Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/367

 10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 353 of speculative thought upon practical questions which marked the end of last and the beginning of this century, and of which the most conspicuous apostles were Adam Smith in the sphere of economics and Jeremy Bentham in the sphere of legal reform. The second was the rapid extension of manu- facturing industry and commerce, itself largely due to the progress of physical science, which ^has placed new resources at the command of man both for the production and for the transportation of commodities. The third influence was po- litical, and was itself in large measure the result of the other two, for it was the combination of industrial growth with in- tellectual emancipation that produced the transfer of political power and democratization of institutions which went on from the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 to the Local Government Act of 1894. Could we imagine this in- dustrial and intellectual development to have failed to work on political institutions as it in fact did work, it would hardly the less have told upon administration and upon private law, for the new needs would under any form of government, even under an oligarchy like that of George II's time, have given birth to new measures fitted to deal with them. The legisla- tion relating to Joint Stock Companies (beginning with the Winding-Up Acts), which filled so important a place in the English Statute-book from 1830 to 1862, and which still continues, though in a reduced stream, would under any political conditions have been required owing to the growth of commerce, the making of railways, the increased need for the provision of water, gas and drainage. And there went on, hand and hand with it, an equally needed development by the Courts of Equity of the law of partnership, of agency and of trusts, as applied to commercial undertakings. What the political changes actually did was to provide a powerful stimulus to reform, and an effective instrument for reform, while reducing that general distaste for novelties which had been so strong in the first half of the eighteenth century. If we now review the general course of changes in institu- tions and law in the two States selected for comparison we shall be struck by two points of difference.