the instruments creating their estates have still to apply to the Legislature for powers to grant long leases for agricultural, building, or mining purposes; whilst in England, for more than twenty years, under the powers contained in the Leases and Sales of Settled Estates Acts, such leases may, subject to certain prescribed conditions, be granted by owners of limited estates— there is absolutely no restriction whatever in this Colony on the barring of an estate tail, except the merely formal requirements of the Registration Act. In England the consent of the Protector of the Settlement has long been a condition precedent to the exercise of such a power. This valuable provision, as well as many others contained in the Act for the Abolition of Fines and Recoveries, are here unknown. Another extraordinary omission in our Real Property Code is that of the 8 & 9 Vic. cap. 106—the Real Property Amendment Act-in consequence of which many important questions as to leases, reversions, feoffments, contingent remainders, &c., are still undetermined. And one very important change in conveyancing, viz., the substitution of a simple Deed of Grant in place of the old familiar Lease and Release, would appear to have in this Colony, in consequence of this same omission, so far as the conveyance of an immediate freehold estate in land is concerned, the sanction only of usage in its support. So, in respect of the law of attendant terms, we are without the Satisfied Terms Act, 8 & 9 Vic. cap. 112; without any statute enabling tenants for life to improve the property of which they are in possession, such as the 8 & 9 Vic. cap. 56; without any Acts corresponding to the English Improvement of Land Act of 1864, the Limited Owners' Residences Acts, the Lands Clauses Consolidation Acts, the Rents Apportionment Act of 1870, the Partition Acts, the Married Womens' Property Act, the Vendors and Purchasers Act, and many other more or less recent English Statutes affecting the law of Real Property. No doubt the same complaint may be made in respect of other departments of our Statute Law, and notably in that of Equity Practice and Procedure and the Law relating to Insolvency and Debtors. At the same time it must be admitted that much mischief and confusion have been caused by the indiscriminate adoption of English Acts. There can hardly be two opinions as to the mischief which has been sown by the irrational attempt to acclimatize in this Colony the English Statute of Limitations affecting Real Estate. Another adopted Act teems with provisions relating to copyhold lands, and even the comparatively recent Wills Act contains sections relating

to Customary and Copyhold Estates, while the Statute of Limitations just referred to contains some very learned provisions in restriction of the right to recover an advowson, which it is needless to say are as inapplicable to this Colony as is the nineteenth section of the same Act, which by the same absurd system of wholesale adoption is made to announce that no part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, &c., &c., shall be deemed to be "beyond the seas❞—an intrinsically ridiculous declaration when applied to countries separated by at least two oceans, but one nevertheless which it required, quite recently, a solemn decision of the Supreme Court to get rid of.

In the judgment of some who are well qualified to give an opinion, there will hardly be found an adequate remedy for this very unsatisfactory state of things the absence of beneficial Imperial laws from our Statute Book, and the presence therein of exotic laws wholly unsuited to our circumstances-until the Legislature shall consent to the creation of a permanent College or Commission of Jurists, whose duty it shall be to present to Parliament, from time to time, well-designed and carefully-prepared groups of Consolidation Acts covering the entire domain over which our Statute Law ought to range. (1)

(1) The writer makes no apology for appending the following extract from the well-known Treatise on Representative Government by the late John Stuart Mill, because it is the statement by a master mind of the reasons for adopting some such expedient as that above suggested :—

"There is hardly any kind of intellectual work which so much needs to be done not only by experienced and exercised minds, but by minds trained to the task through long and laborious study, as the business of making laws. This is a sufficient reason, were there no other, why they can never be well made but by a committee of very few persons. A reason no less conclusive is, that every provision of a law requires to be framed with the most accurate and long-sighted perception of its effect on all the other provisions; and the law when made should be capable of fitting into a consistent whole with the previously existing laws. It is impossible that these conditions should be in any degree fulfilled when laws are voted clause by clause in a miscellaneous assembly. The incongruity of such a mode of legislating would strike all minds, were it not that our laws are already, as to form and construction, such a chaos, that the confusion and contradiction seem incapable of being made greater by any addition to the mass. Yet even now, the utter unfitness of our legislative machinery for its purpose is making itself practically felt every year more and more. The mere time necessarily occupied in getting through Bills, renders Parliament more and more incapable of passing any, except on detached and narrow points. If a Bill is prepared which even attempts to deal with the whole of any subject (and it is impossible to legislate properly on any part without having the whole present to the mind), it hangs over from session to session through sheer impossibility of finding time to dispose of it. It matters not though the Bill may have been deliberately drawn up by the authority deemed the best qualified, with all appliances and means to boot; or by a select commission, chosen for their conversancy with the subject, and having employed years in considering and digesting the particular measure: it cannot be passed, because the House of Commons will not forego the precious privilege of tinkering it with their clumsy hands. The custom has of late been to some extent introduced, when the principle of a Bill has been affirmed on the second reading, of referring it for considerab

In conclusion, the writer wishes to state but without any desire to avert unfavourable criticism-that the work of collecting materials for this volume has of necessity been assigned to such rare intervals of leisure as his official duties left at disposal. He is apprehensive, therefore, that much of that work will be found to

tion in detail to a Select Committee; but it has not been found that this practice causes much less time to be lost afterwards in carrying it through the Committee of the whole House: the opinions or private crotchets which have been overruled by knowledge, always insist on giving themselves a second chance before the tribunal of ignorance. Indeed, the practice itself has been adopted principally by the House of Lords, the members of which are less busy and fond of meddling, and less jealous of the importance of their individual voices, than those of the elective House. And when a Bill of many clauses does succeed in getting itself discussed in detail, what can depict the state in which it comes out of Committee! Clauses omitted, which are essential to the working of the rest; incongruous ones inserted to conciliate some private interest, or some crotchety member who threatens to delay the Bill; articles foisted in on the motion of some sciolist with a mere smattering of the subject, leading to consequences which the member who introduced or those who supported the Bill did not at the moment foresee, and which need an amending Act in the next session to correct their mischiefs. It is one of the evils of the present mode of managing these things, that the explaining and defending of a Bill, and of its various provisions, is scarcely ever performed by the person from whose mind they emanated, who probably has not a seat in the House. Their defence rests upon some minister or member of Parliament who did not frame them, who is dependent on cramming for all his arguments but those which are perfectly obvious, who does not know the full strength of his case, nor the best reasons by which to support it, and is wholly incapable of meeting unforeseen objections. This evil, as far as Government Bills are concerned, admits of remedy, and has been remedied in some representative constitutions, by allowing the Government to be represented in either House by persons in its confidence, having a right to speak, though not to vote.

If that, as yet considerable, majority of the House of Commons who never desire to move an amendment or make a speech, would no longer leave the whole regulation of business to those who do; if they would bethink themselves that better qualifications for legislation exist, and may be found if sought for, than a fluent tongue, and the faculty of getting elected by a constituency; it would soon be recognised, that in legislation as well as administration, the only task to which a representative assembly can possibly be competent, is not that of doing the work, but of causing it to be done: of determining to whom or to what sort of people it shall be confided, and giving or withholding the national sanction to it when performed. Any government fit for a high state of civilization, would have as one of its fundamental elements a small body, not exceeding in number the members of a Cabinet, who should act as a Commission of Legislation, having or its appointed office to make the laws. If the laws of this country were, as surely they will soon be, revised and put into a connected form, the Commission of Codification by which this is effected should remain as a permanent institution, to watch over the work, protect it from deterioration, and make further improvements as often as required. No one would wish that this body should of itself have any power of enacting laws; the Commission would only embody the element of intelligence in their construction; Parliament would represent that of will. No measure would become a law until expressly sanctioned by Parliament; and Parliament, or either House, would have the power not only of rejecting but of sending back a Bill to the Commission for reconsideration and improvement. Either House might also exercise its initiative, by referring any subject to the Commission, with directions to prepare a law. The Commission, of course, would have no power of refusing its instrumentality to any legislation which the country desired. Instructions, concurred in by both Houses, to draw up a Bill which should effect a particular purpose, would be imperative on the Commissioners, unless they preferred to resign their office. Once framed, however, Parliament should have no power to alter the measure, but solely to pass or reject it; or, if partially disapproved of,

be faulty. If, however, those inquirers who may detect errors, whether of omission or commission, will inform him of such discoveries, he will feel under great obligations to them, and will atone for his shortcomings in the next edition of the book.

September, 1877.

A. O.

remit it to the Commission for reconsideration. The Commissioners should be appointed by the Crown, but should hold their offices for a time certain, say five years, unless removed on an address from the two Houses of Parliament grounded either on personal misconduct (as in the case of judges), or on a refusal to draw up a Bill in obedience to the demands of Parliament. At the expiration of the five years a member should cease to hold office unless reappointed, in order to provide a convenient mode of getting rid of those who had not been found equal to their duties and of infusing new and younger blood into the body.

"The necessity of some provision corresponding to this was felt even in the Athenian Democracy, where, in the time of its most complete ascendancy, the popular Ecclesia could pass Psephisms (mostly decrees on single matters of policy), but laws, so called, could only be made or altered by a different and less numerous body, renewed annually, called the Nomothetæ, whose duty it also was to revise the whole of the laws, and keep them consistent with one another. In the English Constitution there is great difficulty in introducing any arrangement which is new both in form and in substance, but comparatively little repugnance is felt to the attainment of new purposes by an adaptation of existing forms and traditions. It appears to me that the means might be devised of enriching the Constitution with this great improvement through the machinery of the House of Lords. A Commission for preparing Bills would in itself be no more an inno vation on the Constitution than the Board for the administration of the Poor Laws, or the Inclosure Commission. If, in consideration of the great importance and dignity of the trust, it were made a rule that every person appointed a member of the Legislative Commission, unless removed from office on an address from Parliament, should be a Peer for life, it is probable that the same good sense and taste which leave the judicial functions of the Peerage practically to the exclusive care of the Law Lords, would leave the business of legislation, except on questions involving political principles and interests, to the professional legislators; that Bills originating in the Upper House would always be drawn up by them; that the Government would devolve on them the framing of all its Bills; and that private members of the House of Commons would gradually find it convenient, and likely to facilitate the passing of their measures through the two Houses, if instead of bringing in a Bill and submitting it directly to the House, they obtained leave to introduce it and have it referred to the Legislative Commission. For it would, of course, be open to the House to refer for the consideration of that body not a subject merely, but any specific proposal or a Draft of a Bill in extenso, when any member thought himself capable of preparing one such as ought to pass; and the House would doubtless refer every such draft to the Commission, if only as materials, and for the benefit of the suggestions it might contain: as they would, in like manner, refer every amendment or objection, which might be proposed in writing by any member of the House after a measure had left the Commissioners' hands. The alteration of Bills by a Committee of the whole House would cease, not by formal abolition, but by desuetude; the right not being abandoned, but laid up in the same armoury with the royal veto, the right of withholding the supplies, and other ancient instruments of political warfare, which no one desires to see used, but no one likes to part with, lest they should at any time be found to be still needed in an extraordinary emergency. By such arrangements as these, legislation would assume its proper place as a work of skilled labour and special study and experience; while the most important liberty of the nation, that of being governed only by laws assented to by its elected representatives, would be fully preserved, and made more valuable by being detached from the serious, but by no means unavoidable, drawbacks which now accompany it in the form of ignorant and ill-considered legislation."-Representative Government, pp. 97-103.