I do not wish to discuss these questions from a partisan point of view; for I am by no means opposed to all of them. But some study of the history of English legislation has made me appreciate not only the lack of novelty of these processes, but that there is a lesson to be drawn from the study of those early times, when in fact they were the usual method of making, of interpreting, and of executing, law. Our knowledge of these matters has come to us recently, mostly from the efforts of German scholars. We learn nothing from Blackstone; while even writers of the Bentham-Austin School wrote in more or less complete ignorance of the past history of Anglo-Saxon institutions, and with thought processes consciously or unconsciously based on the later Roman law. And so there is a school today, that would make the executive all powerful, not merely in the administration of government, but in declaring and executing the law; having as an object efficiency, not liberty, with institutions based on a benevolent State, not on a democratic people. Such schemes are ever attractive as a short cut to-results, particularly so in this country where the best meant efforts of a central government are sometimes controlled and dissipated by the local government of the States. This, however, is a larger question; I shall henceforth confine myself to the four or five precise reforms which have been recently recommended to us.