'law,' marks with emphatic precision the divorce which we have succeeded in effecting between the art and the science. There may be great difficulty in ascertaining exactly what the law is on a given point, but there is no difficulty in ascertaining where it is to be looked for; and no one, at all events, can complain that the wisdom of our judicial serpents will be perverted by any theoretical charmer, charm he never so wisely.

These observations form a necessary preface to the consideration of the works of Mr. Austin and Mr. Maine, as they show the sort of position which they fill. They are exclusively speculative, and though eminently useful to every one who wishes to understand the law of England as a liberal profession and not as a mere trade, they have no direct practical bearing whatever upon it, and probably neither of them will ever attain the distinction, so much coveted by most legal writers, of being quoted as an authority in a court of law.

Part of the interest which attaches to Mr. Austin's work is derived from a source which happily does not affect Mr. Maine's. It is the last memorial of a remarkable man, who has left us without any, or with hardly any, public recognition of his rare merits. A touching preface prefixed by his widow to the present edition of his book, supplies the public with the means of forming some estimate of a thinker who was known during his lifetime to few, but was known to hardly any one who did not regard him with a degree of admiration which is not often earned by a career so quiet and solitary. The incidents of Mr. Austin's life may be described in a very few sentences. He was born in 1790, and died in 1859. He served in the army for five years during part of the great war, and his military life left a stamp upon his manners and bearing which it was impossible to overlook. He was called to the bar in 1818, and he was a candidate for practice, though with little success, till 1825. In 1826 he was appointed professor of jurisprudence in the University of London, then just established, and he studied the subject in Germany for two years before he began his lectures. Between 1828 and 1832 he delivered a course which formed the basis of the present volume, and in 1834 he delivered another course at the Inner Temple. In 1833 he was appointed a member of the Criminal Law Commission, for which he received a salary of 800l. a year. With a delicacy and generosity characteristically high-minded, though perhaps on this occasion it made him unfair to himself, he resigned this appointment, though he was a poor man and had no other occupation, simply because he thought the powers and the views of the Commission too narrow to enable it to effect the reforms which

appeared to him to be required. About two years afterwards he was appointed, in conjunction with Sir G. C. (then Mr.) Lewis, Royal Commissioner to inquire into the grievances of the Maltese, a duty which he discharged with signal success, till that Commission was brought abruptly to an end by ministerial changes. He passed the rest of his life in studious retirement in Germany and France, and for the last ten years at Weybridge, in Surrey.

A life so spent suggests many thoughts both to those who observe and to those who merely read of it. That it should be regarded with enthusiastic veneration by the person who shared and has commemorated it, and that that sentiment should colour all that she has written on the subject, is a fact from which the public are entitled to draw no inferences which it would be becoming to express. Its broad facts are, however, not merely affecting, but instructive. A comparison between Mr. Austin's biography and the book which he has left behind him, conveys a clear notion of a class of men who are most valuable to the world, for whom we in this country provide hardly any place, and who in consequence are both less useful and less happy than they might be. Mr. Austin said of himself, I was born out of time and place. I ought to have been 'a schoolman of the 12th century, or a German Professor.' The whole course of his life showed the justice of his remark. His book proves that he possessed a mind of extraordinary power and accuracy. The outline, now first published and prefixed to his Lectures, of the general scheme of jurisprudence which he had devised, indicate a grasp of mind and a breadth of knowledge almost unexampled; and the incidents of his life sufficiently show that he wanted nothing but a little additional sympathy and freedom from the common trials and anxieties of life, to have produced one of the greatest books of the present century.

It is no doubt easy to say, and it has in some quarters been said with considerable asperity, that Mr. Austin had no right to expect to be treated differently from other people; and that if he failed to work out the plans which he had the power to conceive, the fault ought to be laid on his own want of energy, and not on a state of public feeling which held out to him but little encouragement. There would be much justice in these remarks if they had been made in answer to anything approaching to a complaint made by him or on his behalf, of the treatment which he received at the hands of the world. But no such complaint appears to have been made. He led a life of dignified retirement, asking from others as little as he received;

and all that his widow has done has been to show how fruitful that retirement might have been if her husband's powers had been more generally understood, and if his sensitive and nervous temper had been treated with sympathy and tenderness. Personally, Mr. Austin had as little right as he had inclination to complain of his lot in life. That his great book was never written, was a loss to the world at large, and one which a little seasonable encouragement would have avoided. Sympathy and tenderness from strangers are what no wise man would expect, and what every man should be able to dispense with. In most cases the battle is to the strong, and the race to the swift. Such victories as are to be won in the world are won by men with strong nerves and thick skins, and no one who is without these things has a right to complain if he is pushed on one side by those who have them. But though such are, and always must be, the rules of the game of life, the players may sometimes look with advantage at another side of the matter. Genius has no right to expect to be humoured, and if its possessors are vigorous and hardy, their powers will be braced by the excitement of the turmoil in which they live. But it is as impossible that every man should be sturdy and callous, as that every man should be six feet high; and though the sensitive and delicate must not complain if they are jostled out of the course, it does not follow that it is wise to treat them so. A little extra leniency, a little consideration towards such men, would be one of the best investments which the world could make. It is too late now to consider how this might have been done in Mr. Austin's case. No complaint is made upon the subject. All that remains to be done is to try to sketch out what he designed, and to give some account of what he completed.

Mr. Austin appears, from the account given by his widow of the papers left behind him, and from his own sketch of the book which he intended to write, to have had in his mind the scheme of a treatise on human obligations in all their forms, legal and moral. His plan was to investigate the principles and the sanctions of jurisprudence, positive morality, and ethics. By jurisprudence he understood law in the strict sense of the word; by positive morality, morals as they are; and by ethics, morals as they ought to be. A single illustration will show how these subjects were in his scheme related to each other. Marriage with a deceased wife's sister is illegal. It is also immoral, in so far as it is opposed to the public sentiment which exists respecting such marriages. If the law were altered, it would cease to be illegal. It might also cease to be immoral; but this would depend on the question whether or not the

change of the law produced a corresponding change in public sentiment. Whether or not such marriages ought to be immoral,— or, to use Mr. Austin's expression, whether they would be unethical, is a question which would depend upon their general tendency to produce human happiness.

The vast scale on which Mr. Austin proposed to treat these subjects may be estimated from the fact that he meant to examine international law and diplomacy under the head of Positive Morality.

Of this vast scheme, which as appears from his papers he had turned in his mind for many years, and invested with a considerable degree of unity and definiteness, one fragment only was completed. It is contained in the lectures comprised in the present volume, which formed the first instalment of the first part of the work-that which would have investigated Law Proper. Full notes remain, and are being prepared for publication, of a considerable number of other lectures, in which the same subject was pursued; but Mr. Austin does not appear to have left anything sufficiently advanced for publication on the subjects of Positive Morality or Ethics.

The object of the present volume is to define the province of Jurisprudence, and this is accomplished by careful definitions of the leading terms with which it is concerned. Its general purport may be briefly described as consisting in the establishment and illustration of the three following propositions:

1. A law is a command enforcing a course of conduct.

A command is an intimation by a stronger to a weaker rational being, that if the weaker does or forbears to do some act the stronger will injure him.

2. God sets laws to men, and of these some are revealed and others unrevealed. The test by which the purport of the unrevealed laws may be discovered is that all such courses of conduct as tend to produce the general happiness of mankind are enjoined, and those which tend to diminish it are forbidden.

3. Men set laws to each other; those who set them are called sovereigns, and those to whom they are set are subjects. In every independent political society there is a sovereign and there are subjects; and the tests by which an independent political society may be known are, first, that the bulk of the given society are in a habit of obedience to a determinate and common superior; let that common superior be an individual or an aggregate of individuals. Secondly, this common superior must not be in the habit of obedience to a determinate human superior.

It requires some familiarity with legal and moral speculations

to appreciate the importance of these propositions, and to perceive the difficulty of elaborating and applying them to human affairs; but simple as they may appear, they form the foundation of a view of law, morals, and politics, which is in all probability destined to exercise an influence which it is hard to over-estimate. They place jurisprudence upon a basis as systematic and truly scientific as political economy, and thus afford a second illustration of a moral science in the true sense of the words.

As no words are used more loosely than the words 'moral 'science' it may be desirable to dwell a little upon the meaning and importance of this statement. Comparatively few persons have a distinct notion of their own meaning when they speak of a science, and the number who know what they mean by a moral science is still smaller. It is, however, highly important to distinctness of thought to have clear notions upon these points. All human knowledge may ultimately be resolved into a vast number of impressions described in language; nor is the truth of this statement affected by the great controversies as to the origin of these impressions, and as to the degree of authority which attaches to the words in which they are described, which have always exercised the minds of metaphysicians. In order to make a science it is necessary first to separate one set of these impressions, or, to speak with precision, the phrases describing one set of these impressions, from the rest. They must then be classified and finally condensed, if possible, into a system of rules so arranged that the more general rules shall fit each of the particular cases which fall under them. By arranging and combining these rules, a vast number of impressions may be reduced to a few convenient heads, capable of being applied and combined in a variety of ways as occasion may require. Mathematics afford the best and simplest of all illustrations of the nature of science. The first process is to select the phrases describing the set of impressions which relate to number, space, weight, force, and the like. The most important of the phrases relating to number are the names of the numbers themselves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0. These are described as the ten numerals, and this description is the first step in classification. Next, the names of particular numbers; the word four, for example, may be examined. What does 'four' mean? It means four books, four ships, four articles of furniture, four men, or any other things which when viewed together convey the impression denoted by the word four. On examination it appears that wherever that impression is conveyed, the impression of two twos is conveyed, and thus we get