There are books which mention official informations at the instance of the Attorney-General as if it were a regular and frequent mode of procedure. No one would gather from them that this method had fallen into disuse, and that the last case in which he used his constitutional power was many years ago-in relation, if I mistake not, to certain corrupt practices. Let me mention another illustration of the false impressions conveyed by failing to distinguish between the letter of the law and the mode in which it is administered. The hardships of prisoners before the Prisoners' Defence Act of 1836 are often inadvertently exaggerated. Hardships there were; but they were lessened by a license, recognised in Courts, though not in books, which counsel cross-examining in the interest of the defendant enjoyed. He was allowed to put his questions with great freedom, and often they took the form of short speeches. Some barristers were famous for their skill in the art of stating their points while they examined. I have before me the short-hand notes of a case in which Charles Phillips defended. He did not make one set address to the Jury; he made, unreproved by Parke and Gaselee, a score of short, pithy speeches. The difference between a guidebook, the outcome of one hurried journey, and that written by one who has traversed on foot many times every mile of the country described, is not greater than the difference between this volume, the record of a lifetime of strenuous labour, and the mass of legal works.

In 1863 the writer was feeling his way in regard to many problems; his solutions were sometimes imperfect. His account in the first edition of conspiracy, for example, was vague and unsatisfactory as compared with that to be found in these pages. Half-a-dozen sentences give a clear idea of the stumbling-block of English criminal law, 'malice' and 'malicious.' If there be a better exposition it is in Mr. Justice Stephen's own judgment in Regina v. Tolson. It is often said that the law makes no progress; let those who think so compare the terse and clear exposition of malice in this volume with explanations of it by the masters of the common law forty years earlier say Bayley J. or Littledale J.-and then ask themselves whether they are right. There is scarcely a sentence in this volume which I would presume to criticise; where doubts have presented themselves, the probability is that they are baseless. But is this account of the preliminary steps towards crime entirely satisfactory?

The exact period at which they become criminal cannot, in the nature of things, be precisely ascertained, nor is it desirable that such a matter should be made the subject of great precision. There is more harm than good in telling people precisely how far they may go without risking punishment in the pursuit of unlawful objects.'

Is the dictum conclusive and convincing? In a scientific point of view, is not the complete uncertainty in regard to this subject a reproach to English law, and is it wholly a necessity? Much of the learning in German legal works on the subject of incomplete offences' is more curious than instructive. In English text-books the state of things is still worse, as the Courts will find when the question thus summarily dismissed comes before them.

The common law as to crimes may have nearly attained its final stage of development. Anyone who reflects upon the questions coming before the Court for Crown Cases Reserved for the last ten years, must note the rarity in which they turn upon doctrines of common law, and the frequency with which they relate to particular statutes. The interest in the former may decline; while it exists, this book is likely to keep its unique place. The very foundations of criminal law are now the subjects of dispute as they

never before were; Lombroso and pupils of his school question all the ordinary theories of punishment and responsibility. This book makes no express mention of these modern controversies; but its readers will have little to learn from the author of L'Uomo Delinquente.

JOHN MACDONELL.

We understand that the newest Italian school has not succeeded in gaining much practical importance in its own country.]

A Compendium of Mercantile Law. By JOHN WILLIAM SMITH. Tenth Edition. Edited by JOHN MACDONELL, assisted by GEORGE HUMPHREYS. London: Stevens & Sons; Sweet & Maxwell. 1890. Royal 8vo. 2 vols. lxxxiv and 1290 pp.

THIS well-known work has after nearly thirteen years reached another edition, marked by the advent of a new editor in chief and by considerable changes in form. It was originally published by Mr. John William Smith in 1834; but the third edition, which appeared in 1843, was the last he supervised, and Mr. G. M. Dowdeswell, the late Official Referee, then became its editor and was responsible for subsequent editions down to the ninth, published in 1877; now Master Macdonell appears as editor, assisted by Mr. George Humphreys, the literary record of both gentlemen being such as to justify most favourable expectations of their work. Though 'Smith's Mercantile Law' can as yet boast no Judges among its editors, it has contrived to reach its tenth edition in 66 years from publication, while the rival work of its author, 'Smith's Leading Cases,' now published 62 years, and with the advantage of the editorship of Mr. Justice Willes and Mr. Justice Keating, is at present only in its ninth edition. The present issue is in two volumes instead of one, and shows considerable increase in size. The edition of 1843, the last revised by Mr. Smith, contained 693 octavo pages of text, and 274 pages of statutes; the edition of 1877, the last revised by Mr. Dowdeswell, showed 696 royal octavo pages of text and 297 pages of statutes, while the present edition is composed of 795 pages of text and 430 of statutes, an increase in all of some 230 pages on the preceding edition,

When a work has reached its tenth edition it is perhaps too late to ask whether it meets a want. It obviously does; but we confess ourselves puzzled as to the class of persons who use the work before us. They can hardly be practising barristers. When a practising barrister has a point of company law to consider, he goes to Buckley or Chadwick Healey, not to the 57 pages of Smith which deal with joint stock companies; on partnership he will prefer the volumes of Lindley to the 49 pages of Smith. He will hardly consult the 97 pages on marine insurance in the work under review, when the two volumes of Arnould or Phillips are open to him, and he can hardly hesitate to choose between the 70 pages devoted to the contract of sale by this edition, and the exhaustive and authoritative work of Benjamin. That the work is not intended for the practising solicitor in the country seems clear from the fact that references are only given to one series of reports, and from the character of the treatise, which by its compression and necessary failure to refer to the individual character of the numerous cases it cites renders it difficult to apply its rules to the details of any particular transaction. The price seems to put it beyond the reach of students, and the many authorities referred to are caviare to the layman,

who moreover will hardly recognise many of the statements in the book as to commercial practice as having any reference to the commercial world with which he is acquainted. The present editor's preface indeed suggests a class of readers; he says:-'From no other text-book of modern times have judges oftener avowedly taken expositions of the law. Still more frequent are the instances in which important passages in judgments are paraphrases of this compendium.' We should like to hear the learned editor compelled to justify this statement as against the rival claims of say, Benjamin on Sale, Arnould on Marine Insurance, Abbott on Shipping, or Lindley on Partnership; but assuming that the editor has blown his author's trumpet not only loudly, but accurately, and admitting at once that several of Her Majesty's Judges would be better for a perusal of Smith's Mercantile Law, the continued demand of the whole bench of Judges would not send a book into its tenth edition,

A careful study of the work in detail has increased our difficulty. We have endeavoured to select a part of the book for minute criticism which would test both the original work and the new editors, and we have chosen the chapter on the contract of affreightment. This contained 43 pages in the last edition, and in the present one covers 72 pages, so that to the parent work the editors have added some 30 pages of original matter. We have carefully tested this section, and compared it with the editions of 1843 and 1877, and we regret that we cannot honestly praise it.

In the first place there is an entire absence of any order or method in dealing with the subject. A late distinguished Judge is reported to have asked for his facts in alphabetical order, if counsel could not assist him with any other; but even the alphabet has not brought some sort of order into the chaos of Mr. Smith and his editors. The chapter on affreightment starts with a division as follows:- 1. Contract of affreightment by charter-party. 2. Contract for conveyance in a general ship. 3. Duties of masters and owners. 4. Duties of merchant. 5. General average. 6. Salvage.' This division has come down from the earlier editions, except that until the last edition a short section on 'Dissolution of contracts of affreightment' was added, which has now disappeared. We may shortly dismiss the sections on general average and salvage by saying that general average is so technical and so entirely in the hands of average adjusters, to whom the work before us will be useless, that it might have been omitted with safety; and that the section on salvage contains a considerable amount of matter which has nothing to do with the contract of affreightment at all. But take the remaining divisions; and it is as far as our experience goes quite impossible to discover any reason why any particular matter should be treated under one or the other. Take, for instance, ' demurrage;' under which head should it appear? It clearly may relate to charter-parties, or to bills of lading, or to duties of the merchant; thus establishing a claim to be in three out of the four divisions. The reader will find some three pages devoted to the subject in the section on charter-parties, a portion of which is curiously enough occupied with remarks on demurrage under a bill of lading; he will also find a few incidental remarks on the relation of the bill of lading to the charter in the section on bills of lading. In the section on the duties of master and owner he will find the duty of the consignee to discharge in reasonable time; a surprise for which he will be compensated by discovering in the section on duties of the merchant a dissertation on the duties of the master and owner in respect to goods left on their hands. And in the same section he will again find the question of demurrage treated in two different parts. The seeker for a point of demurrage law

will therefore collect his materials from five different places scattered over the 80 pages, and he will find the duty to load or discharge in reasonable time in the absence of express stipulations reiterated at pages 330, 360, and 367. Surely it would be simpler and more convenient to make 'demurrage' one short section under which all this scattered and reduplicated matter could be collected and condensed, with great gain of clearness and saving of time.

Again, take the important question of 'excepted perils;' which of the divisions of the chapter they should logically come under we should not like to have to decide. As a matter of fact they first appear in the section on charter-parties, casually and unexpectedly, with a remark about restraint of princes; 'perils of the sea' come next, with a quotation from Lord Herschell in The Xantho as to their meaning on a policy of marine insurance; but the reader has to wait a page and interview the celebrated rat of Hamilton v. Pandorf and the question of negligence of the shipowner, before he gets to the statement that 'dangers and accidents of the sea seem in theory' to mean the same in the contract of affreightment and a policy of insurance, and there after about forty lines of print and a quotation the subject drops. Though bills of lading are usually supposed to contain 'excepted perils,' the expectant reader will not find them mentioned in that section. But they appear again 32 pages on in the section on duties of the master and owner, illustrated by a reference to a bill of lading which appeared in the edition of 1843, and has continued in each edition down to the present, regardless of the fact that it is now only used by casual sailing vessels, and that the bill of lading under which most English goods are carried is a much lengthier document and very different in its legal aspects. Then there appears the rat again, one mention of him not sufficing. Next follows a quotation from Willes J., with a reference in a footnote to The Xantho, and a remarkable statement that damage in consequence of a collision from negligence or barratry of the crew... are (sic) not within the exceptions.' The exceptions presumably mean those of the sailing-ship bill of lading in 1843, but why the editors should trouble to tell their readers this without hinting that a large number of bills of lading now contain an exception of negligence of the master, and a still larger number the exception of barratry, is not apparent. And there the treatment of exceptions ends, occupying in all some four pages. We cannot find any statement of the relation of excepted perils to the contracts implied in the contract of affreightment; there is no discussion worthy the name on the effect of what are now the leading cases on the subject, The Xantho and Hamilton v. Pandorf (both reported in 12 Appeal Cases), and there is as far as we can see no recognition of the fact that the majority of modern shipowners endeavour by their bill of lading to protect themselves against every possible source of liability for damage to the goods they carry. We cannot doubt that if Messrs. Macdonell and Humphreys had to write for the first time an account of the position of exceptions in the contract of affreightment they would produce a very different result from the unscientific, scattered, and inadequate treatment of the subject in the work under review.

The editors may indeed reply that they are hampered by the text of their author, which has been approved by nine editions, and should not be lightly altered; and Mr. Macdonell has according to his preface endeavoured to alter the work according to the plan of the author.' But there seems hardly sufficient sanctity even in a plan laid down by Mr. John William Smith to prevent subsequent editors from freely revising his

pages so as to collect the law on one subject at one place, instead of having it in three or four. For instance at page 336 we find the isolated statement in a paragraph all by itself: The charterer is bound to name a safe port for the discharge of the vessel.' This is of course untrue. If the port is named in the charter, it is immaterial whether it is safe or not; we doubt even if under a charter to 'proceed to a port as ordered,' there is any implied warranty of safety, and both the cases cited by the editors', (for this passage is not found in the ninth edition), refer to charters to proceed 'to a safe port as ordered,' which is a very different thing. But forty pages later on, at p. 380, the same subject turns up again, also inserted by the present editors. It is introduced by a curious remark, 'Space does not permit stating the other duties of the charterer, but it may be mentioned that ' and then follow certain matters which the editors have apparently forgotten to introduce elsewhere. At least that seems the only explanation of the fact that Nelson v. Dahl (6 App. C. 38) is not noted where we should expect to find it under the clause 'so near as she may safely get' at p. 328, but is put in this final receptacle for miscellanies. However, among the collection there appears the statement: The port named must be safe having regard to the vessel and the cargo;' and two cases are cited, The Alhambra (6 P. D. 68), which had been cited before, and Allen v. Coltart (11 Q. B. D. 782). What the latter case has to do with the statement to vouch which it is cited, we suspect the editors will be puzzled to explain, and we cannot see any appropriate footnote near from which it has wandered. In this case an inaccurate statement is made in two different places, where one would suffice even for an accurate one; it is vouched for by the citation of one irrelevant and two misleading cases; and The Teutonia (L. R. 4 P. C. 171), which is a leading case on the term 'safe port,' is not referred to. The present editors alone are responsible for this; and some other introductions of theirs appear equally unsatisfactory. For instance, in previous editions, the consideration of those terms of a charter the fulfilment of which is a condition precedent to its validity, had been relegated to a note. The present editors have treated this question in the text, but in a curious way. They say (p. 326): The provisions of the charter-party consist of either conditions precedent or substantive parts of the agreement, the breach of which by one party entitles the other to rescind the contract, or representations or collateral promises, the breach of which gives rise to a cause of action, and a right to damages.' Without disputing that there is such a division, surely the terminology is of the oddest. For instance, what is a clause providing that the charterer shall pay demurrage? It is not a representation; it seems rather misleading to call it a collateral promise,' which implies something outside the charter; and it is a 'substantive part of the agreement,' though its breach does not give a right to rescind. We question whether the sentence quoted throws any light on the subject at all. And without further discussing the eighteen lines devoted to the matter, why did the editors leave standing ten pages further on, at p. 335, a page setting out two cases on conditions precedent, a relic of the old edition which should have been transferred to the new matter inserted at p. 326?

We had noted a large number of other faults of arrangement, and misleading statements, but space fails us to refer to them all. It is odd that the two definitions of charter-parties given at p. 322 should neither of them include time charters. We should at least expect to find the statement at

1 Smith v. Dart, 14 Q. B. D. 105; The Alhambra, 6 P. D. 68.