re
every juvenile statesman has been encouraged to make his inroads, as
in Moray land, where, anciently, according to the idea of the old
Highlanders, all men had a right to take their prey--a subject in a
common dissecting room, left to the scalpel of the junior students,
with the degrading inscription,--_fiat experimentum in corpore vili_.

I do not mean to dispute, Sir, that much alteration was necessary in
our laws, and that much benefit has followed many of the great changes
which have taken place. I do not mean to deprecate a gradual approach
to the English system, especially in commercial law. The Jury Court,
for example, was a fair experiment, in my opinion, cautiously
introduced as such, and placed under such regulations as might best
assimilate its forms with those of the existing Supreme Court. I beg,
therefore, to be considered as not speaking of the alterations
themselves, but of the apparent hostility towards our municipal
institutions, as repeatedly manifested in the course of late
proceedings, tending to force and wrench them into a similarity with
those of England.

The opinions of our own lawyers, nay, of our Judges, than whom wiser
and more honourable men never held that character, have been, if
report speaks true, something too much neglected and controlled in the
course of these important changes, in which, methinks, they ought to
have had a leading and primary voice. They have been almost avowedly
regarded not as persons the best qualified to judge of proposed
innovations, but as prejudiced men, determined to oppose them, right
or wrong. The last public Commission was framed on the very principle,
that if Scotch lawyers were needs to be employed, a sufficient number
of these should consist of gentlemen, who, whatever their talents and
respectability might be in other respects, had been too long estranged
from the study of Scottish law to retain any accurate recollection of
an abstruse science, or any decided partiality for its technical
forms. This was done avowedly for the purpose of evading the natural
partiality of the Scottish Judges and practitioners to their own
system; that partiality which the English themselves hold so sacred a
feeling in their own Judges and Counsel learned in the law. I am not,
I repeat, complaining of the result of the Commissions, but of the
spirit in which the alterations were undertaken. Unquestionably much
was done in brushing up and improving the old machinery of