added by later statutes. The steps by which this was effected are part of the technical history of the modern law, and it does not concern us here to recall them. Then the writ de securitate pacis made it clear beyond cavil that the king's peace was now, by the common law, the right of every lawful man. The precept to the sheriff is that he cause the complainant to have of the person who threatens him "our strict peace according to the custom of England." Binding persons over to keep the peace is in our days one of the commonest forms of summary jurisdiction, and one cannot claim for it any peculiar dignity. Probably it is more familiar in rustic parts than almost any legal institution, and more cherished though less imposing and exciting than the pomp of assizes. If its precise operation is not understood belief in its efficacy loses nothing. We have heard of an application being made in good faith to a Devonshire magistrate to "swear the peace upon" a dying man, to the end of securing the complainant (his wife) from the threatened visitation of his ghost, in the event of her contracting a second marriage of which he disapproved. But if we can clear our imagination from anecdotes of petty sessions and go back to the old form of the writ in Fitzherbert, we shall find in it a gravity and weightiness not unworthy of a great legal reform. We must not think of it as being in its early days a mere preventive of common assaults, an economiser of the "little diachylon made immortal by Holt in Ashby v. White. Rather it must have been a material instrument in the

suppression of wrong-doing on

on a more formidable scale, of tumultuous revenges and private warfare; a task for which all the power at the disposal of the Crown was none too much.

We said that the king's peace and protection had become the established right of every peaceable subject. Nevertheless a trace of the archaic ideas persisted as long as the art of common law pleading itself. The right was to be enjoyed only on condition of being formally demanded. In order to give the king's courts jurisdiction of a plea of trespass it was needful to insert in the writ the words vi et armis, which imported a breach of the peace; and it was usual, if not necessary, also to add expressly the words contra pacem nostram. Without the allegation of force and arms the writ was merely "vicountiel," that is, the sheriff did not return it to the Superior Court but had to determine the matter in the County Court. By so many steps and transformations did it become possible for Lambarde, and Blackstone after him, to say,2 with unconscious inversion of the historical order of development, and as if the matter were in itself too obvious to need explanation: "The king's majesty is, by his office and dignity royal, the principal conservator of the peace within all his dominions; and may give authority to any other to see the peace kept, and to punish such as break it; hence it is usually called the King's Peace."

1 F. N. B. 86.

2 Comm. i. 349, 350.

IV

OXFORD LAW STUDIES 1

THAT the profession of the law is necessary in a civilised commonwealth, and competence therein by no means to be attained without study, is matter of common knowledge. In speaking here of that study we have to consider more closely how it stands with us, not only as English citizens, but as scholars in this University. To what end is our study and teaching of law? Shall we say that we aim at producing successful lawyers? That would be a facile answer, if tenable. But it will not hold on any side. The University would justly refuse approval to it, as the world would justly refuse credit. Speaking as from the world to the University, I should feel constrained to say that such is not our competence; we could not achieve this if we would. Speaking as from the University to the world, I would say that such are not our aspirations; we would not undertake this if we could. Nay more, the undertaking is not within any resources of human teaching; it is in its own nature beyond them. Success in a profession depends,

1 A Public Lecture delivered in the University of Oxford, May 22, 1886. Allusions to matters then recent are left untouched.

at the last, on a man's self and not on what he has received from without. All that his friends can do for him, or any teaching or training institution whatever, is to furnish him forth with such equipment that he may be ready for opportunities when they come, or for the one critical opportunity. And we cannot make even this our business to the full extent or for its own sake. We are no more called upon to make our graduates accomplished advocates or draftsmen than to make them accomplished engineers or railway directors. What really does concern us is that there is a science as well as a practice of law; a science inseparable from the practical art, or separable only at the cost of ceasing to be versed in real matter, but still a science of itself. And we shall find that in this there is nothing strange to our traditional habit, or alien from our dealing with other arts and sciences which have a practical side. If we consider the most obviously academical, and certainly not the least noble or strenuous of professions, we shall find the same distinction in force. The humanities are indispensable to a good schoolmaster, but we do not therefore warrant that our prizemen and classmen shall be good schoolmasters. If any one holds our Classical Schools cheap for not being, as of course and without more, an officina of successful teachers of the classics, the same greatly misconceives both the function of the University and the dignity and difficulty of the teacher's office. What, again, of our relation to those other arts, eminently so called, which more visibly adorn and elevate life? Why have we

saluted Mr. Herkomer as a colleague, and why do we receive Dr. Joachim and Dr. Richter not only as the welcome and familiar guests of England, but as partakers of the honourable degrees of our ancient English Universities? Surely it is not that we expect to send out into the world, from hence or from Cambridge, a certain number of painters and musicians. It is indifferent whether we send out any. The significance of our action is a different and independent one: that the humanities are not limited by any one form of expression. Because Michael Angelo and Turner not less than Homer, Bach and Beethoven not less that Plato, had the secret that bids the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest, therefore we do honour, in the name of the Muses whom we serve, to the masters and ministers of their art. The witness of our various activities here, of the new studies which some regard with suspicion from within, and some with contempt from without, is that the humanities have their part in all science whatever; that a profession, above all a learned profession, is not an affair of bargain and bread-winning, but the undertaking of a high duty to mankind. We do not say that in our schools we can make a man a skilled physician; but we can show him what is the tradition inherited by the science and art of medicine, and how intimate its connections with the whole of man's knowledge of nature and of himself. Neither do we say, perhaps even less ought we to say, that we can make a man a skilled lawyer. But we can endeavour to impress on