THE DOCKET.

IT IS MOST appropriate, in the sketches of the Great Jurists of the world that have been reproduced in these columns during the past two years, that the name to be discussed this month is that of Lord Stowell, the great English Jurist, who from the Bench made the Law of Nations for England just as Lord Mansfield and Lord Holt made the Law of Merchants.

LORD STOWELL, was born William Scott, and was an elder brother of John Scott, known to all English-speaking lawyers as Lord Eldon. While his brother made his way to the Common law bar to become a Lord Chancellor, William after leaving college elected to practice in the Ecclesiasical and Admiralty Courts, which were then combined in the precincts of Doctors' Commons. He took the degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford-a necessary qualification and was admitted into the faculty of advocates of those Courts, and at the same time called to the Bar in 1780, when he was thirty-five years of age.

WHILE the Common Law prevailed almost exclusively in the Court of King's Bench, and in the Courts of Chancery an original system of English equity was being evolved, in the Ecclesiastical and Admiralty Courts, which had jurisdiction over testaments, marriages, and shipping, or as a wag put it, over "bad wills, bad wives, and bad wessels," the Civil Law continued to form the basis of jurisprudence. From the beginning of the sixteenth century the barristers practicing before those Courts had formed themselves into a college, of which each member was a Doctor in the Civil Law. The register dates from 1511, and the college's first habitation was in a block of houses which belonged to St. Paul's Church. After the fire of London in 1666, which destroyed their property, the doctors were for a time lodged in the Strand, but in 1672, by an Order-in-Council, they were authorized to retake possession of their old site, and they erected a new building which henceforth bore the name of Doctors' Commons. This college, which received a charter of incorporation, consisted of a number of fellows all of whom had to be doctors, practicing in the Court of the Arches or the Archbishop's Court; and the judges of the tribunals before which they pleaded were regularly chosen from among the members. The number of advocates was narrowly limited and seldom exceeded twenty-five, so that once a man of ability was admitted, he was well-nigh certain to secure a large practice.

WILLIAM SCOTT was peculiarly fitted for success in the branch of law to which he attached himself. He brought to it not only a splendid intellect, an unrivaled lucidity of expression, an intimate acquaintance with the Civil Law and a wide knowledge of the history of the ages in which it grew, but also some personal experience of shipping affairs. For a year after his father's death he carried on the shipping business preparatory to winding it up; and a privateering enterprise on which a younger brother embarked led him to direct his attention to the Law of Prize. The only quality he lacked was fluency in public speaking: at first he wrote out his speeches, but as the Ecclesiastical and Admiralty Courts knew no jury and relied more on written than on oral testimony, readiness of speech was less requisite than knowledge of law and clearness of argument. In those respects he was pre-eminent.

A YEAR of silence was imposed upon all the newly elected members of the college, during which they were expected to attend the Courts, but as soon as the enforced probation was over, Scott leaped to the front. His brother wrote of him in 1783: "His success has been wonderful, and he has been fortunate beyond example." In that year he obtained a sinecure, being appointed the Registar of the Court of Faculties, and in 1788 he became at once Judge of the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London, Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and AdvocateGeneral--a position which had the same rank at Doctors' Commons as that of the Attorney-General at Westminister. The post was exceptionally lucrative at the time he held it, because of the war which broke out between England and France in 1793. Privateering, as Franklin said, was the passion of England; the spoils were large, and Scott gathered in large fees. It was his duty to appear for the Crown in all cases of disputed prize, and as between 1793 and 1815 the English Admiralty granted 10,000 letters of marque, the number of captures which were brought in for decision was immense. In 1798, having obtained a commanding position as advocate, he was appointed Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, while a few months later his brother became Solicitor-General. This position of Admiralty Judge he retained until 1827 when, at the age of 83, but while his vigor was still unimpaired, he vacated the office and died in 1836.

IT WAS the good fortune of Stowell that all his chief judgments were well reported and have been preserved to illuminate posterity; or, rather, it was the happy fortune of Dr. Christopher Robinson that, on taking his seat in the Admiralty Court in 1798, he determined to add to the collection of reports in the other

Courts of Justice a set recording the decisions in Admiralty, which had not hitherto been so served. At the same time it was happy for the Judge that he was not fettered in his application of broad principles and the usage of nations by the findings of predecessors in his office. With the exception of a few notes by Sir J. Simpson and some scattered memoranda and occasional references to tradition, there was no precedent for the guidance of Scott, and, one may add, no obstacle in his path. In the field of Ecclesiastical Law he was not so unhampered; here the Canon Law, textbooks, and precedents hedged him about; and his decisions, preserved in the reports of Haggard and Phillimore, do not possess the same permanent value and originality. Nevertheless, there are several cases in which his judgment has marked an important step in the development of the law. His place among the world's jurists depends, of course, upon the other part of his work, which is preserved in the volumes of Drs. Christopher Robinson, Dodson, and Edwards.

AS THE NAPOLEONIC Struggle brought forth a Pitt to direct its politics, a Nelson to carry its navy to triumph, and a Wellington to lead its army to victory, so too it brought forth a Scott to erect English Prize Law upon a new and firm foundation, and to establish justice in her hegemony of the sea. The Judge fitly realized the unique opportunity which lay before him, and he lavished an infinite care upon the preparation and edition of his judgments. By their clear adherence to the principles of justice, strict, perhaps, but seldom strained, as much as by their "inimitable felicity of language," they have commanded since the death of their author the assent not only of the English but also of the American Courts, and, more than that, many of the rules which he laid down in adjudicating upon the cases before him have passed into the law of nations. Coleridge in his Table-Talk recommended to all statesmen with the perusal of Grotius, Bynkershoek, Puffendorff, Wolf and Vattel, the reports of Dr. Robinson; and the verdict of later generations has confirmed for Lord Stowell the place which the contemporary poet and philosopher assigned to him, as the finest exponent in practice of the law regulating the rights of belligerents and neutrals in war upon the high seas. Amid all the violence and unwarrantable pretensions of the time, advanced by his own country as well as by Napoleon, he held aloft the standard of fairness towards neutrals, enforcing the established law with exactitude and severity, but cutting at the roots of innovation; never countenancing sham evasions of the law, but never, on the other hand, countenancing oppressive fictions. In the stress of war his judgments were impugned by some American judges, but his vindication came upon maturer consideration; as one of them wrote to him later: "On a calm review

of your decisions after a lapse of years, I am bound to confess my entire conviction both of their accuracy and equity."

THE DISTINGUISHING characteristic of Lord Stowell's judgments is his unerring faculty for seizing on the true bearing of every problem presented to him, and his equally unerring powers of applying broad propositions of law to every combination of circumstances. Perhaps it is due to his early career that he brought to the Bench a philosophic grasp such as few English judges have exhibited. Certain it is that he scorned all chicanery and fiction, and that the distinctions which he drew between different cases of capture and prize are always based upon clear principles. Lord Stowell conceived the position of a Prize Court in its full dignity and responsibility as an International Court, administering not the national judge's theories, but the acknowledged practice of nations, and he defined this conception most eloquently in a case where he had to determine whether a belligerent could set up a Prize Court in neutral territory (The Flad Oyen, 1 C. Rob. 135). A French privateer had carried an English prize vessel into Bergen, and there procured its condemnation by the French Consul. In repudiating the condemnation he declares: "It is my duty not to admit that because one nation has thought proper to depart from the common usage of the world and to treat the notice of mankind in a new and unacknowledged manner, that I am on that account under the necessity of acknowledging the efficacy of such a novel institution, merely because general theory might give it a degree of countenance independent of all practice from the earliest history of mankind. The institution must conform to the text-law and likewise to the constant usage upon the matter." He neither introduced new doctrines himself, nor could he respect their introduction by foreign powers. His function, as he understood it, was where a clear practice did not exist, to define exactly, by application to particular and varying cases, the general principles that were to be found in the works of the great publicists; where it did exist, to follow it and if necessary amplify its scope.

IT WOULD be tedious to mention the decisions in which Lord Stowell defined the English rule as regards contraband, absolute and conditional, and the penalty for its carriage, the conditions of a blockade by notice and de facto, and varying penalties for its breach, unneutral service by carriage of despatches or military officers of the enemy, and the legal consequences attaching to it, the effect of recapture of a prize, and of the transfer of a cargo in transitu by a belligerent to a neutral owner, and the engagement by a neutral in the colonial and coasting trade of the

enemy. Suffice it to say that he settled Prize Law upon all these points, and though circumstances have changed, and international agreements have largely cut down the rights of maritime capture, his judgments still remain the surest guide upon Prize Law, and mark out with scarcely an exception the proper limit of interference with neutral trade.

IT HAS been said of sermons that, while dealing with eternal subjects, they tend to be the most ephemeral literature; and so it might be said of prize judgments, that though concerned with International Law they tend to be the most national expressions of judicial opinion. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century Stowell in England, and Marshall in the United States, bringing to their national Prize Courts two of the greatest intellects of the time, realized the ideal character of the jurisdiction entrusted to them, and established an Anglo-Saxon law of prize which may truly be described as "a light to the nations."

A MOST INTERESTING paper which was read at the meeting of the Grotius Society as described in these columns last month, is that of Sir Graham Bower, upon Prisoners of War and Reprisals. Starting with the well-known words of Grotius in the introduction to his great work, Sir Graham points out that the present war has developed a tendency in the civil and military authorities of the belligerents to depart from the customary and conventional rules of war and to infringe on the natural rights of the peoples as defined by the Law of Nations. This tendency may be classified as follows: 1. To disregard the rights of neutral states. 2. To confuse the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. 3. To ignore the obligations of humanity to the wounded (for the customary armistice to succor the wounded and bury the dead seems to have been dropped). 4. To depart from the customary humane treatment of prisoners. The reversion to conditions which men had come to treat as evidence of barbarism is to be deplored, and no effort should be spared to arrest the backward movement. A special obligation, he says, rests on British subjects to study the law, and to be careful in its observance, for the whole forces of the British Empire are now engaged in the defense of International Law and justice.

THE LESSONS of history teach the expediency of the humane. treatment of prisoners of war, for it is clearly to the interest of a belligerent to encourage the opposing force to surrender; but if the conditions of surrender are so painful, or so dishonorable, as