more settled localities, court proceedings and rulings were governed by precedents and legislative enactments; throughout the mining region, or other distant or thinly populated districts, connnon sense took the place of common law, while statute-books and precedents were flung to the wind as unworthy a sane man's consideration. Such equipage might do for jurists like "that bloated philosopher, who mistook declamation for eloquence, and aflectation for feeling " as Lamartine said of Raynal; but then if they could not reach the truth without the aid of books and book-learning, they could not with them. Away from their bit and harness, these jurists of all-dominating rules and statutes were like that blindly wandering wisdom which looks one way and walks another, and when asked a question, and no books are at hand, nil dlcit, or like Ignaro, foster-father of Argoglia, answers "I cannot tell."
And they were right. Simple and ignorant judges of suiiple differences between ignorant men, the simplest and most direct method was the best for them. All the while, be it remembered, these uncouth jurists were in practical sagacity no whit behind their more intellectually cultured brethren of the woolsack. It was af broad unfolding in the evolution of jurisprudence, that such an element as that which infested the foothills from 1848 to 185G should be so easily and so thoroughly kept in order by their own regulations, carried out by men chosen from among their own number, and with little aid from statutory enactments.
As in religion so in jurisprudence, meaningless forms are becoming obsolete, and substance is the thing considered. Much superfluous tackling has already fallen from court proceedings, and there is more which might profitably be stripped from them; that the well-appointed library of an attorney in fair practice must number its volumes by tens of thousands, and that rulings and decisions nmst be compiled from those who sat and judged thirty or three hundred
