tional or municipal law. It is generally accepted that international law consists of those rules by which the conduct of independent nations is regulated in the varied intercourse and relations with each other, and in respect to the relations and controversies between one nation and the citizens of another, and also in regard to the dealings and disputes between the citizens of one nation and those of another. For the sake of convenience and perspicuity, international law has been divided into two branches, public and private; public, that which regulates the political intercourse of nations with each other; private, that which regulates the comity of states or nations in giving effect in one state to the municipal law of another relating to private persons and their contracts, etc.

National or municipal law has been divided into five great departments, (1) organic law, (2) the law of persons, (3) the law of property, (4) the law of obligations and (5) the law of procedure.

Organic law relates to the form of our government and our country's institutions, and it is by means of this department of the law that the various departments and sub-departments of our governmental system are created and their respective functions defined.

The law of persons defines the rights of persons and relates to the means whereby such rights may be acquired or lost.

The law of property defines property and relates to the means of acquiring and losing dominion over the same.

The law of obligation relates to the various kinds of contracts, ties and engagements between the parties to the same.

The law of procedure relates to the forms and methods of entering and proceeding through our courts of justice to effect the administration and enforcement of the law of the land. Procedure is an arm of the entire body of the law, an arm that directs the interpretation, application and enforcement of the law of all departments of the law. In other words, procedure is "the key to the temple of jurisprudence." In fact the history of our law consists almost entirely of the history of forms and methods of procedure. Upon close inspection of the subject now under consideration we discover that "almost every principle of the law must be stated in terms of the law of procedure." In a broader sense, it may be said that procedure comprises that great body of principles and rules by which the entire law is administered and enforced in accordance with the provisions of the organic law. It is not difficult then to see that judicial procedure is that body of rules of pleading, practice and evidence which regulates the application for and the exercise of official action consistently with the principles of a constitutionalism. Its established and fixed rules of operation safeguard the rights of all

citizens. While many of these rules are expressed in our constitution, many more are implied or imported by construction. See Hughes on Procedure, Callaghan & Company; U. S. v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542; Murray v. Hoboken Land Co., 18 How. 272. The purpose of this discourse, like the one published in the issue of Chicago Legal News, dated October 13, 1906, is to refer to the fact that underlying each and every branch or department of the law are great fundamental principles which are as broad and enduring as the universe itself; that the law may change, but the principles are unchangeable and eternal; that these fundamental principles are the very substance of the entire structure of the law; that when one of these principles is understood, it can be applied to and used in each of the different departments of the law; that the well reasoned opinions in the great and important cases are but the application and illustration of the great principles; that these fundamental principles are the fountains of the law and the decisions in the cases are the rivulets therefrom; that there is a growing tendency to indolence in learning and applying these great principles; that the members of the legal profession are prone to adopt the reasoning in decided cases instead of determining for themselves what principle of law must apply in the case under consideration; that the decisions of our courts are growing less and less harmonious and consistent; that the reported cases are multiplying more and more rapidly, thereby producing such numbers, variety and complexity, confession and contradiction of authorities or precedents, that it is now often impossible to determine from such cases what the law really is on certain subjects.

The late David Dudley Field, in a paper on Jurisprudence, prepared for The Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, among other things wrote as follows:

"In the two vast domains of personal property and of personal contracts, the laws of America and England have moved very much abreast of each other. It could hardly be otherwise, considering the ties of trade and the frequency of intercourse between the two kindred nations. The reports of decisions in the courts of the two countries are interchanged year by year and almost day by day. Our contingent, according to the latest computations, amounts to 118 volumes a year. How many volumes come over the sea, I do not know. I can only guess at the accumulations from a publication now passing through the press entitled 'The American and English Encyclopedia of Law,' which has already issued twenty volumes and promises five more, boasting (what a boast!) of having collected 700,000 decisions."

In this same paper Mr. Field copied with approval a certain passage in an address of Professor Baldwin of Yale,, delivered in July, 1893, before the

Bar Association of Ohio, which passage is as follows:

"We have given, I cannot but think, an undue prominence to judicial precedents as a natural source or annunciation of the law. The multiplication of distinct sovereignties in the same land each fully officered, and each publishing in official form the opinions of its courts of last resort, bewilders the American lawyer in his search for authority. The guiding principles of our law are few and plain. Their application to the matter we may have in hand it is the business of our profession to make, and if we spent more time in doing it ourselves, and less in endeavoring to find how other men had done it in other cases, we should, I believe, be better prepared to inform the court and serve our clients."

There are strong indications that American jurisprudence is less uniform, certain and systematic than the English. Relative to English jurisprudence, Mr. Montague Crackenthorpe of the English Bar in 1894, before the American Bar Association, said:

"The condition of our legal education being what I have described, it is not surprising that English lawyers, bred like myself amid the turmoil of the courts, should be reproached by continental observers with knowing little about the science of law, or the relations which the English system of jurisprudence bears either to those that have preceded it, civilized globe. England, we are told, produces many first rate advocates, occasionally very great judges, but rarely a scientific or comparative jurist. The imputation is, I am bound to admit, not wholly unfounded. With some of our judges and practitioners the very word 'jurist' is in bad odor. 'I will tell you what a jurist means,' said, not long ago, a distinguished member of our bench, prematurely, alas, taken away from our midst, ‘a jurist is a man who knows a little of the law of every land except his own.' That the saying should have survived is prima facie evidence that our continental critics are right. It survived because it was thought to be witty, and there can be no real wit without a grain of truth, or at least what is deemed to be truth by those who regard it as wit.

in

"So long as legal principles lie embedded masses of reported cases, not always to be reconciled with one another, it is hopeless to expect that English law can be looked upon, from the scientific point of view, by those who pursue it professionally. A collector of herbs is not a true botanist, skilled though he may be in the knowledge of specific plants. Unless he understands how to classify them, unless he can tell us something of their native habits and their family relationship he is a collector and nothing more. So of most of our practicing lawyers. They have at their fingers' end a large number of authorities, which they manipulate, discuss and apply according to the exigencies

of the hour; but case knowledge is not scientific knowledge, any more than the particular is the general.

"As is the common run of legal practitioners, so is the common run of legal text-books. We have in our libraries a number of monographs, dealing with the sub-heads of law in minute detail-books on Torts and Contracts, on Settlements and Wills, on Purchases and Sales, on Specific Performance, on Negotiable Instruments and so forth. We have also many valuable Compendia, or institutional treatises, dealing with the law as a whole. Each and all of these bear witness to the disjointed character of our jurisprudence. The numerous monographs overlap and jostle each other like rudderless boats tossing at random on the surface of a wind-swept lake. The instrumental treatises, in their endeavor to be exhaustive, fail in point of logical arrangement, as vessels over-laden with a mixed cargo fail to get it properly stowed away in the hold. Some day, perhaps, we shall produce a corpus juris which will reduce this legal wilderness to order. But if we would lay bare the living forest, we must first grub up the decayed trees."

Jurisprudence is the science of social organism, or in other words, it is the science of the law, or in still other words, it is the practical science of giving a wise interpretation to the law and making a just application of it to all cases as they arise. It should be the sum total of our knowledge which relates to law practically and systematically arranged.

Scientifically viewed the legal profession is far in the rear ranks in the procession of the professions. In the science of chemistry there are certain fundamental principles and formulas that all chemists must know and apply alike. In the science of mathematics all are agreed on the ten elemental figures and the principles of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, etc. In literature all are agreed on the letters of the alphabet and the rules of orthography, grammar and rhetoric. And the beauty of all this is the fact that the knowledge of most professions is reduced to a practical systematic arrangement. But it is to be regretted that our knowledge relative to the law is not so arranged. We have no scientific system of classification or correlation of our law, nor do we show much disposition to appreciate the need of such classification and correlation. Many altruistic lawyers have noted this chaotic condition of the law, but very few of them have taken the time to explore for the seat of the cause of this condition. The American Bar Association touched upon this question at its annual meeting in 1902, when its Committee on Classification of the Law reported that we had no proper corpus juris in our country and recommended the adoption of some plan of classification of the law to produce the following named results: