Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/584

578 and ordinary sense of the words must be modified, so as to avoid that absurdity or inconsistency, but no further.

4. In construing any part of a writing, regard should be had to the entire instrument. Other portions may throw much light upon the one under special investigation or consideration, and greatly modify the meaning which it would bear as an independent clause. Every part of a writing should be brought into action in order to collect from the whole one uniform and consistent purpose, if that is possible. Accordingly, if one construction will give reasonable effect to every part of an instrument, while another would require the rejection of a part, the former will be preferred.

These rules will probably prove sufficient for our present purposes. In order, however, to make it plain to you, perhaps, it may be well for me to give a concrete instance of their application by the courts. I shall select the giving of charges or instructions to juries. In passing upon a single instruction or charge it should be considered in connection with all the other instructions and charges bearing on the same subject, and if, when thus considered, the law appears to have been fairly and impartially presented to the jury, an assignment of error predicated upon the giving of such instruction or charge must fail, unless, under all the peculiar circumstances of the case, the appellate court is of the opinion that such instruction or charge was calculated to confuse, mislead or prejudice the jury. In determining the correctness of charges and instructions, they should be considered as a whole, and, if as a whole they are free from error, an assignment predicated on isolated paragraphs or portions, which, standing alone, might be misleading, must fail. Again, where an instruction, as far as it goes, states a correct proposition of law, but is defective because it fails to qualify or explain the proposition it lays down in consonance with the facts of the case, such defect is cured if subsequent instructions are given containing the required qualifications or exceptions. It is not required that a single instruction should contain all the law relating to the particular subject treated therein.

I believe that these are all the legal propositions to which I wish to call your attention. I might add that the object of judicial interpretation of instruments is not to discover the intention of the maker or writer by the use of any and every legitimate means, but rather to take the instrument itself and determine such intention from the words used therein.

It would really seem that the rules of grammar and the laws of language would be all that we should need in order to determine what Professor James meant in the quoted passages, but even if we should apply these legal rules in all their strictness I do not believe that we should be left in any state of doubt or uncertainty. But we are not