ineffectual to accomplish its intended purpose, and suggests a more apposite re-enactment. This shows the judiciary invested by the Executive with a quasi-legislative function, and the Legislature, supposedly possessed of the power of cogent utterance, instructed as to what declaration it has actually made.

Assuming, for our present purposes, that the sole function of the Legislature is the concise, articulate, intelligible expression of the people's will, what are the desiderata in existing legislative conditions? We shall discuss but three: The codification of substantive law; the condensation and clarification of adjective law; the amplification of complementary law.

The first two of the reforms suggested have been so frequently and so elaborately discussed that but a few general observations are permissible. No one will deny the desirability of a searching revision of the great mass of statute law extant in this State to the end that a crystallized, symmetrical and intelligible code may replace the amorphous and more or less moribund body of law which now exists. The most efficient means to this end are, doubtless, debatable. It would seem proper, in the first place, that every law or portion of a law which had been declared unconstitutional or the operation of whose provisions had expired by virtue of their own limitations, should be specifically repealed by the Legislature. Then every law or portion of a law which had been repealed should be eliminated by the revisers, and the residue, from the first to the last of the Session Laws, should be carefully analyzed and separated into general and special laws, special provisions in general laws being transposed to the special category and vice versa. All laws and portions of laws placed in the special category should be exhaustively tabulated and re-enacted in this classified condition, after

their repeal, as originally passed. No change should be made in the subject-matter of any provision, the repeal and re-enactment being merely for the purpose of simplifying research and citation. All private and individual rights could be carefully safeguarded in a general saving clause and the various legislative beneficaries would thus be saved the anxiety of a possible impairment of their interests and the necessity of testing the constitutionality of the codification. We do not, however, consider the classification and re-enactment of all special and local acts of paramount importance in the general scheme of revision, save to complete its symmetry, inasmuch as the localities and persons affected by these enactments could be trusted to comprehend their entire significance.

The essential and important feature of this reform would be the complete codification of all those acts and portions of acts classed in the category of general laws. These acts would have to be carefully dissected before any special subdivisions of acts in pari materia could be made. Once this analysis were made and the subdivisions formed the codified statement of the existing law would result from a synthesis of all provisions embraced within a given subdivision.

The more specialized the subdivisions, the less labor the synthetic comparison of the statutes in pari materia would entail.

As has been well said, this Herculean task, if accomplished, might shortly be undone in case the Legislature could ignore, with impunity, the rationale of the revision. in subsequent amendments. The permanence or mutability of the revision would depend on the logic and wisdom of the classification of the general laws, the clearness and accuracy of the division lines and the symmetry of the statutory mold. The finest talent of the Bench

and Bar should be requisitioned to project these lines, and once projected in this manner they should receive a constitutional sanction and thereby become invested with a comparative permanence, that is, the Legislature should be constrained by the Constitution to alter or modify a law on a given subject by amending the particular provision of the general law.governing that subject and not be permitted to do so by enacting an independent statute, because the exercise of this right would soon produce again the confusion and complexity which a codification on the lines suggested would remove. Within the bounds so marked the Legislature, in voicing the popular will, should be free to alter or amend, as it desired, but those bounds should not be subject to destruction by any iconoclastic session. It is not denied that great advances in the codification of our substantive law have been made in the past decade, but it is submitted that much yet remains to be accomplished.

The clarification of adjective law would have as its ultimate aim and purpose the production of a brief, clear and concise practice act to replace that mutable and myriad-meaning monstrosity, the Code of Civil Procedure. There can be no doubt that this result is desired by every thoughtful lawyer. The Code, through its inherent and acknowledged weaknesses, is destined to ultimate repeal. The conservatism in the profession which advocates its present retention merely combats the radicalism which would replace it with an enactment widely at variance with the system of administrative justice which it has inculcated. The new Code should, of course, conform to the general jurisdictional lines laid down by the old, but the provisions of substantive law, the redundancies, the prolixities, the ambiguities and the wilderness of minutiae and detail should be elided

once and forever. What little respect we have for the Code results from the wealth of judicial acumen which has been wasted in its interpretation. It would be interesting and instructive, if it were possible, to estimate the time and thought and money which has been expended in the elucidation of its multitudinous provisions since its advent. And yet, in theory at least, the Code is supposed to be as clear to layman as to lawyer. The fundamental fallacy of this pseudo-sacrosanct solecism lies in the assumption that a finite mind can invest itself with omniscience and draft a practice act adapted or adaptable to every possible state of facts. The theoretical concept that the lawyer was a superfluity was born in the judicial reformation which had its rise in the middle of the last century. It was supposed that the practice of the law could be so simplified as to be cast in the form of a statutory primer, the comprehension of which would enable every man to be his own lawyer. This reformation, undoubtedly, wrought lasting benefit in the deracination of the senseless formalism which had overgrown the profession, but the theory which it advanced, that no special skill was requisite in the application of the law, if the law were sufficiently simplified by statute, was essentially erroneous. Such a statutory simplification of adjective law, while perfect in theory, is impossible in practice. Every case differs, óf necessity, from every other case in respect to its facts. This being so, the method or manner of the application of principles of substantive law to a disclosed state of facts must vary to a greater or less extent in every instance. No jurist or legislator can state with precision and accuracy what this variance will be until the determinant facts are disclosed. A certain elasticity is, therefore, essential in every act of procedure, without which justice must, of necessity, miscarry. The Code

stands as a colossal testimonial to this truth. The inference from these facts is clearly that the administration of abstract justice cannot be preconceived and declared with certainty for all prospective litigations, and that the adaptation of general principles of law to particular cases can properly be entrusted only to those trained in the legal craft, whose knowledge qualifies them to determine the relation of the facts of each case to the law as it has been declared. The new Code should provide and strictly enjoin upon the Bench the salutary application of the provision that non-compliance with non-essential requirements should not prejudice substantial rights. This would make the personal equation of the Bench a stronger factor in litigation than is now the case, where the great majority of judicial acts are foreordained by technical Code provisions, and thereby enchance the judicial function and react to insure the proper qualifications in the functionaries. All details of practice should be determined by the Bench and formulated in court rules for the enlightenment of the Bar. This would not, we submit, usurp the legislative function. The determination of the form and manner of the administration of substantive law is intrinsically a judicial function, and, surely, the Bench, coming in daily contact with all classes of litigants, would be better qualified to determine dispassionately what practice would best subserve the ends of justice than the Legislature, which does not uniformly gain its impressions of needed amendments to the Code from unprejudiced sources. It surely could not be said that the Bench, in formulating rules of practice, did not represent the people as truly as the Legislature in enacting a Code. Statutory enactments, relative to procedure, necessarily control formal judicial declarations, but, if these enactments were repealed, there could be no con