The great public benefit conferred by the reforms whose monument is the New Law Courts hard by the church of St Clement Danes, may be condensed into the remark that whereas from 1837 to 1875 it was an accident whether the right party won his case, the presumption in favour of his success in 1897 is so strong as almost to amount to a certainty. Of another sort of fusion, that between the two divisions of the legal profession, solicitors and barristers, much has been heard. But in Canada and some other Colonies some inconvenience and disadvantage are found to result from the absence of any distinction between barristers and solicitors. Gradually, perhaps, a solution in practice is being arrived at. Without mentioning individual names it is the fact that among the men who now stand highest, whether at the Bar or on the Bench, many while students at the Inns of Court have perfected themselves in the practical details of law by voluntarily attending the offices of great firms of solicitors, whether in Westminster or elsewhere. The palace of justice whose opening marked the close of the fourth decade of the reign, commemorates, in a fashion of its own, the unity of the Empire as well as the late achieved unity of the administration of justice. Among the Queen's subjects are nations not only of every creed and of every colour, but trained in obedience to every code of law which human skill has devised. Since the modern era of our Colonial Empire began in 1836, the practice has been to continue to those dependencies the laws under which they were when they came into being, or when they were first acquired by diplomatic cession or military conquest, always provided that these pre-existent systems do not contradict the fundamental principles of British jurisprudence. Thus, in British Guiana, in the Cape Colony, and in Ceylon, the letter and spirit of Roman-Dutch law have been continued under English rule. In lower Canada, French forms have become so confused as to be impracticable: the laws of this province are to-day identical with those in vogue in England at the time of its acquisition in 1763, periodically of course improved by modern lights. In the Mauritius, the French Code Civile and the French Code de Commerce still exist. It is for the sovereign embodying in her own person the unity of the Empire to decide through the Privy Council, that is, to-day, through the Judicial Committee in all disputed cases what the particular law of the locality may be.