afraid of denial, 138; form and cere- PICKENS. His Addresses, noticed, 245 PRESIDENT U S., Annual Message, 510 neous Works of O. Goldsmith, 528 R. RELATIONS BETWEEN SPAIN AND ENG- REYNOLDS, REV. J. L. His Man of Lamartine, character of his genius, SEYMOUR, E. S., Sketches of Minne- 262 pondence, noticed, 250; Common- SPAIN, GLIMPSES OF, by Wallis, 174; T. 533 southern biography, its neglect, 196; fluence of the social world upon the ART. I.-LAW REFORM IN MISSOURI. Law of the State of Missouri, regulating pleadings and practice in Courts of Justice. With notes and appendix, by R. W. WELLS. Published with head notes by B. F. HICKMAN. St. Louis: Missouri Republican steam power press. 1849. 1849. pp. 114. THE history of a nation is best read in her laws, and the philosopher, who looks back on the perishing memorials of her glory, turns in silence from the ordinary page of battles lost and won, and seizes on those legislative enactments, which, in declaring principles of truth, or expedients of success, announce the intelligence of the people and the policy of the State. The little island of Rhodes is remembered only by her maritime code, and a village in Italy, adorns with its name the page of history, by the simple fact that there, (centuries after their enactment) were found the law and code of Justinian. The triumphal arches of victory raised to the honor of this emperor, are now but dust, while his imperishable code opens the pathway of justice, alike on the banks of the Ganges and the Mississippi. The "Navigation Law" of that intrepid soldier, Cromwell, will be remembered, when the victories of Marston Moor and Dunbar are forgotten; and, that dazzling meteor of modern times, whose grasp of conquest almost encircled a continent, will in future times, not be remembered as the victor of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and Eylau, but as the author of the "Code de Napoleon." NEW SERIES, VOL. I.-NO. I. 1 Such is the stern, yet silent justice of history, and without the enactment of good laws the annals of a nation will sink into utter oblivion. The geographer may give it a dubious position on the map, and the antiquary may exhume her crumbled statuary, and broken pillars, but there will her history end! She has perished, and not left one embodied thought of truth and justice which the intellect of posterity has deemed worthy of preservation. Happily, our own favored land has not only established, but practically proved the soundness of principles of good government. And, at this hour, amid the convulsive throes which agitate the old world, the trampled masses, rising Antæus-like, from the earth, are looking to us for models of government, and vigorously contending for the great principles taught them by us-the capacity of a people to govern themselves. But much as we may have done to establish a firm system of political law, we have been grossly deficient in that of municipal. Of the latter, we have been the mere copyist of England; and much of the folly, absurdity and chicanery of her common law is incorporated in our code. In robust health, a corpse has been tied to us, and we have not had firmness enough to cast it loose! Ill-suited to the spirit of our free institutions, alien. to our habits, and discordant to our associations, this hoary system of injustice and obscurity, has been blindly adopted in most of the States of the Union, and under color of the "perfection of reason," (so called by bar and bench) uncertainty of individual rights-difficulty, often amounting to denial of redress for wrong or injury, and plunder of the people by costs, have been tamely submitted to. The common law has only kept its ground by the influence of law-craft. Its jargon and technicalities were so many elements by which free inquiry was baffled, and those bred to minister its rites, constantly proclaimed its beauty, fitness and perfection. It is true, that many a sarcasm at the law's delay and uncertainty has been levelled by the pen of the dramatist or philosopher, and that the bulk of the people have been forced to believe that law, like alchemy or the quadrature of the circle, was something unintelligible. They might comprehend the science of government, and every question of which human reason was the test, but law, which protected their lives, reputation and property, they were expected neither to discuss nor understand! Although some of the rules of the common law may be good, their usefulness has been impaired by the mode of practice and procedure in the courts. Simplicity of rules, and certainty of issue, were avoided, and the unluckly suitor wandered in a labyrinth, only, to escape ruined. Conflicting decisions-courts of varied and discordant jurisdictions, precedents binding only as the whim or caprice of successive judges dictated-a barbarous language of clipped Latin and Norman French, and a mode of procedure utterly unintelligible except to the initiated, were some of the distinctive traits of the common law system. The statutes and decisions of the court were also written in a dead or foreign language, and for centuries (with the exception of the ineffectual struggle in the reign of James I. and the short-lived reform ordained by Cromwell's Parliament) the people of England have submitted to the gross imposture. Some reforms, it is true, were made in the last century by parliament and the courts; but they were mere removals of a portion of the excrescences which disfigured, and not the cancer which rotted the whole system. Yet the public ear is hourly drugged with panegyrics on the excellency of the system! No one can be injured with impunity-the rights of all are protected-there is a remedy for every wrong—a redress for every grievance; and to conclude the laudatory climax, the courts are open to all! And so (replied the witty polemic, Tooke) is the London tavern, provided you have the means to pay the bill! That we have followed this system closely, the history of American jurisprudence will show, and there is no more melancholy detail of the utter waste of intellect, time and money than in the numerous volumes of "reports” annually issued from the American press,―rarely deciding or illustrating principles; but vibrating between cases ruled and overruled, and settling and unsettling points of practice by a logic of hard words and professional phrases. If these books were the annals of college wrangling, they might pass unnoticed; but they are, in a great measure, the law of the land, and for their existence and continuance the pockets of the people are the pledge. They are the necessary results of the English common law and its mode of practice, and until a radical reform shall take place, we shall labor under a system of laws, the administration of which staggers common sense, violates every |