In some respects this great measure of reform has failed to meet with the expectation of its supporters. In accordance with the original design the chancery judges ceased to be vice-chancellors, and as justices of the High Court took turns with the judges of the Queen's Bench in going on circuit to try common law cases. But the practice was soon abandoned, and the chancery judges now confine themselves to the administrative and, other business for which they have special aptitude. Hence the dividing line be tween the two ancient jurisdictions is as clear as ever. In other respects the original scheme of assimilation has broken down. Probate, divorce and admiralty matters still form a class by themselves; bankruptcy affairs have a court of their own, and separate courts sit for the trial of commercial and of i airway and canal cases.
THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE. The establishment of a permanent Court of Appeal under the Judicature Act has served to detract from the relative impor tance of the judges of the High Court. The presidents of the three great divisions are of course most conspicuous. The presiding judge of the Queen's Bench Division is now the Lord Chief Justice of England. Lord Coleridge, the first chief to assume this title, succeeded Cockburn in 1880. Like Cockburn he was a man of ripe scholarship and polished eloquence, and as a presiding magistrate left nothing to be de sired in the way of dignity and urbanity. With an intellect quite as strong and with even broader views, he was nevertheless in ferior to Cockburn in industry and applica tion. He did not seem to enjoy wrestling with principles and authorities in the solution of difficult problems, and was content to contribute less to the law than colleagues who were not so gifted. Occasionally a case of general public interest would rouse him from his seeming indifference, and on such occasions his work was so
admirable as to prompt a feeling of regret that he was not more strenuous in the exer cise of his undoubted powers. The reports contain several such expositions of the law, animated by learning, exquisite diction, ele vation of sentiment and liberality of thought. In the interesting case of Reg. v. Dudley, 15 Cox Cr. Cas. 624, where the issue was whether shipwrecked persons were justified in taking the life of one of their number in order to save the rest from death by starvation, Coleridge said: "Though law and morality are not the same, and though many things may be im moral which are not necessarily illegal, yet the absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence, and such divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defence of it. It is not so. To preserve one's life is, generally speaking, a duty; but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man's duty not to live but to die. The duty, in case of ship wreck, of a captain to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children, as in the noble case of the 'Birkenhead'—these duties impose on men the moral necessity, not of the preservation, but of the sacrifice of their lives for others, from which in no country—least of all, it is to be hoped, in England—will men ever shrink, as indeed they have not shrunk. It is not correct, therefore, to say that there is any absolute and unqualified necessity to preserve one's life. ' Necesse est tit earn, non ut vivant' is a saying of a Roman officer, quoted by Lord Bacon himself with high eulogy in the very chapter on the necessity to which so much reference has been made. It would be a very easy and cheap display of commonplace learning to quote from Greek and Latin authors—from Horace, from Juvenal, from Cicero, from Euripides—passage after pas sage in which the duty of dying for other? lias been laid down in glowing and emphatic language as resulting from the principles of
