of positive systems of law. In reference to the statute law, made with the advice and assistance of the Permanent Commission, the institution would prevent the necessity for those so-called interpretations, with which Courts of Justice, in their own despite, have helped the lame productions of the sovereign legislature. The institution would insensibly form, in the members of the Commission, a body of men equal to the urgent work of reducing the law to a Code. The frightful and accumulating chaos of the written and unwritten law, will, sooner or later, force this measure upon Parliament; but unless care be taken, before the necessity is imminent, for the formation of a body of men competent to the arduous business, it will probably be done in a manner to aggravate the existing evil. Merely practical lawyers are often consummate in the art of applying positive principles; but not being called upon, by the nature of their avocations, to conceive the law as a rational system, they could not conceive the comparatively simple expression to which it might really be reduced. Merely theoretical lawyers are equally incompetent to the business; as wanting a sufficient acquaintance with the details of the law, and that dexterity in applying principles which nothing but practice can impart. The members of a Commission of Legislation, composed as we have suggested, would possess the minute knowledge and practical dexterity which are naturally acquired by experienced lawyers; and, from the nature of their office, they would as naturally combine with these faculties a fculty of a higher order. Their office would give them the talent of conceiving the details of the law, as forming the related parts of an internally coherent whole; and this talent, combined with minute knowledge and practical dexterity, is the talent needed for the work of reducing the law to a Code.

The last consideration suggests an analogy which will concisely illustrate the subject of the present article. If we exclude the conditions of centralization which regard the constitution and functions of local governments, we may say that centralized government is synonymous with regular administration. But this is related to administration not completely extricated from primeval disorder, as a body of law, arranged in a well-made Code, to a body of law, immersed in its natural chaos.

NOTE to the Article in No. CLXVIII. on the Corn-Laws of Athens and Rome.'

In the above Article, it is stated, that in the time of Augustus. 200,000 persons in Rome received each sixty modii of corn ayear. The total quantity of corn distributed is thus, by an oversight, computed to be 1,200,000, instead of 12,000,000 modii. The latter quantity is equal to about 375,000 quarters.

NOTE to the Article in No. CLXX. on the Lives of

Eminent Lawyers.'

WHEN alluding, in the above Article, to the sentence of death pronounced by Sir Matthew Hale, in 1664, upon two women accused of Witchcraft, we happened to mention that the Repeal of the Penal Laws against this imaginary crime was, even so 'late as 1743, denounced by the Presbytery in Edinburgh as a 'national sin.' Of the fact that such a denunciation took place, there can be no doubt; but we ought perhaps to have made it clear that it did not proceed from a Presbytery of the Established Church. That we have been thought so to mean is, as we are assured by a Clergyman of that Church, who has addressed us very earnestly upon the subject, the construction put upon the passage-hurtfully to the feelings, as he avers, of many of his brethren. We therefore think ourselves called upon to state, that the repeal of these Penal Laws-which took place in 1736 -was neither opposed, nor afterwards condemned, as a national 'sin,' by any Judicatory of the National Church. But we have no intention whatever to institute any invidious comparison, when we now state, that this noted denunciation was the act, not of the Established, but of the Secession Church, or Seceders. We shall accordingly dwell upon the point no further than is necessary to remove all ambiguity from the passage complained of. The fact, then, is, that in February 1743, the 'Associate Presbytery'-meaning the Presbytery of the Secession, or Seceders-passed, and soon thereafter published an 'Act for renewing the National Covenant;' in which there is a solemn acknowledgment of sins, and vow to renounce them;

among which is specified The Repeal of the Penal Statutes against Witchcraft, contrary to the express laws of God, and ' for which a Holy God may be provoked, in a way of righteous 'judgment, to leave those who are already ensnared to be hardened more and more, and to permit Satan to tempt and seduce ' others to the same wicked and dangerous snare.'

6

No. CLXXII. will be published in April.

THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

APRIL, 1847.

No. CLXXII.

ART. I.-De la Pologne et des Cabinets du Nord. Par FELIX COLSON. 3 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1841.

T

wo-and-thirty years have now elapsed since the last general Congress of the European Powers assembled at Vienna, to terminate the war in which Europe had been engaged for a quarter of a century, and to establish the territorial arrangements of the continental states upon those principles of international policy which were thenceforward to govern the world. In the course of this period every crown in Europe has descended to the head of another sovereign; a generation of princes is past away; and with the exception of Prince Metternich, Count Nesselrode, and the Duke of Wellington, the plenipotentiaries of the great Powers who contributed to that settlement of Europe have disappeared from the scene. Five great events-the emancipation of Greece, the French Revolution of 1830, the disjunction of Belgium and Holland, the Polish war of 1831, and the civil war in Spain-have since agitated Europe, and partially modified the state of affairs recognised by the treaties of 1815. Nevertheless the work of the Congress of Vienna, however imperfect it may appear when examined with the critical eye of the jurist, or measured by the standard of the historian, continues to be the principal safeguard of the general peace. If we are living under a regular political system, and not under a mere suspension of aggressive forces, it is because the authority of the final act of the Congress of Vienna has not ceased to be invoked by the cabinets of all the

VOL. LXXXV, NO. CLXXII,

S

Powers, and the stipulations upon which it is based are still held to constitute the written international law of Europe.

It might, indeed, be superfluous to advert to facts which are the groundwork of the existing political system, if a recent event, accomplished by the three Northern Courts, had not suddenly brought even these elementary principles into discussion, and shaken seriously the confidence which we have been accustomed to repose on the arrangements of the Congress of Vienna. The annexation of the free city and territory of Cracow to the Austrian Empire, and the total abrogation, by the will of the three Courts of the North alone, of those stipulations in favour of Cracow which were solemnly adopted and guaranteed at Vienna by all the powers of Europe, have excited the surprise, the apprehension, and the indignation of statesmen and of nations. If the principles of the Congress of Vienna are to be thus abandoned-if the express stipulations of the final act of that august assembly are to be broken with impunity-it cannot be thought superfluous to revert in some detail to the transactions in which those principles originated, and to the considerations upon which those stipulations were imposed and accepted. They still belong not only to the history, but to the politics of Europe. They are still in force to restrain the ambitious, to protect the weak, and to maintain the settlement of the continental states; unless, indeed, it should prove that the direct infraction of the stipulations relating to Cracow and to Poland has already so loosened the whole fabric, that the remnant of the treaty has lost its authority, and that the law which has been violated in such particulars as these, shall be no longer recognised in moments of excitement or temptation as binding in others.

A cursory examination of the negotiations which took place at Vienna, and of the events which preceded them, more especially with reference to the condition of Poland, will at once illustrate the contrast between 1815 and 1847, and determine the extent of our present deviation from the course of policy which was then laid down with the consent of Europe. If the stipulations then insisted upon, and which even then were reduced by Russia far below the amount of security for which England, Austria, and Prussia had contended, were indispensable to the security of the adjacent states and the tranquillity of Poland, they have lost none of their importance down to the present hour; and, in addition to the extinction of that public principle which is the universal sanction of a great treaty, the practical consequences of these perilous changes may be readily detected in the increased insecurity of some states, the increasing restlessness and ambition of others, and the mutual