VOL. XV.
No. i.
BOSTON.
JANUARY, 1903
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. By EDWARD B. ADAMS. IT has bgen said that "the old English law yer's idea of a satisfactory body of law was a chaos with a full index." But fashions change. When Mr. Holmes came to the Suf folk bar thirty-five years ago, he saw around him the faint beginnings of a revolt against the old notion. With an overmastering love of knowledge and desire to reduce, at least in his own mind and as far as possible, what was to be the business of his life to the prin ciples of a science, he made himself a leader of the forces of attack. He did not consider "the student of the history of legal doctrine bound to have a practical end in view. It is perfectly proper," he has since said, "to re gard and study the law simply as a great anthropological document. It is proper to resort to it to discover what ideals of society have been strong enough to reach that final form of expression, or what have been the changes in dominant ideals from century to century." He saw the history of civilization woven in the tissues of our jurisprudence, the moral history of the race chronicled in the history of our rules of law. Exact knowledge of the earlier reports was a de light, even when the pleasure was mainly of the sort which the mathematician derived from the theorem of which he proudly said: "The best of it all is that it can never by any possibility be made of the slightest use to anybody for anything." But the value of the historical study of the law is not likely to be underrated in our day. Our danger is lest we forget that "continuity with the past is
only a necessity and not a duty." With moral growth, with changes in the dominant ideals of society, must come development in the rules of law. The law sinks to dry for malism unless it grows. The reports of a given jurisdiction in the course of a generation take up pretty much the whole body of the law, and restate it from the present point of view. We could recon struct the corpus from them, if all that went before were burned." Mr. Holmes believed that the number of our rules of law, when generalized and reduced to a system, was not unmanageably large. They were not a chaos that needed a full index, but the or derly expression of the civilization of the age and country. An attempt to express them in codes, however, would probably be futile, for codes do not proceed, like the common law, by a series of successive approximations, by a continual modification of the form of rules. So believing, Mr. Holmes set himself as practitioner, editor, author, teacher, to find out exactly what the common law was as it had come down to his day, what the reasons for its doctrines were, what was their modern value, and to state the law and its reasons as lucidly as he could. For twenty years now he has been doing what in him lay to help in shaping the law of this Com monwealth into an expression of her most enlightened feeling and her best thought. Inheriting a name honored and loved by readers of the English tongue everywhere and by all members of the community where
