Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/496

 482 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY and solid body : " the task would be heroic, and those who did it the founders and restorers of our laws. ^ Parliament, meanwhile, had been less idle than ineffectual; it appointed a Committee of Law Reform; it read the book containing the whole system of the law which that committee composed; it ordered three hundred copies of it to be printed; and, after that, all Cromwell's persuasion could not induce it to do any more. ^ The truth is, that the Dutch or Swedish simplicity which Hugh Peters demanded ^ was possible only in the United Provinces or in Sweden, and that the reformers were exorbitant. Still codification was desired. In 1666 a committee was appointed under Clarendon to make a code,* and Hale's " Pleas of the Crown," and his " Analysis of the Civil [rather, of the non-criminal] Part of Our Law," are torsos of parts of the code of the Commonwealth. On the latter, though neither exhaustive, nor free from cross-divi- sions, a system might have been built far more palatial and perfect than Blackstone's ; and, comparing those sections of it which correspond with the " Synopsis totius Littleton analytice" (1659), we see how near the Puritans were to that Baconian " reduction and recompilation of the laws " for which we wait. Mr. Fitz-James Stephen contrasts the " Pleas of the Crown " with the " Third Institute," as a code with a digest ; and Professor Amos says that though Hale has not extended his supremacy over the whole see of the Criminal Law, he was peculiarly qualified for the Papal Chair. ^ A criminal code is easier to make than a civil, and perhaps more useful: the magistrate is never a more suc- cessful schoolmaster than when he teaches from such a text- book; and the value of a civil code to the laity was even more exaggerated under the Commonwealth than it now is. dication of the laws of Engl.," u. s. •Peters, "Legacy" (in Harris 1 "Lives," xxv., quoted by Rutt., «. «.) : Whitelock, 430-3, 521, 601. •Austin, "Lectures" (1863), vol. 1, p. cix.; vol. 3, p. 279: A. Amos, " Ruins of the time exemplified in Sir Matthew Hale's ' Hist, of the Pleas of the Crown'" (1856), pp. 1, 3: Stephen, "Criminal Law," c. 2: Bacon, " Certayne articles," «. «., etc.
 * 1 Bulstr., pref. Cp. "An experimental essay," etc. (1648).
 * Whitelock, 51P: Carlyle, "Cromwell," Speeches 2 and 5: "A Vin-
 * Comm. Journ. 1666, Oct. 5.