The official reports of the courts have some of the faults of officialism. They often do not appear until long after the decisions which they chronicle have been made and their general make-up is sometimes unworkmanlike and unscientific. It requires rare gifts to make a good reporter of judicial opinions. He must have the art of clear and concise statement; the power to select what is material and drop the rest; and the faculty of close analysis of abstract reasoning.[Footnote: Four of the reporters of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts have been appointed justices of that court, largely in consequence of their good work in reporting. A good reporter always has the making of a good judge.] Many of our reporters also are practicing lawyers of no special training for the work, and who give to it but a portion of the year. The modern sense of the value of time, of scientific treatment of whatever can be treated scientifically, and of uniformity in scientific methods led toward the close of the nineteenth century to competition in reporting. Private publishing houses undertook the prompt publication, in scientific arrangement upon a uniform plan, of the opinions of the courts. This work began in 1879. The result has been that the series of official reports of the Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States has been discontinued, and that the decisions of all our other appellate courts are now twice reported. One publishing house has grouped the States into clusters, issuing for each cluster its own series of reports, known, respectively, as the Atlantic, the Northeastern, the Northwestern, the Southeastern, the Southern, the Southwestern and the Pacific Reporters. The States forming each group have been selected mainly because they were neighbors geographically, but partly from commercial reasons. Thus Massachusetts, which would naturally be assigned to the Atlantic Reporter, has been put into the Northeastern; and such inland States as Kansas and Colorado find their place in the Pacific Reporter. All the reported decisions of all the States in each group are printed in pamphlet form weekly, as they may be handed down, in chronological order; and every few months the whole issued as a bound volume. In this way, for a trifling sum a copy of any opinion of any American court of last resort can be had in a few days or weeks after its announcement, and a lawyer's library can, at slight expense, be furnished with the decisions not only of his own State but of several others having not unlike laws and institutions.