Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/510

 496 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY not on for him, but passed him by irreversibly. One so thoroughly absorbed in work which he regarded as so press- ing and so important to the world, would have made, it is to be feared, a poor husband, just in proportion as he was a devoted philosopher. Doubtless she judged wisely. It was well for her, and perhaps well for him, that he never saluted the woman who gave him the flower in Green Lane with the tender and sacred name of wife. , In forming a judgment of Bentham's work and of the way he did it and of the efficiency of that waj', it is almost as essential to see how he regarded the English law as it is to inquire precisely how far his opinions were correct. Bentham's voluminous writings leave no doubt as to his vie^s concerning English law. There was no health in it. Admitting, as he did, that the legislative enactments and the reports of adjudged cases contained more valuable materials for the construction of a system of laws than any other nation in the world possessed,^ he yet maintained that the existing law, so far from being the perfection of human reason or the product of matured experience, was (to use his own language) but " a fathomless and boundless chaos, " itely contrived chicanery, which maximizes delay and denial overthrow and destruction as a system, and rebuilding it anew, using old materials as far as they were useful and no farther. He regarded the whole system, as I have often thought, with much the same feeling that the French people contemporaneously looked upon the Bastille, as a monument of feudalism, oppression, and injustice, fit only to be de- stroyed. Blackstone, on the other hand, viewing the system with the optimistic eyes of the age in which he wrote, com- pared it, in his inimitable style, to " an old Gothic castle, " inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers,
 * ' made up of fiction, tautology;--teehnicality, and inconsis-
 * tency, and the administrative "part of it a system of exquis-
 * of justice." Thus viewing it, he saw no remedy but its
 * erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern
 * and the trophied halls are magnificent and venerable, but
 * useless, and therefore neglected. The inferior apart-
 * See ante Lecture VI., p. 174; Lecture X., p. 270.