Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/204

176 176 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. which concerns our own daily practice in the courts ; and they indicate the value and importance of much remoter investigation. You remember, perhaps, that the judicial records of England carry us back to the reign of Richard the First in 1194, seven centuries ago, and that there are scattered memorials of earlier judicial pro- ceedings for another century, gathered for the first time by one of the most learned of our brethren in this association, Prof. Mel- ville M. Bigelow. Much of this vast mass of matter is unprinted, and much is in a foreign tongue. The old records are in Latin. As to the Reports, for the first two hundred and fifty years after reporting begins, it is all in the Anglo-French of the Year-Books, and mostly in an ill-edited and often inaccurate form. To all these sources of diffi- culty must be added the generally brief and often very uninstruc- tive shape of the report itself. A few of the earlier Year-Books have been edited in thorough and scholarly fashion, accompanied by a translation and illustrations from the manuscript records. But most of them are in a condition which makes research very difficult. The learned historians just quoted have said that "the first and indispensable preliminary to a better legal history than we have of the later Middle Ages is a new, a complete, a tolerable edition of the Year-Books. They should be our glory, for no other country has anything like then? ; they are our disgrace, for no other country would have so neglected them." The glory and disgrace are ours also, for English law is ours. Efforts on both sides of the water to accomplish this result have as yet failed ; but they should succeed, and they will succeed. I wish that my voice might reach some one that would help in securing that im- portant result. It would bring down the blessing of legal scholars now and hereafter. After the Year-Books, come three centuries and a half of reported cases in England ; and one of these cen- turies, more or less, includes the multitudinous reports of our own country and of the English colonies, which continue to pour in upon us daily in so copious and ever-increasing a flood. Now, will it be said, perhaps, that in bringing forward for study all this mass of material, past, present, and daily increasing at so vast a rate, I am recommending an impossibility and an absurdity t No, I am not ; I speak as one who has seen it tried. It is not only practicable, but a necessary preliminary for first-rate work. One or two things must be observed here. Of course no one man can thus explore all our law. But some single thing or several con-