statement gives it a new fixity and force. Such a process is carried on every day by courts of justice in deciding disputed points of law. Their object is to ascertain what the legal rule is, not to add to it or alter it; but they cannot declare the rule without putting something more into it, and fixing, as it were, a new starting-point. Most of our law has been gradually built up in this fashion; and Acts of Parliament, so far from superseding this operation, make it more necessary than ever, since even the most carefully framed piece of legislation is sure to leave some room for doubt as to its application to the facts of particular cases. The Bill of Rights and the Petition of Right may be regarded as parliamentary definitions or interpretations of the more ancient instruments and customs on which the

liberties of England were understood to rest. This is the more easily understood when we reflect how much the modern working of our Constitution depends on understandings which have never been defined by any positive authority. The Sovereign is still perfectly entitled, so far as positive law is concerned, to refuse assent to Bills sent up by the estates of the realm. No such body as the Cabinet, and no such person as a Prime Minister, is in any way known to the law. There are Privy Councillors and there is a First Lord of the Treasury; the Cabinet is a wholly informal committee of the Privy Council, and the First Lord of the Treasury is in an equally informal manner its chief. When Lord Beaconsfield described himself in the Treaty of Berlin as First Minister of England, it was remarked as a thing without precedent even in diplomatic documents. Our positive constitutional law takes no notice of the existence of parties or their leaders. It is a legal principle that the Crown can act only through Ministers who are responsible to Parliament; but the manner in which those Ministers are chosen, which is an extremely important part of the practical machinery of government, is outside legal definition and beyond legal control. There is not even any positive rule that Ministers who are not peers must have seats in the House of Commons. One might go on by the hour putting examples of things which would probably or certainly be unconstitutional in the sense of running counter to some of the understandings on which government is carried on, but which certainly would not be illegal. With this system of understandings the Constitution has worked smoothly for nearly half a century, and so long as it goes on working smoothly there will be no need for further definition. It is conceivable, however, that the necessity for it might somehow arise. In such a case it might happen that the Cabinet, like other committees of the Privy Council which began in an informal way, like the superior courts of justice themselves, should come to acquire a legal existence. A similar process, though not quite the same, is being exemplified before our eyes in

the House of Commons. The positive rules of debate are so framed as to leave an immense latitude to members and give immense opportunities for delay. They were framed, and long acted upon, on the assumption that members of the House of Commons would behave themselves as reasonable men and gentlemen, and would not obstruct public business for obstruction's sake. But in the last two or three years certain ingenious members have invented the policy of obstruction for the set purpose of bringing the whole proceedings of Parliament to a dead-lock, and thus intimidating the House into compliance with their demands. What is the result of this? After all the House is master of its own rules, and will not allow them to be notoriously abused. A new rule has already been made; and if that is not found effectual, we cannot doubt that other and more stringent measures will be taken. The understanding founded on trust having broken down, positive regulation becomes needful.

Thus far we have been considering the political aspect of actual laws and legal institutions. But legal ideas of a more abstract kind have also made their mark on politics, and a greater one than might be expected. One instance must suffice to illustrate this, but it shall be a striking one. We have just been speaking of the Revolution and the Bill of Rights. It may seem hardly serious to say that a considerable number of those who, after being more or less troubled with legal and other scruples, determined that their allegiance was no longer due to James II., were mightily fortified in their resolution by a legal fiction. Yet such is the plain fact. The Convention Parliament declared that James had "endeavoured to subvert the Constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people." This original contract, called by later writers the Social Contract, was nothing else than a supposed compact on which society and government were founded. It is hardly needful to state that such a compact is purely fictitious. It is a putting of the cart before the horse. There can be no contract until there are laws and government; and this theory seeks to explain the force of law by founding it on a prior contract. Men living in a state of individual independence are supposed to come together and agree to form a society, whereas we now know that individual rights and independence become possible only when society has reached a fairly advanced stage. It is the fallacy of carrying back modern legal notions to times and circumstances where the facts to which they are applicable do not exist. But it would be out of place here to discuss the doctrine of the Social Contract at any length, and the more so as it has been excellently treated by Mr. Leslie Stephen in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The curious point I wish to call your attention to is that this theory, being distinctly the offspring

of speculative minds under the influence of legal training, was eagerly seized upon for the service of practical politics by our statesmen of the Revolution.1 The express engagements of the coronation oath might seem at first sight to give a better reason for declaring James in default. This, however, was suggested only to be put aside, ostensibly on the technical ground that the king is as much king, and therefore as much entitled to the subject's allegiance, and bound in turn to govern according to law, before he is crowned as after.2 No doubt it was felt that a broader position must be taken as against the doctrine of absolute divine right. It may now seem to us incomprehensible that rational men should adopt or act upon such a doctrine, but at the time it had a real power, and troubled the consciences of many good men who were no friends of tyranny. To combat it with effect a counter theory was necessary, the time and the men not being ripe for a frank appeal to public utility. The happy fiction of the social contract was ready to hand, and smoothed over the difficulty. But though it deserves to be called happy to that extent, it is a still happier thing that the original contract, though it was prominent in the declaration of the two Houses, somehow did not find its way into the Bill of Rights. Had it been embodied in the Act which established the Protestant succession, it might have become for English citizens at large what it really was for a time to the Whig party, a political article of faith.

In the fragmentary view I have given you of some of the leading epochs in English politics, I have tried to make it plain to what an extent the forms of legal institutions, conceptions and claims of strictly legal right, and even the fictions of legal speculation, have entered into the very bones and marrow of the history of our country. We have at the same time, perhaps, obtained a glimpse of a much wider truth which also has its political significance, namely, that law and the machinery of law, like all other human institutions, grow and cannot be made to order. And if I have succeeded in bringing it home to any one of you that in the light of these ideas the critical and historical study of the laws of England is far from being the dry and crabbed business which most Englishmen still suppose it to be, I shall count my pains well rewarded.

FREDERICK POLLOCK.

(1) Hooker, whose authority Locke is glad to put forward on his side, appears to be the first considerable English author in whom the idea is found. It occurs in the Parliamentary debates of 1628, and in the trial of Charles I. There, however, the coronation oath is as much or more insisted upon.

(2) Lord Clarendon's speech, 5 Parl. Hist. 76.

NICHOLAS ALEXEIVITCH NEKRASOFF.

NICHOLAS ALEXEIVITCH NEKRASOFF was born November 22nd, 1821, in the government of Kamenetz-Podolski, at a small town where the regiment in which his father served happened to be then quartered. Whilst still young he lost his mother, a good and brave woman, who in her eighteenth year had fled from her Polish home with the poet's father, and who on many an occasion defended her children from his rough and tyrannous usage. In later years the poet loved to celebrate her virtues and beauty, as in the following lines taken from his well-known poem entitled My Mother :

"Born in a strange land, not less unhappy
But less harsh and sullen than our own,
Thou wert alone, from thy eighteenth year,
Alone in our morose dull clime of the north;
And he, to whom fate had assigned thee,

And with whom thou trustingly fledst from home,
He ceased to love thee: but not so thou,

Only death could release thee from thy vow of love.
To thee I sing, dear mother, my hymn of repentance,
Praying thee, with warm tears of pity

From those soft blue eyes of thine

To wash each dark stain from out my soul."

Soon after her death his father quitted the army with the rank of major, and retiring to the family estate near Yaroslaff accepted a place as Commissioner of the County Police. The duties of his office were fulfilled with that high-handed disregard of law and right which, in the old times preceding the establishment of regular tribunals of justice, for the most part characterized Russian police administration. The boy, then in his twelfth year, often accompanied his father in his official journeys, and was thus witness of cruel extortions practised on the poor peasantry, and scenes that left on his mind an indelible impression, the remembrance of which gave in after years a gloomy colouring to his pictures of Russian life :

"Once more I behold the familiar places,

Where the days of my fathers, barren and reckless,

Were passed in riot and in petty tyranny;

Where the herd of oppressed and trembling slaves

Envied the free life of the dog and the horse;

Where I was fated first to see the light of God's world,

And where I soon learned the lesson of patience and hate."

He was placed first at a grammar school, and afterwards, in 1839, sent to a cadet's school at St. Petersburg; but his aversion to the military service and his predilection for the literary profession were

so strong that he soon left the academy, and determined to prepare himsef for the university. He thereby incurred the displeasure of his father, who immediately stopped all supplies, and Nekrasoff found himself reduced to a state of absolute penury. He himself has told us the story of these years of suffering and hunger. "I was literally starving," he writes, "and it is simply terrible to think what an appetite I then had. I remember once playing at cards with some students almost as poor as myself, and winning a shilling, with which I bought some rolls. I do not recollect how many my two friends ate, but I know I devoured all they left." As we might expect, he soon got into debt for the damp, ill-furnished room he rented from an old soldier, and returning late one cold autumn night was refused admittance and locked out. For hours the homeless lad wandered along the streets, his thin and well-worn cloak affording but a sorry protection against the wind and snow, till, overcome with fatigue and hunger, he sank down on the doorstep of a shop. At that late hour the street was deserted and lonely, but suddenly approaching steps were heard, and looking up he saw a beggarman and boy. The latter had already begun in a whining tone the form of prayer for charity usual with Russian mendicants— "For the sake of Christ"-when, seeing that Nekrasoff was halffrozen to death, the man offered to find him a shelter for the night. They accordingly brought him to a beggars' haunt in the purlieus of the city. It was a large room, dimly lighted with two tallow candles that just made the darkness visible, and round a long table in the centre were gathered some twenty or thirty men and women drinking and smoking. "There is a scholar we have picked up that has no home," said his host by way of introducing him to the company, "so give him some vodki." One of the beggars, an old woman, arranged a mattress in a corner of the room, covered him up with a blanket, and placed a greasy but soft pillow under his head. He soon fell fast asleep, and on awaking late in the morning found himself alone with his good friend. She came up to him and said, "Write out a paper for me that I want, or else I shall get into trouble with the police." He did so, and she insisted on his taking threepence for his pains. And with this modest sum he had to begin life again as best he could.

In the meanwhile the time had come when he must pass the entrance examination at the university. Unfortunately, he failed in one of the subjects he had to take up, and but for the kindly interference of M. Pletnieff, the rector, the privations endured for the sake of being admitted as a university student would have been in vain. It was no easy task to provide the customary fees, or to find rent money for the humble lodging that he took in one of the shabbiest and most distant quarters of the town. But he struggled bravely