scattered legislation into a systematic, coherent, and intelligible shape, were to render the mastery of the statute law a matter of possibility to him who should honestly apply himself to its study; if lawyers, instead of wasting their lives in ignoble struggles with verbal difficulties, were enfranchised from this debasing servitude, and set at large to apply their faculties in the investigation of the principles and the application of the rules of that science which, in the loftiness of its aim and the liberality of its sentiments, ought to yield to no other; an immeasurable benefit would be conferred on the profession, and one in which the community at large would participate in a not much inferior degree.

It is difficult to over-rate the extent to which future legislation would be aided by this systematizing of our body of written law. In fact, before any act of legislation can be now accomplished, this process must be gone through as regards that branch to which the legislation is applicable. But this is too often neglected by the framers of Bills; and, as a result, there is scarcely any important measure which is not followed by one or more Amendment Acts to cure the perplexities which the neglect of this duty has occasioned.

Each matter being relegated to its proper book, chapter, and section of the code, future additions or amendments would without difficulty be assigned to their own proper, natural position. Take, for example, the head of Criminal Procedure. Each enactment at present attaching criminal consequences to an act not previously the object of prosecution, has to define the nature and limits of the jurisdiction of the tribunals, original and appellate, the mode of procedure, and the punishment attached. But if all the descriptions of punishment attached to offences were set forth in the code according as they are against the state, against the person, against property, such an Act of the Legislature as I have described, would be accomplished by a simple declaration that such an act, accompanied by the criminal intent, should be an offence within such a section of the Criminal