those of England must in time perish, it made him give the naïve reply that Rome, Sparta, and Carthage, at the time when their liberties were lost, were strangers to trial by jury. It made him spend all his ingenuity in defending the rule of descent which excluded kinsmen of the half-blood. And it was the chief cause of the contempt which, like Coke, he had for statute law. Though he never ventures to say so in plain terms, as his predecessors did with something more than rhetorical belief, yet at heart he is convinced that the common law is the perfection of reason. Yet to represent Blackstone’s mind as absolutely stationary would be unjust; for now and again he puts forward a gentle suggestion of improvement. He draws attention to defects in the system of trial by jury, and makes several excellent proposals for its amendment. He even anticipates the legislation of our own day when he points out that our laws are faulty in not constraining parents to bestow a proper education on their children. He recognises the possibility of a change in political representation, which would admit the people to a somewhat larger share; and it is doubtless on the strength of that mild admission that Major Cartwright included him in the list of men conversant with public affairs who had expressed themselves in favor either of a fair representation or of short parliaments. The criminal law seemed to him very far from perfect. Within his own lifetime it had been made a capital crime to break down the mound of a fish-pond whereby any fish should escape, or to cut down a cherry-tree in an orchard. These laws would never have been passed, he says, with a confidence which it is not easy to share, if, as was usual with private bills in his days, public bills had been first referred to some of the learned judges for their consideration. It was still felony without benefit of clergy to be seen for one month in the company of the persons called Egyptians. He believed that this would not have continued, if a committee were appointed at least once in a hundred years to revise the criminal law—a proposal which his friend Daines Barrington made about the same time and worked out in some detail.