court says he can maintain no action against the railway. A man must keep away from burning tanks of oil as from Mt. Pelée. Two young ladies read to me some of these opinions. The dramatic element soon caught hold of them and the blood reddened their cheeks in their interest to find what the denouement of the case might be. If one wants We talk about the realistic element in novels. to see this element set forth let him go into a lawyer's office and take down any volume of reports and read any decision in it and he will find realism at its best. The law reports are a compend, a treasury of dramatic realism. We have no better exhibition of such realism in our total literature. One who does not read novels for mere dissipation might find matter of deep psychological interest in the opinion of a court even in a civil case. In reading these opinions an element becomes apparent on which I wish to fasten attention. They disclose a most delicate and sensitive ethical spirit. Kant gives us an ultimate rule in ethics, let each particular act be such that it might become a universal rule of conduct. I think that rule can be seen to be a dominant inspiration in the opinions of courts. The courts try to find the universal rule in each case, or to settle each case into such universal rule. It does not take long reading in judicial decisions to give one the conviction that the judges with singleness of heart are trying to execute that intent. A most massive body of ethics stands in treatises and reports of law. If righteousness be right" writ large," then in law we have a body of righteousness as pronounced and unmistakable, as infallible, as has anywhere come to expression since Enoch walked with God. That the courts are corrupt, are bought up by capital or by any influence social or political, is a groundless accusation that can spring only from the malice of ignorance. Sometimes in reading a scientific article of these days one gets the impression that the disposition to find and state exact truth was born with the discovery of chemistry, with the perception of the processes of retorts and crucibles. But the disposition to find and give expression to truth was reverend and hoary in law before modern science uttered a lisp. We have it now taught by the advocates of manual training that the superior way in which to teach a child regard for truth is to make him fit a tenon to a mortise. Practice of that sort may afford a new illustration of the necessity of exactness in word and deed or a new field for the exercise of such exactness. But the world found ethical inspiration without the aid of illustration from manual or pedal training. To that fact law bears witness. When physical science and the practical arts come upon the stage they simply come under the vinculum that is stretched over all act and thought the demand of conformity to system of call for the exact - the fit. - In reading these decisions of the court one is inclined to ask the question,- What if the pulpit put up much more of its work in this form? What if, instead of the argument of an attorney, it wrote an opinion of the court in matters theological? The work of the advocate does not live the opinion of the court does and passes into the constitution of society. The pulpit is "ruined by cheap -rhetoric. There is no force in anything save the force in the reason of it, ought to be as good principle in theology as in law. What if instead of an effort for eloquence to excite sentiment, it once in a while made an effort to carry ultimate reason? It is said the pulpit is losing power at both ends of the scale with the educated man above and the ignorant man beneath. Does not this, if it is true, come about just because the pulpit has left the bench and gone down into the bar? Rhetorical effect is shortlived anywhere. Man is a rational being after all and what will carry him surest and longest is something that sits restfully in his judgment. Do we get from the pulpit very often anything that resembles the opinion of a judge something that is wrought to finish-something put in shape to stand the inspection of the centuries? If this sort of work cannot be done every Sunday could it not be done, say five or ten times a year? If it were done even infrequently would the objection long lie against the pulpit that it could not hold the people? Does not the pulpit underestimate the capacity of the people for thought? There is not a hod carrier that cannot understand the conclusion reached in the opinions I have read, and some of the reasoning by which that conclusion is reached. It is said we are afloat in religion - have no definite body of common conclusion. Is not this because the clergy do not put congregations to the intellectual exercise out of which any matter can become "res adjudicata?" Instead of a close hand-to-hand grapple with the people over the rationality of a doctrine do not ministers prefer to work the long-range guns of authority over them; and they long since have become "brutum fulmen "dead dead lightning, exhausted thunder. And when they quit the ground of authority do they not go clear over to entertainment? I have said these opinions are entertaining; but they were not written to entertain. They have a beginning, a middle and an end - they start from somewhere, go through something, and end somewhere, and you distinctly know where that is. There ought to be some propositions in and about theology that would support like intellectual processes. An attempt at their elaboration would win public respect. The bench does not lack esteem in the minds of the people. If the pulpit has lost such esteem it may be because it does not do as earnest, thoughtful, rational work on its problems as is expended on legal questions by the bench. Into some such reflections have the opinions of the court delivered by the friend of my young manhood led me. They have been a delightful mental gymnastic. I am by some years the elder "But before I go, dear Judge, LOMBARD, ILL. CHARLES CAVERNO. CONSTITUTIONAL PHASES OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Viewed at a glance by an ordinary observer, the political history of England during the seventeenth century appears much like a kaleidoscope. The successive events are varied and sometimes incongruous, and the governmental changes are so decided, and often so startling, that they seem far outside the scope of the ordinary evolution of historical events. We pass rapidly from the England under James I., who feels the hostility of a Parliament which he fears to antagonize, to the England under a Charles I., who endeavors without success to overrule the parliaments which he hates, and succumbs to them; thence to a nation which takes the unprecedented step of bringing its king to trial. and execution; thence through stages of chaos to a Commonwealth which exhibits great apparent strength, but is overthrown by a despotic protectorate, which commands admiration by the benignity of its exercise of vast power, but which in its turn grows effete and gives way to a restored kingship. The shifting scenes now exhibit a once vigorous and aggressive Protestantism, wasting away before the rising power of a Roman Catholicism which soon becomes dominant; abdicating and flying king, abandoning the prerogative for which his family had staked their all; — and then an elective Kingship, which at last becomes the distinguishing feature of the century's closing history. next an So sudden are many of these mutations, and so bewildering are they all, as to lead one to think that sedate history has in this instance put on the dress of Harlequin and has taken to turning somersaults. Viewed, however, with closer scrutiny, by a careful inquirer into the meaning of these dissolving views, they appear as the successive acts of a great historical drama. One consistent pur pose asserts itself throughout the whole discordant era. One dominant theme recurs again and again. One end, though often obscured, is once more aimed at, and is finally accomplished. The hearty welcome of the English people to their first Scottish ruler was their tribute of loyalty to the kingship as an essential feature of their constitutional polity. But the English view of the place and office of the king was something of which the Stuarts, first and last, were invincibly ignorant. The past of the English people gave them a parliament, as well as a king, an institution making equal demands upon their loyal devotion. The writers of our histories continue to style the parliaments of the time of any king, that king's parliaments. The truth is, that they were the people's parliaments, not the king's. Though the institution in its then existing form dated from the time only of Edward I., yet it was in principle even an older Anglo-Saxon institution than the kingship. The fatal Stuart error was the attempt to make this parliament subordinate. The genius of the English people insisted on retaining both king and parliament, assigning to each its appropriate sphere. This insistent idea of the nation, though often overpowered, now by the encroachments of the kingly prerogative, now by the ascendency of republicanism, finally triumphed. Thenceforth it was settled that king and parliament must coexist, as the governmental agents of the sovereign people. Elizabeth had recognized this peculiar feeling among her subjects, had realized its vitality, and had skillfully managed to conform to and live with it. In the seventeenth century, this feeling, now become a theory, must struggle for respect, for recognition, for existence. The history of the century chronicles its struggles and its triumph. The Stuarts attacked it with their claim of divine right to rule, the army and the Republicans undertook to abolish the kingship, and the heavy foot of Cromwell crushed for a time the power of both king and parliament. Other causes and forces were at work, too, in shaping the political movements of the time, and bringing in various complications, so as sometimes to obscure the great constitutional issues of the period. Among these influences were the religious dissensions then rife, the profligacy and weakness of Charles II., the perversity and incapacity |