Looking for a definition of my subject, I find in my learned and lamented friend Professor Dicey's introduction to the second edition of his Law and Public Opinion in England, written in 1914, a sentence which will serve better than any definition of my own. “Since 1859”—the date of Mill's Essay on Liberty—“ almost every event which has happened has diverted public attention to the extreme difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of drawing a rigid distinction between actions which merely concern a man himself and actions which also concern society.” That is a clear statement in untechnical terms of the facts underlying the formal distinction between Public and Private Law, and of the fact that the relations of the two classes of actions and of the rules of law dealing with them have become in our own time, and are still becoming, more and more intimate and complex. It has more than once been observed of late that Public Law is encroaching on Private Law. Perhaps it has not been sufficiently noted that this process by no means obliterates the distinction between them, but on the contrary makes it all the more needful to bear it in mind. Confusion and trouble must arise when private rights arising out of legal or administrative rules established with a primary view to the public weal are treated as if they were matters of merely private interest, and when the framers or administrators of measures designed for the public good ignore the various ways in which private rights will be affected.

Prosecutions for the crime of blasphemy are rare. But one which took place recently in London has elicited from the Home Secretary an utterance which is of interest and of importance.

During the last Long Vacation—which I am afraid, by the way, will be the last long vacation—I Was just about starting out to indulge in a pastime which a don of the rival, but much inferior, university has described as “putting little balls into little holes with instruments singularly unadapted for the purpose” when a letter was put into my hand with an American stamp and a United States postmark. I opened it hastily and glanced at it, and gathered the impression that some unknown society in the United States was inviting me to proceed there in the month of November to deliver an address on some legal subject. I was flattered and puzzled. I threw the letter on the table and went out to indulge in the aforesaid pastime. It was not till I got home and read the letter carefully that I discovered what it was all about. I gathered that your Downing Professor, who prefers to spend his holiday in a dry climate—a bone-dry climate—was conveying to me the request of the University Law Society that I should come back to my old university and my old college and speak to the law students, and I was very much flattered and grateful. I felt a little, however, like the Prodigal Son, for I thought that for the Cambridge Law Society and the Law School of Cambridge to invite a man who had paid little attention to them while he was up, to come and address them, was heaping coals of fire upon his head.

The old system of pleading has passed so completely into the limbo of things forgotten that the title of this paper is not intelligible without an explanation. I must, therefore, remind the reader that, in pursuance of the Second Report of the Common Law Procedure Commissioners, which was issued in 1830, the Judges made some new general rules as to pleading in the Hilary Term of 1834 which, on the whole, tended to aggravate the existing evils of the common law system of special pleading, by making special pleading compulsory where it had before been only optional. Something was done to alleviate these evils by the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1852, 1854, and 1860; but they were not wholly eliminated till the new system of procedure and pleading introduced by the Judicature Acts. The result was that right down to the Judicature Acts the system of pleading was the old system; and, subject to the modifications introduced by the Common Law Procedure Acts, the old system aggravated by the new pleading rules of the Hilary Term, 1834. Now it seems to me that there are certain developments in common law doctrine in the nineteenth century which may in part, at least, be traced to the indirect influence of these new pleading rules. But it is obvious that before I can even state my thesis I must explain some of the characteristics of the old system of special pleading, and the effect of these new pleading rules. I shall therefore divide this paper into these three parts, and deal firstly with certain characteristics of the old system of special pleading; secondly, with the new pleading rules of the Hilary Term, 1834; and thirdly, with the question of their effect on the development of the substantive law.

Mr. President and Gentlemen,—You make me feel a little shy. When I somewhat incontinently accepted your kind invitation I wholly forgot that I was a Judge of the Privy Council. Thank heaven, I have no written address to deliver, and I am informed that there are no reporters present. But even that does not free me from embarrassment. I have under-taken to speak to you tonight of the position of the Judicial Committee in the Constitution of the Empire, and I have to remember that we who sit on the Judicial Committee have taken a tremendous oath not to disclose any of the secrets that come to the fore there; and I have also to consider that it was only this very morning that at half-past ten, in the absence of the Lord Chancellor, who is frequently called away at this moment on other business, I was sitting to dispose of the list in that Court, presiding as the senior remaining ex-Lord Chancellor. Well, we finished the list at eleven, and I went over to sit on the Woolsack at the House of Lords, which I occupied till a ' quarter to four, when public business made it necessary that I should adjourn the tribunal a little early. I did not say why, and my unsuspecting colleagues acquiesced. Now, gentlemen, you will see why I have something of the sense of the boy who comes to tell tales out of school. However, let us begin.

The first colonists in America might be divided roughly into two streams. Those that went to the North were of the Puritan stripe; those that went to the South were, so far as the ruling class is concerned, Englishmen quite in sympathy with existing affairs, who went only to better themselves. The middle colonies, between New England and Pennsylvania, were not first settled by Englishmen; they require different consideration. The people, then, who settled New England, and to a considerable extent the people who settled Pennsylvania, were not in sympathy with existing conditions in England; and they had as a result of their experience a certain antipathy to the English law as it had been administered. In Massachusetts Bay this antipathy was carried to the extent of forbidding any English lawyer to live in the colony; and they abolished the English law by ordinance, and provided that all matters should be settled by appeal to the Bible, which nreant, to them, the Old Testament. That continued for a while, but, of course, it was absolutely an unworkable condition. Men trained in the thoughts of Englishmen could not think like the ancient Jews, and could not really be governed by the law of Moses; and the ordinance rather passed out of their recollection. It was still true, however, that lawyers did not plead in their Courts. The Courts were magistrate Courts, presided over in the highest Court by the persons elected as governor and assistants, in the lower Courts by the lesser magistrates. The law administered—if one can call it law—was simply the whim or the good sense of the magistrate, along with such ordinances as had been passed. The same thing was true of the other New England colonies and—as time passed—was equally true in Pennsylvania.

At the beginning of the '70s there were two Maitlands at Trinity. One of them took a first class in Law—the other took a first class in Moral Sciences. The latter was our Maitland, and thereby hangs a tale. It was natural, when in later years he became a distinguished man, for people to look up the academic records, and equally natural for them to fall into the error of supposing that the Maitland who was the distinguished legal historian was the Maitland who “went out” in Law. Even the then editors of the University Calendar fell into the trap, and in the Calendars from 1898 to 1901 there is a note to the name Maitland in the Law Tripos, 1873, describing him as Downing Professor of Law. Other people were misled. Whittaker, of Trinity, whom many of us know to have been an old pupil and intimate friend of Maitland, told me that not long ago he met one of the men who were classed above the Maitland of the Law Tripos. Both being Cambridge men and lawyers they talked, of course, of Cambridge and Law and Maitland. The other man observed, “After all, it will always be a feather in my cap that I once beat Maitland in examination”; and Whittaker had not the heart to undeceive him.

Looked at with respect to subject-matter these two books are more truly two parts of one work, the former being the historical introduction and the latter the dogmatic and critical exposition of the present law. Indeed they were intended originally to be one volume and separation resulted from inclusion of the historical portion in the Cambridge Studies in English Legal History, to which the dogmatic and critical portion, perhaps with excess of scrupulousness, was thought inappropriate. It must be said, however, that the line has been drawn skilfully between the two volumes and those who have occasion to use the second for practical purposes may very likely prefer the arrangement as it stands.

At a joint meeting of the Cambridge University Medical Society and of the Cambridge University Law Society, held on October 28th, 1922, Mr. Travers Humphreys (Senior Counsel to the Treasury) and Dr. G. F. E. Prideaux (of the Ministry of Pensions, F.R.S.M.) debated the following motion: “That in the opinion of this House, the law of England, regarding the criminal responsibility of the alleged insane, is reasonable and fair: and in the interests of justice no alteration is called for”. They have kindly permitted the Cambridge Law Journal to print their speeches in full.

I hope that I shall not either dissatisfy you or disappoint you in what I have got to say to-night, in offering you some observations on the Permanent Court of International Justice, but I confess that it is a pleasure to me to feel that I can cast away all such taints and disadvantages as may attach to a member of the Government, and speak to you as a Trinity man.

There have been, and are, good manuals of Roman law in plenty which might seem to render superfluous the publication of yet another. But, after all, they are foreign, sind what is more (ranitas canitatum!) however carefully later researches are digested in successive editions, there are changes of point of view which cannot be adopted in this fashion. What one may look for in a new manual is, besides a synthesis of recent work, the specification which that work lias undergone in the author's mind, also his general point of view and the special qualities which give his work individuality.

The Committee of the Cambridge University Law Society, when they honoured me with the invitation to address the society, had doubtless the expectation that a solicitor who had been in practice for between forty and fifty years might from his experience be able to explain the work and environment of the profession in a way which might be useful to those members of the society who, having determined to follow the legal profession, had not yet decided to which branch of that profession they should devote their lives. I will endeavour to fulfil that expectation. I will draw for you the picture of a solicitor's professional life and work and surroundings with such accuracy as my powers and the time at my disposal permit, not concealing its blemishes or exaggerating its merits. I hope that I shall be able to make you see the picture right. If so, you will, when I have finished, agree with me that though the highest honours and emoluments of the legal profession are not at present open to solicitors, yet theirs is a calling which renders to the community an important–indeed, an essential–service, and one to which a man of ability, and still more of character, may devote himself with confidence as affording ample scope for his energy and ambition. I claim for the profession that, properly practised, it can and does do nothing but good. Unless I were prepared to make that claim after forty-seven years' experience in the profession, I should not be here. I resent the representations by popular novelists and dramatists of the solicitor as a costs-pursuing pettifogger, if nothing worse. Dickens heads the tribe of libellers with representations which, even as caricatures, are grossly overdrawn. In his celebrated preface and first chapter of “ Bleak House ” he discloses his motive, which was the laudable one of the correction of abuses of legal procedure. At the time he was writing (the middle of the nineteenth century) those abuses no doubt prevailed. But I hope I need not assure my present audience that Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, Mr. Tulkingherne, Messrs. Spenlow and Jorkins, Messrs.

The publication of a new edition of the late Professor Oppenheim's second volume on International Law, which deals with “War and Neutrality,” will raise in some minds the question as to the applicability of the maxim inter arma silent leges. If it be true, how can there be a law and laws of war?

In an article on “Contributory Negligence” in the January number of the Law Quarterly Review, the learned writer, Lord Justice O'Connor, draws attention to the state of confusion which a study of recent cases reveals as reigning with regard to this subject, and concludes by suggesting that the bare question should be put to the jury, “Whose fault was it?”. This article is not intended as a criticism of that thesis. But if the condition of principle is such that experience suggests its total abandonment, it is surely high time that Theory bestirred herself. The following observations constitute an attempt to apply the current formula to a particular class of cases—those namely which may be described as collision and running down cases—with the intention of showing that the formula does adequately cover the cases.

Under the above title Professor Maitland gave a characteristic study of the relations of the Common Law Courts to the Canon Law in the reign of Edward the Third. His object was to trace the history of an attempt by the temporal authority to “enforce” (for its own ends) the provisions of the papal Extravagant “Execrabilis” by securing its recognition in the Court of Common Pleas and excluding the spiritual Courts from their claim to the sole cognizance of the matters covered by the Bull. To his treatment of the subject it may be objected, with all due deference, that the Bull Execrabilis, interesting as it is, cannot be regarded as an altogether new factor in English law calling into operation an entirely new set of phenomena that can be isolated and studied alone; on the contrary, when the Bull made its first appearance in the English Courts of Common Law it became immediately involved in a fairly old dispute between the spiritual and temporal jurisdictions. This aspect of the subject received no consideration in Maitland's essay, with the result that his treatment of the matter is incomplete and in one important particular incorrect.