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privileges that will justify the expenditure of your money and the employment of your time and skill.' Such a grant is a contract, with mutual considerations, and justice and good policy alike require that the protection of the law should be assured to it."

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The same attitude of mind is expressed by the Supreme Court of the United States as late as 1885, in a leading gas company case. The City of New Orleans granted a franchise to a gas company in 1835, which was afterwards renewed, and the proper interpretation of the franchise is here involved. The Supreme Court said in that case:

"It is to be presumed that the legislature of Louisiana when granting the exclusive privileges in question, deemed it unwise to burden the public with the cost of erecting and maintaining gas works sufficient to meet the necessities of the municipal government and the people of New Orleans, and that the public would be best protected, as well as best served, through a single corporation invested with the power and charged with the duty of supplying gas of the requisite quality and in such quantity as the public needs demanded. In order to accomplish what, in its judgment, the public welfare required, the Legislature deemed it necessary that some inducement be offered to private capitalists to undertake, at their own cost this work. That inducement was furnished in the grant of an exclusive privilege of manufacturing and distributing gas by means of pipes laid in the streets of New Orleans for a fixed period, during which the company would be protected against competition from corporations or companies engaged in like business."

All these cases are pertinent in a discussion of the question whether public authorities can permit competition in cases where franchises have been given to telephone and other public utilities, where competition is really unneces

sary.

These cases also seem to show that the contracts by public authorities with public utilities are not ordinary contracts with existing public utilities at all, but are rather, contracts with capitalists for the purpose of inducing them to enter upon public callings for the public benefit. The entering on such enterprise was not considered to be a privilege but rather a burden to the public utility and a

13 New Orleans Gas Co. v. Louisiana Light Co., 115 U. S. 650.

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benefit to the public. That the assumption of such burden in behalf of the public justified not only the granting of the right to received designated tolls but also the right to be free from competition for a fixed period of years or in perpetuity. CLINTON J. EVANS.

ΤΟΡΕΚΑ, ΚΑΝ.

BACON'S LOST RULES AND DECISIONS.

We are told that it was in the early days of Hellenic splendor and civilization that a commission was formed in Rome and went to Greece. Its formation seems to have been inspired by a learned Greek, Herodotus of Ephesus, who had become a Roman citizen. What this commission brought back seems "not to have been a code but much that had proved of the uttermost practical value to Greece." This material was used in connection with the existing Roman Law. It was at first promulgated in the year 451 B. C., and designated as the law of the Ten Tables -so call because it was inscribed on ten tablets of brass. Two tablets were afterwards added, and thereafter it was called the law of the Twelve Tables. "In these was enunciated a collection of legal maxims of universal application sufficient to support the fabric of the law which was afterwards built upon it." It was, says our historian, Judge M. F. Morris, late associate justice of the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, "like every other institution worthy of consideration, an evolution from primary principles by the most competent race of law givers that has ever existed." Sir James McIntosh says: "The maxims are the condensed good sense of the nations." Alexander Hamilton says, "A study of the maxims is a study of government." It was his knowledge of them that made Hamilton the power he was at the Philadelphia Convention, which adopted the Constitution of the United States. The recent Judge Murray F. Tuley, revered by the bar of Chicago, who sat as chancellor on the Circuit Bench of Cook County, Illinois, for thirty-five years, speaking of the maxims in an address before the Illinois Bar Association, said: "The maxims are so broad, so comprehensive, so fruitful, so elastic and inculcate, so pure a morality, that

I have sometimes thought that possibly the world would be better off if we could burn all our text books upon equity jurisprudence, and we might include ninety per cent of the reports, and preserve only those grand, wise, comprehensive, pure and beautiful maxims, with which to redress Civil Wrongs and enforce all Civil Rights as between man and man." The Romans exemplified the sufficiency of this statement, for the maxims were what the Romans began with and are the structure of the Civil Law. To understand what has wrought so much havoc with our Jurisprudence in America, there must be a thorough understanding of the difference between the systems represented by Coke and Blackstone on the one hand and by Bacon on the other. A thorough understanding of the nature and origin of these and their philosophies, will show clearly even to laymen, how far the system of Bacon surpassed that of Coke and Blackstone. Bacon saw all the philosophical beauty of the Civil Law. He saw that it was a development from the maxims of the Twelve Tables. He saw in the maxims the conserving principles of government; that in them were the wisest provisions ever made by any nation. The morality the maxims represent could have originated only from the highest moral source. They were in fact inspirations. Bacon saw the fundamental conserving principles of the Roman system in the maxim, Juris praecepta sunt haec: Honeste vivere; alterum non laedere; suum cuiquae tribuere. On what better foundation could a government be laid than this: These are the precepts of the law: Live honestly; injure no one; render to every man his due. To test whether a decision was well founded, the provision of the Roman was to go back to the fountain head, hence the maxim, "It is better to seek the fountains than wander down the rivulets," was provided as a guide for the judge to determine the right of a matter. Following this rule the judge would always get back to the great fountain head: "These are the precepts of the law: Live honestly; injure no one; render to every man

his due." Bacon, the greatest of lawyers and philosophers, could not help seeing the genius of the Roman in government. He saw that if he wished to build well and permanently, he must build with the material the Republic of Rome had left to posterity. He knew that it would be for the good of posterity, that he should warn mankind against the errors of Coke. The latter, through his greater political influence and the English prejudice against the Civil Law, succeeded in establishing his system of reports, which has prevailed in England and America ever since. But Bacon, though he failed to establish his system of Jurisprudence, left us this: "I am in good hope, that when Sir Edward's (Coke's) reports and my Rules and Decisions come to posterity (no matter what may now be thought) it will then be seen which was the greater lawyer." Here we have the cue to an understanding of what Bacon meant to leave us in his Rules and Decisions. Bacon knew that the Roman Law had been built upon rules (the maxims) and the decisions were the product of the rules.

All the rules of construction left by Bacon with which to articulate the decisions of the Equity Courts of England come from the Civil Law. Since there is no question but that he was an open advocate of the Civil Law, it is practically certain that the rules which he wished to come to posterity were the maxims of the Civil Law. It must also appear, since there can be no doubt that Bacon saw in the maxims the fundamentals of Government, that the decisions he would have provided would have been such as to show the practical use of these maxim rules in the decisions. It was Bacon's idea that with certain decisions articulating the maxims or rules he got from the Civil Law, there would be a fixedness to Jurisprudence which had not been wholly provided in the maxims alone. Bacon's contribution to the Civil Law was intended by him to be a set of decisions selected and designed to cover practically the body of the law and thereby to show the relationships of the maxims to each other. Vainly did Bacon importune King James to

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