Luke Sharp Makes a Quotation and Attempts to Vertify it.

"The law is a hass," said a very celebrated authority many years ago and there are indications abroad in England which tend to show that the law is at last beginning to realise that it is a "hass." There is a movement afoot for the codifying of the English law, for setting of it all down condensedly in black and white, and the arranging of it in such a manner that the ordinary person outside the law courts may, if he choses to study the code, get some little inkling what the law really is. Curiously enough this motion for the codifying of the English law comes from an unexpected source, namely, from the lawyers themselves. One would imagine that it ought to be the game of the lawyers to keep the law as obscure as possible, so that Satan would find some mischief still for legal hands to do. But there is a reason for all things, and the reason for this most extraordinary move on the part of certain lawyers in England I shall presently attempt to show. "Keep ye the law; be swift in all obedience," writes Rudyard Kipling; but this, in England, is one of the things easier said than done. How is a man to keep the law if he knows absolutely nothing about it. In the middle library there are something like 2000 volumes containing reports of English cases, and in any page or paargraph of the most innumerable leaves that compose these books there may be a sentence that will (and does) overturn something that has gone before. English law has, therefore, become a heap of legal decisions and parliamentary enactments piled one on top of the other into an enormous mass, built up slowly through the centuries like a coral reef, and if it were not for the average horse sense of the English judges I confess I cannot see how any man could hope to get justice on any subject whatever; as it is they blunder along, and I believe that there is probably as much justice to the square inch in England as in any other country in the world.

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Nevertheless the law is admitted to be tremendously expensive luxury in England, and aside from that it is ponderously slow, and as been so well shown by Charles Dickens.

Now the Englishman is pre-eminently a practical individual. I think myself that he is the most understood man on the face of the earth; but that's another subject altogether, and I merely wish to indicate what he does when he finds himself in a difficulty. He may not rise up and smash things with the angry impetuosity of his brother in the West, but he evinces a slow and dogged determination to find the way out of a hole if he has managed to stumble into one.

The lawyers of London fattened on the misfortunes and necessities of the people of England. The whole administration of the law was in the hands of, one may say, a close corporation; competition was impossible. Bills and costs were frightfully excessive, and although there is a legal method of taxing costs, and thus cutting down the charges of a dishonest solicitor, the law remains a most unsatisfactory way of settling differences. Merchants of London found cases dragging on year after year and remaining unsettled. Finally, the decisions were as often as not wrong, made by incompetent and ignorant judges, who knew nothing of mercantile procedure, and who quite evidently cared less. The merchants of London made no fuss and raised no howl; they wrote no letters to the papers, and did not try to get parliament to come to their relief, knowing very well that legislation could not help them, because a large proportion of parliament was composed of lawyers whose game evidently was to make the law more difficult rather than less complex. So the merchants quietly formed boards of arbitration, and agreed to refer their differences to these self-constituted courts. There are three arbitrators, as a rule, men who understand the kind of business to which the case belongs, but who are strangers to the parties in dispute. They are paid a guinea a day, and often settle in a day at a cost of three guineas, and settle on the whole satisfactorily, cases that would have dragged for months from court to court, and would have cost thousands upon thousands before a like reasonable decision was reached.

Within the last dozen years, therefore, the legal profession of London have found themselves high and dry. Business to the amount of millions annually has gone from them, and gone, as I thoroughly believe, forever. Whether they codify their laws or burn them will make little difference to the hard-headed merchants of London.

All of which tends to show the truth of the old adage, that it is folly to wring the neck of the goose that is laying the golden egg; which the legal profession of England is at present without much inclination to deny.—Detroit Free Press.