"I have given my Lord Chancellor permission to cross the seas, so that he may address the meeting at Montreal. I have asked him to convey from me to that great meeting of the lawyers of the United States and of Canada my best wishes for its success. I entertain the hope that the deliberations of the distinguished men of both countries who are to assemble at Montreal may add yet further to the esteem and goodwill which the people of the United States and of Canada and the United Kingdom have for each other."

The King's message forms a text for what I have to say, and, having conveyed that message to you, I propose in the first place to turn to the reasons which make me think that the class to which you and I belong has a peculiar and extensive responsibility as regards the future relations of the three countries. But these reasons turn on the position which courts of law hold in Anglo-Saxon constitutions, and before I enter on them I must recall to you the character of the tradition that tends to fashion a common mind in you and me as members of a profession that has exercised a profound influence on Anglo-Saxon society. It is not difficult in an assemblage of lawyers such as we are to realize the process by which our customary habits of thought have come into being and bind us together. The spirit of the jurisprudence which is ours, of the system which we apply to the regulation of human affairs in Canada, in the United States, and in Great Britain alike, is different from that which obtains in other countries. It is its very peculiarity that lends to it its potency, and it is worth while. to make explicit what the spirit of our law really means for us.

I read the other day the reflections of a foreign thinker on what seemed to him the barbarism of the entire system of English jurisprudence, in its essence judge-made and not based on the scientific foundation of a code. I do not wonder at such reflections. There is a gulf fixed between the method of a code and such procedure as that of Chief Justice Holt in Coggs v. Bernard, of Chief Justice Pratt in Armory v. Delmarie, and of Lord Mansfield when he defined the count for money had and received. A stranger to the spirit of the law as it was evolved through centuries in England will always find its history a curious one. Looking first at the early English common law its most striking feature is the enormous extent to which its founders concerned themselves with remedies before settling the sub

stantive rules for breach of which the remedies were required. Nowhere else, unless perhaps in the law of ancient Rome, do we see such a spectacle of legal writs making legal rights. Of the system of the common law there is a saying of Mr. Justice Wendell Holmes which is profoundly true: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intentions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." As the distinguished writer whom I have quoted tells us, we cannot, without the closest application of the historical method, comprehend the genesis and evolution of the English common law. Its paradox is that in its beginnings the forms of action came before the substance. It is in the history of English remedies that we have to study the growth of rights. I recall a notable sentence in one of Sir Henry Maine's books. "So great," he declares, "is the ascendancy of the law of actions in the infancy of courts of justice, that substantive law has at first the look of being gradually secreted in the interstices of procedure." I will add to his observation this: That all our reforms notwithstanding, the dead hands of the old forms. of action still rest firmly upon us. In logic the substantive conceptions ought of course to have preceded these forms. But the historical sequence has been different, for reasons with which every competent student of early English histery is familiar. The phenomenon is no uncommon one. The time spirit and the spirit of logical form do not always, in a world where the contingent is ever obtruding itself, travel hand in hand. The germs of substantive law were indeed present as potential forces from the beginning, but they did not grow into life until later on. And therefore forms of action have thrust themselves forward with undue prominence. That is why the understanding of our law is, even for the practitioner of to-day, inseparable from knowledge of its history.

As with the common law, so it is with equity. To know the principles of equity is to know the history of the courts

in which it has been administered, and especially the history of the office which at present I chance myself to hold. Between law and equity there is no other true line of demarcation. The King was the fountain of justice. But to get justice at his hands it was necessary first of all to obtain the King's writ. As Bracton declared, "non potest quis sine brevi agere." But the King could not personally look after the department where such writs were to be obtained. At the head of this, his chancery, he therefore placed a Chancellor, usually a Bishop, but sometimes an Archbishop, and even a Cardinal, for in those days the church had a grip which to a Lord Chancellor of the twentieth century is unfamiliar. At first the holder of the office was not a judge. But he was keeper of the King's conscience, and his business was to see that the King's subjects had remedies when he considered that they had suffered wrongs. Consequently he began to invent new writs, and finally to develop remedies which were not confined by the rigid precedents of the common law. Thus he soon became a Judge. When he found that he could not grant a common law writ he took to summoning people before him and to searching their consciences. He inquired, for instance, as to trusts which they were said to have undertaken, and as the result of his inquiries, rights and obligations, unknown to the common law were born in his court of conscience. You see at a glance how susceptible such a practice was of development into a complete system of equity. You would expect, moreover, to find that the ecclesiastical atmosphere in which my official predecessors lived would influence the forms in which they moulded their special system of jurisprudence. This did indeed happen, but even in those days. the atmosphere was not merely ecclesiastical. For the Lord High Chancellor in the household of an early English monarch was the King's domestic chaplain, and as, unlike his fellow-servants in the household, the Lord High Steward and the Lord Great Chamberlain, he always possessed the by no means common advantage of being able to read and write, he acted as the King's political secretary. He used, it seems, in early days to live in the palace, and he had 1 regular daily allowance. From one of the records it appears. that his wages were five shillings, a simnel cake, two seasoned simnels, one sextary of clear wine, one sextary of household wine, one large wax candle, and forty small pieces

of candle. In the time of Henry II. the modern treasury spirit appears to have begun to walk abroad, for in the records the allowance of five shillings appears as if subjected to a reduction. If he dined away from the palace, si extra domun comederit, and was thereby forced to provide extras, then indeed he got his five shillings. But if he dined at home, intra domun, he was not allowed more than three shillings and sixpence. The advantage of his position. was, however, that, living in the palace, he was always at the King's ear. He kept the Great Seal through which all great acts of state were manifested. Indeed it was the custody of the Great Seal that made him Chancellor. Even to-day this is the constitutional usage. When I myself was made Lord Chancellor the appointment was effected, not by letters patent, nor by writing under the sign manual, nor even by words spoken, but by the Sovereign making a simple delivery of the Great Seal into my hands while I knelt before him at Buckingham Palace in the presence of the Privy Council.

The reign of Charles I. saw the last of the ecclesiastical Chancellors. The slight sketch of the earlier period which I have drawn shews that in these times there might well have developed a great divergence of equity from the common law, under the influence of the canon and Roman laws to which ecclesiastical chancellors would naturally turn. In the old courts of equity it was natural that a different atmosphere from that of the common law courts should be breathed. But with the gradual drawing together of the courts of law and equity under law chancellors the difference of atmosphere disappears, and we see the two systems becoming fused into one.

The moral of the whole story, is the hopelessness of attempting to study Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence apart from the history of its growth and of the characters of the judges who created it. It is by no accident that among AngloSaxon lawyers the law does not assume the form of codes, but is largely judge-made. We have statutory codes for portions of the field which we have to cover. But these statutory codes come, not at the beginning, but at the end. For the most part the law has already been made by those who practise it before the codes embody it. Such codes with us arrive only with the close of the day, after its heat and burden have been borne, and when the journey is already near its end.

I have spoken of a spirit and of traditions which have been apparent in English law. But they have made their influence felt elsewhere. My judicial colleagues in the Province of Quebec administer a system which is partly embodied in a great modern code, and partly depends on old French law of the period of Louis XIV. They apply, moreover, a good deal of the public and commercial law of England. The relation of the code to these systems has given rise to some controversies. What I have gathered, however, when sitting in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, is that a spirit not very different from that of the English lawyers has prevailed in Quebec. The influence of the judges in moulding the law, and of legal opinion in fashioning the shape which it should take, seem to me to have been hardly less apparent in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada. Indeed, the several systems of our group of nations, however these systems have originated, everywhere shew a similar spirit, and disclose the power of our lawyers in creating and developing the law as well as in changing it; a power which has been more exercised outside the legislature than within it. It is surely because the lawyers of the New World have an influence so potent and so easily wielded that they have been able to use it copiously in a wider field of public affairs than that of mere jurisprudence. It is very striking to the observer to see how many of the names of those who have controlled the currents of public opinion in the United States and Canada alike have been the names of famous lawyers. I think this has been so partly because the tradition and spirit of the law were always what I have described and different from that on the Continent of Europe. But it has also been so because, in consequence of that tradition and spirit, the vocation of the lawyers has not, as on the continent of Europe, been that of a segregated profession of interpreters; but a vocation which has placed him at the very heart of affairs. In the United Kingdom this has happened in the same fashion, yet hardly to so great an extent, because there has been competition of other and powerful classes whose tradition has been to devote their lives to a parliamentary career. But in the case of all three nations it is profoundly true that, as was said by the present President of the United States in 1910, in an address delivered to this very Association, "the country must find lawyers of the right sort and the old