long ceased to be astonished at anything which the Council may do, the Council, to do them justice, seem to have realised that some explanation might be expected as to their latest step. Here it is: "As many subscribers have been deterred from subscribing to the Law Reports by the fact that they must either begin with an incomplete series, or else purchase, at a considerable cost, the volumes already issued by the Council, the commencement of a new series will afford a convenient opportunity for gentlemen who are not already subscribers to become so." The modesty of the Legal Profession and of gentlemen who are likely to subscribe to a series of Law Reports may be taken for granted, along with the grammar and meaning of the above sentence, but it does not seem to have occurred to the Council, that a gentleman, or anyone else, who wants a book for professional use, and has the means of paying for it, will probably buy it, even at the risk of allowing his clients to see that he would rather have an incomplete series than none at all. To hope to attract new subscribers by any improvement in the Reports for the future would perhaps be unreasonable in the eyes of those who are aware of the unbounded admiration which the work of the Council in the past has commanded; but the allusion to the "considerable cost" may well have raised great expectations in the minds of any who are familiar with the financial position of the Council. After giving £1,000 a year a piece to their editors, and adequately remunerating the barrister's clerk who is popularly believed to be responsible for the Weekly Notes of Cases, and for their consequent unfailing rejection as authorities by the Courts, and after paying the youngest of their reporters a salary from four to twentyfold that offered by other employers whose Reports are cited with respect, it appears by the last Balance-Sheet of the Council, published in May, that in the previous December they carried over

£20,000 to the Reserve Fund, held (among other property) investments valued at nearly £36,000, and had also £7,000 at their bankers. But although the Council are never weary of asserting that their services are "perfectly gratuitous," and that they are not a commercial body (and indeed their method of business may confidently be cited in support of the statement), and exist only for the good of their subscribers, they cannot reduce by one penny the "considerable cost" of even "an incomplete series." For it would seem that, in their unselfish endeavour to conduct their business on non-commercial principles, they have disposed of the entire back stock (hitherto valued in their estimates at "cost price," thus becoming "available when sold") to their publishers, at a figure which, if not "perfectly gratuitous," necessarily requires those gentlemen to expect, and to charge accordingly to the "subscribers who have been deterred from subscribing," a price which must naturally be more than even the "considerable cost' which would otherwise have been paid direct to the Council.

It is an accepted principle of commerce, outside the present sphere of the Incorporated Council, that the public will buy a good article, and the following suggestions, some of which have already appeared in our pages, are offered to the Council as an even better means of attracting "subscribers who have been deterred from subscribing" than the commencement of a new series, which can only be cited by a most clumsy abbreviation, i.e., as we understand, [1891] 1 Ch., [1891] 2 Ch., [1891] 1 Q.B., &c.

Let a few practical men be added to the Council, which at present consists partly of gentlemen, who are so very eminent and busy that they cannot possibly attend to the details which the Council should superintend, and partly of gentlemen who were busy and eminent so many years ago that they can hardly realise the professional wants of their

present or future subscribers. Let this Council occasionally read through their Charter of Incorporation, and so learn their powers and duties, and especially that their funds are exclusively applicable to professional objects. This alone would obviate the squandering again of thousands of Pounds in the preparation of such a monument of uselessness as the Index to Gazettes, a work which weighs between five and six pounds, and is believed never to have found a single purchaser except the Government, for whose benefit the funds of the Council were not subscribed. Let the original proposal (see Weekly Notes, Vol. I., No. 1) that each decision should be published as nearly as may be within a month (not from three to six months) of its date, be observed. Let some one be responsible for seeing that the well paid reporters of the Council are duly at their posts, and do not furnish reports which are merely made up of such information as may have been gleaned from other reporters, or the newspapers and the shorthand writers. Let the reporters be forbidden to undertake such work as examinerships, and reporting for various periodicals in other Courts than that to which they have been appointed by the Council, and let no reporter be authorised by the Council to report in more than one Court. If a foolish mistake has been made by a reporter, let the matter be honestly corrected by notice in the Errata in the usual way, and not slurred over by an expensive reprint of four or eight pages, in the hope of concealing it. Let some proportion of the enormous and unnecessary reserve fund of the Council be expended upon some more distinctly "professional object" than the purchase of Metropolitan stock or Consols, or an excessive deposit account with a banker; for it is certain that the only contingency against which provision is now professedly made, viz., the utter collapse of the whole concern, is one which need never be contemplated if the Council will but properly discharge their duties. It is now more than five

years since the Council announced that, "independently of their then reserve fund, and assuming them only to retain their then number of subscribers, their funds were sufficient to pay all annual charges, including a liberal bonus to the staff, and leaving a balance for contingencies." If, for the reasons already given, or others, the Notes of Cases must still be expressly made unfit for citation, let the weekly paper itself be made of some use to the subscribers, e.g., by containing an early reprint of all new Orders and Rules of Court, printed on one side of the paper for insertion in the text books. Instead of forcing upon the subscribers who do subscribe, the circulation all over the world, at great expense, every two or three years, of monstrous volumes of Statute Digests, which every one can see for himself in any decent Library on the rare occasions when a reference to them is necessary, let the Council look out for really useful works for presentation. There may be instanced the excellent cheap re-issue of the Statutes now being published in 8vo. volumes under the direction of the Statute Law Revision Committee; or the Council might buy up the copyright of such standard Reports by private authors as can now only be obtained, when the volumes come into the market, at a prohibitive price, and reprint the works for sale at a moderate charge. It should not be too much to hope that the Profession has seen for the last time the traditional "December Number," containing the sweepings of reports delayed in earlier months; this can easily be avoided for the future. Such a number is in marked contrast to the July and August reprints of Statutes for the year 1890, which contained exactly sixteen pages each, beginning or ending in the middle of a Statute.

These things, or some of them, if the Council will do, they may be spared the further prosecution of their present, as it appears to us, undignified appeal for subscribers, and may even contemplate with some satisfaction that august

list of their names and mysteries, which, in accordance with their never-omitted instruction to the binder, must be put "facing the title and bound with each volume" of their laborious and costly productions.

Armed Vessels not Commissioned by a State or Recognised Belligerent.

It appears to us that a point relatively of rare occurrence, happily, at the present day, has come to the surface during the recent internal disturbances in the Republic of Chili, and that it is of sufficient importance to demand some notice in these pages, as far as our present information warrants a conclusion. What has been spoken of as a "Blockade" of the Chilian ports evidently depended for its possession of that character not solely on the question whether the force was adequate to the extent of the alleged operations of the socalled blockading force, but also, and indeed principally, on the question what was the character of that force in International Law. We know what had been the character of the armed vessels which purported to blockade the ports of Chili. These ships were formally commissioned by the Republic of Chili, but their officers and crews had, at the time they claimed to be a blockading force, thrown off their allegiance to that Republic, the Government of which was still in possession on land, and they had not been commissioned afresh by any State or recognised belligerent. It would appear, therefore, that the status of these armed vessels was simply that of pirates, and it is obvious that if such was the aspect which they presented to the Diplomatic Representatives accredited to the Chilian Government, those Representatives could not possibly recognise the alleged blockade as having any validity in International Law. This appears to us to be the probable ground of the action of the Diplomatic Body in Chili, and