ART. V.-EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM LORD BROUGHAM TO THE EARL OF RADNOR.

"AND I really must admit that the last Session, if it were to be judged by the number only of its measures as compared with former years, would appear to disadvantage. But, then, we are to reckon the value as well as the number; and one is reminded by the season of what all farmers, at least with us in the North, and I take for granted with you also, are dwelling upon, wishing that the yield may be, if small in bulk, yet great in value.' So we really may say of the legislative yield, that it answered this description: the amendments of the law were not many, but they were of very considerable importance.

The Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act was, with great industry and the skill and learning which might well be expected in that quarter, framed by the Chancellor (Lord Westbury ;) and the most material parts were passed. The Lords made considerable alterations, after a full examination of its provisions in a select committee. The principal change was the disallowance of the chief judge, chiefly upon the ground that the appeals were too few to justify the creation of such an office; and so it certainly would stand if no increase were to follow from the great and most salutary provision of the Act, giving jurisdiction in bankruptcy to the County Courts. Whether by a chief judge or by a Court formed of the Commissioners it will certainly be found that some provision is necessary under the new law. Upon this alteration the Commons held out in their difference with our House, and the chief judgeship was given up, though with great reluctance, and after a very powerful defence of his plan by the Chancellor.

Upon the other alteration, in which I can have little doubt

the Lords were right, the restoring the power of the official assignees, the Commons showed as much candour and conciliation as we had done upon the chief judgeship. It is devoutly to be wished that the trades' assignees may be found to act in all respects differently from their predecessors before the great change of 1831, which I. Smith declared would occasion a loss to the house of Smith, Payne, and Smith, of three or four thousand a year, the produce of the sums left by trades' assignees in their hands. In the first year or two of their appointment, about two millions were collected by the official assignees, all of which it seems had been wholly lost sight of by the trades' assignees; and in many cases dividends were made of 17s. or 18s. in the pound, after many years had elapsed without a dividend; nay, in one or two instances, the whole debts were paid and the bankruptcy superseded. If the nature of the creditors' assignee is now completely changed, we may have less anxiety about the change which the new Act effects on the official assignee, or if the precautions taken to insure diligence and prevent malversation shall be found sufficient; and I know that the Chancellor feels confident in the security which the Act affords, denying altogether the allegation of the Lords' Committee, that there is a material change in the present system by the proposed one.

It must be admitted that, with all the alterations made in our House, the Act as it passed has been a most valuable improvement. It would be so had nothing more been done than providing a local jurisdiction, enabling creditors to prove in their own neighbourhood instead of being obliged to go perhaps eighty or a hundred miles—a grievance so great that many debts of small amount never were proved at all. But there are other important benefits secured to the creditors, and not the least considerable is the relieving them from the large payment of compensations to the officers who lost their places in 1831, and the holders of the old sinecures, one of which had no less than £7000 a year, which is now transferred to the consolidated fund.

I hardly know if I ought not to reckon the Consolidation Acts even a more important gain to our jurisprudence than the one I have just been considering. Ever since 1831 we had been attempting to form a digest of our Criminal Law. Commissioners had examined and reported upon the subject. Bills had been framed, grounded at least upon their reports; these had been thoroughly discussed in committees of our House; many of them had passed through all the stages and been sent to the Commons, but in vain; for if each of the many hundred clauses were to undergo a scrutiny there, every one saw that no such Bills could pass. There is, as Lord Lyndhurst observed, but one way of having a digest,-confiding in the learned and experienced Commissioners to whom the preparation of it is entrusted, and then examining their work in a select committee of the Lords. At length the Commons have adopted this course, and nearly the whole of our Criminal Law is digested in the five Acts passed. There remains little more than, by a similar process, to digest the important subject of Criminal Law procedure. My hopes are therefore sanguine, which I cherished thirty years ago when I sent this subject to a Commission; and the long course of disappointment is happily at an end, when Sir F. Kelly can declare his hopes, hitherto frustrated in presenting his ablyframed Bills, that they would reduce the forty volumes of our Statute Law to four.

Those Bills of this able and learned person were not his only service last Session. He proposed a Bill for removing the defect of our law as to wills of British subjects residing in foreign countries. It was a more extensive measure than Lord Kingsdown's, which passed, and is of considerable value, and removes a great part of the defect complained of.

Lastly, there was an important Act on the Poor Laws, passed upon the proposal of Mr. Villiers, reducing the time for giving a settlement from five to three years, extending the residence required over the whole union, and making a more equal distribution of the payment of rates.

Beside stating the expectation that this will be followed by others, removing all that remains defective in the Law of Settlement, I may well declare a like expectation of the results from the Commission issued upon Lord Clanricarde's motion for inquiring into the differences between the law of Ireland and ours, in regard to judicature and judicial procedure. When he made his able and useful statement of these diversities, I was induced to remark, that without waiting for the report of the Commission, one part of our system might well be extended to the sister kingdom-the department of judicial statistics-which, without any new law, might be done by an order from the Home Office, and would entail no further cost than the appointment of an additional clerk. He at once agreed to the proposal; and I have since had the satisfaction of learning that the Government has lost no time in acting upon the suggestion.

Thus we may really feel less cause of complaint than in former years, with regard to measures of Law Amendment, the first and most important branch of Social Science, if I may still use the term, which I am somewhat surprised to see an ably and learnedly conducted journal arraign as the greatest of absurdities, inasmuch as they say it has no existence, nay, that there can be no such science. My surprise is all the greater that I find, in the same quarter, lavish praise bestowed upon the sister Association of British Science, and its proceedings of last month, one considerable portion of which consisted of papers read on the very same subjects that were discussed at our Dublin Congress the month before; nay, one, perhaps the most important paper read—being elaborated by one of our committees, and leave given by our council to read it at Manchester.* But there is no such thing as Social

* Lord Brougham, we believe, alludes to the Report and Resolutions on the Patent Law, prepared by a Committee of the Social Science Association, and presented to that body at Dublin. The Report was of so valuable a nature, and its framers (The Right Hon. Joseph Napier, Lord Stanley, General Sabine, Mr. Grove, Q.C., Mr. Thomas Webster, and others) are so universally recognised as authorities on the various questions with which it deals, that the British Association asked leave to present the Report to

Science it seems! When you and I were, nearer seventy than sixty years ago, studying at Edinburgh, this had not been discovered. When Playfair taught the mathematics and D. Stewart mental philosophy, it was well understood that those sciences did not relate to men as members of society, but could be learnt by the individual and of the individual; and that when D. Stewart lectured on political economy, he taught a science which regarded men in their social statea social science. But not only economics belongs to this class. The whole of jurisprudence, in all its branches, both the law, the procedure, its promulgation, and its execution, is most strictly a science, the result of experience, that is, of induction. Whatever relates to the prevention of crime and the reformation of criminals depends on principles which are an important branch of science, social in the strictest sense of the term. Of the whole subject of education, the same may be said, and, in truth, of all that occupies the Association at its yearly congress. That many papers are read, and much discussion takes place, in an unscientific form, is true, and is inevitable; and so it happens to the British Association, even on subjects unconnected with social science. And yet the objectors do not deny the name of scientific to that Association. It may be mentioned that, two years before our Association was founded, they had established a society at Paris for investigating La Science Sociale,' and this was unknown to us till after ours had been in operation a year or more-though our good neighbours have taken credit in the last report of their society for having originated ours. But the fact of their having as well chosen the same name, without any concert, is a proof that there was some reason for our choice of it.

Whatever be the name, or however loose its application occasionally may be, the vast importance of the subject no one their members at Manchester. The Council of the Social Science Association at once, and most cordially, acceded to the proposal, and an interesting discussion was the result. We trust these two great Associations will always act together in a similar spirit.-ED. L. M. § L. R.