During the last Long Vacation—which I am afraid, by the way, will be the last long vacation—I Was just about starting out to indulge in a pastime which a don of the rival, but much inferior, university has described as “putting little balls into little holes with instruments singularly unadapted for the purpose” when a letter was put into my hand with an American stamp and a United States postmark. I opened it hastily and glanced at it, and gathered the impression that some unknown society in the United States was inviting me to proceed there in the month of November to deliver an address on some legal subject. I was flattered and puzzled. I threw the letter on the table and went out to indulge in the aforesaid pastime. It was not till I got home and read the letter carefully that I discovered what it was all about. I gathered that your Downing Professor, who prefers to spend his holiday in a dry climate—a bone-dry climate—was conveying to me the request of the University Law Society that I should come back to my old university and my old college and speak to the law students, and I was very much flattered and grateful. I felt a little, however, like the Prodigal Son, for I thought that for the Cambridge Law Society and the Law School of Cambridge to invite a man who had paid little attention to them while he was up, to come and address them, was heaping coals of fire upon his head.

The first colonists in America might be divided roughly into two streams. Those that went to the North were of the Puritan stripe; those that went to the South were, so far as the ruling class is concerned, Englishmen quite in sympathy with existing affairs, who went only to better themselves. The middle colonies, between New England and Pennsylvania, were not first settled by Englishmen; they require different consideration. The people, then, who settled New England, and to a considerable extent the people who settled Pennsylvania, were not in sympathy with existing conditions in England; and they had as a result of their experience a certain antipathy to the English law as it had been administered. In Massachusetts Bay this antipathy was carried to the extent of forbidding any English lawyer to live in the colony; and they abolished the English law by ordinance, and provided that all matters should be settled by appeal to the Bible, which nreant, to them, the Old Testament. That continued for a while, but, of course, it was absolutely an unworkable condition. Men trained in the thoughts of Englishmen could not think like the ancient Jews, and could not really be governed by the law of Moses; and the ordinance rather passed out of their recollection. It was still true, however, that lawyers did not plead in their Courts. The Courts were magistrate Courts, presided over in the highest Court by the persons elected as governor and assistants, in the lower Courts by the lesser magistrates. The law administered—if one can call it law—was simply the whim or the good sense of the magistrate, along with such ordinances as had been passed. The same thing was true of the other New England colonies and—as time passed—was equally true in Pennsylvania.

I hope that I shall not either dissatisfy you or disappoint you in what I have got to say to-night, in offering you some observations on the Permanent Court of International Justice, but I confess that it is a pleasure to me to feel that I can cast away all such taints and disadvantages as may attach to a member of the Government, and speak to you as a Trinity man.

The Committee of the Cambridge University Law Society, when they honoured me with the invitation to address the society, had doubtless the expectation that a solicitor who had been in practice for between forty and fifty years might from his experience be able to explain the work and environment of the profession in a way which might be useful to those members of the society who, having determined to follow the legal profession, had not yet decided to which branch of that profession they should devote their lives. I will endeavour to fulfil that expectation. I will draw for you the picture of a solicitor's professional life and work and surroundings with such accuracy as my powers and the time at my disposal permit, not concealing its blemishes or exaggerating its merits. I hope that I shall be able to make you see the picture right. If so, you will, when I have finished, agree with me that though the highest honours and emoluments of the legal profession are not at present open to solicitors, yet theirs is a calling which renders to the community an important–indeed, an essential–service, and one to which a man of ability, and still more of character, may devote himself with confidence as affording ample scope for his energy and ambition. I claim for the profession that, properly practised, it can and does do nothing but good. Unless I were prepared to make that claim after forty-seven years' experience in the profession, I should not be here. I resent the representations by popular novelists and dramatists of the solicitor as a costs-pursuing pettifogger, if nothing worse. Dickens heads the tribe of libellers with representations which, even as caricatures, are grossly overdrawn. In his celebrated preface and first chapter of “ Bleak House ” he discloses his motive, which was the laudable one of the correction of abuses of legal procedure. At the time he was writing (the middle of the nineteenth century) those abuses no doubt prevailed. But I hope I need not assure my present audience that Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, Mr. Tulkingherne, Messrs. Spenlow and Jorkins, Messrs.

Under the above title Professor Maitland gave a characteristic study of the relations of the Common Law Courts to the Canon Law in the reign of Edward the Third. His object was to trace the history of an attempt by the temporal authority to “enforce” (for its own ends) the provisions of the papal Extravagant “Execrabilis” by securing its recognition in the Court of Common Pleas and excluding the spiritual Courts from their claim to the sole cognizance of the matters covered by the Bull. To his treatment of the subject it may be objected, with all due deference, that the Bull Execrabilis, interesting as it is, cannot be regarded as an altogether new factor in English law calling into operation an entirely new set of phenomena that can be isolated and studied alone; on the contrary, when the Bull made its first appearance in the English Courts of Common Law it became immediately involved in a fairly old dispute between the spiritual and temporal jurisdictions. This aspect of the subject received no consideration in Maitland's essay, with the result that his treatment of the matter is incomplete and in one important particular incorrect.