Our contribution in amendment of Paterson's Biography. 111

tinent for the purpose of studying the trades and manufactures that might be advantageously introduced into England; and in Holland he had made himself acquainted with the Dutch system of banking. His summary of what the Dutch had done is so concise that we are tempted to quote it :

'First, they have fitted themselves with a public register of all their lands and houses, whereby it is made ready moneys all times, without the charge of law or the necessity of a lawyer. Secondly, by making cut rivers navigable in all places where art can possibly effect it, thereby making trade more communicable and easy than in other places. Thirdly, by a public bank the great sinews of trade, the credit thereof making paper go in trade equal with ready moey-yea, better, in many parts of the world, than money. Fourthly, a court of merchants to end all differences betwixt merchant and merchant. Fifthly, a lumber-house.' *

And again he says: 'Observe, all you that read this, and tell to your children this strange thing that paper in Holland is equal with moneys in England; and he enters into an argument to prove that a bank may rise in London equal with that of Amsterdam':

'And I would have the mistaken world know that a bank is as safe and practicable in a kingdom as in a commonwealth, and particularly in an island that is convenient for trade. And the reason why it is so is because it is a bank of credit, and not of cash, as is the Chamber of London and the East India Company, whose treasures are abroad in trade, and increasing, and only the books in the offices. I say it is impossible to keep a bank from rising in this kingdom, nay, many banks, if we were under a voluntary register (of lands).'

We have said enough, then, to show that while Paterson might be the actual founder of the Bank of England, there were other members of the commercial community fully alive to the paramount importance of such an institution; and although this circumstance need not derogate from the honours that are his due, it is quite necessary that the fact should be stated, otherwise a distorted view of history is impressed on the vision of the reader. Paterson was the man who executed the achievement, and who brought the system of banking to a practical bearing, but Yarranton had preceded him by twenty years in a clear statement of the requisites; and we have little hesitation in affirming that if a bank had been founded on the principles announced by Andrew, it would have been a better, more secure, and more useful bank than any single institution bearing the name that has ever existed in this country.

One peculiarity, however, must strike the reader-that both Paterson and Yarranton are compelled to argue that a bank could exist in a kingdom as well as in a commonwealth. Nor was this without reason. In 1676 banking was at its lowest point. The goldsmiths had formerly carried on a system of banking, and had

*The lumber-house is spoken of by Paterson as the Lombard, or Lombard house, whereby all poor people may have moneys lent upon goods at very easy interest,'

borrowed

borrowed money, say at 6 per cent., advancing it to the Government, say at 8 or 10. But when the Dutch sailed up the Medway, in 1667, there had been a panic and a run, and the goldsmiths' credit had been destroyed. Some time later, Charles II. had seized the money in the exchequer, and had ruined thousands of families. It was, therefore, not without reason that the practical men of the time connected the idea of safe banking with the notion of a republic; and it was only after the Revolution of 1688 that the Bank of England came to be possible. It seems, in fact, to have been known as the Revolution Bank, and was supported by the revolution party, including John Locke, who was one of the 1,300 original shareholders.

Into the later career of Paterson we need not enter, briefly stating that in 1695 he proposed to found an Orphan Bank Fund, and quitted the direction of the Bank of England. Soon after he was engaged in the Darien scheme. In 1701 he published his 'Proposals and Reasons for constituting a Council of Trade,' a work of great merit, long attributed to the paper-money adventurer, John Law, from the circumstance that it was republished in 1761 by Foulis, of Glasgow, with Law's name. In 1706 he took part in the preliminaries for the union with Scotland, and in the first united parliament was elected for the borough of Dumfries. The last ten years of his life he appears to have spent in Westminster, and he died on the 22nd January, 1719; but where he died appears to be still unknown.

Mr. Bannister has announced as in the press (2 vols., 8vo.), The Writings of William Paterson,' and the announcement affords us the opportunity of throwing out a suggestion connected with the literature of commerce. The suggestion is this:-There are at present in existence various societies for the republication of scarce and valuable works that are no longer accessible to the great mass of readers-Ray Societies, Sydenham Societies, Maitland Societies, &c. To these societies a certain number of members subscribe, either in the form of an annual subscription, or in the presentation of a work or part of a work. Many books of great historic and professional value are thus rescued from oblivion, and the available literature of the nation becomes at once more perfect and more complete-more perfect, inasmuch as a distinct department is cultivated by special men with special regard to thorough investigation; and more complete, inasmuch as every wanting link is hunted up in every imaginable direction: and the accumulated fragments become of incomparably more value when assembled together, than when, in their scattered isolation, they exist only as the curiosities of the richer or more fortunate libraries. Why not, then, have a special society devoted to the reproduction and republication of the commercial literature

of

Our suggestion of a Commercial Literary Society.

113 of the country? Britain, the most commercial country in the world, would surely be found to contain as inany wealthy merchants-including, in the term merchant, all who are engaged in the active industry of the age, whether mining, manufacturing, trading, or money-dealing-as would be willing to subscribe their annual guinea, or two guineas, for the purpose of rescuing from oblivion the literature of their own profession. And to exhibit this necessity, we have brought together Andrew Yarranton and William Paterson. Almost all who have read anything at all have read of Adam Smith, the political economist, and of the doctrines by which he swept away the old system of restriction. Yet where is the scholar who could tell us how the system demolished by Adam Smith had its origin? who was its founder? under what circumstances it was developed? who was it that wrote the thesis of which Adam Smith wrote the anti-thesis? Smith was the literary founder of the modern system by which free trade is destined to extend over the world: who was the founder of the older system, by which restrictions were imposed on trade? Was it, or was it not, this same Andrew Yarranton who promulgated the policy of protection, while, at the same time, he was using his best endeavour to import the skill and machinery of the continent? Paterson's works, taken alone, would be of no great value, because, to most readers, they would be historically unintelligible; but taken in connection with those that preceded them, and with those that succeeded them, down to Adam Smith, they would probably attain to high historic rank, and elucidate the foundation of England's commercial greatness. Why, then, should there not be a 'Paterson Society' for the republication of a complete series of the commercial literature of Great Britain, chronologically arranged? Paterson's works, under the able and acute editorship of Mr. Bannister, might form the nucleus of a national enterprise of the very highest importance.

ART. II.-1. Report of Statute Law Commission, 1835. 2. The Statute Law Commission, 1854.

3. Report of the Law Amendment Society, 1856.

4. Revision of Code of Laws of the State of New York, 1830.

THE

HE Law of England, which has been pronounced by its flatterers to be the perfection of reason, abounds with theories, which, however wise and beneficent they may have been in their origin, have now become most inconvenient, if not positively mischievous, in their operation. The revolutions in our social and economical relations during a long course of ages, and the changes which the ever-varying phases of society have necessitated,

sitated, have helped to produce so vast and so heterogeneous an accumulation of legal ordinances, that the law itself has become little better than a mockery and a snare.' That the law is, for the most part, founded upon principles of equity, and that it is administered with an earnest desire to mete out even-handed justice, few, perhaps, would care to deny; and yet the grievances which exist are so onerous to all classes, when, from necessity, they become involved in its meshes, that submission to wrong is often considered preferable to the vindication of clear, undoubted right, when that vindication can only be asserted by the employment of the complex machinery of the law. De minimis non curat lex,' is a maxim which is thoroughly appreciated by all who have had anything to do with its vexatious delays, its alluring uncertainties, and its costly processes. But the theory of our law is, that from the exquisite simplicity of its provisions no one ought to be ignorant of them; and that theory, with the somewhat grave consequences which it involves, we find expressed in the wellknown .naxim, Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.' Under the most favourable combination of circumstances, and in a state of society at once natural and healthy, such a proposition could hardly be regarded as just and reasonable; but it would at least be expected that the laws which adopted such a legal principle would be conspicuous for their simplicity of arrangement, their perspicuity of thought, and their terseness of expression; it would be expected that, like the Laws of the Twelve Tables, they would be expounded in clear, unambiguous language, and made intelligible to the minds of the people, so that the commission of an offence might not be imputed to the ignorance of the law so much as to the positive disobedience of the offender.

The Law of England, however, contradicts, in this respect, every principle of justice and expediency. As a system-if such it can be called-it is without method, and its parts have neither coherence with, nor due relation to, each other. Dating from a remote antiquity, it has accumulated a mass of motley incongruities which have been elaborated by the subtlety of man's intellect until they have become well-nigh unintelligible, and what common sense they once contained has been almost smothered under the weight of the most artificial distinctions. It is, in short, a system built up of legal atoms, which, like the constitution of the world of the Atomic philosophers, have found their way into the places they hold by little less than blind chance.

The most accomplished lawyer who has sought to master it by the most diligent study, and by the viginti annorum lucubrationes,' pretends to no more than an acquaintance with its principles, as enunciated in the judicial decisions of the courts. The courts and their component members, judges of great erudition

and

Common and Statute Law.

115

and large powers of mind, are not unfrequently opposed to each other, while in their judgments they anxiously endeavour, by reasoning and by thought, to trace out the foundations of the law when it has become loose and unsettled.

This system of law, the Municipal Law as it is termed 'quod quisque populus sibi constituit,' which has been established in this country for the governance of the people, and which consists of judicial decisions, and of legislative enactments whose origin is traceable to a very early period, is written or statute law, and unwritten or common law. The common law, which is declared by universal tradition and by long practice, is supposed to have had its source in the Laws of Alfred, or, as they were afterwards called, the Laws of Edward the Confessor. These laws, which were themselves a digest of the customs prevailing among the Saxons, were, no doubt, after the Norman Conquest perpetuated by tradition, and became, in combination with the enactments of early, but now extinct statutes, the foundation of what we call the Common Law of England. This law has been expounded by judges through successive ages, and their decisions, either explaining or amplifying its principles, have been recorded in Reports which are extant in a regular series from the reign of Heury III. to the present time. But besides the Common Law, there is, as it were, an off-shoot from it, which is hardly of inferior importance to, and, in its proportions, falls little short of the parent tree, which must also be ranked under the category of unwritten law. Equity, which has been defined to be To TOU VOμou, arose as a system in this country when the Common Law Courts became timorous of devising new remedies for new wrongs. Equally as afraid in the fourteenth century, as we are now, of exceeding the boundaries which have been prescribed by precedent, they permitted a new jurisdiction to be established, which left it to the conscience of the judge to decide all questions which were not strictly subjects of legal cognisance, or for which a writ in consimili casu could not at once be framed, untrammelled by authority, and according to the very right and justice of the case. The decisions which have been pronounced by courts of equity are also extant in a series of Reports from the reign of Henry VIII., and consisting, as they do, of well-considered judgments, and of expositions of portions of the Statute Law, must be regarded as virtually a part of the unwritten law.

The Statute Law which has come down to us dates its existence from the reign of Henry III. The oldest statute extant is Magna Charta, as confirmed by the Parliament in the ninth year of the reign of Henry III. From that time to the present, the Statute Law has been continually increased in bulk at least, if not in wisdom, by the experimental legislation of six cen

turies,