Louisiana had some generous thoughts, and were moved by creditable motives? Is it incredible that they who in the markets and exchanges of the world deal in the stocks and bonds of governments are endowed with honorable sentiments in as great measure as the sugar-planters, rice-growers, and field-laborers of Louisiana?

I can not close this argument without adverting to the moral aspects of the case; not that I would have it judged by any other test than that of the Constitution and the laws, but that I invoke the spirit of the Constitution as its best interpreter. This great compact is instinct with good faith. That is the breath of its life. The citizens are taught to lean on and confide in each other. None know better than you, our judges, before whom is spread the history of the law, not less than its precepts, what a shock an open, defiant, triumphant repudiation, by one of our States, of its solemn engagements, must give to our whole moral, social, political, and legal system. These States are bound together by ties that can never be broken. If one bears a tainted name or the stain of evil deeds, she will harm the good name of all the rest. Her example is an invitation to every one of her own citizens, and indeed to the citizens of all to do likewise-to deceive, to cheat, and to betray.

A great tribune of England described faith as that which "holds the moral elements of the world together." It holds them, as the law of gravitation holds the physical elements, without which chaos would be universal. The absence of faith is the disintegration of society; an approach to that period when the nearer one gets to his neighbor, the more he wishes to get away from him; when the worst foes of a man are those of his own household, even the wife of his bosom and the children of his loins.

I appeal to you, supreme judges of the land, pre-eminent in dignity, in honor, and in power; I appeal to every lover of his country; to every true son of Louisiana, and there must be many such, though overborne for the moment by an ignorant and thievish multitude; I appeal to the learned counsel himself, who, I am sure, abhors in his inmost heart the perfidy which he is obliged to defend; I appeal to all, to lead us out of this valley of humiliation, to help us blot this ordinance of repudiation and shame from the book of the laws of Louisiana, from the pages of history, and from the memory of men.

ADDRESS BEFORE THE LAW REFORM SOCIETY,

JANUARY 30, 1883.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: When I received last Friday your invitation to address you on the occasion of this your first regular meeting, I feared that by reason of previous engagements I should not be able to arrange properly what I should say; and even now I must beg you in advance to excuse any deficiencies which you may observe.

A code is a digest of the law on a given subject or class of subjects, analyzed, condensed, stated in distinct propositions, and arranged in scientific order. It is thus a comprehensive statute. Most of our law is or was, as you know, what is sometimes called unwritten law, sometimes case law, sometimes judge-made law. It is described by Tennyson as

"That codeless myriad of precedents;

That wilderness of single instances."

In this condition nobody but a trained lawyer can find it out, and even he is bewildered as often as he is led aright. He gropes about in search of these single instances, these precedents, and finds them, good and bad, right and wrong, in hundreds or thousands of volumes, sometimes agreeing with each other, sometimes disagreeing. He never feels safe until be has read the last book of reports of the court of last resort, and even then he is not sure but that in the next book that comes out he will find the case he relies upon qualified, distinguished, doubted, or overruled. In the last volume of the reports of our own Court of Appeals, the eighty-eighth, containing the decisions from February 8, 1882, to April 18, 1882, two months and ten days, are to be found 123 decisions in all, and these contain criticisms upon forty-nine previous cases as reversed, distinguished, etc. The number of cases cited in the opinions is 492, and in the arguments of counsel 5,037. The twelfth case in the volume gives 165 citations, of which eighteen were from England, one from Maine, two from New Hamp

shire, seven from Massachusetts, one from Connecticut, twentyfour from New York, one from New Jersey, eleven from Pennsylvania, six from Delaware, two from Virginia, one from North Carolina, seven from Georgia, seven from Alabama, two from Mississippi, one from Louisiana, two from Texas, one from Arkansas, two from Michigan, three from Minnesota, five from Kentucky, five from Ohio, eight from Indiana, seven from Illinois, three from Iowa, nine from Missouri, one from Kansas, two from Nebraska, six from California, and fifteen from the courts of the United States. The eighty-third case in the same volume gives 234 cases as cited by counsel-cited, be it remembered, as precedents and guides for New York judges administering, or rather I should say making, law for the State of New York. Thus we have in one volume, the product of little more than the sixth part of a year, 123 decisions, and these for the most part evolved from 5,037 cases that went before, painfully sought out of hundreds and thousands of volumes. Is not this a state of things appalling to the profession, and still more appalling to the public? Is it any wonder that Hallam should have written: "Nor is there any reading more jejune and unprofitable to the philosophical mind than that of our ancient law books. Later times have introduced other inconveniences, until the vast extent and multiplicity of our laws have become a practical evil of serious importance, and an evil which, between the timidity of the Legislature on the one hand and the selfish views of practitioners on the other, is liable to reach in no long time an intolerable excess. Deterred by an interested clamor against innovation from abrogating what is useless, simplifying what is complex, or determining what is doubtful, and always more inclined to stave off an immediate difficulty by some patchwork scheme of modifications and suspensions, than to consult for posterity in the comprehensive spirit of legal philosophy, we accumulate statute upon statute and precedent upon precedent till no industry can acquire nor any intellect digest the mass of learning that grows upon the panting student, and our jurisprudence seems not unlikely to be simplified in the worst and least honorable manner-a tacit agreement of ignorance among its professors."Or that Amos should have written: "But for a youth yet unformed by any other course of accurate study, it may safely be said that the study of English law in its present shape is the most distorting, noxious, and mentally paralyzing mode of education that the most injudicious and cruel

instructor could devise." Or that Herbert Spencer should have written: "Until now, that county courts are taken away their practice, all officers of the law have doggedly opposed law reform. Dare any one assert that, had constituencies been always canvassed on principles of law reform versus law conservatism, ecclesiastical courts would have continued for centuries fattening on the goods of widows and orphans? . . . The complicated follies of our legal verbiage, which the uninitiated can not understand, and which the initiated interpret in various senses, would be quickly put an end to."

Such is case law and the administration of case law. What is the substitute for it? The law of the Legislature; law made by those who alone have the right to make it-the lawgivers; in other words, a code. The practicability and expediency of a code have been so much discussed of late that I need only refer to two or three publications. A pamphlet lately published contains one of the letters of Jeremy Bentham to the people of this country, and a report of Judges Story, Metcalf, and others, on the practicability and expediency of reducing to a written and systematic code the common law of Massachusetts. Pollock, in his "Essay on Jurisprudence and Ethics," published within the year, has a chapter on the science of case law, concluding with these words : "A good part even of our statute law may be regarded as consolidated case law. This consolidation, commonly treated as one of the minor functions of legislation, is in truth one of its highest. On a large scale it is codification, and inasmuch as I found when this essay was first published that some of its expressions were liable to be perverted by enemies of codification to uses they were never meant for, it may not be amiss now to say that I am a strong believer in codification, and have given my reasons for it in some detail elsewhere." Judge Thompson, of Missouri, has just published an article in "The Western Jurist," from which I make this extract: "We are in favor of a code, because we prefer a certainty to that which is uncertain; because we desire to see that law which it is claimed is founded upon the 'immutable principles of justice' reduced to positive enactments; because there is much in the common law which is unsuited to our present civilization, and which we shall never get rid of except by codification; because from the 'elasticity' of the common law flow an innumerable train of evils; and, finally, because codification means a decrease in litigation, a saving of labor for the judge and the

practitioner, and greater security to the rights of the individual. It has been argued that the time has not come for codification in Iowa; but, however that may be, it does not follow that the time has not come in New York. We confess that in this, as in most of the new States, the peculiar features of the country, the habits of our people, and the customs in some lines of trade, may create rights and bring about a development of law which it would be impossible now to foresee and make provision for; but Iowa has been permitted to enjoy a foretaste of codification through the complete reduction of some branches of her law to statutory provision, and before she is half as old as New York she will have a code. What we say upon this question is with regard to codification in general. We do not see why a code should interfere with the theoretical and historical study of our law'; if this age 'is not capable of producing a great work' in jurisprudence, the production of as good a one as it is capable of will not interfere with the production of a greater in another. A code will always be open to amendment or revision whenever in the wisdom of succeeding years it shall be shown to be defective, or a revelation of new rights or a change in our civilization shall require it. In this regard the 'elasticity' of a code will be greater than that of the common law."

Passing from these views of codification in general, let us now see what has been done and what remains to be done for codification in the State of New York. The Constitution of 1846 made two special provisions for codifying the law through what are generally known as the Practice and Code Commissions; the former for remedial and the latter for the substantive departments of the law. Both commissions performed their allotted tasks and reported to the Legislature-one, codes of civil and criminal procedure, and the other the political, penal, and civil codes. These five codes embraced in their scope the whole body of the law. The Legislature having acted upon the reports of the practice commissioners and adopted codes of procedure, civil and criminal, we may confine ourselves here to the work of the Code Commission. The provision of the Constitution under which it was appointed required that three commissioners should be appointed, whose duty it should be "to reduce into a written and systematic code the whole body of the law of this State, or so much and such parts thereof as to the said commissioners shall [should] seem practicable and expedient," and the statute which appointed the